by Paul Cornell
‘What? I wasn’t saying you were … weak or anything. I felt that too.’
‘Right. Great. Okay, then.’
Costain found himself looking intently at her face, wishing desperately that he knew what was going on underneath all that anger. But he wasn’t going to find out now because he’d set off all her defences. He raised his hands in surrender. ‘I’m really sorry.’
She just shook her head again. As if she was shaking him off her.
* * *
In the car heading back to the nick, Lisa Ross looked out of her side window and tried to keep her expression steady. Costain was an expert at hiding his intentions, at getting people talking. Had he tried today to get her to open up about herself? Right at the moment when she had something she wanted to hide, particularly from him? He’d seemed really awkward about that text message – really awkward, as if it had been an embarrassing mistake, the sort of mistake someone trying to put up a front shouldn’t make.
Or maybe the sort of mistake someone trying to put up a front wouldn’t make.
She sneaked a look across at him driving. Was it just that he fancied her? She was constantly taken by surprise when that happened. She never realized until it was too late. It was always difficult and complicated. She remembered him having stayed with her in the hospital. He’d shown a whole caring side to him that … or, even back then, was that what he’d wanted her to think?
Maybe she was being too hard on him. What had he done, today, really? Just tried to find in her some utterly understandable feelings of being shaken up. Maybe he really had felt the same way. He’d looked as if he had at the time. He’d hit one of her buttons: she could never live with any suggestion that she was being less than professional.
Maybe he’d hit that button deliberately to set her off, to see what it revealed. Had he any inkling what she was up to? Would she ever know, one way or the other? If he did, it was impossible that he wouldn’t act on it, impossible that he wouldn’t start trying to play her. He would have to know for himself what she was finding out. The object she was after was unique, too valuable for him just to ask her about it and risk warning her of any intentions he might have.
Was it just that he fancied her? She wondered if he’d ever do anything else about it, now that she’d behaved the way she had.
Those eyes of his were very useful for an undercover, she decided.
He looked very trustworthy. Even when she knew he wasn’t.
FIVE
Sefton finished his coffee. He was inside the usual pub, in his usual place, sitting looking towards the window but far enough back from it that he wouldn’t be seen by anyone looking back from his target. He’d started to come here a few weeks ago and had previously treated this part of his duties reasonably casually. Now, though, he’d been asked to begin to make use of the progress he’d made in getting a look at people involved in London’s occult community. So today was going to be a bit different and he was now in the mental space he associated with being undercover, lightly wearing a role which could basically be described as ‘definitely not a policeman’. He’d always come here on Thursdays because that was the day when more of the particular sort of people he was interested in – the people who could make a little use of what his team called ‘the London shit’ to do impossible things, the people Losley had called Privileged – tended to go into the particular shop on Greek Street, across the road from the pub. In fact, there was one of them now, a bloke whom Sefton now knew well enough by sight to be able to follow him in a crowd: white male; early twenties; around six foot one; slim build; neatly trimmed beard; always wore a waistcoat and tie; a bit tweedy. Student, most likely. Straight. Whether or not everyone who made use of the power of London also had the Sight was an open question, one which Sefton had made a lot of notes about in his special notebooks. More certain was the fact that neither those who had the Sight nor those who knew how to use the power necessarily stood out as being important to someone Sighted. The team hadn’t been able to follow Losley just by feeling her presence. From his own studies, and this was something he was planning to share with the team soon, he suspected that he knew of at least one way in which those who understood how to use this stuff went into stealth mode.
The man was wandering over to the biggest branch of Quicksilver Dawn, the chain of occult shops that had sponsored one of the stalls at the New Age fair the team had attended when investigating the Losley case. All the meaningful customers that Sefton had identified seemed to dress slightly differently to the norm, but there had been very few in anything like the full-on Victorian dress seen at that fair. This, Sefton understood as he made his way to the door, was something J.K. Rowling had got right about the non-Muggle population: the askew dress sense. Maybe she knew more than she let on. He left the pub and sauntered across the street, enjoying the sunshine on his arms. Last night he’d had troubled dreams again. He had felt as if something was trying to get into his head, that the summer had got past his antihistamines and shoved its way right up into his sinuses and was rushing about in his brain, kicking down all the doors. He’d gone into the bathroom at 3 a.m. and splashed water on his face, and only slowly got back to sleep.
Now, in the distance, he could hear the drums of yet another protest march, heading for Parliament. The murders hadn’t deflated that movement; if anything, they had actually increased the number of protestors. The public, he thought, had sensed blood, and now it was as if their ancient hatred of those in power had started to be set free. If there was going to be a Police Federation strike, Sefton had already decided that he wouldn’t join in.
He went to look in the window of the shop. Just displays of completely ordinary Tarot cards and crystals on fake velvet in the window. There was an artificial spring that bubbled from a length of silvered tubing and twinkled as it fell delightfully into the limpid depths below. That might give his team an excuse to stroll in here one day this summer. ‘Hosepipe ban, sir. We’re searching the premises for free-flowing water.’ Even Quill, open to leaving the rule book behind now that they were working in the wild extremes, might blanch at that. There was nothing of Sighted interest in the window, nothing weighty.
Sefton paused for a moment and found that he was quite calm. He was undercover, he was at home with this sort of tension. He went inside.
* * *
The shop smelt clean and airy. The shelves were white, and enormous posters and paintings decorated the walls. Gentle, tuneless music wafted past. No incense; it would be too hard for the staff to put up with all day. There were those staff, twenty-somethings in black T-shirts with the logo of the shop; two of them were laughing at the till, everyday-looking kids, divorced from the clientele he was after.
He wandered towards the back of the store and realized straight away that this was like walking uphill. There was a precise gradient. Every step he took, according to the Sight, got him into more serious territory. Checking the price tags on the items, he saw that they followed that index too: more expensive with every step. He stopped. That felt … wrong. Why? This shop, logically, attached a higher price tag to items that were genuinely powerful, that had the strength of London about them, that had the age so prized by the small portion of the clientele who knew what they were doing. Presumably, he was heading towards more valuable items that could accomplish things – like the Tarot of London or Book of Changes that Ross had encountered – unlike the jewellery in these halfway cases, which just shone through association, without the feeling that it might leap up and help him or hurt him. So what was the problem with any of that? He realized he was feeling that there was something wrong with linking occult power and money. Something almost … gauche about it. He could feel that embarrassment as a physical effect. It was like … being on a fairground ride, with each foot on a plank that rocked in a different direction … the power and the money were sort of … angry at being chained together. They were resisting each other. What the fuck was that about? He recalled the same feeling from th
e green thing that he’d run into in Soho when he first got the Sight – that same anger at money.
He shook off the feeling and glanced back to the staff. They hadn’t even looked up. They must be used to people doing weird shit in here.
He kept moving.
There was an area right at the back with glass-fronted cases and narrow walkways between the shelves. It smelt mustier. The design of the shop identified it as the dull bit, for serious collectors only, but there were two security cameras up there, neatly covering everything. It seemed that the owners didn’t find it profitable to bring much in the way of this genuine stuff to the New Age fairs. Sefton’s target was looking into one of the display cases. Ignoring him, Sefton walked up to stand beside him, deciding to fix his eyes on something in there that shone brightly to the Sight: a brass bracelet that looked as if it had spent some time underwater, decorated with rough knotwork. There would be some serious London history to it. There was no label on it; if you were back here, you were supposed to know what this stuff was. There was a price tag, though: £1999.99. He could feel the object kind of itching at its attachment to such a value. He could feel its age. He could also feel that there was nothing scary about it; here was an item you could lean on in a crisis, an old friend that would always see you through. He’d seldom felt emotional detail like that with the Sight. Maybe that was because of the shop environment. If someone Sighted had stocked this place – and that was a conclusion he felt he could safely come to – they wouldn’t put out anything that made their customers feel like shit. That’d be in the back, the higher slopes that he felt continued past this end wall, the special stuff for special people.
Sefton had picked the bloke he’d followed in here because he looked young and was in modern dress, unlike the serious practitioners they’d encountered at the New Age fair. Today was just about making sure that the guy saw him here, so that by the third or fourth encounter he’d think of him as a regular, and then maybe start talking to him. Sefton wasn’t planning to begin a conversation himself. You didn’t initiate contact. Doing this in a subcultural context couldn’t help but remind Sefton of something he’d never done himself: cottaging. What would be just a small indicator that he and the man shared common predilections? There might well be a secret language here, but if there was an occult underworld in London, the sort of community that knew itself as a community, it stayed off the internet. With what Ross had reported about her fortune-teller’s embrace of all that was old, maybe that wasn’t surprising. What would be the obvious thing to do here?
He let himself smile at the warm feeling coming from the artefact, then glanced sidelong and saw that the young man was surely feeling the same way. But then he actually made eye contact with Sefton, and instead of any shared sentiment, as if they were both in an art gallery, the look on his face was grim. To Sefton’s surprise, the man spoke. He kept his voice low and urgent. He had a slight stammer and an upper-class accent. ‘Does you being here mean what I think it does?’
Sefton turned slowly to look at him, sizing him up.
‘Does someone like you being here mean that the Keel brothers are about to make their move?’
Someone like him? In what sense? Sefton chose his West Indian gang accent. ‘I don’t feel you.’ Suggesting that he really did know what was going on.
The man looked suddenly shocked. He lowered his voice even further. ‘You’re prepared to go that far? In the presence of all this?’
Sefton was now completely lost. But he didn’t let his expression show it. It was vital that he continue to feed this man’s assumption that he knew as much about what was going on as the man did. That was his way in. He smiled a very deliberate smile, and straightened his back from his gang slump, squared his shoulders, emanating basic dominance. Whatever this was, yeah, he was prepared to go that far. Feigning confidence had saved him in the past. Sometimes he thought that was all there was to life. He wished he found it as easy to do in the real world as when he was undercover.
The man seemed not to know what to do. He looked exasperated for a moment, then turned and walked quickly away. He looked back to Sefton from the end of the aisle, then he was off.
Well, that had been a come-hither look. So, here we go; the way in was opening up. Sefton gave it a moment of further window shopping, then went past the oblivious staff again, down something that was trying to slope both ways and out into the sunshine and onto the normal pavement. The man was loitering on the corner beside an ancient-looking cafe; when he saw that Sefton was following, he went inside. So Sefton did too.
* * *
The cafe was one of those you got on the corners of central London, unchanged in design and function since the fifties, apart from a microwave and a smoking ban. There were, now Sefton thought about it, quite a few businesses like this near the occult shop. The pub he’d been in hadn’t even had a telly. Were the proprietors aware that some of their clientele were what might be called neophobic, culturally attached to the past? Or was this just an evolutionary process caused by the flow of cash: in the squeeze, anything that had smacked of modernity had just unknowingly suffered from those customers not showing up? Maybe not. It wasn’t as if the individuals they’d met at the New Age fair were rolling in it. Exactly the opposite.
He went to join the man at a corner table, and now the bloke felt able to look up and acknowledge his presence. ‘I’m on your side. I really am.’
Sefton kept looking stern. Let him talk. His aim here was to find out as much as possible about the culture this man belonged to, and perhaps get an invitation to move further in, to meet more of them. The now-urgent need the man had to express some sort of fellow feeling might be an excellent engine to power that along.
‘But you can’t just march across all the lines. You have to tread carefully.’
What lines? Costain always liked to say that Sefton asked too many questions when undercover. But, sod him, Sefton was in his own world now. ‘Are you disrespecting me?’
From the wince on the man’s face, that had been the wrong thing to say. ‘Why do you keep doing that? Whatever the Keel brothers might want, speaking like that is going too far.’
As his training had taught him, Sefton did the opposite of what he wanted to, looking aside as if being accepted, being invited to become part of this community in some way, was nothing to him. ‘I know it’s hard, in your position—’ the man started to say. ‘You don’t know anything, mate.’
‘I’m only on the fringes myself. But when I’m in their places I do my best to talk their language. You know, to speak all old-fashioned London. All that Mary Poppins music-hall nonsense. It’s just what they’ve always done.’
He meant how Ross’ fortune-teller at the New Age fair had talked. So that was what this guy was worried about – his speech patterns. Just as well he hadn’t gone total Peckham on him.
‘I know the Keel brothers and others are trying to force changes now, that a generational thing of some kind is going on, and that suits me too…’
Sefton filed that one away for future reference.
‘… but you can’t get everything you want at once. Might as well work out which way the wind is going to end up blowing. I know I’m only in the very first stages. And I know it must be a lot worse for … for you…’
‘For black people, you mean?’
He hesitated again, big time. ‘I’m not one of the people who feel you’re automatically too modern. There have been … people of African descent in London for centuries.’
So this was definitely about being seen as too modern. Something not from whatever ‘golden age’ people like that fortune-teller harked back to.
So, hey, entering that shop and heading into the serious stuff at the back must be something you didn’t often see people of colour doing. To this bloke, encountering Sefton had been like getting onto the bus and having Rosa Parks sit down next to him. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘It’s time for a change.’
‘Are you going to the G
oat?’ He had lowered his voice, so it seemed that mentioning it in public was dangerous. But he’d also said it as if it was obvious that Sefton would know what he was on about.
Sefton narrowed his eyes and made as if to get up, again doing the opposite of what the man wanted rather than reveal his own lack of knowledge. Again, it worked. The man leaped to his feet, obviously feeling that he’d offended Sefton in some way. ‘Listen, I know about what they say is going to happen there this month. I’m a regular, just on the first level, not every Thursday, but at least on the first Thursday. People are saying that now that the Keel brothers have bought the place, it might get easier for me to, you know, get downstairs. That they’re going to change the rules. You must know something about that.’
The man was obviously assuming that Sefton’s skin colour automatically made him a radical in this subculture, and radicals knew about radical developments. The Goat? It might be a pub. On the first Thursday of the month. That explained why Thursdays brought this sort of person into town. He’d just found one of the meeting places of the London occult community. Job done. He didn’t let that satisfaction show. He slowly sat back down, nodding as if appreciating this bloke’s knowledge of the situation. ‘I might.’
‘Well, if you’re there next Thursday … tread carefully, eh? They might announce new rules, but real change takes time. This might not be the moment. But, hey, if you do get anywhere, I’ll be there to cheer you on. I’d benefit too. I’ve worked hard to get this far. Be nice to get down to the lower floors.’
Sefton considered. He really wanted to know this man’s name and to be given a map of how to get to a location that might be supernaturally hard to find, but he couldn’t risk asking for either. Names were a big deal in both undercover work and everything he’d read about the weird stuff. He waited for a long moment before answering. ‘Let’s see how it goes.’