by Paul Cornell
‘Maybe,’ said Costain, once again back to being Mr Funny with that fake-jaunty sound in his voice, ‘there’s a serial killer going after fictional Londoners. We stake out Mary Poppins and bring Paddington in for protective custody.’
Ross thankfully realized she’d just got an email alert and looked at her phone. ‘They’ve got a DNA match from the blood on the wall in the first murder,’ she said. ‘It’s someone who was in custody at the time. Which these guys are referring to as obviously a mistake, impossible, but—’
‘Yeah,’ said Sefton, ‘but the “I” word is where we come in.’
Quill’s phone rang, a call from DI Clarke. After a moment, Quill put her on speaker. ‘We’ve now got someone we’d normally fancy for this, big time, but as you’ve heard, he’s got the perfect alibi. That CCTV footage from outside the second murder scene shows a black male, early twenties, around six foot, about a hundred and forty pounds, scaling a wooden ladder. We’ve got a clear shot of his face, which we’ve put through facial recognition, and he resembles to a degree that would satisfy any jury the suspect already in custody whose DNA matches that of the blood from the first scene. I’ve just sent Lisa the files.’ Ross clicked on her phone and found the image of a young man. ‘Suspect’s name is Albert Bates, known as Albie.’
After Quill finished the call, Ross played the video. The figure climbing the ladder, with a calm, professional look on his face, was clearly the same man. ‘We need to talk to him,’ she said. ‘If he’s guilty of one or both murders, we have to find out how, and if he’s got anything to do with the Holmes murder.’
Sefton pointed to the photo of the murder weapon on the ops board. ‘We can also make use of an asset we have in our pocket. An occult London expert like Ballard might be willing and able to tell us something about the blade and about that chalk, if he’s looking to make a deal.’
Ross automatically looked to Quill, seeking for him to split their forces. He stared back at her for a moment, then clicked again into the role he was meant to be playing. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a long day, so let’s get back to this tomorrow. If Clarke lets us play through, Costain interviews the suspect in jail, Sefton will talk to Ballard, and Ross will interview the Holmes Museum curator.’
‘What about you?’ said Ross.
‘I’ll be . . . here,’ he said, once again lost.
SIX
Costain felt HM Prison Wandsworth before he saw it. Driving his car along Trinity Road, he felt that old grumbling sensation in his gut again, like when he’d first got the Sight and attempted to leave London. Up ahead on the right, a big beast was coming, full of shit and history. He turned off and drove slowly towards the low, square fortress that actually had a portcullis visible over its doors. There were leafy little houses all around, pensioners out in their gardens. This monstrosity loomed over them.
He’d been inside ‘Wanno’ once before, as an undercover placed to obtain information on drugs getting into the prison. He hadn’t found out very much, hadn’t had a chance to. There’d been a whisper that he’d been compromised and they’d got him out of there. Given the sentences of the offenders he’d mixed with, and the brevity of his stay, he doubted anyone would recognize him. Still, it gave him pause. This place had given him nightmares way before the Sight.
He went to the staff entrance and found an office with thick glass and an intercom that was always on, no button to push. He slipped his warrant card through the slit and waited in this space that made him itch, made him feel like an animal in a net, just the bleached smell of it, the same smell you got in sandwich shops after some homeless person had wandered in and they’d cleaned up. It seemed like it took an age while they checked his appointment and identity against their lists.
They finally found his data, and asked for his phone, which he handed over, annoyed despite knowing about this stage in advance, looking into the face of the office worker who was regarding him with a horrifying blandness that could mask . . . anything. Who knew what the people in a bureaucracy like this thought about him? He was sent to the social visits side of the entranceway, had to actually go out and come in again, and there he was asked, again with that blank look, to allow himself to be patted down, to see if he was carrying contraband, and scanned for explosives and drugs. He found he was breathing hard as it was done, wanted to say he was a fucking police officer, but that’s you protesting too much, eh, mate? All by the book, sir. He hoped the man would say that, but he didn’t. Costain took small pleasure in indicating the officer should stop. ‘Wait a sec.’ He took from his pocket an evidence bag, in which was a most unusual item. ‘Evidence to show the prisoner.’ The man took it, looked inside it without opening the bag, finally gave it back to him and nodded.
He was sent back out again and into the staff side once more to await his escort. The middle-aged man in prison officer uniform arrived ten minutes later, but, walking swiftly through the bleached corridors, making the man keep up, Costain managed to arrive on time for his appointment with the officer in charge. He asked to see what had been in the suspect’s pockets when they’d brought him in, and quickly sifted through a tray containing a mobile phone, a wallet in bright purple with a tiny coke spoon attached, which was surely a statement that said the opposite of what this kid thought it did, a little cash, crumpled, some condoms past their expiry date. Costain switched on the phone, found nothing blazing to his extra senses from the screen. None of these items had anything of the Sight about them. ‘What’s he like?’ he asked.
The officer in charge shrugged.
Costain was led into the Heathfield Centre, as the main body of the prison was called, and then towards B Wing. He walked down corridors painted pale green and cream with a new prison officer beside him. She made little sighing jokes, her face set into a calm lack of expression. The place smelt of guilt and denial. The feeling was ground into the walls. There were little cracks in the edifice of hurt, flashes of light that Costain glimpsed out of the corners of his eyes as he walked, actual visible hope, which only served to make the cloak of cynicism and self-defeat more obvious. The building felt like the waiting room for the Hell he’d himself once glimpsed.
Thinking about it suddenly made it almost too much to take. He nearly turned back. He would have done had it not been for a questioning look from the prison officer. He was the wrong person to come here. In the past, perhaps Quill would have picked someone else. Or he’d have sent Costain deliberately to rub his nose in it. Even that would have been easier to handle. The guilt of this place was making him think of Lisa. He associated any sort of guilt with her, because of what he’d done to her.
He thought of being inside her, of the passion on her face, and then killed that thought. That was the guiltiest thing of all, the thing she must think of all the time, that she and he had just been about sex, when being with her had been for him the first time in his life when sex had felt like coming home. He thought about how there was such stark silence every time they had to work together, how every time they talked it felt as though they might just suddenly start talking like they once had.
It must take such effort on her part to keep her guard up when he was around, not to let herself relax in his presence for even a second. No, who was he kidding? His crime against her had been so big that it took her no effort at all, because she felt it again every time she saw him. He realized his thoughts had distracted him from what he was seeing. There were impossible shadows moving on the walls. The motions were the raising and lashing of a whip. With the shadows now came sounds. Screams began echoing and re-echoing, bouncing back from the ends of every corridor in this part of the prison.
He felt the whip on his back, damn it; he actually felt it through his jacket like the sting of a wasp and flinched.
This place had been where they’d once kept the national stock of the birch and the cat-o’-nine-tails, as though there might be a shortage. The prison officer, oblivious, led him round a corner and Costain jumped at a new sud
den noise, the release of a catch, something falling, a crack of wooden machinery. The new shadow fell down the corridor towards and over him: the gallows.
He couldn’t remember how many it was, over a hundred people, who had been executed here, including Lord Haw-Haw and Derek Bentley. The death penalty for murder had been abolished in 1965, but they’d kept the gallows here in good working order, it was said, until 1993. Just in case the powers that be changed their minds. He’d read about Oscar Wilde being kept in here, his only crime being that he was gay. Costain wondered about whether there was a memory of that kept by the building, or rather by all the living and the dead who kept a memory of the building, and then, of course, in the way of the Sight, all of a sudden Costain could see him, a hunched figure, trying only to cling on to something of himself, stumbling ahead, looking suddenly agonized sidelong as small children were marched in a line past him. He was worried entirely for them, not at all for himself.
Costain wondered about that for a moment. Partly to get rid of an incredulous expression on the face of the prison officer, who was probably wondering what sort of a loony she was escorting, with all his sudden twitches and winces, he asked her if children had ever been kept here.
‘Oh yes, tons of them, back in the nineteenth century. You know, sensible policies for a happier Britain.’ She led him into a corridor of interview rooms at the end of a cell block. He was shown into one of the rooms, provided with coffee by another prison officer, and then the young man familiar from the scene-of-crime video was led in, in prison uniform. His face didn’t wear the same purposeful expression as it had on the camera footage, just a sort of calm boredom. The escorting officer left and closed the door. They were alone. No CCTV, even.
Costain took a long breath and was immediately a professional, his game face on. ‘Are you Albie Bates?’
The kid nodded.
‘Don’t just fucking nod to me, son – you’re in shit here.’
The basic intimidation didn’t get to the kid. He’d been interviewed by the main investigation earlier this morning. He’d claimed ignorance throughout. Easy to do when you had the perfect alibi. He’d never read any Sherlock Holmes stories because he’d never read anything, and didn’t remember seeing anything with the word ‘Rache’ in it on telly. Now he leaned back in his chair, opened his legs, folded his arms, resigned to this latest waste of his valuable time.
‘Yeah.’
From what Costain had read, the kid was like most repeat offenders, adapted to life inside. He kept himself fit enough to avoid trouble, made small sums of money off jail work to pay for his cigarettes, relied on the regularity and stability in here. As soon as he’d been released, on three previous occasions, he’d gone straight back into pissed-up violence and theft. He was in this time for GBH, having delivered a serious kicking to an old lady while still failing to get her purse off her. This was the sort of boy the gangsters only signed up once, the sort of boy who found life out there to be just too fucking complicated. The good news about that was he was no criminal mastermind. The bad news was he looked a very bad fit for a masterplan to assassinate Sherlock Holmes.
Costain took the item from his pocket that Sefton had chosen and put it on the table between them. It was something the DC had found in a second-hand shop, a tiny bell, with a London manufacturer’s mark on its handle. He hadn’t managed to discover anything about it, which was a little worrying, because, to those with the Sight, it screamed its existence; it bellowed. It had taken weeks for Sefton to conclude that it didn’t seem able to do anything else, at least not without precise instructions he couldn’t even guess at. Costain had carried it in his pocket this morning feeling like he was hauling a bowling ball, until the bell’s feeling of significance had become eclipsed by that of the prison itself. You put this thing down in front of someone with the Sight, they were going to react.
Bates laughed, didn’t flinch. ‘What the fuck?’
Costain pointed at the bell. ‘Made in London.’
Here was something. A tiny reaction. ‘Fuck off.’
‘Oh, what, did you think the law didn’t know about all that stuff, that it was a whole world of freedom for shit like you? We see so many like you, son. We’re in that world; we hear it all. We walk with the Rat King to our left.’ Now the boy was reacting, trying to hide it. He was looking at the bell, clearly not feeling it, but as if he’d suddenly thought it might have some power that could be a threat to him. ‘Oh, there we go – the bell’s a bit more meaningful now, right? You want to call someone? You reckon anyone official here knows what I’m talking about? You reckon your lawyer knows about it? The law on your side don’t know this stuff, but the law on my side does.’
The boy shut down, his face a mask. He was breathing hard, though. He hadn’t expected this level of knowledge on Costain’s part. He was still wondering what the bell might be there for. His eyes kept flicking to it, and he was hunched up a little now, like . . . like he was personally afraid of it, like it was a drugs scanner. Costain carefully lifted up the bell and looked at it, grinned, like he’d taken a reading off it, then looked the boy up and down. Bates stiffened, guilty of something.
‘So you see what this means? Your “alibi” means fuck all to me. I know you got out of here. I know you did those murders. Your blood’s at one crime scene; you’re caught on bloody camera at the other. They showed you that video, the last lot that were through here, right? Only, they believed you when you said “just someone who looks like me”, and I fucking don’t.’
Bates tried to front it out. ‘So what you do about that, blood? If lawyers don’t believe this stuff, how you going to—?’
He hadn’t finished his sentence before Costain had leaped out of his seat, grabbed him and slammed his head into the table. He hauled the boy’s head back and threw him off his seat onto the ground. Costain moved quickly forwards, as if he was about to start kicking, and stopped to let the boy squirm out of the way, heave himself up against the wall, put a hand to his nose to stem the flow of blood. Costain wasn’t actually prepared to take the violence any further, but the kid didn’t know that.
He yelled helplessly as Costain grabbed him again, the sound of someone who’d been beaten a lot. There was a tiny sound of Hell in that shout, but Costain didn’t let himself care. He was doing this now just so he could get close enough to search him, to catch a tiny hint of something of the Sight about the boy’s clothes, to find—
There it was. Costain pushed the boy back so he hit the wall and put a finger between his eyes. ‘Take whatever that is out of your top pocket. Slowly.’
Bates hesitated, saw the look in Costain’s eye, then reached inside his uniform and produced a stick of chalk, roaring with Sighted power, power that had been weirdly and entirely muted by being inside the kid’s clothes. It must be designed that way, thought Costain distantly, as he felt the extraordinary weight of the thing. He put his hand out and Bates reluctantly gave him the chalk.
Costain expected it to be heavier than the slight weight that rested in his palm. Now he needed to know exactly what this was and if possible where it came from, because who knew whether or not Ballard would dish, or even know? But, as in undercover work, to ask was to give away more than you got.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Clever. You figured you could just keep it on you, ’cos nobody’s going to care about this in a search, are they? Nobody’s going to nick it either. Where did a nobody like you get hold of something like this?’
Bates had blood on his lip, his tongue flicking to it. He was sizing Costain up, wondering how to get the best deal. ‘That’ll cost you.’ He stepped back as Costain moved as if to attack him again, and his voice got shrill. ‘I didn’t kill no one. If I tell you, you gonna move against him, finger him for this, not me. I used it, but I didn’t use it to go and fucking kill no one. It was him. I can prove it.’
So the chalk could be used to get out of here, and to get in and out of the Holmes murder scene, in the same way Ballard had us
ed it.
‘Who are you going on about?’ Costain asked.
‘This bloke. Remand prisoner, I think he was. He was in his own clothes, anyway. You know they go on about this shit in here. Some of them got their fucking religion, and some of them talk about voodoo or whatever. But just a few of them, they really know. You get to be able to tell. They ain’t showy about it. You get to know them, and they’ll do tricks with it, like passing out fags from an empty hand, and you can see them appear – it’s not like some fucking thing on telly.’
That was something Sefton was going to enjoy hearing about, that the culture of the Sight was known to prisoners. Costain wondered if that, like so much about their world, had been a development of the last few years. ‘Yeah,’ he said, careful not to appear interested, ‘this bloke.’
‘He was one of them lot, was talking to all the ones like that. He was in here for a few days, told me that he could get me out if I liked. I was all, yeah, sure. He meant it, though. He showed me how to use it, drew a door and walked through the wall of the shower block, did it again, came back, rubbed the mark off before anyone saw. He called it walkthrough.’
‘Does just what it says on the tin. No, don’t smile at me, son. He gave you it out of the goodness of his heart, did he?’