by Paul Cornell
‘I’m amazed you ever came back,’ said Quill to Costain. The man looked suddenly furious at him, and Quill raised his hands, quickly explaining himself. ‘I mean ’cos any of us here would have thought about doing a runner. I’ll bet Ross is thinking right now about going back to her old nick.’
‘Old Nick?’ said Sefton, ‘I wouldn’t use that expression.’
Which made Ross burst out into an enormous, awkward laugh, and then she put a hand over her mouth, her eyes gleaming with tears as if she’d done the most terrible thing. Sefton found himself weirdly pleased, in the midst of how shocked he’d been feeling. He never told jokes; it had just slipped out and made a change in the world.
Costain managed a sad smile. ‘We could all easily hop it,’ he said. ‘We could put in for transfers, take any family we have with us. We could leave all this behind. Except . . . I think I now have to consider so carefully every . . . decision I make. And I think that getting out of it now . . . doing anything but my best to help nick her . . . would be wrong.’
The tone of his voice was so alien to him, so beaten down, that Sefton almost wanted the bully in him back. Almost.
Quill nodded, giving that statement its due. ‘We all have to decide,’ he said. ‘A highly dangerous suspect has admitted to several murders, and has threatened to carry out more. She’s going to kill any player that scores a hat-trick against West Ham Football Club. Their next match is tomorrow night. We know her MO, and we’ve already worked her background. We have that tiny advantage: we can do proper police work on her. While we were working on that board, it felt as if we were also working to stop her – and that made me feel better. What about you two?’
Sefton nodded. There wasn’t really a choice, as far as he could see. ‘You’re right about going after her, but it benefits us too, doesn’t it? I don’t want to have to stay away from London all my life, and who knows what else is waiting out there? If we can find some way to nick her, maybe then we can force her to take away the Sight from us and all.’
And that got a gratifying reaction too. That hope he’d found had touched a chord in all of them.
Quill looked to Ross, who was deep in thought. ‘She almost certainly didn’t kill my dad,’ she said. ‘Wrong MO. But she’s a serial killer, and only we can have her. And,’ she pointed to her nose, ‘I fucking owe her.’
Quill held up a finger as if to mark this moment. He went over to the pile of paper and card, and took out a long strip of cardboard upon which he wrote something, then pinned it at the top of the board, having finally decided the name of the investigation. Just for once, he didn’t feel he was taking a risk by making it relevant, though the witch from The Wizard of Oz looked positively benign compared to this one.
‘Operation Toto,’ he said.
TWELVE
‘Just nobody ask which of us is missing a brain. Operational objectives.’ Quill began writing them down on the right-hand side of the Ops Board:
1. Ensure the safety of the public.
2. Gather evidence of offences.
3. Find subject Mora Losley.
4. Find means to arrest subject.
5. Arrest subject.
6. Forcibly negotiate removal of the Sight.
7. Bring to trial/destroy.
It took Quill a moment to add that last word, Sefton realized. But they all nodded when they saw it. ‘Yeah,’ he concurred.
Quill shrugged. ‘We don’t want to turn this into some sort of witch hunt.’ Which was the point at which Sefton understood what the man had done. He’d turned their personal nightmare into something approaching business as usual. It wasn’t bloody sustainable, but it at least gave them solid ground to put their feet on. The blankets had been left behind, hanging on the backs of their chairs. It was now starting to get light outside the Portakabin.
‘I’m going to put in requests for bill records from . . . sod it, all the thirty-three boroughs, going back . . . well, as far as they go, which’ll only be ten years or so, but it’s a start,’ declared Ross, going to the computer. ‘There’ll be a pile of them, but if her alterations, her edits, stand out that clearly, just skimming them will do.’
‘It’ll take weeks of grunt work and potentially lead nowhere,’ said Quill. ‘Excellent: that sounds like police work to me. Anyone got anything else?’
Sefton found one of the new police pocket books he’d been given when he’d suddenly stopped being a UC, and leafed quickly through it. There wasn’t much there that related to anything that was true – not now they knew what the truth was. He put it aside, went to the cupboard and found four plain notepads. ‘Special pocket books,’ he said. ‘Not as issued by the IBO. For our sort of stuff. Like Ross here has always used for her speciality. Maybe one day a court will be prepared to believe us. We can’t put this stuff in the regular pocket books, but we’ll need to remember things.’
‘And now paperwork’, Quill nodded. ‘I’m feeling more at home all the time.’
Sefton felt weird at doing so much speaking up now. His skills had been, up until now, basically hiding, pretending and observing. It must be the observing part of that which was giving him all these ideas. ‘Yeah, well, that’s what this is about: remembering. We have to . . . remember better than she does. Starting with . . .’ He grabbed a marker pen and a sheaf of paper, and started urgently writing out big headings. ‘Protocol.’ ‘The Sight.’ ‘Privileged.’ ‘Make Sacrifice.’ ‘Remembered.’ He held up those last two. ‘That’s an either/or,’ he explained, his brain moving so fast that he just hoped he was making sense. ‘She asked us if we “made sacrifice” or if we were “remembered”.’ He put them up as headings down the left-hand side of the Ops Board. ‘And . . . this is a new area on the board, where the concepts go.’ He stared at it for a moment. He’d just created a new area on an Ops Board. An innovation in policing, just like that. It was only a matter of time before someone stopped him from doing stuff like this.
‘So what does “remembered” actually mean?’ asked Quill. ‘How is that the other choice, instead of just making sacrifice?’
‘Maybe that’s what I felt about the difference between stuff that’s sort of . . . grown . . . like Jack the green man was, and . . . made, like Losley’s stuff is.’
‘So long as we don’t properly know things like that, we’re going to be living on assumptions,’ said Ross, looking up from the computer. ‘We need to get used to that, using working assumptions but bearing in mind that they are just that.’
‘And feelings as well as assumptions,’ said Sefton. ‘Copper instinct. Like when the guv . . .’ he hesitated, but then had to say it anyway, ‘. . . got his cock out.’
‘If you write that down,’ insisted Quill, ‘do make the context clear. How do we limit what we record? Ghost ships, Harry’s dad, your Jack creature . . . it’s like claiming every crime in London is relevant to a murder case.’
‘If we didn’t know what murder was,’ said Ross, ‘they would be.’ She came over and looked at Sefton’s new side of the board with an expert eye. ‘Everything we see with the Sight is part of . . . a hidden culture of London. Like an OCN could be divided into chop shops, robberies, toms and drugs, and each of those have their own subculture involving loads of signifiers and definitions that interact with each other. But it’s all still the one thing, and quite often we encounter a small part of it and, given time, pull at that one thread to find a way to nick the whole thing. There are new factors appearing in normal police work all the time: new security behaviours, tech use, drugs. But maybe this special culture is a bit easier because, unlike with organized crime, there might be only two ways for someone to get into this business . . .’ She pointed at Sefton’s signs. ‘I mean sacrifice or be remembered. We have some idea what one of those involves: from seeing the kids in the cauldron.’ She now linked those pieces of paper with white thread. ‘We need to find out what this other concept means.’
‘“Protocol”, that’s the word that applied to us,’ said Costai
n, pointing at the other sign. ‘That’s the important one for us lot. She mentioned it as if it wasn’t something she was used to, either.’
‘Yeah,’ said Quill, ‘I noticed that, too. So that’s someone else’s technical term, not one she’d use normally herself.’
‘It’s called “a Protocol”, and we “had it on us”, as if it’s something physical – that’s what she said – and it “reacted with the soil”.’
‘But of the four of us in that attic, only I touched that soil,’ said Quill. ‘This must involve some sort of area effect, like a hand grenade going off.’
‘Whatever, that’s how she thinks we got the Sight, why we’re seeing all this shit. So what is it?’
Nobody had any answers to that one. ‘We need to use these new eyes of ours,’ said Ross, ‘and check out the evidence again.’
‘Well,’ said Quill, ‘there’s one piece for which we can do that immediately.’
They stood at the fence at the back of Gipsy Hill police station. Sefton could now see the mound of soil shining from here. ‘If we touched that,’ said Quill, ‘would it give us more of the Sight, or would it maybe switch it off?’
‘Neither,’ said Sefton, to himself. He looked up when he realized the others were wondering why he sounded so certain. ‘She left it there. It’s not precious any more, so it must be kind of . . . used up.’ Quill popped inside the fence to take a quick look. It took a few moments for it to dawn on Sefton that he wasn’t worried, standing here, that the uniforms might get a look at him. The possibility that any remnants of the Toshack organization might learn his identity was nowhere near as threatening as what he now knew lay under reality itself. ‘It’s better in the day,’ he said, ‘don’t you reckon?’
Costain glanced across to London. ‘Yeah, maybe.’
Quill returned to tell them that this mound of soil, when seen with the Sight, looked like a pale reflection of the pile they’d seen inside the house, before Quill had pissed on it. ‘And, yeah, I touched it, but no joy to be had.’
‘I don’t think it’s a symbol of anything,’ said Ross, ‘not like we thought. These things are invisible to most people. When that soil got pissed on, suspect wasn’t psychologically traumatized, but she got so worried she actually legged it! No, this is practical. A system we don’t know much about, but still a system. I think, for some reason, she needs the West Ham soil. She told us she needs to keep it clean, and I don’t think that’s a psychological tic on her part, either. I think she needs to bring it with her when she’s killing, to put it in that heap, in that pattern, otherwise she just wouldn’t do that.’
‘“I have more soil,” that’s what she said,’ recalled Costain, ‘as if it was valuable to her. As if it’s her stash. Maybe that’s why she’s got so many houses.’
‘Like with a heroin-distribution network,’ said Ross, ‘you don’t keep all the eggs in the same basket.’
‘We know Toshack tried to find her at her main home first, on his own. Then he went round all her other houses, her safe houses. He went up into every loft, maybe because he was checking to see if she’d left some soil there, which would mean she still used the place.’
‘While he was getting the rest of us to make as much noise as possible downstairs,’ said Sefton, suddenly sounding shocked again.
‘The fucker was using us as bait! He was trying to make her come out and grab us! We were to be his sacrifices, like he said in that note!’
‘He tried to do that again when the raid went down,’ said Quill, ‘calling her a sow and all.’
‘Why West Ham soil?’ said Ross. ‘Just ’cos she’s a fan?’
Nobody had an answer to that either. Quill called the nicks in all the areas where the other Losley houses were located. They’d already been sealed off by Goodfellow, but now he asked to hear from them about what had been found in their lofts.
‘Get them to piss on it, too,’ suggested Costain.
Quill declined that recommendation. He swiftly heard that largely empty tubs had been found in all the houses, with just a layer of local soil left at the bottom. ‘Right you are: she hauled in her stash.’
Quill felt the new energy of his team, and liked it. But now they needed to do something positive with it rapidly. They needed an aim to work towards, or all this new hope was going to fall apart again. They went back into the Portakabin. There had been a lot of emails forwarded to them concerning possible Losley sightings by members of the public but, given that she could make herself invisible, Quill had the team give them only a quick once-over, and they found nothing that caught their eyes. He got copies of the Goodfellow files emailed over, but he was deeply familiar with their contents, and there was nothing that leaped out at him now that he had this new way of seeing. ‘She said she met Toshack at the football . . .’ he reminded them.
Ross found on the PC the list of season-ticket holders in seats close to Losley that West Ham had sent over to Quill. ‘I was going to get to this today,’ she said. She ran her finger down the list of names. Then stopped at a particular one. The seat next to Losley’s was occupied by one Robert Toshack.
‘Get in,’ said Quill triumphantly.
He found the disc with the CCTV tape on it and played it again. That familiar corner of the building, and that flower bed. One moment there was nothing there, and then there was Losley, who’d literally appeared out of thin air. Quill again found himself startled, fearful even at the sight of a moving image of her. ‘It works through video as well as still photos,’ he said, with a cough to conceal his reaction. On screen, Losley took a small bag from her pocket, and poured the contents out on the ground, tracing a spiral with her hand, the other turning in the air. A pile of soil far too large to be contained in the bag was deposited there, arranged in the familiar pattern, shining with power.
‘Maybe it’s like wi-fi,’ said Ross, ‘she can only operate so far from a base station.’
‘Why do it out there?’ said Sefton. ‘Why not just arrive in the interview room itself?’
Quill clapped his hands together in realization. ‘Because she needs to put soil on soil! To put her earth on top of what was there before. Like with those containers in her houses.’
They watched as Losley walked directly towards Gipsy Hill police station and straight through the wall, moving her hands before her as if she was performing an intricate dance. ‘Those gestures, all the time,’ observed Sefton. ‘That’s not habit, that’s meaningful. That’s how she does what she does, using words and gestures as weapons.’
Quill liked how much he was speaking up now. And now he had a sudden idea himself. He called up the nick, then headed over there to pick up a much less controversial CCTV camera recording. He played that back in front of his team, and they all saw the next part of the action: Losley in the interview room, sending Toshack flying up to the roof; Quill looking on awkwardly, his expression and body language saying he was trying to look in all directions at once; the expression on the brief’s face also saying that he didn’t quite know what he was looking at.
‘It’s as if we scratched the lottery card of reality,’ he said, ‘and this is what was bloody underneath. Not a big win, really.’
‘The eighteen per cent!’ said Ross suddenly.
‘What?’ said Quill.
‘The eighteen per cent of the other cases, the hat-trick scorers over the years who we thought probably died of natural causes . . .’ Ross went to the computer and busied herself for half an hour, then gathered them round a display on the screen. ‘They’re almost all from teams outside London. So sometimes she’d get them when they came back to town, sometimes she’d forget or give up, sometimes they never came back at all. But she never followed them home!’
‘That means she’s got an operational range,’ said Sefton. ‘Soil in her pockets will only take her so far. Only London provides power. And she only has power inside London.’
‘Fuck,’ said Ross, ‘that’s why Toshack didn’t send her after me. I was up n
orth.’ She added a note to that effect to the board, under Losley’s name.
They mulled that over for a few moments.
‘I’ll see if she’s caught on camera anywhere else inside the nick,’ said Quill. ‘Though I don’t know if we’ll learn anything more from it. Meanwhile . . .’ he turned to the others and realized that, with two UCs and an analyst, he had no sensible way of picking who should do the legwork. ‘Toss a coin for who calls up West Ham again. See if they have a list of people who they sold their soil to. Then tell them to stop.’
They actually did the coin toss, and it turned out to be Costain whose job it was to cajole and intimidate the West Ham hierarchy. Quill listened to him doing it, impressed but also a bit freaked out. There was something in the man’s voice that sounded as if it was his first day on the job now, too eager to impress. He felt that Losley had already taken a piece out of one of his team by making Costain behave like that. The football club turned out only to have a mailing list of people who’d bought soil over the internet. Getting that sent over was no problem, and indeed it arrived by immediate email. But they were selling a lot of soil right now, because they were in the process of moving to their new home, and every fan wanted a piece of the old Boleyn Ground at Upton Park, and those in charge couldn’t see any reason why the police would want them to cease trading. All Costain could say was, ‘it’s an operational matter.’
When Quill waved to him to give the phone over to him and have a superior officer yell at them, Costain held up a hand and went into overdrive. ‘You know what you get when you Google “West Ham” now? Serial killer, serial killer, serial killer . . . oh, look, there’s also some news about your FA Cup run, there on the third page. Only saving grace is, you’re helping to catch this killer by cooperating so fully. Yeah, I will speak to your chairman, that’d be nice.’ When he eventually put down the phone, job done, Quill slapped him on the back.
Costain nodded solemnly. ‘Yeah,’ he said.
That afternoon, Quill led his small team into Gipsy Hill, causing a raised eyebrow from the station reception officer on shift when she saw Costain and Sefton. Everyone would now be gossiping, Quill knew, about the huge pay-off from what had originally looked like a weird and intimidating spin-off. And everyone would be wondering why they themselves hadn’t been considered good enough or straight enough to go after the real juice behind the Toshack organization. Seeing the four of them march in right now, including the UCs, half of the operational team would assume they were here to nick someone, and the other half that just showing them those two UCs was some sort of demonstration of trust.