by Paul Cornell
‘We should talk about what we’re going to do about the auction.’
‘Yeah.’
He decided he was going to risk it. Just to see her reaction. ‘You could call it our third date.’
She stopped what she was going to say, actually a little flustered, which was deeply pleasing. ‘Technically,’ she said.
TWELVE
The following evening, Sarah Quill watched her husband silently drink his coffee at the kitchen table. She never liked it when he was silent. ‘So they didn’t find an easy exit to the brothel?’
‘Nah, but I’m not ready for Christmas presents in the middle of summer. We spent the day trying to find the woman from the Ripper attack on the Soviet bar and her male friend, but we don’t really have enough to go on.’
‘What are you going to do next?’
‘Prepare to send Costain and Sefton in. Continue to pursue an interview with Vincent. Continue to search the victims’ histories for some connection.’
‘The announcement of the result of the postal ballot of Police Federation members is tomorrow.’
‘Yeah.’
‘If they have decided to take industrial action, coppers coming out illegally, won’t it all contribute to how bad London is feeling right now?’
‘And therefore to this ostentation malarkey. The thought had occurred to me. London will have been told it can do what it likes. And so it will. I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen.’
‘The driver, Tunstall – you think he must have been in on it?’
‘It looks that way. We looked over Spatley’s two other offices, his constituency one and the one in the House, and didn’t find anything there. We spoke to the chief whip, and he told us that, if anything, Spatley had been focusing himself, cutting down on constituency work.’
‘To prepare for some sort of fight.’
‘Yes, but in politics you’d normally need to gather allies, put a gang together – that was the feeling I got from every civil service bod we talked to. Spatley, paranoid as he was, hadn’t told anyone what he was about to do, as far as we can tell. We got into the business of Spatley’s phone with SO15, Counter-Terrorism Command. They have serious hackers, and they took his mobile apart. There was nothing.’
‘And what about your phones?’
He smiled. He was always pleased when she worked something out. ‘Them too. And again, a clean bill of health. We had SO15 sweep the Portakabin for bugs while they were at it. That caused a few raised eyebrows. Nothing found there, either.’
‘So let me get this straight. You talked out loud about reinter-viewing a witness while you were in the Treasury, a place which is, security-wise, presumably as safe as the proverbial Bank of England, and the witness you talked about interviewing is killed the next morning.’
‘With us having only talked to each other about it, on phones which have definitively not been hacked.’
‘But, dear God, somehow you’re being listened in on.’
‘It looks that way, yeah.’
‘Maybe whatever evil shit you’re up against this time is all seeing and all powerful?’
‘Let’s hope so. Then we can just retire and leave them to it.’ He looked a little happier now. ‘I always like it when we talk things through like this. We should have an Ops Board at home.’
‘Really,’ she said, ‘no.’
* * *
Ross stood on her balcony, listening to the summer sounds of her suburb: the distant music, the cars racing by with conflicting tunes blaring from them, nearby laughter, the pubs, ambulances over the hill. Distant sirens spoke of continuing violence, which hadn’t yet reached Catford. She’d stopped watching the news. It was all uniforms with shields and helmets and the surging of huge masses of people, and then fires and running kids with looted televisions. She’d thought there was a limit to how long it could go on; seemingly there wasn’t. It was turning out to be a long summer. The Summer of Blood. Whoever had coined that phrase had – if what Gaiman said about ostentation was true – helped in a tiny way to make it happen.
She was dressed for the underworld again, in costume. The only advantage she had tonight was that, unless he’d looked it up – and he might well have done – Costain didn’t know where her dad was buried. If she got the Bridge of Spikes, she’d have to get there fast and activate it, without Costain following her, she hoped. She didn’t have any idea how the device actually worked. Presumably, if it was in the auction, it would come with instructions. She hoped Costain was also uncertain about that.
She would keep her knife on her tonight, in case she got hold of the Bridge and Costain tried to take it, in spite of all his promises. She was prepared to hurt him. She wouldn’t back away from that possibility. She was doing this for Dad, and she wasn’t going to stop now.
Alongside that, it was also going to be their third date. If he was being honest, if he was now genuinely on her side, they might end up together, might get to celebrate together. The possibility of that had turned her on all day, whenever she thought about it. She’d even gone out and bought some underwear.
It almost made her smile. Talk about all or nothing.
When he arrived, she opened the door to him and would have been happy to let him kiss her. But he didn’t. He looked calm and serious and committed to her cause. The librarian look he once again sported helped with that. ‘Let’s get this done,’ he said.
* * *
The map on the card had surprised Ross when she’d compared it to Google Maps. The location given hadn’t looked promising when she’d checked it out in person, either. But she supposed it made a sort of sense.
How thin the Millennium Bridge across the Thames felt as they walked over it that evening. Perhaps it was because with every step Ross felt something enormous growing all around her. The sun was still a way above the horizon behind her, making her shadow sharp on the new stone. The full moon was in the sky ahead, the base of it still hidden behind the buildings. She found that Costain, beside her, had slowed his walk too. She looked over the rail, to the river itself. It was sparkling in the combined light, a reminder of the great river of silver and gold that lay beneath all things in London. Tonight it felt as if it was simmering with the million sparkles on its surface, preparing, flexing like a muscle. It was uniting with the sky above, creating this enormous sensation of a waiting, observing, presence.
She could feel London tonight as if she had her palms against the heart of a wild animal. She could sense it watching them. She supposed it was because she herself was on the edge of a precipice. Maybe all Londoners felt it at times like these. Maybe this was how some of the Privileged felt all the time. It wasn’t the first time she’d thought of them as lucky. This was the truth that was under everything.
If she looked down into the detail at the water’s edge, she’d see terrible things, but that would be the truth too. To be part of a city was to be a cell in a bigger animal, an animal large enough to have a conversation with the sea, which the river moderated, and the sky, which the river reflected. To be part of a city was to have an index of your mortal life right in front of you: as you got older you’d start saying you remembered when it was all different around here.
She understood why those who had the Sight felt the need to hang on to the past. She herself, she realized, was trying to get back to when her dad had been alive. It was as if she was trying to begin her life again, even when everything about a city said the world went on without you.
She slowed to a stop and Costain halted too. They were halfway across the bridge. Where they stood, people had attached padlocks to the horizontal wires, usually with the names of couples on them. It was a gesture that was supposed to be about eternal love, but it had always felt a bit creepy to Ross, suggesting that locks had anything to do with love. Every month, the City of London Corporation sent people along with bolt cutters to remove them.
She understood now that she had no idea about that sort of love except as somethin
g people talked about. She’d always hoped if she ever felt like that, it’d be free of the locks she’d made for herself, of the burdens of her own quest. That it would be freeing.
She felt now how small her mission was. Just one person – her dad. She was prepared to harm Costain, to do anything, for that one tiny being. She could give all that up and choose love instead, the river seemed to be saying to her.
No, all she knew about London said the opposite: that the actions of one person could be remembered. Saving her dad was who she was. Sorry, she said now to the glory of London, I am what I am and I will do what I am going to do.
The glory of London seemed to worry in reply, to flex its river muscles anxiously, to fret about what she was going to contribute to its history tonight.
‘What are you thinking?’ asked Costain.
She turned to look at him, and was sad for him because he was with her. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.
* * *
They finally made their way to the end of the bridge, and thus to the enormous square and ugly building that had once been Bankside Power Station. ‘The Tate Modern art gallery,’ said Costain. ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’
Ross got out the card again. The vortex on its surface was twisting, reaching forwards, the map distorting more and more as they got closer. ‘Incredibly,’ she said.
The art gallery was open late for a new exhibition: Metaphysical: The Nostalgia of the Infinite. The poster had made Ross wonder if, despite the occult underworld’s problems with the whole concept of modernity, this might in fact be an exhibition that suited it. What she took from the accompanying leaflet: the concept of items or buildings being placed to overshadow and influence people – surely that struck a nerve with them? The Turbine Hall was packed with people queuing to get up to level three, where the exhibition was. Ross recalled seeing something about this having suddenly become one of those summer art ticket rushes London had, with staggered entry and sweaty groups of people craning to look at the paintings, even as the suburbs burned.
Thankfully, their destination was down in the Tanks, originally underground oil reservoirs, some of which were now used for exhibitions themselves, but not all. They saw more of the Sighted sort of people as they made their way through an installation where projectors would suddenly display random film clips of people talking about dead relatives. The Sighted they saw, in their ragged period costume, were sighing or walking quickly through or even sniggering at the exhibit. ‘It’s sort of like a half-hearted version of our lives now,’ said Costain, standing in the light of a woman sobbing uncontrollably, holding up a picture of what must have been her dead teenage son. ‘No wonder they don’t like it.’
‘I think maybe,’ said Ross, ‘they just don’t like modern art.’
She found the side door she had located a few days before, which had now been left unlocked, and followed a furtive-looking group of the Sighted through it.
There was nobody checking invites at the door. To know where the auction was seemed to be enough. The room they entered didn’t look as if it was part of the Tate – more as if it might still be a working part of a power station. Perhaps the pipes overhead did gleam a little too brightly, and the wall that seemed to be taken up with one big engine did so a touch artfully, but it was considerably more authentic than its surroundings. Right beside it, yes, Ross could feel it through the wall, they were up against the river here. It roiled and fretted just feet away.
She recognized several faces from the crowd that had been at the Goat and Compasses. Judging by the startled looks among those people, they were recognized in return. They had something to do with the death of Barry Keel. There were none of the wannabes here from the top floors of the pub; they were amid the serious people now. Among the crowd, though, were a scattered handful who looked a bit different: smart people in business suits finding quieter corners to talk on their phones. Ross glanced to Costain, who shook his head, neither of them had any idea what that different demographic was about. Ross felt a few attempts to ‘read her bar code’ and used Sefton’s blanket technique to foil them. They died down after a few moments. If only Ross could read bar codes herself.
Ross saw that people were starting to look at the fob watches they’d pulled from their ancient pockets, and that a crowd was forming in front of a low wooden stage. In its normal life, this place must be some sort of lecture space used by school groups and the like. There was no sign of any chairs, so the crowd stood, or in some cases just sat on the ground, presumably ready to haul themselves up when an auction item they were interested in was announced. Ross and Costain got as far forward as they could, to a place where they could see the stage.
A door at the back of the stage opened, and without any ceremony, into the room walked an elegant elderly woman with long silver hair, dressed in a grey ball gown that was actually covered in cobwebs. Ross could see a couple of spiders on it; one of them was moving.
‘Madams and Messiers!’ the lady called. Her accent was pretend posh, not even an attempt at French, a music hall barker, playacting ‘above her station’. The crowd applauded. ‘Welcome once again to this high point of the Seen season, the place to be Seen, our quarterly quantifying of quality, your refreshment on the way to your revels, a palimpsest of prognostication, prestidigitation and parsimony!’ The crowd went ‘ooh’ at every long word. The host leaned closer to someone in the front row, and put her hand to her mouth in a stage whisper. ‘It’s the stuff of London, on the cheap, dear!’ Then she straightened up again. ‘The truce is in place, so mind your fucking manners. I am your ’ost, Miss Haversham with an “er” as well as an aitch, not Havisham like that berk Dickens ’ad it.’
Ross heard the crowd chanting along with that bit, a mantra they’d obviously heard many times before.
‘I can tell you good people are itching to begin. Bit hot out there, innit? Bernie the Bitch, distribute the catalogues!’
A very thin middle-aged man dressed as a waiter, with bicycle clips on the bottoms of his trousers and a hangdog expression, entered at that same instant through the door behind the stage. In his arms he carried a pile of papers, which were eagerly snatched up by the audience. When Ross got hold of one, she saw that this list of auction items had been printed very roughly, as if from some form of mechanical copier, the faded ink pink and purple. The pages smelt of chemicals. There were over fifty items listed. There were no descriptions and no pictures, just the name of the object beside each item number. She found herself desperately looking down the list. She looked once, she looked twice. Then she threw the piece of paper at Costain. ‘It’s not there! That barmaid said it would be. She said she had “a strong feeling”. She said it like she knew!’ Costain grabbed the paper, looked quickly down it himself, as if he might see something she hadn’t. On the stage, Bernie had joined Haversham, carrying an enormous ledger and a quill pen in an inkpot, which he set up on a small lectern.
Ross looked at the crowd and the hosts as they prepared to begin. She couldn’t just walk away. She marched up to the stage. Costain quickly followed. ‘The item I’m after,’ she called, ‘it’s not here.’
Miss Haversham looked at her, and Ross had, in that moment, to use the blanket harder and faster than at any time previously. ‘We’ve had no withdrawals, have we, Bernie? Are you sure it was meant to be on sale tonight?’
Truly, she wasn’t. She’d been caught out, she realized, by assumption. It made her want to laugh and not stop laughing. But still she answered yes.
Haversham sighed. ‘You aren’t, you know. We get quite a few like you here, following one of the ways that happenstance and aim interact in the metropolis. They all find their just deserts.’ She added a big stage wink, then turned away.
Ross wanted to yell at her. She could feel the crowd looking at her with pity, shame and – given what had happened the last time she and her mate were about – worry. Costain now had a grim look about him. Was he distraught for her, or for himself? She put that
thought aside, because a new idea had come to her. It had brought the sudden pain of new hope with it. They stepped aside from the crowd to talk in private. ‘That book…’ she said, ‘that’ll be, what, a record of sales?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And it’s bloody huge.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So maybe what I’m after has already been sold at one of these auctions, and the details of whoever bought it are written down in there. Maybe that’s what the barmaid meant. Maybe she’d seen my future.’
‘That warning we got during the Losley inquiry about someone close to us dying, that was as if someone had seen the future, so I suppose it’s … possible.’ With a lurch of her stomach, Ross knew from his tone exactly what that grim expression of his meant. He was thinking that she might have deluded herself, that she’d aroused false hope in him, put him through the emotional wringer for nothing. Was he about to walk away, to reveal that his attempts to be close to her were all a lie? No, even if that were true, he didn’t quite have reason enough to do that, not yet.
‘Look, even if the Bridge isn’t there, that list would be a treasure trove of background sources for our team. If it turns out that I can’t do anything for myself here—’
‘Then we should do something to help our guys. Yeah, I agree.’
That would mean she could tell Quill where they’d been, make this secret excursion something the two of them had pursued of their own volition, like when Sefton had gone off after Brutus.
The crowd quietened. The auction was beginning. Ross fought down her fury and disappointment and tried to keep her hope in sight. The rushing of the water nearby spoke of power that was nearly hers, but might never be.
‘Everything is allowed,’ said Haversham, clearly reciting from a familiar ritual, ‘anything can be dealt in here and, as I’m these days forced to add –’ and she made a significant pause before adding it – ‘anything can be bought.’ There came grumbles from the audience, but angry shouts of support too. ‘Although, for the first time in a decade, for obvious reasons’ – was there a glance in Costain and Ross’ direction then? –‘the Keel brothers aren’t present this evening.’