The Severed Streets

by Paul Cornell

  Lofthouse looked between them. ‘You don’t trust the Met in general, because of the possibility of a strike.’

  ‘The certainty of one, about three to one in favour of illegal action,’ said Sue. ‘That’s how the vote will go today. But also because we have reason to believe that certain parts of it have started … not quite playing the game.’

  ‘But you do trust me?’

  ‘Because we know you’re honest, and you’re in charge of Quill’s team, and they did so well on the Losley case. Remarkably well. We remarked on it, didn’t we?’

  ‘We did,’ said Sue. ‘We noted it.’

  ‘What exactly do they do, by the way?’ Rita said it quickly, looking back to the pitch, as if it was the most trivial question in the world and she had an absolute right to know.

  Well, that was one of Lofthouse’s questions answered. These two knew nothing about the Sight. She tried to keep the enjoyment out of her voice. ‘That’s an operational matter. Are you saying you know who our Ripper is?’

  Sue laughed prettily. ‘In the same breath, you won’t give but you want to take! Tell me, what is it that you’re getting up to that your superiors, your husband and your office know nothing about? Where do you go when you leave home and take such care not to be followed? We’re sure there are no financial irregularities or you wouldn’t be here, but please tell me it isn’t just some dull affair.’ She took another sip from her cup. ‘Do you want to tell us about Quill’s team, or about that?’

  Lofthouse stood up. She hoped she wasn’t shaking visibly. ‘I’ll be going now.’

  There was a cheer from the crowd. A ball went whizzing up onto the roof of the stand above them and rolled down with an audible noise. Lofthouse looked back to Rita and Sue to see that they were at least bothering to feign being impressed. ‘Sit down, Superintendent,’ said Rita gently. ‘We’re only playing.’

  Lofthouse, reluctantly, sat. She couldn’t afford not to take anything they had to offer. How did they know about her excursions? She had been so careful.

  ‘None of the above is as important as us getting this information to you,’ said Sue. ‘You ask if we know certain things. Not for sure, no. But we aim to clear our consciences—’

  ‘Such as they are,’ said Rita.

  ‘—and send you in the right direction. Having stumbled across some information, the nature of which we’re not going to divulge to you, we decided to use the unique capabilities of our organization to investigate the financial dealings of several people who are doubtless of interest to you.’

  ‘Michael Spatley MP,’ said Rita. ‘Squeaky clean.’

  Lofthouse felt able to risk a follow-up. ‘Not even sexually dodgy? No payments to brothels, and so on?’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Sue. ‘But no.’

  ‘Rupert Rudlin,’ said Rita, ‘had his misdemeanours – actually paid for cocaine on his credit card a couple of times – but nothing to concern you. But as to the others—’

  Lofthouse was amazed. ‘You have something on the other victims?’

  Rita handed her an envelope. ‘This is our gift to you. Because of what we think is going to happen soon.’

  ‘We’re not going to tell you what that is,’ said Sue in a stage whisper.

  ‘Your Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Geoffrey Staunce, and the driver, Brian Tunstall,’ continued Rita, ‘both have a history of unusual payments being made to them, Staunce until a couple of years back, Tunstall only recently. But Staunce got another one … the day after Spatley was murdered.’

  Lofthouse looked through the papers with growing interest. ‘Thank you. This could be extremely helpful.’

  ‘Not as much as it could be,’ said Sue. ‘The trails all lead back to cut-outs in the realm of offshore banking. Not even our reach extends that far.’ She looked up suddenly at the sound of leather on willow. ‘Oh, lovely shot.’

  FOURTEEN

  Quill’s team had gathered in front of the Ops Board once more. Ross had told the others about the auction, but had made it sound as if it was something she’d found out about from the Docklands papers only on that same night. She’d managed not to mention that Costain had come along too. She’d thus established an honest context for having connected the man who’d left the Soviet bar to the big circle they’d drawn to indicate the wider world of the London occult underground. She’d mentioned getting a look at the auction ledger, and thus finding the record of Vincent’s transaction, as though anyone could easily do that. She had made no mention of her ordeal.

  Sefton had looked suspiciously at her as she’d told them all that, but had in the end accepted that he’d made solo jaunts himself; it was something their team did. ‘Just bring me along to the next one, okay?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Ross had needed her best poker face for that one. She’d managed to avoid looking to Costain. ‘Yeah.’

  Sefton had finally just nodded.

  Now, Ross attached an association thread between Tunstall and Staunce. ‘According to Lofthouse, Tunstall received six cash payments of ten thousand pounds each during the six-week period before his death. He was smart enough not to put them into his Barclays current account, but instead started up a deposit account with Mansion House, a bank based in the Cayman Islands.’

  ‘The main investigation would have looked into his financials,’ said Quill. ‘But they didn’t find that; it took the funny people to do so. So it was set up by someone with considerable knowledge of financial kung fu.’

  ‘The payments made to Staunce,’ continued Ross, ‘which he put into a more traditional Swiss bank, Heinkemann’s, are of the same amount and frequency, but happen in bursts, every few months, the first of which was paid ten years ago.’

  ‘That’d be when he became commissioner,’ said Quill.

  ‘They cease two years ago, but then there’s another payment, the day after the Spatley murder, and then Staunce is killed that same night. This gives us a clear association line between these two but we don’t know what that association is.’

  ‘We were given that on a plate,’ said Quill, pointing at the line that connected Staunce to Tunstall. ‘We didn’t have to work for it. I don’t like that. Kev, what have you got for us this fine morning?’

  Sefton stepped forward and used a marker to add to the concepts part of the board. ‘Scrying,’ he said, ‘means looking deeply into. A “scrying glass”, the item Vincent is recorded as having bought at that auction, is something used in stories to answer questions or get info.’

  ‘As in “mirror, mirror on the wall”?’

  ‘That’s the one. I say “in stories” because I couldn’t find anything in my research that came from a real-world source.’

  ‘There’s nothing in the Docklands documents either,’ said Ross.

  ‘But this is one of those points where the shallowness of our research materials is obvious. I get the feeling, because it is so well documented in folk tales, that almost anyone at the Goat and Compasses would know what a scrying glass really is.’

  ‘Assumption,’ said Ross.

  ‘Professional instinct,’ said Sefton. ‘But, yeah.’

  ‘So did Vincent buy one,’ said Costain, ‘to see if he was still the fairest of them all?’

  ‘Someone,’ said Quill, ‘is about to equate us with Grumpy, Sneezy, Bashful and Happy. No, don’t sort out which is which – they were picked at random.’

  ‘No they weren’t,’ said Sefton.

  ‘At least,’ said Quill, ‘the mention of said object made Vincent suddenly very cooperative. I think we might shake some juice out of him today.’

  Ross finally risked a look at Costain. He smiled back. She felt only relief that they’d sold their colleagues on her story. It was going to be difficult doing her duty today. After work, the two of them were going to set out on their own quest.

  It was at least vaguely possible that, by tonight, her dad would once again be alive.

  * * *


  That afternoon, the four of them took an unmarked car over to Marble Arch, parked with Quill’s logbook propped in the window, and looked around for the address they’d been given by Vincent’s PA. It turned out to be a very plain door to a mews flat, with what had been a stable made into a garage beside it.

  ‘It’s the same address as he gave to the auction,’ noted Ross.

  Quill rang the doorbell. ‘Hi ho,’ he said. ‘It’s off to work we go.’

  * * *

  They were led up from an entrance hall by an assistant, and it became clear that this wasn’t one mews flat, but a whole row of them knocked together. Some of the rooms were just bare repositories of empty bookshelves and unlooked-at art, but some seemed thoroughly lived in. They were taken along a corridor with carpeting that made their copper feet tired and were finally shown into the presence.

  Russell Vincent immediately stood up from his desk and shook their hands. ‘I’m sorry my office took so long to get through to me about this,’ he said. Sefton saw Quill leave that one unremarked on. ‘DI Quill, good to see you again. I’m glad it’s you handling this, but, ah, gosh, exactly what this is…’

  Sefton hadn’t felt anything of the Sight on entering the building and he didn’t now.

  ‘What this is,’ said Quill, ‘is something many might find unbelievable, but I now strongly suspect you won’t.’

  Vincent looked awkward. He was clearly wary of them, trying to find a way to run this meeting on his own terms. Here, Sefton thought, was a man who didn’t know whether or not he could trust these people who’d come asking questions. ‘The sort of thing you were asking about at the do the other night, but which I was a bit shy of. Before your approach became … official.’

  ‘Are you, Mr Russell Vincent,’ said Ross, using the official-sounding language they’d agreed on earlier, ‘the owner of a scrying glass?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said quickly, perhaps a little guiltily. ‘Actually, that’s why I wanted to meet you at this address.’

  * * *

  Vincent pulled a dusty cloth away from an object which stood in the corner of one of his many disused rooms. ‘This is it,’ he said, ‘my “scrying glass”. The romance of a name, eh?’ It was a full-length mirror on a stand which allowed it to be turned on a vertical axis, the sort of thing you might find, Sefton thought, in a Victorian lady’s boudoir. It certainly looked ominous: an absolutely smooth surface in which he could see the contents of the room reflected.

  Sefton looked over his shoulder and saw that the PA who’d answered the door had followed them in. Maybe Vincent wanted a witness at all times? She was standing on the threshold here, as if nervous of what had just been unveiled. Sefton stepped forward and put his hand up to the mirror. Then onto it. The glass was cold to the touch but no more than you might expect. There was nothing that said ‘London’ about its appearance or manufacture. There was no feeling of the Sight about it.

  ‘What does it do?’ said Quill.

  Vincent looked awkwardly at him and his team. ‘I rather need to know how much you fellows know about … well…’

  ‘The power of London,’ said Sefton, adopting a confidence he didn’t feel. ‘Enough. Whatever you’re going to say, we’ll believe you.’

  ‘So, you’re police officers who know there are impossible things here?’ Vincent seemed fascinated. ‘My goodness. That must be so much help in your work. If you need to find a missing person or a suspect, you must be able to just make a gesture and…’ He made his own fumbling turn of fingers in the air.

  ‘You’d think,’ sighed Quill.

  ‘So you can’t do that?’

  ‘That’d be an operational matter,’ said Ross.

  ‘But at least you can defend yourselves against … against what we both know is out there. Please tell me you can do that.’

  Ross raised her eyebrow at him. ‘And again.’

  ‘You were going to tell us, sir,’ said Quill, ‘what the scrying glass does.’

  ‘You mean you don’t know? Well, that makes this more awkward, in that I don’t see why I should…’ He trailed off, but seemed to make up his mind as Quill’s expression became darker. ‘I suppose you could find out from just about anyone in the community. Look, let me start at the beginning. I suppose it all began on the day I walked out of the Bussard Inquiry into phone hacking, having told them I’d run roughshod through my media business, found a few editors responsible for looking illicitly into the mobile phones of politicians and celebrities and sacked them all. I gave my word to those bastards – and, more importantly, to the public who buy my papers – that from now on mine was going to be the clean press corporation which didn’t do that sort of thing.’

  ‘How very ethical,’ said Costain, a completely non-ironic look on his face.

  ‘Not so much, actually,’ said Vincent. ‘I could see the way the wind was blowing – towards bloody government regulation if we weren’t careful – and I wanted to be the one who could use being spotless as a unique selling point. Trouble was … how do I put this?’

  ‘It’s not easy being clean?’ said Quill.

  ‘Well, precisely. Politicians and celebrities these days aren’t exactly soft touches. If you’re pursuing stories in the public interest, which, yes, does indeed sometimes mean “what interests the public”, you’ve simply got to cut a few corners. So I, erm, started to look for new ways to do so. I’d always had an interest in occult matters, always been aware of the whispers, knew there was something to it. So now I sent some of my people on fact-finding missions. They went incognito to a few pub nights—’

  ‘Such as…?’ asked Ross.

  ‘I think one was called the Goat and Compasses, I deliberately didn’t keep records of this stuff. Never mind being a bit dodgy, my shareholders care if I’ve, erm, you know, gone bonkers.’ He looked awkward again for a moment, as if wondering once more if they too would think he was mad.

  ‘Understood,’ said Quill. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, I finally went to one of those pub nights myself, incognito. I wasn’t very impressed with the people involved. They seemed all over the place; they didn’t know much, and, well, I can respect people who don’t have time for money, but this lot seemed desperately conflicted about it, obsessed with what they claimed to despise. I got my people to dig further, to ask about … well, about devices that could be used to find out people’s secrets. They came back with a suggestion: the scrying glass.’

  Sefton looked at the others, and found they shared his shock. So a scrying glass might be what was being used to listen in on them, might have been what led to the leak that had got Tunstall killed.

  ‘How?’ growled Quill. ‘How does it do that?’

  Vincent looked reluctant. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m assuming this is never going to reach the authorities because, goodness knows, any new inquiry wouldn’t believe you, but you’ve got me over a barrel here, just knowing I’ve got one of these.’

  ‘We’re after bigger fish than you, sunshine,’ said Quill. ‘Tell us.’

  ‘The scrying glass is meant to be a device for entering people’s dreams.’

  Sefton wanted to punch something. How many times had he had that feeling in his sleep, of something rifling through his mind? He looked again to his colleagues and could see from their own expressions of horror and anger that this was a shared experience.

  ‘And once you’re in,’ Vincent said, ‘you can check out whatever’s in their memory.’

  ‘How did that go for you?’ said Quill, advancing dangerously on Vincent.

  The billionaire raised his hands in surrender. ‘It didn’t go at all,’ he said. ‘I’ve never successfully used the blasted thing. Wish I’d never set eyes on it. I bought it at this auction which took place under the skeleton of a whale in the Natural History Museum. Not wanting to be there myself in case I was recognized, I stayed on the other end of a phone line and had my proxy purchase this “scrying glass”, which I’d been told was as rare as hen’s teeth.
I paid around forty thou for it and had it delivered to me here. I expected some sort of instruction manual, but there was nothing. So I decided that perhaps using it was just going to be a matter of instinct.’ Sefton recognized his own blundering attitude to dealing with the power of London. ‘The first time I tried … well, the only time … Maggie, would you please continue the story? Tell the truth.’

  Sefton was intrigued by the idea that otherwise the PA might not tell the truth. They all looked to the middle-aged woman, who now had an awkward expression on her face. She’d been surprised to hear all this from her boss, Sefton felt. She was wondering if he was mad. But she was also very worried that he might not be. ‘It must have been about two and a half years ago,’ she began, haltingly. ‘There was snow on the ground. I was downstairs making tea, and Mr Vincent had said that that night I could leave early, because he was going to be busy all evening. And then I heard him cry out from up here. There was the most enormous crashing around. It was like someone had got in here and was attacking him. I should have hit the panic button, but I didn’t; I just ran upstairs and opened the door and found him staggering about. The room was smashed up. It must have been over in seconds, whatever it was. His shirt was ripped. Mr Vincent saw me standing there and yelled for me to get out. He ran out himself and closed the door behind us. He made sure I was all right, but he wouldn’t tell me what had happened – just that I wasn’t to tell anyone, and … well, he’s never asked me to work in this room since, and I’ve been glad not to.’ She looked as if she was now making some terrible mental calculations about how her perceptions of what was possible had changed since the start of this meeting.

  ‘What happened?’ Sefton asked Vincent.

  Vincent went to a sofa and sat down. ‘Something I now think you might be familiar with. Something I’ve been wondering about coming forward about since the murders started. How could I? When you asked me about the impossible at the party, Inspector Quill, I should have told you then, but I knew nothing about you.’ He let out a long breath. ‘I was attacked by Jack the Ripper.’