London Falling

by Paul Cornell

  ‘She’s got a history of abusive behaviour,’ she told Quill, ‘a lot of complaints against her by fellow fans. But what I’m getting from the West Ham fan chatter online is that, as she’s a terrace icon, a lot of them are willing to forgive her anything.’

  ‘That’s the feeling I got from the lads,’ agreed Sefton. ‘She’s everyone’s barmy auntie.’

  Costain looked uneasy. ‘Who heaves the soil about, then? Maybe she’s got some big nephews?’

  Ross was surprised to hear Costain express a useful thought. ‘Maybe she’s got a son, some relatives, some followers. She’s been a West Ham season-ticket holder since 1955.’ Ross handed Quill the ticket records and the only image she had discovered: a copy of a passport photo, the latest of those submitted every year to get the season ticket renewed. A little old lady who indeed appeared bland enough to be described in many different ways. Ross had found herself looking back to it several times, trying to fix the non-existent details in her mind and failing.

  Quill pinned the photo to the Ops Board that was slowly developing. ‘List of complaints is interesting,’ he said. ‘Abuse of fellow fans, a lot of her upsetting children. And even small instances of violence . . .’

  ‘Against animals,’ said Ross. ‘She kicks dogs. That’s a serial-killer marker.’

  ‘Moves around a bit, too,’ said Quill. ‘You need an address for the season ticket, and those tally with the ones given at her formal warnings. Loads of different places in the Wembley and Neasden area.’

  ‘Where?’ said Costain. He got to his feet and took the sheet of paper from Quill. Then a smile spread all over his face. ‘I know these houses,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’ve been to a lot of them.’

  Sefton looked over his shoulder, and started to laugh.

  ‘These,’ said Costain, ‘are the houses Toshack went to search on New Year’s Eve! All except this one in Willesden. That could be the one he went to on his own, before he called us out. Toshack was looking for Mora Losley!’

  Quill leaped up, and Ross thought he was about to hug her but, seeing the look on her face, he awkwardly turned it into a high-five that became a hearty handshake. Then he grabbed his phone. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is enough to merit a search warrant!’

  Costain looked around him, as he waited in the unmarked car. The house Toshack had visited on his own had turned out to be situated on a suburban T-junction, with an Irish pub at one end and a West Indian pub at the other, in a row of houses running along a curved street near the park. At lunchtime, in winter sunshine, Quill’s tiny team had parked just around the corner from it, where they could hear the sounds of the school playing field. The unmarked van sat at a decent interval along the curve of the road itself. At Quill’s request, approved through Lofthouse’s office, personnel from the local nick had been folded into an operation that was registered as still being called ‘name to follow’.

  That indicated a certain lack of confidence, as if Quill still thought this might be about something other than the obvious. Like catching out Costain? Costain himself didn’t really think this could still be about that situation in reverse. This wasn’t about Lofthouse suspecting Quill. He’d been wondering if she would pop up again, reassure him again, give him something else to go on as to why she wanted him involved in this. There was one particular thing which could still have him – have him badly. It was what he’d thought of as his exit strategy. But here he was, hanging on, even getting interested in how the pieces were coming together.

  Costain had grown up in Willesden, and it hadn’t bloody changed much. There were a lot of For Sale signs, a lot of boarded-up shopfronts, chain stores that now hid behind sheets of wood instead of bullet-damaged windows. All these neat little houses with individual gardens were from when this had been a posh suburb, decades before he was born. They’d also driven past one of those marooned churches, with a big sunny graveyard, from when this had been a separate village. At one point there had actually been pilgrimages that led people here. Costain remembered deciphering the shopping street at the end of this very road when he’d first walked along it as a copper, his new training considered sufficiently in place. It included honest greengrocer with West Indian produce outside, paying protection; a furtive newsagent with something that looked like a pillbox on his roof . . . That remained there from when that same corner shop had been the entrance hall to an art-deco club where the Charleston was played, back when it took an adventurous train ride to get you to this fashionable suburb. There had been kids on mountain bikes riding up to catch the baggies of coke as they were thrown from that vantage point above. The only difference now would be that they’d ride scooters, and the set of guys chucking the bags would have changed about twenty times in the meantime. Back then he’d actually wondered if there was anything he could do there on his own, and reported this activity when he got back to his nick. There had been posters up for black comedy nights, representing traces of community. There had been black grannies who kept those sociable gardens nice, and owned their own houses. A few doorsteps where people sat outside in the evening. There had been life in the ruins then, green shoots that were signs that the place might resist the creeping gentrification of nearby Hampstead.

  From what he’d seen this morning, though, in the last decade the character of the place had tottered from being rotten black and Irish to theme-pub black and Irish, and then reverted to rotten again, without ever having quite been decent black and Irish at any moment in between. God, it was as if the future was dead. As if nobody could imagine now what might come next. He seemed to have fallen into being a copper again, as if someone had handed him a different hat. And that took some getting used to.

  They’d met the local uniforms last Friday, and had received a briefing from a sergeant. The place was a typical house in a typical residential street. Nothing on the books, but a couple of incidents nearby this year: a mugging and a pub fight, neither connected. They’d driven just once past the house before they’d parked, Costain being the one allowed to glance idly at it. Bare garden, a little snow still melting in the shade. In fact, it looked a lot like the everyday houses Toshack had dragged them round. Except this one had very dark windows. Heavy black curtains, maybe? But not so much as a West Ham pennant on display.

  Mora Losley didn’t show up in any official records, other than police ones. It seemed that she didn’t use any local services, didn’t answer to any landlord; the ground plans were mysteriously absent, and she’d somehow avoided taxation. The council had said, embarrassed, that she must be in the system somewhere, but they hadn’t yet come back with anything. It was actually an unprofessional level of secrecy; even international terrorists paid their council-tax bills. The strangeness was astonishing. Not the sort of thing Toshack usually did.

  Quill now got on the radio to the sergeant in charge of the uniforms. That same morning, he’d given a briefing about looking out for traps. Maybe there was going to be a scene, and spitting, and that weird taboo thing of an elderly woman swearing at you.

  They got out of the car at exactly the same moment as the four uniforms got out of the van: two women, two men. There were two more already round at the back door. Quill opened the gate and led them up the garden path. He pulled the warrant and search notice out of his pocket, along with his warrant card. He knocked heavily on the door. If there was no reply, they’d move in the squad with the breaking device.

  The door suddenly seemed to give way under Quill’s knocking, as if it had been standing open, resting against the frame. It swung open an inch or two. Only darkness was visible beyond. Quill looked ill at ease. Costain hadn’t heard anyone moving inside. He found himself taking a step back, the UC part of him already anticipating gunfire blasting through that door.

  ‘Police officers,’ Quill called into the darkened gap. ‘I am Detective Inspector James Quill. Ms Losley, we are here with a warrant to search your premises in connection with the death of Matthew Howarth.’

  No reply.

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nbsp; Quill pushed the door gently with his foot until it was fully open. He stepped inside, the uniforms quickly following him, then came Costain and the others.

  Costain found himself taking a deep breath as he went in. This was different from the others: the inside of the house was pitch black. That thin carpet again, though. That bare granny’s house feeling. The little window panel beside the door had been painted on the inside with something that looked black and sticky. That was different too.

  And on the newel post at the top of the banister there sat something that couldn’t quite be made out, but that looked organic, animal origin and long dead. It could only have been fixed there.

  Ross’ voice sounded tremendously calm. ‘Is that the skull of a baby?’

  Costain stepped forward and now saw what she meant. And, at that moment, the smell hit him. And the others, too, if the coughing was anything to go by.

  Quill immediately called for back-up, containment and an Armed Response Unit.

  Costain felt the sense of triumph from the coppers around him, and something inside him finally started to relax. This was why Toshack had come to this house on his own. ‘Serial killer house,’ he said. ‘Excellent.’

  It took them several hours to move into the house properly. First the Armed Response Unit had swept it thoroughly. Then Forensics and Explosives had gone through in turn. Costain hadn’t known what to do with himself in the meantime. When he’d been a UC, scene-of-crime had been more of a before routine for him than an after. More and more police vans arrived outside, a lot of uniforms needed for crowd control as locals and the press started massing. Finally, the house was declared clear, and Quill’s team were allowed in.

  They found some West Ham paraphernalia, and a scarf left over a chair in the kitchen. Quill got hold of a magistrate, and put out a new warrant for Losley’s arrest in connection with the Howarth murder. Even assuming that someone else was doing the killing, such as a family member she kept under the same roof, finding her should eventually lead to them. He also gave orders that all the other houses Losley had inhabited were to be searched.

  The tiny skull on the newel post turned out to be fixed in place by purple wax. ‘No,’ corrected Sefton, ‘claret-coloured wax.’ A West Ham serial killer – how huge was this? Costain found himself smiling. He was now part of a successful operation and, for a bonus, not as a UC. The guys back home would have a fucking fit. This justified everything Lofthouse had done. She was right to have put him here, if this was the pay-off. This was the juice.

  ‘I would hate,’ he said, ‘to be doing PR for that football club tonight.’

  ‘Obvious she’d have to be West Ham,’ remarked Quill. ‘Just one stop away from Barking.’

  They gradually explored every room. Upstairs was worse than down below. The bedroom was just a soiled mattress, the stink of ammonia so strong that none of them could linger there. Every inch of the walls of the upper floor was daubed with patterns, symbols and writing. Costain found player lists of what the internet confirmed were old West Ham squads, and what seemed to be maps of geographical features with labels in Latin. The smile was now constantly fixed to his face: he was a detective again. He saw Sefton glance in his direction, so he made sure to smile wider. Yeah, he’d made it all right, no thanks to posh boy over there. Ross brought up a translation on her phone. ‘The Latin looks like it might be a legal paragraph, a very old one, about the right, or otherwise, of the monarch to enter a private citizen’s dwelling.’

  ‘And they called her eccentric,’ said Quill.

  Nothing they found there suggested to Costain that the place had been inhabited by anyone other than an old lady.

  There was a trapdoor leading to a loft. The armed officers and forensics people had closed it again after they’d done a search up there. As Quill reopened it with a hook on a pole, a puff of stale air from inside made everyone cough. Quill insisted on going first, and who was Costain to deny him that? He climbed up the stepladder that the uniforms had brought with them, and cautiously stuck his head through the gap. A moment later, he called for the others to follow. He sounded excited once again.

  The loft had been converted into one big room. It had been roughly boarded-out at some stage, and over the boards had been thrown a variety of dirty rugs. They’d been drawn on, too, in sticky black: lines, diagrams and tiny writing. It was even colder up here. The room was filled with West Ham memorabilia: scarves, hats, really old posters that were more like theatre bills, annuals and a copy of a team sing-along album sitting beside an ancient gramophone to play it on. There was one huge central feature: a wooden tub about six feet across. It didn’t have an original purpose in the loft, and it couldn’t have fitted through the trapdoor. It must have been assembled up here.

  It contained only a huge pile of soil, the surface shaped into a familiar spiral. The room smelt of it, and it looked fresh and uncontaminated.

  ‘What’s the betting,’ said Quill, ‘that this soil’s the same type used to form the other spirals?’

  ‘Jimmy.’ Sefton was holding up a plastic sack gleefully. On it was written: Original West Ham Turf. Take the Irons spirit into your garden! There was a tightly folded roll of other such sacks stashed under a bench.

  ‘Here’s what Forensics were talking about.’ Ross’ voice sounded different. She was leaning over an iron cauldron.

  They all went over to see. In the cauldron lay three small human skeletons, arranged in a rough circle, head to toe. There were still the tiniest fragments of meat on the bones. Smaller bones lay scattered across the bottom of the vessel.

  Costain felt himself relax completely. Thanks to Lofthouse’s mad hunch and some good police work, he was once again on the up. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated, ‘serial killer house.’

  Ross made sure she kept working, knowing the coppers were more used to this. They had a work culture to support them. She’d been quite surprised that Quill had asked her to come along, but, as he’d said, this operation was bizarre to start with, and ‘she’d pine away if left all alone in that Portakabin’. Which was, she guessed, the result of him noting the desperation she’d been trying to hide. From now on she’d have to get used to being operational, he’d said, too. And that had certainly felt better than the alternative. Until this. If she even stopped to think about what had happened here . . . so she wouldn’t. Had Toshack known about the child murders? Maybe, yeah. He’d have been the kind willing to turn a blind eye, all right.

  ‘As long as it wasn’t on his own doorstep,’ said Costain, catching the expression on her face. She looked away. She didn’t like people being so close to her old world – or making guesses at what she was thinking.

  And there was . . . the other thing. The thing that, incredibly, this house was making her think about for the first time in years. She could do that if she had to, deliberately not think about stuff. It was . . . just a coincidental thing, just an association. Children in a pot: that just made your mind go to a certain place, and that was a place she shouldn’t go. She got out her laptop and carried out a Full Business Objects Search, on the Crime Recording System. She could find only two unsolved missing-children cases for this part of London in the last three years, and both of those turned out to involve older individuals.

  ‘Has it really gone that far?’ said Quill, when she told him. ‘Bloody three children go missing, and nobody calls it in?’

  ‘These two modes are really different. Possible poison that leaves no trace . . . and kids cooked in a pot. What sort of narrative has she put together for herself that connects those? She kills the former away, and these at home, probably.’ She slapped her hand on the wall, over and over, feeling more alive than she had since Toshack had been killed, and also feeling a little alarmed at the intensity of it. ‘It’s as if we’re seeing the outlying features of something more complicated. As if there are different killers with different MOs . . . or something. We’re in this house, but we’re still not seeing . . . what’s in the middle.’

&nb
sp; ‘If anyone finds a ripe, rosy apple,’ said Quill, ‘don’t touch.’

  ‘You reckon those three are Dopey, Grumpy and Sneezy?’ said Costain, indicating the cauldron.

  Ross put it out of her mind again. She understood the context of these copper jokes: it was what people who dealt with horrors did. She’d once been shown round the paramedic control centre in High Barnet, and they’d put cartoons up of their call-outs – what they called their ‘shouts’ – with the highest body count. She wished she had it in herself to join in. For her there was even a little jolt now as she looked at Losley’s photo, even though she did it to reassure herself. This Losley woman was a complete stranger to her. But what had previously been bland had now certainly become sinister. No dead-eyed Myra Hindley, this one, that calm look on her face maybe saying: Ooh yes, if you had any to spare, she might be persuaded to snap up just one or two of your children.

  The Scene of Crime Officers of SCD 4 had extracted a very new-looking piece of paper from where it had been found folded up and wedged between two floorboards, and handed it to them, properly bagged, for inspection.

  Quill laughed out loud when, at the bottom of the same letter, he saw Rob Toshack’s signature. Putting all modesty aside, he called Ross over – with her younger eyes – to read it aloud.

  ‘Dear Mora,’ she read out, increasing pleasure in her voice. ‘You’re not here, and I can’t find that door of yours. If it sweetens the deal, I’m bringing a few of my lot over to your safe houses. You can have any of them you want, all of them if you like. Just talk to me, all right? Yours sincerely—’

  ‘Formal, in the circumstances,’ commented Sefton.

  ‘That’s him, all right,’ said Costain. ‘Proper, like.’ There was a horrified look on his face, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Was he offering her . . . us?’