by Paul Cornell
There had been a door leading off each room they’d been in. Through it, Costain was sure, would be one or more hard cases, ready to protect the investment here. The prostitutes would be on a percentage, but it would still be more than they’d get on the street. ‘The one on the end,’ he said, picking one of the white girls.
‘You know what I like, Tone,’ said Sefton, and nodded towards the Asian woman.
* * *
They were both led to rooms leading off a corridor; through a couple of other doors could be heard more, rather artificial, sounds of passion. Again Costain tried not to respond to the art of those simulated groans. The woman he was with smiled professionally at him and let him into a particular room, a rather bare bedroom with a double bed, a shower in one corner and a single painting on the wall, apparently sourced from the same sort of place that provided anonymous art for hotel chains. ‘One hundred and fifty for a blow job,’ she said, her voice retaining that businesslike composure, ‘two hundred for straight sex, two hundred and fifty for anal, eighty for spanking, and I tell you when to stop, fifty for me using a strap-on on you, and if you want to look in the cupboard, there are toys in there, and I can tell you what each of them will cost to use.’
‘Okay,’ said Costain. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘But first.’ She went and turned the shower on and, turning back to Costain, started to undress, with a series of practised movements. ‘Please call me Lucy, and let me know what you’d like me to call you.’
Costain wondered how long he could ethically wait to do this, and decided that, especially given who was listening, now would be good. ‘My name is Tony,’ he said, ‘and I’m actually a private investigator. No, keep the shower running.’ He stepped between her and it, and took a roll of bills from his pocket. ‘On top of your cut from what I gave your boss, I’ll give you four hundred for the answers to a few questions, none of which will jeopardize your employer or put you or your job at risk.’
She thought about it for a moment. ‘Money now, and I decide.’ He handed it to her. She counted it, then put most of it in her bag. She put the rest on the duvet. ‘You tell them you had a blow job.’
* * *
Sefton was also sitting on a bed, next to the woman he’d come here with, who called herself Mi Ling. He hadn’t come out with any particular cover story. He’d just started talking, which hadn’t surprised her. He supposed a significant minority of her clients did that.
‘You’re going to have to pay for the time,’ she reminded him after a moment.
He handed her some money and gave his background as one of the people he’d been as an undercover once, adding that they must get all sorts through here.
She made a non-committal noise, alert to anything in that direction. More than her job was worth, to give away information. Sefton realized that this was going to take a while. He manoeuvred the one-sided conversation back onto safer ground.
* * *
‘I don’t think I want to tell you about that.’ The woman with Costain was looking angry and … yeah, afraid. ‘We never saw any politician, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
* * *
Sefton and Mi Ling had finally found themselves laughing together at a completely safe conversation about recent celebrity misdemeanours. Sefton was pleased when she went from that to ones she knew about herself, because, as he’d suspected, she was sometimes at the sort of party that had paparazzi waiting outside. It was safe for her to talk about what her famous acquaintances got up to there.
After a while he took a risk and held up his phone to show her a picture of Spatley. ‘Is that the bloke who got killed?’ she said.
‘What about this one?’ He showed her a picture of Tunstall, then Staunce, but the only result was her frowning at him. These people meant nothing to her other than faces on the telly. ‘Would you know if they’d been here?’
‘Course I would,’ she said. ‘We all know when someone famous comes through. Are you a reporter or something?’
‘Look at this,’ he said, showing her a picture of Rupert Rudlin taken from CCTV footage.
‘That’s—’ She stopped. She was looking at the phone intently. ‘I don’t know the man, but—’
‘But?’
‘The woman he’s with … she’s a mate of mine.’
Sefton realized that he was looking at her in shock. He made himself point to the image of the woman who, a few moments after this picture had been taken, would be thrown up against the wall. ‘Her, you mean?’
‘Yeah. She left here. I mean, suddenly. I mean she still owes them money. Nobody knows where she went.’
‘What’s her name?’ The woman looked suddenly awkward, wondering again if she should get involved with this. ‘Listen, look at me, look at me, I’m not after her to harm her, I’m trying to save her. You believe me, don’t you?’
The woman considered for a moment, then finally nodded. ‘That’s Mary. Mary Arthur. She wasn’t full time here. She did jobs on the side. When she disappeared … we all said she must have made it big, gone to Saudi.’
‘Do you know where she lived?’
‘Somewhere in Muswell Hill.’
‘This is saving lives…’
‘That’s all I know.’
The door burst open and an enormous man in a Brazilian football strip, carrying a baseball bat, with a bar through his nose and a huge moustache, threw himself at Sefton.
* * *
Costain jumped back off the bed, his hands in the air. ‘Mate, mate, I didn’t touch her!’
His own assailant, shaved head and paunch, pretty designer T-shirt with a much-copied image of some Seventies model, hefty about the limbs, obviously used to dealing damage and carrying what looked like a specialist hunting knife, instinctively glanced at the woman.
Costain wrenched his arm over, made him drop the knife and dived for the door.
* * *
Sefton felt his bruised ribs as the Brazil fan made to smash him across the body. He danced out of the way, avoided the grasp and headed for the door. He saw Mi Ling carefully not reacting, then he was out of there, into the corridor, where he could hear a whole stampede of footsteps rushing up the stairs. There was Costain, dashing out of a door in front of him. They looked at each other. ‘Window?’ said Costain. They grabbed for it, and started to haul it away from its sealed, peeling paintwork.
* * *
‘Fuck,’ said Quill, panting as he arrived at the door, Ross beside him. ‘Fuck.’ He hammered on the door, rang the doorbell, and then kicked it for good measure.
The door opened and a woman he assumed to be the one who’d welcomed Costain and Sefton looked out. ‘This is a private—’
Quill shoved his warrant card in her face. ‘I know what this is. My name is DI James Quill, and the two men you’re having a go at are police officers on an operation. So unless you want to be party to assaulting a police officer—’
There came a crash from behind the building. ‘I think,’ said the woman, her voice dripping with contempt, ‘you’ll find they just left.’
SIXTEEN
‘Thanks for coming in for us,’ said Sefton. They were back at the Portakabin, with very strong coffee and, if Quill himself was anything to go by, a feeling of both relief and new pressure at having found a fresh lead. The name Mary Arthur was now written under the victim photograph on the Ops Board. That was a precious data point that their mysterious enemy would become aware they knew of, if they went to sleep.
Costain stretched his knee and winced. ‘We should have them for not keeping a fire escape in working order.’
‘Mary Arthur,’ said Ross, looking up from the PC. The others gathered around to see. ‘Last known address in Muswell Hill, a landlord who called the police when she went missing … two months ago.’
‘Way before she was in that bar,’ said Costain. ‘Looks like she went back to her freelance work.’
‘Having cut off all ties with everyone she knew,’ said Sef
ton. ‘She deliberately vanished.’
‘Is that her mobile number that was written on the business card we found in Spatley’s office?’ asked Quill.
‘Not that’s listed,’ said Ross.
They went over to the board. Ross reached for an association line, then put it back in the box. ‘I want to associate Mary Arthur with Spatley,’ she said. ‘But I can’t quite do it yet.’
‘Work it out loud,’ said Quill.
‘Michael Spatley MP handles a business card from a brothel he probably never frequented. He loses it in his office, so he obviously doesn’t think it’s very important. Perhaps he’s copied down the info from it, though we haven’t found that. Perhaps he’s tried the phone number, like we did, and got no result. But Tunstall, or whoever was paying Tunstall, does think it’s important, enough to search the place. Then Mary is attacked, but not killed, by the same entity that killed Spatley. And who’s this fucker?’ She stabbed her finger angrily at the picture of the man who’d been at both the bar and the auction. ‘I think there are, in reality, association lines all over this lot. But I can’t attach them on the board because we don’t know what they are. Oh.’
She’d stopped. Quill felt relief at the sound that indicated an imminent breakthrough. ‘Tell us, maestro.’
Ross put her finger beside the picture of Rupert Rudlin, the actual victim from the bar, and ran it in a circle right round him. ‘I was talking about lots of associations for the others. Then I could see it: no associations for Rudlin, not with anyone on this board.’ She pointed back to the picture of Mary Arthur. ‘She’s linked to all this, though we don’t know how. She was the one who was initially attacked in that bar. How about if the Ripper was there for her, and Rudlin just got in the way?’
Quill felt his relief wane slightly. ‘But … he had a good shot at her. He had every chance to kill her.’
‘And Rudlin is a rich white bloke,’ said Costain.
‘Yeah, we’ve been saying that, haven’t we, that Jack the Ripper now just kills rich white blokes, but Tunstall wasn’t rich, and as for them all being white, well, they’ve all been part of the establishment, so storks on roofs there, but, blokes…’ She trailed off.
Quill waited for more insight, but she just hugged herself and sighed, unsatisfied. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘how would you sum that up?’
‘I’d bet,’ said Ross, ‘and this is an assumption—’
‘Marked as such,’ said Costain.
‘—that Mary Arthur was meant to be the Ripper’s next victim. That he had motive for killing her. And for some reason didn’t, and killed Rudlin instead. If we can crack that motive and that reason, we might crack this.’
They kept looking at the board. They wanted desperately for something new to leap out at them. It didn’t. Quill finally turned to an expectant-looking Costain and made his decision. ‘I’m going to choose to believe,’ he said, ‘that our dream lurker already knows all we know. That he or she might actually get scared off by the idea that we know what they’re up to in our brains. So tonight we try Sefton’s protections, and if we feel we’re being got at, we do our damnedest to wake up, and we don’t yet resort to snorting bloody meth, all right?’
* * *
It was in the early hours by the time Costain and Ross got to 16 Leyton Gardens. Ross had asked Costain, as soon as they got in the car, to get out his supply, and he’d demonstrated to her how to sniff it. It felt good; the effect wasn’t as extreme as she’d expected. But then, she’d experienced some extreme things to compare it to. The others could do what they liked; she and Costain had reasons of their own for staying awake.
She’d realized, spending the day with him – sometimes nearby, sometimes away, sometimes with his voice over a speaker – how strange it was for her to be with someone. They’d touched each other in passing, when nobody else was looking, just a hand on her arm. To have touch in her life … it was like a sense she’d lost the use of. There was comfort in it. It made her aware of where the happiness would be if she could feel it. It was like a currency she had none of now, none to pay him back with, none to reward herself with. She was trusting him, and that felt weird too, but he deserved it: every look he gave her, every word he said, told her that he did. Still, she planned to stay right beside him to make sure. If he betrayed her …
She didn’t want to think about that. The meth might make her more paranoid. She had to guard against that.
Every now and then during that day he’d looked to her, as if checking she was okay, as if checking for happiness, and had found … his expression said he was slightly disappointed not to have found it. Every time.
They’d driven past burning cars and heard the thunder of drums and smelt the smoke. But for now it was keeping away from Kentish Town.
The address of the owner of the object turned out to be in one of the grottiest two-storey apartment blocks Ross had ever seen. Every one of the flats on the lower floor had a garden, and all but two of them were overgrown. The balconies on the upper row were the same: window boxes stood empty and piles of junk sat, inviting more disarray. The lights in the particular flat they were interested in weren’t on. ‘I wonder how she paid for it,’ she said.
‘The same way you did?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Speeding. I’m never going to be feeling happy. Could you stop asking?’
‘Sorry.’
You’re never going to make me happy, she didn’t add. That’s a conclusion you might end up dwelling on. She leaned into him for a second, just headbutted his shoulder.
They went to the door of the flat and rang the bell. Nobody was in. They asked next door, where there were still lights on. Yes, the bloke in the Spurs shirt said, freaked out to have his doorbell rung at this hour, but comforted by Costain’s warrant card, the young woman who lived there, weird she was, he’d seen her about recently. She kept herself to herself. The only time he’d spoken to her, well, he didn’t think much of her, to be honest.
They got a description, which was as detailed as you might expect from one meeting, generic, even. The small amount of research Ross had done on this woman had found that here was someone else missing from official records, exactly as Losley had been. She wondered how common a trick that was among the Privileged. Ross didn’t want to have to look through hundreds of records to find the ones where the Sight could reveal concealment again, not with the address in question in front of her and the owner in situ, but she would if she had to find out more about her. They went and looked at the door again. It looked easy enough to break in but that threat assessment didn’t include whatever occult nastiness might await inside.
‘Do you reckon it’s in there?’ Costain asked.
‘No idea. Can you feel anything?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither. I was thinking she might have … you know … used it.’ She hadn’t wanted to say that out loud. If one had bought the Bridge to insure one’s own safety, her reading indicated that it had to be on one’s person at the moment of death to do so, but if she’d bought it to return someone to life …
‘I thought that too. Didn’t want to say anything.’
They waited there for a while, not knowing what to do. ‘Do you think everyone who dabbles with the power of London goes to Hell?’ asked Ross. She could feel the drug surging through her brain, putting her above worries like that so she could say them out loud.
Costain shrugged. ‘Toshack said all four of us were. But I never believed that. I thought it was just a threat, another way of saying the Smiling Man was going to kill us.’ He was looking kind of hungrily at the door. He saw Ross looking at him, and his expression changed. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘We keep coming to this house,’ she said. ‘We do it in shifts if we have to. We meet this woman, and then we do whatever we have to to get the Bridge of Spikes.’
* * *
> Quill went home to find Sarah already in bed, reading. She looked up in surprise at the bag of salt and carrier bag of clinking items he was carrying. ‘Hello, love,’ he said. ‘I feel like experimenting in the bedroom tonight.’
She was horrified when he told her. She talked about getting all of them out of London right now, going to stay in a hotel in Reading or something. But Quill pointed out that, unlike with Losley, there was nothing to indicate that this intruder couldn’t find them wherever they went.
The salt-and-chalk line on the carpet and protective items on the bedpost comforted her only a little. But she got to sleep. It took Quill himself a lot longer, but he finally did.
He woke in the morning to find Sarah looking at him interrogatively. ‘Well?’ she said.
‘I don’t think anything weird happened,’ said Quill. ‘I think the defences might actually have worked.’
* * *
On the way in to Gipsy Hill, while stuck at the traffic lights, Quill put in a call to Forrest’s office, asking if the DCI had time after work tonight to compare notes. He’d emailed his team over breakfast, and none of them had reported incursions into their dreams, but Quill didn’t entirely trust that. He’d been so exhausted and tense last night he suspected he’d have slept through anything. Ross and Costain sounded to have renewed energy. He’d told them the next thing they should do, while continuing to pursue the prostitute Mary Arthur, was start organizing a raid on the Keel occult shop, where they might find some more defences against dream incursion. That was going to need some seriously bogus justification, so getting the main investigation back onside was a priority. Besides, now Quill had a lead to share with them.
He got a call back a few minutes later saying that DCI Forrest would indeed be free and in central London this evening, and that the Opera Rooms was his quiet pub of choice. Quill was pleased to hear that. He could not only do the business he had to do, but he could also become more au fait with a copper whom he felt was much like himself and could try to begin the process of requesting backup for a raid that they’d have to try and squeeze in before a police strike, the purpose of said raid being one that might well escape the DCI.