The Severed Streets

by Paul Cornell

  ‘I can tell him!’ shouted Ross. She whispered the name and item and given address in his ear.

  He stared at her, astonished, started to say something.

  She pushed him away and quickly turned back to the book. She had to put that out of her mind now and get back to her original aim. The object she was after wasn’t in the first two years of auctions she looked through, to the point where she started to panic at the thought that she’d missed it, because she wasn’t going to get to the front of the book before the time ran out, but then—

  There. Her eye had gone past it then instantly been drawn back. She realized she was breathing more deeply, her fight-or-flight reflex set off just by seeing the words on paper. Anna Lassiter was the name of the purchaser, at 16 Leyton Gardens, with a postcode that put it in Kentish Town. Sixteen flowers, laid on, Leyton, she ran a mnemonic around her head a few times, piling associations on the address and the post code. She should tell Costain this too, have two brains remembering it. She looked over to him. He’d seen that she’d found something.

  No. Still no. She still could not trust him.

  She slammed the book closed and grabbed her notebook, ripped out a page, pulled out a pen and wrote the information down before he could arrive beside her. She folded the paper up and shoved it into her waistcoat breast pocket.

  She had it. She knew the location of the object that could bring her dad back to life.

  It made her excited. But it didn’t make her happy.

  She headed for the door; Costain followed at a run.

  * * *

  He caught up with her in the Turbine Hall. ‘So what’s the plan? Are we going straight there?’

  She didn’t want him going with her. She didn’t want to tell him that. She felt emotionally exhausted, and she was aware of a terrible numbness that had taken hold of some part of her personality like an anaesthetic. Besides, though she really did want to go straight to the address and at least look at where this precious object might be, it did make more sense to use all the tools at her disposal to learn everything she could about the place beforehand.

  She turned to look at Costain and saw that he was prepared for disappointment here, prepared to be disbelieved, as he’d been doubted all his life.

  She put her hands on both sides of his face and kissed him.

  He kissed her back. Then he stopped. ‘Lisa,’ he said, ‘we have to talk about—’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘we don’t.’

  * * *

  She took him home. He kept on kissing her as she slowly pushed him up against the wall, but he was not going to go any further. His expression said he wouldn’t let himself unless she gave him some sort of signal. She took his hand and put it not on her breast as she’d thought to do, but on second thoughts, between her legs. They stood there awkwardly, him looking at her, still questioning, even at that, him cupping her. She found her body was moving unconsciously against him. She opened her mouth to say – God, did she have to give him permission aloud?

  Something suddenly changed in his expression. He took the hand away and went to unbutton her, to start to undress her, quickly, roughly. She raised her arms to let him.

  He manhandled her and turned her body and opened her with his hands. He spent so long licking her, expertly, but agonizingly too long, too precisely. He was still fully dressed, even. He needed to keep his control. She grabbed his hair, and looked into those deeply worried eyes. Wasn’t he hard? Hadn’t she made him hard for her? ‘For God’s sake!’

  He looked at her as if he was convincing himself this was real. He was so unused to being wanted. Suddenly, he got to his feet.

  She watched him, wondering if he was going to leave her there.

  Slowly, he started to take off his clothes. When he was naked, he put a hand on his cock, showed her how hard she made him. He was shivering.

  She reached into her bedside table and took out an unopened packet of condoms. She opened it; her eyes kept darting between her short-nailed fingers slipping on the cellophane, his face, his cock. She kept expecting to find laughter somewhere in all this, but, no, it was all deadly serious. She supposed this was what it was going to be like for her always now.

  She had sold happiness for—

  No, she didn’t want to think about that now.

  She took out a condom packet, ripped it open and reached out. She held him, pleased at how hot he was, at how steadily hard she’d made him. At the feeling of him pulsing in her hand. She rolled the condom over him, and pulled it to cover him, tight. She looked up at him again and took a deep breath.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said.

  His lips bruised hers as he slammed her back into the pillow.

  * * *

  They lay there afterwards, feeling the cool through the open window, the sounds of summer and of distant violence still outside. Costain slowly ran a hand down her back as she lay on his chest. He felt that he should now show how gentle he could be. Here was a woman who’d just suffered a huge emotional loss, and he’d … had he taken advantage of her? He looked at her face. She looked calmly back. He already thought that perhaps she seemed different, not quite displaying all the emotions he might expect. But then she wasn’t like the other women he’d been with, and he didn’t know what was normal.

  He still felt that this was … uneven. That he should somehow … pay for what he’d just done. Either guilt had become so much a part of his life now – living as he was with the prospect of Hell – that it had infested this moment too, or maybe this was something more natural, how he felt now he was with someone … for real. Maybe for the first time. Maybe this sort of guilt was what most blokes dealt with when they were in their teens.

  God, they were both like children. ‘I want us to be together,’ he said. ‘Do you?’

  She paused for a long moment. When she said it there was no happiness in her voice. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So we keep telling each other it’s okay.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And tomorrow we talk about—’

  ‘We’ll talk about everything.’

  They slept.

  * * *

  In the early hours, Costain woke from dreams of being closely investigated, explored even. He got up to go to the toilet, and he walked over the pile of her clothes, the underwear that couldn’t have been her usual choice, which she must have worn for him, and there was the waistcoat which had, in its pocket, that piece of paper with the address where the item that could keep him out of Hell was located.

  She had left it there. She wouldn’t have done that offhandedly. She had decided to leave it there. She had stirred as he’d got up and she was probably awake now. Watching him to see what he’d do. He had to prove himself.

  He stepped on over the waistcoat, went to the bathroom, came back.

  She was looking at him, sitting up, entirely awake. ‘You didn’t look at the piece of paper.’

  ‘No.’ He went to sit beside her on the bed. She lay against him once more. He looked at her. He could see that frown on her face in the darkness. He’d always found how solemn she looked kind of horny, now he thought of it. That seriousness had indeed extended to how passionate, how committed, she’d been. But the idea that she would now be like that all the time … the hurt she’d done herself felt enormous. That was the biggest reason he wouldn’t look at the address: the high price she’d paid for it to be hers.

  ‘I’m never going to be happy,’ she said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘I’m satisfied. Calm. Peaceful. But not happy. It turns out that happy is an active sort of thing.’

  ‘Would even getting your dad out of Hell make you happy now?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I tried to stop you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have. I don’t regret it.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  They were silent for a few moments. ‘Go and get the piece of paper,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You ha
ve to. We need to trust each other.’

  He hesitated. Then he went over to her waistcoat and came back with the paper. She switched on the bedside light.

  They looked at the address together: 16 Leyton Gardens. It seemed a small thing to base such trust on. He looked at her face and saw the intensity of her expression still. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  She looked almost angrily at him. As if she was already wondering if she’d made the right decision. ‘We work a full day tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We don’t put this before the job.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Then we go to this place, research the buyer, make them some sort of offer.’

  ‘Or—’

  ‘I don’t want to think about that until we have to.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Then we resurrect Dad. We go to where he’s buried and dig him right out.’

  He kept his voice even. He was amazed at such trust. He was going to be worthy of it, he was. ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Right. So there’s something else we need to do, right now.’

  He found his phone and started texting Quill. ‘You’re sure about the details?’

  ‘Yeah. I found in that ledger the name of an item purchased at one of those auctions two and a half years ago, a “scrying glass”. The name of the buyer was Russell Vincent.’

  THIRTEEN

  The next morning, Rebecca Lofthouse opened her front door to find, standing there in a business suit, an extraordinarily beautiful young woman. ‘Good morning, Superintendent,’ she said. ‘I’m here to drive you to Lord’s.’

  Lofthouse stared at her. ‘I didn’t order a driver, and I’m not going to Lord’s.’

  ‘Forgive me, but you are.’

  The accent was very RP. One of the better schools, without the mockney they tended to produce these days. There had been no threat in her tone. ‘I’ve got a meeting—’

  ‘We’ve postponed that for you.’

  ‘And you are…?’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll never learn my name.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lofthouse, feeling both relieved and a whole different sort of worried at the same time. ‘You’re one of the funny people.’

  * * *

  Lofthouse kept looking out of the window as the woman drove her, making sure the car was heading for north-west London. The young driver had neither confirmed nor denied that she was an officer in what the older generation of the Met called ‘the funny people’, and what the younger generation, influenced as they were by the movies, called ‘five’, when actually it should be MI5, or, more properly, the Security Service. When she was sure the car was going where she’d been told it was, she checked out what else had happened overnight: Quill was reporting that his team had encountered the man from the Soviet bar once more, and that, by using the right words in a message to Russell Vincent via his PA, his team had finally got an appointment to interview him. They were also preparing to raid the brothel. The results of the postal ballot on strike action were due to be released today. Lofthouse felt something give inside her. It went against everything she believed in for police to strike, but she understood why they would. She looked back with fondness now to the couple of weeks of the Olympics. There had been soldiers on the streets then doing happy crowd control. They might be returning soon, and bloody private security firms too, and things would not be so happy.

  She wished she could share with James Quill the burden she was bearing, the reason she couldn’t tell him anything about why she believed him when he talked about the occult powers of London.

  The car pulled up at Lord’s, in a parking space in what seemed to be a private members’ car park. It was the first day of a Test Match, Lofthouse gathered, and there was a mass of people in sun hats, carrying cool boxes, some in the distinctive striped blazers and ties of Marylebone Cricket Club, heading for the many entrances of the ground. No amount of riots would change that. She recalled the distraught emails of American friends during the London terrorist attacks of 2005. They been shocked by the everyday responses they’d got, how she’d ridden the tube the very next day with only a slight second thought, how she’d been polite but a little sighing with her replies. To Londoners, bombs and riots were just an extreme form of weather.

  She was led through a door opened by a waiter at the rear of a bar, and then swiftly closed behind them, along a concrete corridor behind the stands, and then up a flight of steps into the light, revealing a view of the ground, the green of the pitch looking perfect and clean, and somehow too close and too small to be an area where people really played international sport. A sign said this was the Tavern Stand, reserved for members and their guests. The beautiful woman whose name she would never know led her upwards still, into a balcony with a sidelong view of the wicket, where, far below, the bell had rung, and, to rising applause, the teams were coming onto the field. To the right was Old Father Time, the weathervane in the shape of an old man with a scythe, taking the bails off the wicket for the end of a game. Lofthouse had never understood why the home of cricket had put death in charge. She allowed herself to be led along the balcony to where, sitting back in the shade, were two middle-aged ladies in summer dresses. One of them looked to be of Indian heritage, a walking stick propped on the chair beside her, very long black hair tied back. The other was white, with a fringe of blonde hair, laughter lines around her eyes. They were both smiling at her, pleased by this civilized abduction.

  ‘We’re just getting tea,’ said the dark-haired lady. ‘Would you like some?’

  ‘Or hang on for an hour and we’re planning on a bottle of rosé,’ added the blonde. ‘Bit early as yet for the lady petrol.’

  ‘Tea, please.’ Lofthouse sat and waited as the woman who’d driven her here took the order and departed.

  ‘Now,’ said the blonde woman, ‘our apologies for the secrecy.’

  ‘I’m Rita,’ said the dark-haired lady, ‘and this is Sue.’

  ‘Not our real names, of course.’

  ‘Because those I will never hear.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Sue smiled as if Lofthouse was a quick learner.

  ‘We,’ continued Rita, ‘are, as you put it to your driver, Bob, the “funny people”, which I’ve always thought is a really flattering bit of Met argot for such tremendously ordinary civil servants as ourselves.’

  ‘It’s really not,’ said Lofthouse, not minded to be as gracious as her abductors.

  ‘Well,’ said Sue, ‘let’s pretend it is. Women were only allowed to become members here in 1998, you know.’

  ‘Not that we are members,’ added Rita.

  ‘I know who I’m talking to,’ said Lofthouse. ‘I know you tend to get access to whatever you want. Why did you bring me here?’

  ‘Well, your operation, Fog, isn’t progressing as fast as it could be, is it? Oh, good shot.’

  Lofthouse looked across to the pitch to see a ball rushing across the boundary, a cheer rising in the crowd below. She wondered how they knew anything about Operation Fog, but was certain she wouldn’t get any answers, just a bit more ‘charming’ hand waving. Why was the Security Service interested in Quill’s team? ‘Did you bring me here just to criticize the activities of my unit?’

  ‘We weren’t criticizing,’ said Rita. ‘We’re here to help. I always think the game of cricket sums up what we do.’ Lofthouse grudgingly turned to see an Indian fast bowler she couldn’t name start his run-up towards Alastair Cook. ‘We try to anticipate what’s coming –’ Cook ducked as the ball sped over his head – ‘in terms of the illicit activities of foreign governments and terrorists on British soil, and to react in the most appropriate way. Either defence, or, when it’s safe to do so, attack.’ On the big screen across the ground, she watched as Cook prepared himself for the next ball, the sponsor’s logo on his bat front and centre. ‘Every year, both this sport and what we do gets more influenced by money. Be it the Indian Premier League attracting those who’d otherwise choose to play for their country, or the non-localized nat
ure of many modern threats to the stability of this nation.’

  Lofthouse was sure she was being told something, but she had no idea what. The bowler completed his run-up, let go of another ball too fast to follow, and the crowd reacted before she saw what had happened. The wicket had been uprooted, and now Cook, furious with himself, was walking away from the strip in the middle, and the crowd were applauding. Oddly, it felt as if a lot of the applause was directed at the bowler. Strange that the English should have built here something so seemingly unpartisan.

  ‘Every now and then something like that happens,’ said Sue. ‘And when the game is cricket we say, “Well played,” to the other side. But in the game we play, there are other options.’

  ‘You’re saying you take direct action?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Sue pretended to be shocked.

  ‘We don’t blow things up,’ said Rita. ‘We let them explode of their own accord.’

  ‘Because alongside the laws of cricket,’ said Sue, ‘there is also the spirit of the game, just like the unwritten constitution of Britain.’

  Lofthouse didn’t like the implication that anything in the UK happened beyond the reach of law. She was aware, though, that because of the allusive nature of the way she was being told this, it could all be very easily denied. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘You might at some point be searching for a solution to a specific problem and think of us.’

  ‘I’m never going to reach out in that direction.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Why do you think I might need you now?’

  The beautiful woman returned, with a tray upon which were three cups, sugar, milk and a teapot, all with Marylebone Cricket Club logos. She put it on a small table she erected for the purpose and left. The pause gave Rita and Sue the opportunity not to answer the question. ‘The trouble,’ ventured Sue, stirring her tea, ‘is that sometimes we chance across some indicative piece of information that should rightly be dealt with by another service, but don’t quite have complete faith in the service in question.’

  ‘Especially when it’s something … enormous,’ added Rita.