by Paul Cornell
‘Crime stories say the centre can hold; in reality, it’s going to fall apart any minute. Maybe all this chaos lately is something to do with the sort of thing you lot investigate.’
‘Yeah, we’re all wondering about that: that maybe the shittiness of life right now is all down to the Smiler and how he’s “moved the goalposts” and changed London. That’d be a comforting thought, eh?’
‘Only for you is that comforting.’ Joe, having finished his own, took one of Sefton’s chips. ‘I think the riots and protests would have happened anyway. The protestors are the only people left who give a shit. You just expect a sort of … self-serving hypocrisy from politicians now. You’d be amazed what the guys in my office said about Spatley. Nobody was like, “He deserved it,” but…’ He let the sentence fall away with a shrug.
Sefton let his gaze drift along the street full of people. ‘Bloody general public. Even with London falling apart in the world they can see, all they talk about is the royal baby and The X Factor and all that shit—’
‘You like The X Factor.’
‘—while my lot are involved with … the secret of eternal life, making space out of nothing, extra “boroughs” that don’t seem to be in this universe. You know what’d be really good?’
‘Go on.’
‘You remember when I caught that “ghost bus” and went … somewhere else, somewhere away from this world, and talked to … whatever that being was, that called himself Brutus and dressed like a Roman?’
‘You really told your workmates about this?’
‘I really did, but even when I did it sounded like something I’d dreamed or made up. Anyway, just having met some sort of … big London being … that the others hadn’t, I felt like I’d started to get a handle on this stuff. But as time goes on I’m starting to feel more and more that I did dream him. It’s not as if he gave me much in the way of solid advice, a path I could follow. He didn’t leave me with anything certain, with any mission in life. And without that certainty, there’s this … gap. There’s all sorts of stuff I want to ask him about. I’ve made an actual list, and today I added the silver goo to that list.’ He rubbed the bridge of his nose and then had to brush away the salt from his chips he’d deposited there. ‘Sometimes I feel like he might just show up, that I might sit down on a park bench and there he’d be. And then there are times when I know he isn’t real. You can sort of feel something like him in the air, sometimes.’ He was very aware of Joe’s arched eyebrow. ‘You can. That’s a proper Sighted feeling. That seemed to be getting easier as summer came on, but now…’
‘When Ross got her Tarot cards read, she was promised “hope in summer”, wasn’t she, and “in autumn” too, just those sentences? And it had something to do with that card called “The Sacrifice of Tyburn Tree” which you all thought was about her dad—’
‘You remember all the details, don’t you? You’re such a fanboy of us lot. Just don’t go on the internet with this stuff.’
‘I’m saying, maybe good stuff is about to happen. Maybe you’ll find Brutus.’
Sefton sighed, had to look away from that smile. ‘But it’s summer now, and it’s just this … burdened heat.’
‘Is there anything you can do to, you know, summon him or something?’
‘Nothing in any of the books I’ve found. He’s not in the books. If I can’t find him, I need to find … something.’ Sefton suddenly felt the need to get rid of all this shit. ‘Fuck it, I need a pint. And you’re not going to let me go on about the Hogwarts stuff any more tonight. Deal?’
‘No,’ said Joe, smiling at him.
* * *
As always, Lisa Ross was awake into the early hours. Hers was one of many lights still on in her Catford housing block. There were people who kept a light on at all hours, no matter what the bills were, as if that offered some protection against the shrieks of the urban foxes and the drunken yelling outside. She barely registered that stuff. She would get the three hours’ sleep she found necessary sometime around 3 a.m.
Tonight, like every night, she was about her secret work. She was sure that the others thought she was nobly sacrificing her spare time to make a database of the documents they’d found in the Docklands ruins. She had let them think that. It was safer. Quill had stars in his eyes about her, about her having saved his daughter. She was letting him and the rest of the team down so badly.
But she had no choice. After the ruins had been looted for so long, there hadn’t been much of interest left, so she wasn’t actually keeping the team from anything that could help them. She wasn’t telling them the whole truth either. The document she spent all her time on now was about her own needs. It had probably been spared the scavenging that had emptied that building because it was written in an indecipherable language in a hand that didn’t invite study. That obscurity had spoken to her of something being deliberately hidden. She had found something like the script on a visit to the British Library archives. It turned out that it had been noted on only one tomb in Iran, but the inscriptions on that tomb had been written in several other languages also. So there was, it had turned out, printed only in one issue of one archaeological journal, and still not available online, a working alphabet for the document she had before her. It hadn’t taken her long to translate the document, and thus understand what she was looking at. The document was a description of an object that had arrived in Britain in the last five years, just before the destruction of the Docklands site, in fact. Now she was looking on her laptop at a series of objects that might prove to be that thing. She had been doing this for the last week of long nights. She was on the fiftieth page of the third such catalogue site she had visited, and she was still absolutely certain, because she made herself stay awake and alert at every page load, that she hadn’t yet seen the object she was after. She was starting to wonder if the tomb in question really had, as the document alleged, been empty. If there really was an object that would do what the document said it did.
There was a noise from beside her. A text message. She was startled to see it was from Costain. He was wondering if she ‘had five minutes’.
What? At this time in the morning? He’d never texted her before. He was probably drunk. Or was this meaningful? Was this the start of the sort of activity on his part that she’d told herself to watch out for? Whatever. She put the phone back down without replying.
Costain was the one from whom she especially needed to keep this work secret.
* * *
Quill was once again hauled awake by the sound of his phone. His dreams had been full of something reaching towards him, reaching into him. But he couldn’t remember it now. Jessica, unwoken by the sound of the phone, was lying across his head.
‘Would you please answer that,’ said Sarah, ‘and tell them to –’ she looked at her daughter and gritted her teeth – ‘go away?’
Quill saw that the call was again from Ross, and said so.
‘Getting over her now,’ said Sarah.
He picked it up. After listening for a few moments, he quickly got out of bed and started getting dressed.
‘What?’ moaned Sarah.
‘Another one. It’s police.’
* * *
The slightly portly middle-aged man lay across the sofa. He was still dressed in a blue towelling robe, the now-familiar silver fluid splattered across him and all over the room. The robe was open, and so was he. A livid red trail led from what remained of his abdomen, across the polished wooden floor, and finished in an explosion of blood against the far wall, next to a Jack Vettriano. The expression on the victim’s face was an almost comical extreme of horror and incredulity. His eyes were open, glassy.
Quill’s team stood in the doorway, feeling – if Quill himself was anything to go by – like anything but an elite unit at this hour of the morning. Forensics had just finished with the crime scene and were packing up. Uniforms were filling just about every available inch of the building.
What they were staring
at was enormous. Bigger, even, than the death of a cabinet minister.
‘Sir Geoffrey Staunce, KCBE, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,’ said Ross, keeping her voice low as a uniform made her way past.
‘They got him,’ said Quill. ‘That’s what the papers are going to say tomorrow. With a strike looming, the protestors killed London’s most senior copper at his home in Piccadilly.’
‘There were indeed Toffs in the area last night, making a nuisance of themselves,’ said Ross, looking up from the report she’d been given on entering. ‘For this sort of address that’s pretty incredible.’
‘The connection is also the locked room and the MO,’ said Quill.
‘Plus, from our point of view, the silver goo,’ added Sefton.
‘And,’ said Costain, ‘the wife is talking about an invisible assailant.’
They paused for a moment, taking in the scene. Quill’s team’s speciality was now being tested against a very mainstream, very high-profile, series of murders.
‘This is going to set London on fire,’ said Costain. ‘I mean literally.’
‘Where’s this message they were talking about?’ Stepping carefully, Ross followed the trail of blood across the room. She got to the enormous splatter of it across the far wall and stopped. Quill and the others joined her. She was pointing at the fine detail that the chaotic enormity of the splatter concealed. Among the blood was written, in awkward, blocky characters:
THE JEWS ARE THE MEN WHO WILL NOT BE BLAMED FOR ANYTHING.
‘What is that?’ said Sefton. ‘I recognize that.’ He started to tap at his phone.
‘So this is almost certainly from the killer,’ said Costain, ‘but—’
‘Making assumptions,’ said Ross.
‘You said we could—’
‘Only when we remember to mark them as such. This is me doing that. Yes, it could be from the killer, but there might also have been person or persons unknown here, associated with the killer or otherwise, who might have left what they regarded as a useful, or just anti-Semitic, message for the many Londoners who will read it when they get a news camera in here.’
‘Next time you make an assumption, I’ll make sure I mark it.’
‘I hope you will.’
‘Would you just bloody finish the sentence you originally started?’ Quill asked Costain.
‘Just that it’s really weird,’ said Costain, ‘to use “are the men” in what’s otherwise a natural-sounding phrase. It feels like … pretence to me. A front.’
‘You’d know,’ said Ross.
‘I would. There’s the fingerprint.’ He pointed to the very end of the words, where the fingers that had daubed the message had paused for just a moment, leaving a single smeared print.
Ross took a photograph of it. ‘I’ll ask to hear from the investigation about the comparison of that to the prints found in Spatley’s car.’
‘Oh, my God,’ said Sefton. ‘“The Jews are the men”!’ He held up his phone as the others clustered around. He read from it, keeping his voice down so the uniforms all around couldn’t hear. ‘Those words, or something like them, were what was written on a wall in a place called Goulston Street in Whitechapel, in 1888.’
‘So?’
‘It’s the message left by Jack the Ripper.’
THREE
‘Jack … the Ripper?’ Sarah Quill slowly lowered her cup of coffee to the kitchen table.
‘Such is my glamorous existence,’ said Quill. ‘Celebrate my diversity.’
‘What does that even mean?’
‘I don’t know, I just say these things.’
‘I mean, is it that the Ripper’s … ghost has started to attack people?’
‘We don’t know anything beyond the message, not yet. But it makes sense of the shape of the attacker. That Toff image of the protestors is also very like the archetypal image of the Ripper. And, thanks to the press—’
‘Ahem.’
‘Present company excepted. Thanks to them, everyone thinks the protestors have now started murdering people, though they can’t quite work out how. The original version of what’s become the Toff mask was, so the people at the factory tell us, part of their “Jolly King” costume. That costume company have gone from employing a publicity person for the first time, and neither condoning nor condemning the protestors, to slamming the doors and hiding behind press releases.’
‘Royalty? Like in some of the mad Ripper theories? Could that be a thing? One of your lot will have said that, right?’
Quill loved it when she deduced something. She didn’t do analysis exactly in the way his team did, but like the news editor she was, always casting around for a lead. ‘Sefton. He’s been reading up on this stuff. Ross said that when she first got the Sight, she felt a certain gravity from the direction of Buckingham Palace. I bloody hope this Ripper business doesn’t take us there.’
‘Jack the Ripper. God, Quill, I wish I could have this story. Can I have this story?’
‘No. Because you and I have a deal—’
‘I know, I know: you all need to have someone you can talk to about this stuff. But, bloody hell, of all journalists, only I know that there’s a connection between these two incredibly high-profile murder cases. Only I know about the message on the wall. And I’m going to go back into my office this afternoon, and my editor’s going to ask how you are, and I’m going to say, “He’s fine, he expressed sympathy about the ongoing decline of the Enfield Leader and the redundancies that are bound to start happening soon—”’
‘Love—’
‘Fuck, I could string this story to the Mail or the Herald or something. I could make a fortune. They still give people who dob in for them serious money.’ She made grim eye contact with him again. ‘I’m only having you on. Really. No, I am.’
The media were, of course, even with the little they knew, going apeshit about the killings. The Independent was calling this second murder ‘the final failure of authority’ and the Sun had gone with ‘Day of the Mob’. The Herald was still very much implying that the Toff protestors must somehow be to blame, and that the CCTV footage from the car attack had somehow been tampered with. Quill wondered how many news stories over the years had been influenced by stuff from what was now his area of expertise, and how much impossibility, before the blinkers had been taken off, he’d seen euphemized or made ‘sense’ of. That paper, and a couple of others, had long since wandered away from facts into what Sarah called ‘opinion leads’ – meaning, so far as Quill could see, fiction – which the Herald usually used to cover half the front page with furious wordage that led up to a big headline. ‘People don’t buy newspapers for the news now,’ she’d said. ‘They buy a voice that agrees with them. The Herald knows that best of all and is angling itself towards a future when all the papers will be like that.’ Quill hoped that by that point some kind soul might have put him out of his misery. The Herald regarded the Coalition government, incredibly, as far too middle of the road and wishy-washy, and it wanted a crackdown on, well, everything, as far as he could tell. Every now and then, someone on the news would opine that the paper might soon declare its support for some other, currently minor, party further to the right. That would, people said, be a game-changer. Quill wasn’t sure and didn’t care very much at the moment. To him it was all bloody people doing what bloody people did.
‘At the end of all this,’ he said, ‘when I retire, maybe you can write the book.’
‘By then we’ll be living in a land where what you lot deal with is accepted, will we? I don’t know if I’m looking forward to that. I keep thinking that we should send Jessica to school somewhere outside London when she’s old enough.’
‘But—’
‘I mean boarding school. You have to stay here to fight this stuff.’
‘But—’
‘And we can talk about this sometime in the next five years.’ She picked up her iPad. ‘I’m just checking on the headlines. Not contributing to them. At all. Just
looking. Shit.’
Quill didn’t like how her expression had changed. ‘What?’
She held up the front page of the Herald site so he could see the headline. This time it was short and to the point:
YOURS TRULY, JACK THE RIPPER
Quill grabbed the tablet off her. ‘How the fuck did they get that?’
‘Well, this is the Herald, the cleanest newspaper in Britain, as they proudly state. So they’ll just have been looking through the window of that house with a long lens. Or had an anonymous photo emailed to them. Or something equally ethical. Dear God, I could have beaten the Herald to what’s turned out to be an exclusive for them. By about a minute. It’s an exquisite form of torture.’ She gave him a deliberately manic grin, threw back her tea and banged the mug down on the table. ‘Have a nice day at work, dear.’
* * *
Quill knew exactly what he was going to see when he entered Lofthouse’s office at Gipsy Hill. Sure enough, there it was: the Herald on her desk.
‘In case I hadn’t heard,’ he said.
She gave him a wry look and daintily dropped the newspaper into the wastebasket. ‘Tell me.’
Quill paused for a moment, returning her calm expression. He wished he could ask her to tell him what she knew. But he had learned from their first few regular meetings that it wouldn’t get him anywhere. He was still getting used to being able to talk to her about impossible things. ‘We found traces of the silver liquid that you can’t see on the exterior wall at what would have been the exit point of the assailant. There were a few drops of it in the garden, but no major deposits, and nothing had been disturbed, suggesting, once again, an airborne escape route.’