London Falling (50 page)

‘If we’re going to carry on in this job,’ he said to them, ‘embarrassment is going to have to be the least of our worries.’ To underline that, he called over some distant private-security personnel who’d started to take an interest, and showed them his warrant card. A quick chat with them revealed no local problems except some disturbances involving youths, in the evenings.

The adjacent garden annex apparently belonged to the nearby firm of De Souza and Raymonde.

Quill swept his hand over the surface of the table. It seemed to be made of granite. There were traces of a floor underneath it, on which could be glimpsed signs of . . .

‘The same pattern that’s on the table,’ confirmed Sefton. ‘That’s a pentagram, such as is used as a protective symbol.’

‘Obviously a not
very
protective symbol,’ said Costain, gesturing at the ruin around them. ‘Have you been taking occult evening classes?’

‘I’ve been reading up on this stuff,’ Sefton admitted, ‘wanting to, you know, survive.’

‘Come on, then,’ said Quill. ‘Give me the who, what, when, why.’

‘Relatively recent,’ said Ross, studying the table. ‘There’s bird shit on this thing—’

‘Do you reckon the birds can see it?’

‘—and, comparing it to this car that’s been sitting outside my flat for the last few months—’

‘That’s really the limit of our useful forensics now?’ remarked Costain. ‘That’s going to be an issue.’

‘—this has been open to the sky for quite a lot longer than that.’ She put her palm on the surface. ‘But it’s hardly weathered, so we’re talking only a few years that it’s been exposed, not centuries.’

‘If I was asked to guess what we’re looking at,’ said Sefton. ‘I’d say it’s some sort of meeting room, with a stone table out of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
, out here all on its own—’

‘Not on its own,’ said Costain, standing at the far corner and looking towards the long shadow of the De Souza and Raymonde skyscraper. ‘Look at where that path leads. This little room belongs to that enormous building.’

‘Right, so we’ll be having a word,’ said Quill. ‘That could be the
who
of who owns this – scary architects.’

‘Masons,’ suggested Sefton. ‘And now we’re in the
Da Vinci Code
.’

‘And as for the why,’ said Quill, ‘this place doesn’t look like a bomb’s hit it. No scarring anywhere, not even on this lovely table; no sign of concussive debris; no fire damage . . .’

‘Even if it was attacked with hammers,’ said Ross, ‘where’s the rubble? That’s what makes it look like a historical ruin—’

‘Because someone’s tidied up,’ said Costain. ‘Which kind of implies this place was subject to some sort of . . . special attack.’

‘But if they could do this,’ said Quill, ‘they could have just left it flattened, couldn’t they? Or left it as a mountain of candyfloss or something.’

‘Which then implies,’ said Sefton, ‘that it was left here like this deliberately as—’

‘A sign,’ said Ross, ‘a warning.’

They walked the entire floor, each taking a quarter of the small area, treading with care, staring down at it as they went. Costain brushed some leaf mulch aside with his shoe, and then called out to the others.

It was a small loop of rope, connected to a metal ring set into one of the larger floor tiles. Costain bent down to pull it—

Sefton called for him to stop, and went over.

‘Okay,’ said Costain, ‘what sort of extra protection have you got for me?’

Sefton thought about it for a moment. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

Costain let out a long breath and put his fingers into the loop again. ‘I wasn’t feeling as scared, before you did that.’ He heaved on the loop. He grabbed his straining wrist with his other hand and put his full weight into it—

A row of several tiles flew up, leaf mulch falling from them, and slammed onto the ground like the lid of a chest. The team looked down into what was below. A dark space, that smell of a library—

‘There are books down there,’ said Quill, aware of the copper’s relish in his voice. ‘Documents.’

Ross clomped over to a chair standing in her quarter of the area and moved it aside. It had been in front of a small post with a metal rotary lever on it. ‘I was waiting to mention it until after I’d finished examining my section,’ she said. ‘Could someone please—?’

Sefton turned the handle. It, too, took a little effort. He leaned on it with all his weight. ‘Rusty,’ he said. There was a sudden noise from under them, and then something rushed up out of the gap in the tiles and into the ruins—

And came clanking to a halt with a solid click of machinery. Wooden racks that looked to form part of some Victorian library. Containing row after row of cards and documents. Quill let out a long, exultant breath.

They found spindles full of information, too, that had to be hauled out of the ground, and then spun so fast that, when they slammed to a stop, they swayed as if they were going to collapse. Sefton found himself excitedly moving back and forth between all this information, exchanging glances with Ross, both of them interested by virtue of their own speciality.

This was what he was now: a police specialist in . . . well, call it the London underworld. ‘There are gaps,’ he announced. ‘Look at it, someone’s been through this.’ He opened up a polished wooden case with brass handles, and found a velvet interior with . . . he put the vanes he’d used to find this place into the gaps, and they fitted perfectly. ‘There’s been a bit of looting but, of course, it’s only been by those who’ve got the Sight. We might get a lot of evidence here, but the site’ll have been filleted for anything that’s powerful in itself.’

They were going to need at least a large van to take away this haul. The light was failing them, the big shadows of the skyscrapers obscuring the ruin, more and more people passing through the square as they headed home from work. They all looked at them curiously.

Quill and Costain went to commandeer bags and boxes from anywhere they could, and Ross called Mehta to tell him to take his boat back to his nick. There was no authority onto which they could pass this crime scene, if it was one; no experts to examine all this in situ. Forensics just would not
see
anything out here, so this had to be their business now, thought Sefton, and theirs alone.

They started to put everything into the bags and boxes systematically. Until suddenly Sefton realized that, in his hand, he was holding something like a personnel file. He called everyone over. Inside the file were just photographs of five people. The looks on their faces were proud, almost smug. ‘The “Continuing Projects Team”,’ he said, reading aloud. He had a quick look through the job descriptions on each photo and raised an eyebrow. ‘A brief, an architect, a priest, a senior civil servant, even someone from the BBC.’

Ross looked up from her phone. ‘None of whom are recorded anywhere.’

‘All of whom,’ said Quill, ‘have been forgotten.’

‘Think of the energy,’ said Sefton, ‘that someone is putting into keeping that going.’ He gestured around him. ‘Into
this
.’

They ended up reading by torchlight amid the ruins. They were all too interested to wait until they got it back to the Portakabin. ‘It’s all about . . . buildings,’ said Sefton, ‘shapes. Nothing much here about people.’

‘And this lot,’ observed Quill, ‘go on about “protocols” all the bloody time.’

‘I think they,’ Ross flapped the folder, ‘must be the “old law” that Losley talked about.’

‘And maybe this,’ Costain gestured at the ruins around them, ‘was when those goalposts got moved.’

They thought about that in silence for a while. Sefton was about to suggest that it was time to pack up and summon that van over, when Ross made a sudden noise. She held up a personnel file with nothing inside it, which she had just found between the remains of two filing boxes.

On the front of it was written:
Detective Superintendent Rebecca Lofthouse.

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Quill.

There was a noise from nearby, and they all looked up. Standing there was Lofthouse herself. She looked very uncertain, and was holding what looked like an ancient key. It had a gravity about it. It was a thing of the Sight.

‘Oh,’ said Quill, ‘and I’d seen that on her charm bracelet so many times.’ He stood up, and they all did.

Sefton suddenly remembered his sensation, inside the circle in the bookshop, that there should be five of them, rather than four. He looked back to the pentagram on the broken table: there had been five members of this team, too. And there had been that weird moment when Lofthouse had got them to sit at very particular places around that meeting table. ‘Five,’ he said to Ross, under his breath.

‘Five is better than four,’ she replied. ‘Like the fortune-teller said.’

Lofthouse stepped forward, looking between them and the key in her hand.

‘There’s something here I can’t see, isn’t there, Jimmy?’ she said.

Quill could only nod.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘now I know why I’ve been supporting you all this time.
This
explains
a lot
.’

GLOSSARY

the Admiral Duncan
– gay pub in Soho

Airwave
– a type of police radio

baggy
– a plastic bag containing cocaine

batty boy
– West Indian derogatory term for a gay man

’blige!
– North London expression of laughing astonishment, perhaps short for ‘obliged’

the Boleyn Ground
– alternative name for Upton Park, home of West Ham Football Club

brass
– slang term for a prostitute

butcher’s, have a
– slang for ‘take a look’

CAD number
– Computer Aided Dispatch reference number, which allows police on the move to keep those that need to know informed of their whereabouts

Chelsea tractor
– sports utility vehicles that the upper classes use incongruously to get around London

chisel
– slang term for cocaine

chop shop
– a garage where stolen cars are illegally serviced and altered

CID
– Criminal Investigation Department, the branch of a police force consisting of plain-clothes detectives

CRIMINT
– a national crime database

DC
– detective constable

DCI
– detective chief inspector, senior to a DI

detective superintendent
– or ‘super’, senior to a DCI

DI
– detective inspector, senior to a DS

DPS
– Department of Professional Standards – see below

DS
– detective sergeant, senior to a DC

estuary English
– the sounds of modern working-class speech in South-East London, and areas bordering the River Thames

five by fives
– a grading system with which analysts assess the importance and reliability of intelligence

Flying Squad
– mobile detective unit within the Met

FME
– Force Medical Examiner, the on-call doctor covering several police stations

Grindr
– gay dating website

Hendon
– location of the police college

39 Hilldrop Crescent
– home of infamous murderer Dr Crippen

I2 link chart
– analysis tool to show links within criminal organizations

IBO
– Integrated Borough Operations, a police department within a borough, which handles communications and gives out pocket books

‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’
– a song associated with West Ham Football Club

Intelligence Cycle
– a standard model of how intelligence is processed in professional organizations

the Irons
– nickname for West Ham Football Club

kettling
– police crowd-control tactic of isolating groups of protest marchers and containing them

Kojack
– police slang term for an electrical socket only found on the dashboards of police vehicles

marked car
– a police car with police insignia on it. An unmarked car is a car without insignia

Metvest
– body armour that also identifies the wearer as an officer in the London Metropolitan Police

NDNAD
– the United Kingdom National DNA Database

Nagra
– an outdated form of undercover recording device

National Intelligence Model
– a formal declaration of how intelligence should be applied to policing

OCN
– an organized criminal network, a gang

OCU
– Operational Command Unit, a division of police forces not on a geographical basis

Professional Standards
– the department of the London Metropolitan Police that deals with police wrongdoing and corruption

PRO-FIT
– software that lets a witness build up an image of a suspect’s face

punt
– slang term for a bet or a liaison with a prostitute

10 Rillington Place
– home of infamous murderer John Christie

RV point
– rendezvous point

SCD 4
– the police department that examines the scene of the crime

SCD 7(2)
– the police department that deals with special projects within Serious and Organized Crime

SCD 10
– the police department that runs undercover operations

Shebeen
– an illegal and unlicensed bar, usually in a private house

shout
– paramedic and fire service slang for a call out

SOCO
– a Scene of Crime Officer

spod
– slang term for an intellectual

the thirty-three boroughs
– all the boroughs that together make up Greater London

tom
– slang term for a prostitute