by Paul Cornell
She turned slowly to look at the person who might stand in her way.
Costain was shaking, a hand still over his mouth. He saw she was looking at him. After a moment, he composed himself enough to say something. ‘That smell…’
She had thought about what this would do to him. She knew it would remind him of his own time in Hell. But she had thought that, beyond that, it would show him exactly what her dad was going through. A darker thought came to her. Maybe it wasn’t that she’d hoped to persuade him to let her keep the object that could free her father. Maybe it was that she’d wanted to demonstrate why she’d do anything to keep it. Now he knew what he was dealing with.
She went to him and calmly took his hands in hers. ‘Do you see now?’
He nodded. He licked his lips. His eyes met hers. ‘I want to help.’
‘I know you do.’ Though she really didn’t.
‘He’s wrong about me.’
‘You don’t know you’re going to end up in Hell, not for sure, but my dad is in there now—’
‘Rob Toshack would have given me to Losley. I know that.’
‘I know—’
Costain suddenly shouted. ‘I was planning to take it for myself, okay?!’
Ross stared at him, trying to see the truth in his eyes.
‘But I won’t now. I won’t now. Okay? I want you to use it on him. I want you to get him out of there.’
Ross didn’t know what she believed. She didn’t want him looking at her in that moment. So she pulled him to her. Awkwardly, they held each other.
* * *
Quill only remembered to get his dinner suit back from the drycleaners because Sarah got Jessica to run into the kitchen and ask him if he’d done so. He was looking forward to this do where the staff of her paper were going to be shown what it meant to be part of the Daily Herald media group. It would be an evening out where he wouldn’t have to think about being a police officer, or about London falling apart, or that two of his team had reported back from extraordinary experiences with nothing but a single negative between them: that whatever was doing the killings wasn’t anything to do with the original Jack the Ripper. Of course, at this do, everyone Sarah introduced him to would be interested in his job and ask what he was working on right now, and he’d lie, probably. In the back of his head was the thought that idle conversation might uncover some journalistic titbit about the Ripper or how the Herald knew about that bloody scrawled message. But how likely was that, really?
He was hauling the suit through the front door when he got a text from Lofthouse telling him that his request to search Spatley’s offices had been approved for tomorrow. At least there’d been some progress.
* * *
The reception was held, to Quill’s surprise, behind a completely nondescript door, without even a letter box, in a tourist-packed street in Soho. Sarah, done up and smelling of some new perfume, had buzzed an intercom and told a receptionist they were there for the Vincent do, and they’d been let in to walk up a flight of stairs to a coat check. Another staircase took them to a surprisingly spacious bar with a stage and corporate logos everywhere. There was already a crowd; Sarah had insisted that they did not ‘do the copper thing’ and arrive early, as if this was a crime scene that might be disturbed. Quill gratefully switched off the demanding bit of his head that was a police officer and kept a step behind Sarah as she found her editor, Geoff, and some others from her work, who all looked equally out of place in evening wear and starry-eyed at being in this media nirvana, while forcing themselves to remain cynical in almost every utterance.
Quill recalled he’d enjoyed their company on the last few occasions he’d encountered them; he let himself relax further. He hoped he could get out of his head the news reports of which boroughs were burning. Had it been his imagination, or had there been fewer tourists on the streets? The journalists who didn’t already know indeed asked him what he did for a living and what he was working on now, and he circumnavigated the truth. The room filled up a bit more, and a suit came onstage to general applause and thanked everyone for coming. He introduced, to Quill’s pleasant surprise, the comedian Frankie Boyle, who did a highly entertaining routine that was unexpectedly harsh towards their host. Sarah nudged Quill in the ribs and indicated where the familiar figure of Russell Vincent stood among a gaggle of close advisers, all of them laughing uproariously at the jokes being told at his expense. A bit too enthusiastically, Quill thought. Vincent was in his early fifties, with saggy jowls, hair that was a bit uncontrollable and a twinkle in his eye. ‘I bet,’ Quill whispered to Sarah, ‘if he suddenly stopped laughing, the whole room would too.’
‘Yeah, Quill, except you.’
‘Probably.’
Vincent happened to look over at that moment, saw Sarah’s party and clearly pointed them out to his inner circle, who nodded along, looking approving.
‘I hope that isn’t “sack them all anyway”,’ said Geoff, who was a very balding man with a continual sigh in his voice. ‘I’ve been warned he might come over. If he does, don’t tell him you’re a copper, Mr Quill. We don’t want to scare him off.’
Boyle came to the end of his routine, and told his audience that now he’d got paid they could all fuck themselves, which produced another cheer. He departed with a jolly wave. Almost immediately, Vincent headed over.
Quill patted Sarah’s shoulder. ‘Here we go. Good luck.’
‘I’m a professional,’ she said.
‘Don’t spill your drink on him.’
‘Now you’ve jinxed that.’ She put her wine glass down on the table.
‘You’d be Geoff Sumpter of the Enfield Leader,’ said Vincent, holding his hand out to Sarah’s editor as he arrived. ‘Russell Vincent.’ The voice was how Quill remembered it from the telly: that slightly puzzled, self-mocking tone, as if he was stumbling his way along, delighted by life. It was a public school voice, but a chummy, harmless one. Quill found it all very artificial, a deliberate attempt at being charming. He remembered the most famous moment of the Bussard Inquiry, when Vincent, in the middle of dealing with the charges of phone hacking that had been levelled against his newspapers, had had also to deal with his own mobile ringing during his testimony. His frantic, clownish efforts to switch it off had actually got the ministers laughing. Quill fixed a smile on his face now, hoping he wouldn’t have to talk to him.
Geoff introduced his team, and Vincent shook each hand in turn. ‘I’m not going to remember anyone’s name, you realize; I have people to do that. Which of you is Sarah Quill?’
Geoff indicated Sarah, who was now looking flabbergasted. ‘Er, hello!’
Vincent held up his hands. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got a list here of one person on each of the acquired titles whose work I think is exemplary. Or rather, who my people think is exemplary. They want me to tell you it’s me who thinks that – but oh dear, I’ve blown that. The rest of you are disposable!’ He threw up his hands before they could even react and laughed. ‘No, no, you all get to stay. In fact, yours is the title I think we’re going to keep doing exactly what it does now. I think you lot might actually be able to win your circulation battle, once you’re plugged into our distribution network.’ Quill watched the smile on Geoff’s face getting broader and broader. ‘Geoff, you run a great ship. You all enjoy yourselves. I just need a quick word with Sarah and her husband here.’
Quill girded his loins as, without pausing, Vincent led the two of them off into a gap that automatically opened for him in the midst of the crowd. His people had not followed him, but had been left to carry on chatting up Geoff and his team. Quill was aware of everyone in the room wondering who they were to deserve such face time.
‘We’re going to be screening some of the new ads that are going out tomorrow,’ said Vincent, as the screen behind the stage lit up, ‘and I’d value your opinion, but mostly I’m doing this to let each of the talent I’ve picked out from all the papers look like they’re going places, so the rest of the staff tu
ne into that, and –’ he plucked a card from his pocket and put it into Sarah’s hand – ‘you now have my personal contact details, so if you or I need to ask each other anything, we can both do that. Or, to not insult your intelligence, you’re going to keep tabs on your boss for me.’
‘Ah,’ said Sarah.
‘Standard practice. Geoff’s an honest bloke, and I don’t think he’ll lie to me, but I always like to have another honest source in reserve. Oh, here we go.’ On the screen now was a scene of a group of footballers all gathered around, engrossed in an issue of the Herald with the headline ‘Invasion of the Immigrants’. The footballers were all black. A couple of them had their mouths open in extraordinary astonishment, gaping at whatever the contents of the paper were meant to be. The music that accompanied the clip was something Latin and trumpety. ‘Do you think,’ asked Vincent, as if he was asking for a second opinion about a corked bottle of wine, ‘that this ad is a tiny bit racist?’
Quill looked to Sarah, who was obviously making a split-second decision about telling truth to power. ‘Yes.’
‘Good! Good! Why?’
‘It makes them look stupid.’
‘So you might be moved to complain to the advertising standards authority?’
‘I don’t know if I’d go that far.’
‘We’re hoping some people will. That’s why that’s the cheap one. The idea is that it gets banned, we make a great fuss about it, how we thought we’d made a very liberal choice to hire a bunch of black actors. The headline on the paper, that’s to lure people into that way of thinking too. I think if the headline had been about bananas or something, then it would really be racist, not just pretend racist. I’m of Jewish descent myself, so…’ He left that with a shrug. ‘If it’s banned it gets talked about in pubs, replayed on YouTube endlessly, it gets a sort of fascinating sheen to it. It makes us look young and rebellious, which is what our research tells us is what we’re most seen as not being. It’s called “outrage marketing”.’
‘Ah,’ said Sarah, ‘right.’
‘Hmm. You’re still against us showing the clip, though?’
‘Yeah.’ She said it as if it was just narrowly the best of no really good options.
He laughed. ‘This is all good. I need you to be honest with me.’
‘What’s the music about?’ asked Quill.
Vincent turned to him, and Quill found himself being sized up. ‘Something with no relation at all to the subject matter: Herb Alpert. People will ask exactly that question. Again, it’ll stick in their heads, but that effect fades quickly. If we kept doing adverts with that attached, it’d stop being jarring and start just being our tune. These days anything can come to mean anything. Sorry, you must be … no, don’t tell me – James, yes, I recall. And you are a … police officer, are you not? A detective. Right, hence the question. It’s your job to sort through a huge number of signifiers, many different people and events, and work out which of them means anything to you.’
‘I suppose,’ said Quill, slightly dreading what might come next, and already tired by how fast this man spoke. He hoped that at no point would Vincent ask him to give him the inside track on anything. Although this bloke was supposed to be the only newspaper proprietor who didn’t do stuff like that, he was obviously a bit of a shit, and probably guilty of something. But then Quill thought that about most of the general public.
‘What I like about the Met,’ said Vincent, ‘is that it’s still a meritocracy.’
Quill suppressed a cynical laugh, and managed a tilt of the head that he hoped indicated nothing in particular.
Vincent seemed to notice the half-heartedness of the gesture. ‘Well, that’s what senior officers always tell me. I started out as a copy boy; I’ve been an editor all my life. Oh, here’s another one.’
He looked back to the screen and started to narrate what he saw in this next advert. ‘Handsome young chap, smart suit but not expensive, down-to-earth London accent but not faux Jamaican youth accent, more the sort of voice kept alive by soap operas, so he’s doing what the audience want to do and could actually do, leading them into thinking that if they copy him and buy the paper, they’ll be free and happy like him…’ Quill noticed that the finely ironed copy of the Herald the man flapped open had the same headline as in the last advert. ‘He’s our aspirational cheerleader figure, he’s in all the rest of these, which will actually get on telly and push the brand along in the spotlight.’
‘Interesting,’ said Quill.
‘We’re really in the same job, James. You notice meaning, I try to make it.’
Quill wanted to ask if a newspaperman’s job shouldn’t be to report the news, but, aware of Sarah’s tight-lipped smile, contented himself with a chummy laugh.
‘Well, I must go,’ said Vincent, ‘if those above you ever grind you down…’ He took another card from his pocket and placed it in Quill’s palm.
Quill looked at the card and his eyes widened. He looked up at Vincent. ‘Tell me,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘Mr Vincent, have you ever experienced anything impossible?’
Sarah’s face was suddenly a picture.
Vincent seemed to falter. Here, Quill was sure now, was someone who knew exactly what he was talking about. ‘I … I don’t know what that is, and I don’t have time to get into it. Sarah, James, good evening.’ He moved swiftly off into the crowd.
Sarah looked aghast. ‘What the fuck, Quill?’
Quill took the business card from her hand and held it up beside the one he’d been given. To his eyes and his eyes alone, they were both spattered with freezing droplets of silver.
TEN
‘How did Sefton end up with “severe bruises on his arms”?’ asked Lofthouse.
Quill didn’t quite feel able to share all the details of Sefton’s experiment. ‘He failed to see a man about a bus,’ he said. The two of them were walking down a corridor in the Treasury, all polished wood and the smell of a carpet that was cleaned daily. Quill had asked her to come along to give him as much political clout as possible in what looked likely to be a difficult day. What they’d seen on the way in – protestors gathering in Parliament Square – had put them all on edge. This time the youths in the masks had been carrying an enormous puppet of the Toff character, held up by sticks. It held a bloody razor, doubtless made of felt. To Quill it felt as if this new Ripper was being elevated to the status of minor local god, a god that demanded sacrifice. Perhaps literally.
There was something else that was weird, too. As soon as they’d stepped into the precincts of the Houses of Parliament, he had felt a sudden lack of something, as if he’d walked into a recording studio and the ambient sound of the world had cut off. It had taken him a few paces to realize what was going on, then he’d walked back and stepped back and forth, oblivious to the glances he was getting, until he’d found a specific line where it happened. ‘It feels … safe in here,’ he’d told Lofthouse, who had raised an eyebrow at his performance. ‘Like past this line the power of London doesn’t work.’
‘That has to be deliberate.’
‘It does sound like the sort of thing those who laid down the law in past centuries might do: protect the centres of power from occult dodginess.’ They’d gone out again and walked around the boundaries of the old buildings, Quill finding that the force field or whatever it was approximated to the walls in some places but not in others. The modern additions weren’t covered. Everyone inside was lucky in ways that the vast majority of them didn’t appreciate. He noted that this wasn’t something that Lofthouse had known previously. When she said she knew less than they did, she seemed to be telling the truth. So why couldn’t she tell them what she did know?
Finally, they’d had to head in again because it was time for their appointment. ‘You’re trying to get a meeting with Vincent?’ asked Lofthouse now.
‘I have a call in with him, as they say. He’s obviously had an encounter with something from the Sighted world and, given that our suspect is the
only thing we’ve seen so far that splatters, maybe even the Ripper himself. And Vincent radiates dodgy. The number on those business cards turned out to be just his PA, but that’s closer than most people get.’
‘Last time a fully armed parliamentary inquiry went after him he came up smelling of roses. Tread very gently.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Did you find the taxi that picked up the male witness from the bar?’
‘We did, but unfortunately he paid in cash, so we’ve just got a few extra lines of description from the foggy recall of a taxi driver. He bloody got out near Tottenham Court Road too, right in the middle of town, and we lose him on camera somewhere in the shops. So no indication of home address.’
‘And you’re pursuing Gaiman?’
‘He’s one of only two survivors from the Goat and Compasses that we can definitely find. He’s still in London, and in the face of a call from the Met, his agent was fulsomely cooperative, so our oomph is still respected in some quarters. Ross and Sefton, who insisted on getting right back on the horse, are interviewing him this afternoon.’
‘The other survivor would be…?’
‘The surviving Keel brother, Terry, who we’ve left where he is. Sefton’s been keeping a watch on the shop, and the individuals who were regular clientele seem to be lying low. For the moment.’
A door ahead of them opened, and a pleasant-faced, neat young man stepped out of it. ‘Superintendent Lofthouse?’
* * *
They were taken to a rather more impressive door and shown in to see the permanent secretary to the Treasury, Sir Anthony Clough. He rose to greet them. A very guarded man, Quill thought: big smile on his face, but nothing in the eyes. He was large, had once been muscular, a big head with white hair around the temples. He’d served under both flavours of administration, was known to have an Olympian disregard for party politics and was, according to a senior Met colleague, ‘cruel, but fair’. Having exchanged pleasantries, he addressed himself to Lofthouse and asked what reason her people had for searching Spatley’s departmental and parliamentary offices, when they’d already been checked out once by the main inquiry. Lofthouse looked to Quill, who again trotted out that they were a special team with a special remit, and Lofthouse made the right noises to indicate that further questions, even from this level of seniority, wouldn’t be advisable.