London Falling

by Paul Cornell

  She smacked Lisa across the face with the telephone directory – so fast it was like a bat on a ball. The back of Lisa’s head hit the wall.

  She collapsed, oh so slowly, forward, the blood bursting from her newly broken nose. Her head was ringing, slowly; she was feeling different to any way she’d ever felt before. To be hit that hard; it felt it could change her. She didn’t know if she was going to be able to even suck in a breath—

  The woman hit her again, as her head was sagging, and the blow was just as hard.

  Lisa fell in and out of consciousness during the next half-hour, but her body never fell and she never managed to make a sound.

  She woke again, her vision a blur, to find the woman standing at a distance again. ‘This is your master’s mercy,’ she said, ‘so be thankful.’

  And then she left. Right through the wall.

  Lisa found that she could make noises now. So she did. But nobody came. She’d locked herself in her room. So that couldn’t have happened. She finally fell over on one side.

  The bruises had almost faded by the next morning. It hurt her to move, but there wasn’t a lot to show anyone. Her nose was at an angle, and it hurt to touch it, but somehow it had already set.

  Lisa stared into the bathroom mirror. It was as if she’d done this damage to herself.

  She started to sob, leaning on the sink and giving way to it, but then she remembered her dad’s face again, and how it looked as if he’d done it to himself too, and she made this about him again, and she heaved herself upright, though it hurt like hell, and through her loosened teeth she turned the sobs into a roar.

  Mum never saw anything that could have convinced her. So Lisa didn’t even try. Mum remained silent at all meals where Lisa was around. Rob kept his distance for a few days, but when he finally looked at her, he looked interrogatively. Lesson learned?

  Lisa put away her very particular type of fashions and make-up and music.

  For the next three years, she was silent but she was polite. She wore very clean jeans; a crisp shirt; the hair that the hairdresser suggested, every time. She looked just like ‘a teenager’ in a soap opera.

  When she started to think about that terrible night, she thought about Dad instead. To the point where she wasn’t sure how it could ever have happened. How something impossible could have happened. It wasn’t supported by anything in her everyday world. Sometimes she wondered if it was a story she’d written, or if she’d dreamed it. But what had happened to Dad was real. At least she hung on to that.

  She made sure her mother never got worried. She hid the allergies she now developed to everything existing in the family home, her eyes streaming at the smell of that carpet, at the polish, even at the air in her own bedroom. She threw back one-a-day antihistamines six times a day.

  She had her mantra.

  It wasn’t a suicide.

  Nine GCSEs: seven As and two Bs. She met older blokes through the family, and lost her virginity to one of Rob’s soldiers after a party. Afterwards, sore and curled up into a little ball, she goaded him with what her mum could make Rob do to him, if she found out. He was having a punt, wasn’t he? Thought she was a bit of a tart, didn’t he? She got him out of there in five minutes.

  They planned a big party for her sixteenth birthday. Lisa Toshack let them.

  Now Rob would ruffle her hair whenever he passed. His organization had grown at high speed since Alf’s death. In consequence everyone was dressing better. From the distance of history, it now looked as if a weak man had been holding them all back. Mum found a new man, one of Rob’s lieutenants, and he was decent enough, neutral to Lisa. She could feel the prohibitions issued about her, the threats said in her name, the anticipation of her future somewhere in the bookkeeping of the organization. They had even decided on her A levels: statistics, computers, finance.

  But she was kept out of the heart of it, even though she tried to get closer. Her mum was kept out too. A lot of people were. Now, more than ever, even more than under her dad, there was the firm and there was whatever made it work, and between those things there were locked doors and Rob taking himself off, away from any of the lieutenants Lisa knew.

  Three months before her birthday, she made contact with the Crown Prosecution Service in Bethnal Green. In the weeks leading up to her party, she put several large packages in the post. On the night before her birthday, she kissed her mum goodnight, then she went to the cupboard under the stairs. The knife that Dad had supposedly used to stab himself in the ribs had been returned to the family with the rest of the evidence, years ago. Rob had actually kept it, put it back in the toolkit it had come from. That was typical of him. Lisa had made sure, every week since, that she knew where it was. It was clean, free of incrimination, but she wanted it. She put it in her pocket.

  She left the house at midnight, a legal adult now, carrying only a small suitcase and a wad of cash, the loss of which could never be reported to the police.

  Her lawyer got in touch with the Toshack family at ten the next morning, before, as it turned out, anyone had even realized she was gone. He indicated that all communication in future would be solely between him and the family. He also told them that Lisa intended to change her name.

  She made sure she could not be found. She knew exactly what that would take, and how far the Toshack soldiers would go. Then she thought of what had happened in her room that night, and went many steps beyond. She chose the name Ross, which she’d seen on the side of a refrigerated lorry lying overturned in a ditch. Lisa Ross subsequently worked in a supermarket in Durham, where she was happy and helpful. She was promoted twice. She studied sociology of crime, sports science and criminology part-time at college. She’d been meaning to become a police officer, but the more she read, the more she realized how difficult it would be, if she did so, to carry out what she needed to do.

  She walked into a police recruitment van at the careers fair, talked for ten minutes about what her ambitions were, and in response they suggested exactly what she’d already started training herself for. She therefore applied, and was asked to attend an interview a few weeks later and, on the same day, to make a presentation, with half an hour’s preparation, about an organizational system she was familiar with.

  Dressed properly and efficiently, she stood up in front of the panel, and began her presentation with a chart she’d drawn from memory during that half-hour. ‘This,’ she said, ‘shows the flow of money within the Toshack crime family.’

  The exclamations of astonishment from the panel didn’t manage to make her smile, though she’d thought they might.

  The big guys didn’t express an interest in her at first, not even an awareness. She was told many times that she had to do what anyone else would do, that her heritage actually made it harder for her. She agreed, she nodded, she knew, but she didn’t waver. She went through psychometric testing and, to her surprise, everyone seemed to think she was sane. She didn’t mention anything which would convince them otherwise.

  She took the three-week basic training course, learning about the intelligence cycle, the national intelligence model, handling five by fives and assigning codes. She was told she was lucky the training centre had moved up north, since she’d thus missed a particular grim building in Putney. She hadn’t mentioned that, if the course had been located there, she wouldn’t have gone. At the same time, she started studying for her criminology degree in the evenings.

  Her first assignment as an intelligence analyst was in Bishop Auckland. She watched the patterns of small-scale drug sales, learned how to use I2 link charts to get to know who knew who, where they met, where the money went. She learned how the best intelligence was predictive intelligence, and that it only became intel once an analyst had processed it. How only the phone call logs of criminal organizations formed a closed circuit, without any random calls made to 118 or pizza delivery or girlfriends.

  Patterns like that started saying things to her. It was like discerning the hidden contour
s in a map. She loved it so much, it was nearly enough in itself.

  But it wasn’t.

  Her boss was a senior analyst called Andrea Stretfield, a ferociously calm lady in her sixties, the last, she said, of some previous generation who possessed wisdom that had since been lost. ‘Don’t just crunch the numbers,’ she advised. ‘Don’t ever be afraid of the responsibility of offering an opinion. There is an art to report-writing, young lady, and it’s not about cutting and pasting. This is how we find the naughty men, by applying the craft.’ At the time, Ross had wondered if this was genuine wisdom, or just the past attempting to claim that it had been better, that the new boys and girls were naive fools. Andrea seemed so sure of everything, but was obviously now a bit out of touch. Gradually, though, Ross came to see how she could pick and choose from the tension between past and present, that having the old guard assert themselves let her take the best from what they knew and then she could apply it to going forward.

  She’d imagined that that phone call from her lawyer, a few years ago, would have caused the gravity to shift in Bermondsey, made the drugs and the prostitutes and the gambling and the chop shops vanish. For a while, at least. Maybe for a year. That only then would they start to poke their heads out again, and finally not be able to resist continuing as usual. But, during her time up north, she learned that nothing of the kind had actually happened, and that Toshack had continued business as usual.

  That had been a bad night. That night she had again heavy objects up against the door of the bedroom of her flat – and then taken them away again because of how doing that had scared her.

  But again she’d thought of her dad, and had kept going.

  She had waited, learning her skills in operations that were nothing to do with her. She learned devil’s advocacy, brainstorming and analysis of competing hypotheses. She went on a course with the army Intelligence Corps, and loved what she saw of that way of life. Some part of her wanted to be a real soldier, not in the way that Toshack used the word. She made the rank of higher analyst, which was supposed to put her on equal terms with a DI – though she’d never met a copper who saw it that way – and she started to get roped in by senior detectives on completely different operations, to help them with presentations when the money stuff got difficult. She got the reputation she was after: direct and straightforward and thorough.

  And finally, finally, they came to see her.

  A Met detective superintendent called Rebecca Lofthouse showed up at her nick. She looked as if she had no time for any bullshit from Ross, which was good, because Ross had none to give her. She spent a good long time looking at her before she even said a word. She toyed with her charm bracelet instead, then finally she seemed to decide. ‘Your uncle,’ she declared, ‘is a thoroughgoing bastard.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Ross.

  ‘If you’re working undercover for him, it’s the deepest I’ve seen. And he doesn’t need it, not these days. So . . . We’ve currently got nothing and you might give us something. There are also factors involved about which you may never hear. At any rate, I’ve decided to take you up on the generous offer which you haven’t yet made to us.’ It transpired that she had an operation in mind, down in the smoke, which would require Ross to be transferred, a request which had already been granted in principle. Lofthouse had already pulled a DI from SCD 7(2), the special projects team, to lead it, and Lambeth Operational Command Unit were letting them use a station that was a significant distance from the subjects, and would keep the op out of the organized crime mainstream, in case Toshack’s intelligence-gathering was all it was cracked up to be. Ross, with the possibility of name and face recognition, would even be kept out of that. They were going to play a long game, putting in some UCs using her knowledge. It was to be called Operation Goodfellow.

  ‘Have you got anything else to tell me?’ Lofthouse asked, at the end of the final briefing. ‘Anything you haven’t put on the record?’ She seemed genuinely interested, eager to hear, even. ‘Anything you . . . couldn’t?’

  Ross had thought about it for a moment. ‘No, ma’am,’ she said.

  TEN

  ‘You are Alfred Toshack’s daughter,’ said Mora Losley. She pointed to Ross’ nose. ‘I made that. It could have been any accident, across the course of your life, but it was me. I am the mother of your face.’

  The fear gripped Ross now. That smell! It had taken her back to when she’d been terribly hurt. It made her feel very small. This was what she had always imagined she would sometime see again.

  As she studied Ross, Losley inclined her head sideways, like a predatory bird, moving her hands in a strangely elegant gesture as she did so. ‘The disobedient child, a policeman and two blackamoors, one of them a sodomite.’

  Ross couldn’t begin to process that.

  ‘And yet somehow they have a “protocol” on them. What is it?’ The woman took a step towards her. It took an effort, but Ross made herself stay where she was. ‘Did you make sacrifice and then touch my mistress’ blessed soil deliberately, so as to gain the Sight? You? Or is this an accident?’

  Ross could feel the power of her. Even the force of her shadow on the floor was making the air between them ripple with heat. The fact she had questions was the only thing now saving them. There were so many people downstairs: all she had to do was yell and they’d come running. But they wouldn’t see the old woman. They’d be blind to the danger.

  ‘Are you privileged?’ Losley barked. ‘Do you make sacrifice, or are you remembered?’ Her accent had slid suddenly upwards, into something resonating with privilege. Even as Ross distantly wondered what any of those words meant, her mind obeying her training even as it reeled in shock, she was ridiculously reminded of Keith Richards. ‘Answer me!’

  ‘How . . . how did my uncle employ you?’

  Losley stopped. She looked suspicious again, as if this question had revealed some hint of worrying knowledge. ‘I am not employed. He merely knew of me from the football club.’ She put a hand to her heart and then to her brow, a kind of benediction. She had said ‘football club’ very precisely, as if she’d learned those words once and kept them carefully enunciated like that. ‘He made a good sacrifice. My lord of the pleasant face assigned me to his service.’

  Ross felt very small again. Toshack hadn’t even bothered to send this thing after her when she’d run. She couldn’t quite believe that. But she’d discovered it now, out of some horrible accident or of some destiny that was going to destroy her. She managed to make herself speak again. ‘So why did you kill Toshack?’ She was aware of Quill looking towards her, still in shock but urging her on.

  ‘When my service ended, my lord of the pleasant face would not hear his pleas, so he offered me sacrifice to continue!’ She shook her head, looking at Ross with a terrible aloofness, as if all this were her fault by association. ‘Modern rubbish. The rules are not written down! When I ignored that fucking cunt of a criminal, he tried to tell this watchman’ – she pointed at Quill – ‘my name!’

  Quill stepped forward until he was alongside Ross, breathing heavily. She realized he was going to do it, this absurd, futile thing. She felt admiration and fear for him. ‘Mora Losley,’ he said, and he clearly had to pause and gather himself together before he continued quickly, ‘you are under arrest for the murder of Robert Toshack and several others. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence—’

  She raised a hand and screamed.

  The sound made them stagger. They fell to the ground. And still it continued, battering them from every angle of the attic. Ross put her hands over her ears, and she was properly back there now, sobbing in the dark, with the hugeness looming over her and blow after blow . . . But no. No. She would not go back there. She would not.

  She hauled herself to her feet. The room swayed in front of her, all in red. Blood in her eyes. Blows still reflecting off the walls. But there was the witch, her mouth slowly closing around the mere sound that had beaten them all to
their knees, looking so hugely affronted, so vastly above any of their lives that for them to try to bring her down to their level had made her bellow thus in horror at the insult.

  Ross would not go through this again. She had to fight. It was more important than staying alive. She ran at Losley, her hands reaching in front of her face. She got further than her feet expected to, swinging her balance at the last second to throw a punch straight at—

  Losley made another gesture.

  Ross felt something precious drop out of her head. And then she was looking upwards as her body flew away from her, like some aircraft she was falling from, and was soaring up towards the ceiling, impossibly. She twisted frantically, to see what was below her. Hot black entwined darkness was hurtling up at her from out of the floor.

  Quill had seen what Ross was about to do and had staggered to his feet, a second ahead of the other two. He was having trouble controlling his bladder, which made him feel like a child in the face of this thing. He had been about to shout something. To yell that they should get out . . . that they had walked into a situation they weren’t expecting . . .

  He had no idea what he had been about to shout.

  But then his brain had fallen through his shoes, and his body was blasted up out of him like a rocket, and he was a falling ghost with no visible self, nothing to him but his own awareness of himself.

  He remembered, as he fell and fell an impossible distance, beyond the height of the room, that look on Toshack’s face in the interview room. He remembered how his own eyes had hurt at what had been happening, how his brain had failed to understand it. And he realized that Toshack hadn’t been slammed up against the wall, as he’d thought at the time. It had been the ceiling he’d been staring down from. And he imagined Losley standing there, invisible, doing to Toshack then what she was doing to them now. With that terrible ancient nurse’s face, revealing her sad certainty of pain.