by Paul Cornell
‘What?’ She was looking openly suspicious at him now.
He slapped the card down on the table. It was a business card with just a map that had a bit of the Sight about it and a date. ‘I found a few of these behind the bar at the Goat, in a drawer marked “auction”. What do you reckon that’s about?’
* * *
Ross tried to keep her expression steady, but she was so angry – with herself and with him – that she wanted to leap up and throw this table over him. She had to wait while the waiter brought their meals over, and Costain made ridiculous small comments about the preparation of the dishes, as if he was still trying to impress her.
She’d thought she could safely see how much he knew, but he’d had that card. He knew it was an auction. He could either tell the others about it – and there must be a reason he hadn’t done so already – or, worse, he could come along himself. If the object she was so desperately seeking was on sale there, as the barmaid had hinted it might be, then he would understand, if he didn’t already, that he needed it as much as she did. He would bid against her. He might still have dodgy sources of cash that could go much further than an intelligence analyst’s savings would. Or, if the auction was based on barter, on sacrifice, he was better placed with his life in the underworld to find terrible things to offer, when all she would have was herself.
That whole chain of thought fell like a row of dominoes as the plates were put on the table. If she was honest with herself, she’d been having fun watching his fumbling attempts to unlock her, enjoying watching him, until now.
What was she going to do? She couldn’t risk him bidding against her, so she had to try to get him onside. It meant not showing him this anger and instead telling him what he wanted to hear. So he had won, damn it. For now.
She reached into her bag, found her own card and put it down on the table beside his. ‘It’s an invitation,’ she said, ‘to an auction, as you’ve realized. An auction, I think, of occult London objects.’
He smiled right across his face, as if appreciating her all over again. She’d revealed hidden depths. ‘Why haven’t you told the others?’
‘Why haven’t you?’
The smile continued. ‘Because I’d like to see if there’s anything on sale there that might help me avoid going to Hell.’
She took a deep breath and let her secret out. ‘And I’d like to see if there’s anything on sale there that would get my father out of Hell.’
‘Interesting.’ He wasn’t pretending at all now, just going through the motions, giving her credit as a fellow player while looking at her as if he wanted to eat her. ‘And do you think there will be an item on sale there that will allow either … or both … of us to achieve our respective goals?’
She paused for a moment, getting tiny satisfaction from keeping him in suspense. ‘I’ve been reading up on an object called the Bridge of Spikes. There was a document about it in the hoard we found in the Docklands ruins. Very hard to translate, but I managed it. It talked about a device that resurrects a person to full, breathing, unharmed life, wherever their body is, and simultaneously wipes clean what you might call their ethical record.’
‘A “Get out of Hell Free” card.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Is this a London thing?’
‘No. It was used once, in medieval times, somewhere in the Middle East. I think it can be used once per century. And, yes, that means that this occult shit can happen in other cities. I haven’t told the others that, either.’
He took a long drink of his wine, his eyes never leaving hers. ‘Once per century also means that only one of us could use it.’
Her lips were dry; Ross took a drink herself. Her heart was racing. An efficient solution to Costain’s problem now, she knew, would be for him to kill her and dispose of her card. She was pretty sure he wasn’t capable of that. Pretty sure. But now he had the prospect in front of him of having all his sins erased, would he decide it was worth it? She examined his face again. No. At least not before he was sure he had it in his sights, there at the auction on the night. She would have to play him along, right up to that moment, then find a way to get the object and run. ‘Right.’
‘I knew you were thinking that.’
‘I was.’
‘You’re also thinking I might bid against you. Try to nick it from you if you won. Worse.’
‘Yeah.’
He paused, considering, then looked at her with a quizzical expression that contained an edge of hurt. ‘Is that why you agreed to this? To see how much I knew?’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe a bit.’
He seemed to accept that. ‘What are we going to do?’
She found she wasn’t angry any more. As he’d said, they both now knew what the game was going to be. ‘Join forces. Go to the auction together. See what happens?’
He considered that. Then nodded. ‘What about … this?’
‘What?’
‘Is this still a date?’ He was trying to make her think he was actually still concerned about that – that it really did matter to him. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. If she was going to be stringing him along, waiting for a chance to take the object for herself, she didn’t want to have to play the scarlet woman to do it.
That would only be the case if she wasn’t also genuinely … okay, this was complicated. She looked him in the eye. ‘If you want it to be.’
He looked like the cat that had got the cream. The size of his reaction, and the moment it took for him to conceal it, warmed her. Or fooled her, she thought, a moment later. He held up his glass. ‘Cheers.’
She picked up her glass, satisfied that at least her hand wasn’t shaking, and touched it to his. ‘Cheers.’
* * *
It was around eleven when they got back to Catford. They had each made an obvious effort to talk about other stuff on the way, though when Ross started to weigh up various dead ends in the op, he had gently shut her down. Yeah, that was just normal. She should know when to let herself not work. She liked having someone tell her that, actually. It was seductive. It was probably quite deliberate on his part.
They walked to her place; the housing block loomed above them. They stopped by his car. She wasn’t going to invite him in.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘thank you for a lovely evening.’
She couldn’t help but laugh at that. ‘No, thank you.’
‘So, neither of us is going to tell the others about…?’
‘No.’
Instead they were going to play out this game of theirs. He was looking at her very determinedly. She let herself look challengingly back.
‘Well.’ She put a little tired sigh in her voice. Time to turn in. She was going to see how far he was prepared to take this.
He suddenly stepped forwards and put his hands on both sides of her face, and with incredible gentleness and force at the same time, kissed her.
She realized that she’d raised her hands. What she did with them, what she did next, this was so important, she had just a second to decide …
She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him back. She let the kiss become passionate. She closed her eyes. She let his tongue into her mouth. Okay, so she was now the full-on scarlet woman. Damn it.
She had to stop this before it got too intense and in a moment he’d think they’d be going inside to—
He broke away. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her with the most gorgeous, scared, vulnerable expression. His hands dropped from hers.
‘Good night,’ he said. With a smile that again had just that hint of the cat that had got the cream about it, he got into his car.
She stood there while he drove away. After his car turned the corner, she dropped her head to one side, confused. ‘Oh,’ she whispered, ‘well played.’
* * *
Quill woke from dreadful dreams that he couldn’t now remember to find himself sweating in his duvet, and his phone once more ringing.
‘Would you
please tell him,’ Sarah groaned, ‘to kill people in the morning?’
Quill answered his phone. It was Lofthouse. ‘A third murder, same MO,’ she said. ‘It’s open season on rich white males.’
EIGHT
The bar in Hoxton was called Soviet, all sofas and low tables and big red projections of Stalin on the wall, so deeply ironic that Quill wasn’t sure he quite followed it. It had been packed at the time of the incident. There were dozens of witnesses, who were now slouching around looking vaguely annoyed, glancing at their expensive watches, as uniforms and Scene of Crime Officers moved between them. There was a huge splatter of blood on the ground between fallen tables, from where a body had recently been removed. Only Quill’s people could see that there was also a splatter of cold silver, which continued across the establishment, right to the window, where this time entry as well as exit splatters could be seen on both sides. An enormous dripping mass of it also covered the far wall. The name of the deceased was Rupert Rudlin, twenty-eight years old, worked for Challis Merchant Bank as an analyst. Parents in Twickenham, single, one sister living in the States.
‘He kept looking over at this young girl, I mean, young woman,’ said Jamie, who was, to give him credit, visibly shaken in his bomber jacket and necktie. ‘He kept saying he was going to go over and talk to her, and everyone was, you know, laughing at him. She was sitting at a table with this guy; Rupert kept saying she was out of his league. And then there was a crash from the window. It was the protestors outside.’ There had been, Quill had gathered, a major Toff gathering outside the bar that evening, something approaching a flash mob, swiftly brought together by Twitter. There were enough youths with those masks in this suburb to do that now, he supposed. ‘They’d thrown a dustbin or something. So we all cheered and waved to them, you know? The bouncers – sorry, security staff – went out there and talked to them. Some of the lads in here – and I don’t agree with this, okay? – they got out their wallets and started waving their cash at them, and pointing to themselves, and they got this chant going, “bankers” … “wankers” … pointing back and forth. Really stupid. Everyone was texting and tweeting about it and, you know, wondering if the police were even going to show up, what with this strike vote and everything.’ Quill was sure that his expression hadn’t revealed anything, but the young man stopped and looked awkward. ‘Sorry. Anyway, that’s when we started to hear the sieg heils from outside, and we realized there were bloody skinheads … well, not real skinheads now but, you know, that lot, they were out there too, and they’d started to fight the Toffs. You could see them outside the window, laying into them, chasing each other across the square, getting into scuffles. There were cheers from in here, not for either side, really. Anyway, I looked back and Rupert had gone over to the woman at the table, had gone to chat her up. That was Rupert all over. The bloke she was with just got up, looked at his watch, didn’t seem like he wanted to get in the way of that. More of a business drink than a date, I got the feeling. But I still thought it was a bit odd that he didn’t want to make sure Rupert wasn’t going to hassle her.’
‘Did she respond well to Rupert’s advances?’
‘It looked as if he was getting somewhere. She was smiling, anyway.’
‘What about the bloke she was with?’
‘He headed off. I didn’t see if he actually left.’
‘What happened then?’
The young man paused, and Quill, through experience, knew that now he was at the point where the impossible had intervened. The boy was trying to navigate through what he could say that might be believed.
‘Just tell the truth.’
Jamie hesitated, then gave in. ‘I thought maybe I was on something, that maybe someone had dropped something into my pint. That table –’ he pointed – ‘right beside Rupert and this girl just … erupted. All the glasses went flying. This guy that had been standing there was knocked down by it, got cut across his head, and he was screaming. The girl went to help him, squatted down to see what was wrong with him, and Rupert went too. I was thinking maybe some sort of bomb had gone off. And I think the security people started to come over.’
‘And?’
‘She went flying backwards. Like she’d been on one of those springboards stuntmen use. I mean, she shot upwards, I saw her feet off the ground, backwards, and she sort of flew, just a couple of feet, and hit the back wall there, and she stayed there, hanging there, and she was struggling, she was yelling, it was like she was actually fighting with something. She had no idea what was going on, no more than I did.’
‘What was Rupert doing?’
‘He went to try to get her down. But then … he spun round, and blood came out of his mouth. I thought he’d been shot. I ducked down. Really, I did. But then these … wounds … they just started to appear on him, up and down his body, across his neck, and he was staggering about, screaming. And then, then it was like something just burst out of him, like he’d been ripped open. There was this enormous spray of blood, more than you’d think there could be. He fell down. The crowd panicked, I mean, everyone just went apeshit, trying to get outside, running right into the Toffs and the skinheads, and then the police got here, thank Christ, and…’ He trailed off. He was looking at Quill almost desperately. ‘That’s the truth,’ he said. ‘Is that okay?’
* * *
‘Not many of the witnesses did tell the truth, actually,’ said Ross, reading the report that had been thrust into her hand by an annoyed-looking member of Jason Forrest’s staff. ‘You can’t really blame them. Our own witness statements tend to greater accuracy in cases like this because we let them know it’s okay to say mad shit. We have statements here taken by the main operation, saying that both a skinhead and a Toff protestor did the killing. Which means, I hope, that Forrester will just regard the statements we’ve harvested, when we share them with him, as equally mad.’
Quill glanced through the big window at a hungover early summer morning. A police line was keeping an enormous scrum of press back from the scene of the crime. Forrest himself was now striding about the room, looking at where the body had lain, with Lofthouse at his side. There was no message this time, they were certain, having examined every inch of wall.
‘It all fits the profile,’ said Costain.
Ross was frowning. ‘White men is a big profile. It’s everyone who’s not “the other”.’
‘Rich white men isn’t as big,’ countered Sefton. ‘There’s a reason why they’re called the one per cent.’
‘Was Staunce rich? Was Spatley rich?’
Quill recognized that Ross was sort of talking to herself out loud.
‘Privileged, then,’ said Costain.
‘Usually means the opposite in our world,’ said Sefton.
‘Great,’ said Quill, ‘we’re in a land of things meaning their opposites. What about the woman who was attacked?’
‘She wasn’t among those who stayed behind and were interviewed and processed,’ said Ross, looking at her own copy of the notes. ‘We have some descriptions – wildly varying, of course. There is, hooray, security camera footage of the whole bar.’
‘Hooray indeed.’ Quill looked up and grimaced. ‘Gird your loins, here comes trouble.’
Forrest had arrived, Lofthouse beside him. ‘It took us a couple of hours to sort out the scrummage outside before we could even get in here,’ he said. ‘Multiple arrests, protestors and now, dear God, rival right-wing protestors.’ Quill recalled seeing graffiti about ‘kikes’ on buildings around the square. ‘That’s rare to the point of unique for round here. The hard cases in my cells are saying they’re aiming to break up every Toff gathering.’
‘Just what we bloody need,’ sighed Quill.
‘What, they’re onside with the bankers?’ Ross had a look on her face as if reality was lying to her.
‘What we’re getting out of their online forums is that they think the Ripper message indicates that these killings are all a Jewish conspiracy, and that by wearing
that mask, the Toffs are supporting the secret powers that rule the world.’
‘Which in previous decades would have been associated with the bankers themselves,’ said Ross.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Quill, ‘now it’s like anything can mean anything.’
‘The Ripper really should have been more specific with that message,’ said Sefton. ‘Then at least we’d only have one side to deal with.’
‘So, DI Quill,’ said Forrester, ‘what can you bring to the table?’
Quill had prepared this report mentally over the last few days. ‘We’ve placed undercovers in relevant communities and are already hearing useful chatter, though none yet of operational relevance.’ He wished he could mention the silver, but couldn’t think of a way to do it.
‘So, you’ve got fuck all?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Fantastic. Keep up the good work.’
‘Any fingerprints here?’
‘No matches with the others, no.’
‘May I ask, sir, if, given this, we’re still building a case against the driver, Tunstall?’
‘Of course we are. Logically, he must have been involved in the first crime, and it beggars belief that we won’t have him for it in the end. When we’ve got enough evidence we’ll rearrest him, and he’ll eventually give us his accomplices. End of.’ With an ironic glance at Lofthouse that looked to be about Quill’s bizarre querying of that certainty, he was off.
‘To be expected,’ said Lofthouse, reassuringly.
‘Yeah,’ said Quill. ‘He has someone he fancies for it. I’d probably see it like that myself. Let’s check out the security camera footage, shall we?’
* * *
They had a few different angles to choose from this time. There was the young woman: white, late teens, five four, slim build, no visible identifying marks, long brown hair, here in a pony tail, dressed reasonably expensively and fashionably, sitting at her table. There came Rupert Rudlin, the victim, to talk to her. Standing up was the woman’s male companion: white, late thirties, five nine, large build, no visible identifying marks, balding, dark hair, off-the-peg suit, glancing at his watch, saying goodbye to her and heading off. They followed him across the bar and out of the door, shaking his head at door staff, pushing his way through against their urging him to stay inside, actually going out into the riot. Then light arrived in the corner of the frame and the shining figure in the shape of the Ripper leaped lightly into it. The assailant had landed on the table, causing the drinks and empties placed there to fly off, wounding the bystander as the witness had stated. The young woman had tried to aid the wounded man and been slammed up against the wall, where the assailant indeed held her for twenty seconds, as Rudlin got to his feet.