London Falling

by Paul Cornell

  Plus, of course, Quill’s lot hadn’t slept and they all looked like tramps.

  Nods and smiles of appreciation greeted Quill when he entered the Ops Room, but he could feel the dutiful nature of it, the fear and irony at the edge of it. Goodfellow was busy to overflowing with paperwork and personnel, but it was all post-raid stuff eclipsed now by his serial killer. Quill felt glad to be back in his real world. Except here came Harry, with his dad beside him. Quill looked over his shoulder and saw the other three checking out this new vision. Well, at least nobody else in the nick seemed to be carting dead relatives around with them.

  Harry held out his wrists. ‘It’s a fair cop, Jimmy.’

  ‘Don’t kow-tow to him,’ said his dad. ‘You little shit, you’re worth ten of him.’

  Quill wished desperately that he could talk to Harry alone. That they could go for a pint again, be proper mates again. ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘come on now—’

  ‘What,’ said Harry, suddenly serious, ‘you’re not really here for me, are you?’

  ‘Don’t be fucking scared of him! What sort of a friend is he, to lord it over you?! He’s just a pretend copper, an actor playing a part!’

  Quill clapped his hands together to get the room’s attention. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you lot, listen. I came over from my Siberian exile to say that Operation Toto has found conclusive proof of what I always suspected: there isn’t and never has been a security leak in Operation Goodfellow. More than that I can’t tell you, only that . . . I never bloody believed it, okay? I never sat there looking down at you lot, thinking any single one of you, Harry here included, were anything but the best bloody coppers in the world, all right? And to be put at this distance from you like that . . .’ He found he had a catch in his throat, and let it stop him. To his amazement, Harry came over and put a hand on his shoulder, which made his dad scowl. And the applause slowly started up again from the whole room. Only this time it was genuine.

  Quill raised a hand in acknowledgement, then clapped an arm around Harry’s shoulder, and hauled him away from his dad. ‘And, erm, also we popped over ’cos we’re after the keys to the evidence room. And any chance of a cup of sugar?’ Behind him, he saw Sefton putting his hand right through Harry’s dad, and getting a glare in return.

  ‘Jimmy, mate,’ said Harry, ‘I’ll open it up for you myself.’ Quill followed him through the door, looking over his shoulder to where the other three were all backing out of the room quickly, embarrassed by and not used to dealing with the appreciation of their comrades. He was glad they’d got to see that, though.

  Ross had hoped that the door of the evidence room would be heaved open to reveal a glittering mass of objects: like the contents of that locked study in the Toshack house that she’d had such expectations of, but that had contained no juice at all when the UCs had searched it. She’d hoped that this look back into Goodfellow would be more fruitful than Quill’s examination of the operation’s files. But at first glance that was not to be. The shelves contained rows of tagged evidence, and a pile of Toshack’s favourite cardboard boxes at the back, but nothing at all leaped out. Their Sight counted for nothing here. She’d delivered some brave words about Losley, but it was now slowly sinking in that her revenge was still going to count for nothing. More than that, something worse had taken Toshack’s place, and she hadn’t prepared herself for it, hadn’t focused herself in the right way. The death of her father was now sidelined. It felt horribly selfish to make the pursuit of Losley all about her own teenage injuries. But what else could give her the stimulus she needed to get through this?

  ‘So we look through it all again,’ announced Quill. ‘We untag, process, seal and record.’

  ‘I’ll give you a hand if you like,’ said Harry. ‘Be good for me to catch up.’

  So they worked their way through all the stuff.

  ‘Why,’ said Sefton, ‘did this bloke keep eighty-three stationery boxes with nothing in them?’ He glanced over to where Harry was busy opening boxes, Quill being forced to look over his shoulder continually, because Harry wouldn’t be able to see what they were looking for. Harry’s dad kept berating him, both of them getting increasingly worked up.

  ‘There was nothing like this when my dad was in charge of the gang,’ remarked Ross. She was starting to feel the effects of fatigue, seeing things out of the corner of her eye which scared her awake again, but which weren’t real, just memories, the symptoms of sleep trying to force its way into her.

  ‘He kept his local branch of Staples busy,’ said Sefton. ‘That’d be good for his epitaph.’

  ‘Though it does fail,’ observed Ross, ‘to tell the whole story.’

  ‘Listen to you, with the copper jokes.’

  ‘Why is he looking over your shoulder?’ Harry’s father prodded. ‘Look at him, he’d much rather have just his new friends here. He doesn’t trust you. You’re not quite the thing, are you? Not any more.’

  ‘You may have wondered why I’m looking over your shoulder,’ said Quill to Harry. ‘It’s ’cos I’m looking for a particular piece of evidence, and you wouldn’t recognize what you were looking at.’

  ‘What is it, exactly?’

  ‘Can’t tell you. Due to the usual operational bollocks. But – tell you what – you find anything unusual,’ he looked meaningfully towards Harry’s dad, ‘and it’ll be pay dirt. Then I’ll use it to try and get you recruited for Toto. And how often do you get to use that sentence?’

  Harry nodded appreciatively, and took another box down from the shelf.

  Quill waited for a moment to see if Harry’s dad was going to react to anything, then, when he didn’t, wandered over to the others, glancing back to see the ghost looking at him angrily. ‘He’s a bit one-note,’ he remarked quietly. ‘I was hoping, ’cos he was his dad, he’d want to help Harry a bit and so he’d whizz about like a genie and find what we’re looking for. But he’s all about delivering the abuse.’ He sighed. ‘I can be a bit of a bastard, you may have noticed.’

  Quill felt the energy draining from his team as it became clear they weren’t going to find anything new. He said a fond goodbye to Harry, glowered at his dad, and forced on himself another burst of enthusiasm. He drove them out to the Toshack house, so they could keep talking in the car, and, apart from a couple of near misses, found that nothing of the Sight jumped out to stop him from driving safely. Maybe, he said, the wonders were still concealed in the place itself. But the house, emptied for purposes of evidence, was completely normal. Even that regularly locked office the UCs had had such high hopes of turned out to be utterly mundane. As night came on, they returned to the Hill and the Portakabin, and managed, slumped together, to watch CCTV footage from the nick that merely showed Losley, as expected, impossibly approaching and walking through the wall of the interview room. All that they’d recently added to the board was a list of notes in the Concepts section, beneath a new heading about ‘Soil’.

  ‘I think we’ve worked off a bit of that original shock,’ said Quill, ‘so you’ll be ready for what comes next.’ They all looked up at him at once, those defeated faces again expectant. ‘We know where she’s going to be. She might have only one bolt-hole left to run to. And we know she’s got a limited fuel supply. She’s a big monster, but so’s the Met. Normal police methods have got us a long way, so let’s use them to see how much of her is merely front. Go home and get some kip, because tomorrow we’re going to nick her.’

  ‘You look terrible,’ said Lofthouse. ‘Will a drop of gin help with that?’

  Quill waved that suggestion aside, settling heavily into the comfort of the chair facing her desk. ‘It’s only ten o’clock at night, so a bit early for me.’ He noticed that she wasn’t wearing her charm bracelet, and then felt a little uncomfortable about noticing it.

  ‘Bit of a blip in the media coverage last night. They went away again through lack of fresh material, thank God. What’s this about a broken window and a hoo-hah at the crime scene?’

&nbs
p; Quill didn’t want to lie to her. ‘Just . . . one of those things,’ he replied.

  ‘Have you got everything you need for tomorrow?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so. Ta for getting that sorted so fast.’

  ‘A lot of it involved persuading Brian Finch, the Stoke City chairman, that his players might have anything to fear from a mad old woman – even one who poisons people.’

  Quill suddenly thought of something. Did the bemusement they’d all felt at the super putting this incredibly weird team together mean she knew something extra about this situation he’d found himself in? ‘Does . . . the word “protocol” mean anything to you, ma’am?’

  ‘Are you saying that operational protocol is getting in the way of—?’

  Quill shook his head, dismissing it. ‘Thanks for all you’ve done, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope it pays off tomorrow.’

  THIRTEEN

  Quill drove himself home to his semi in Enfield. A journey which seemed to take a day. He had to keep the radio turned way up to keep himself awake. Every now and then, outside the car, some weird sight shouted into his eyeballs. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he responded.

  The lounge floor was covered in bizarre novelties. The kitchen floor was messy and the house smelt of . . . must be some problem with the plumbing. But the Sight told him nothing disturbing about any of the rooms he looked in, thank God. Outside, his street had looked normal too. He heard music from upstairs, so Sarah was home.

  He looked round the door of her office, trying to project sobriety before he remembered that he was actually sober. She didn’t look up from her computer, therefore he knew she was angry with him. He watched the back of her head, the defensive hunch of her shoulders. He’d been thinking about this all the way home. He wanted to tell her everything, but she just wouldn’t believe him. They weren’t . . . close enough, he felt, for him to tell her something impossible and for her just to accept it. Maybe they had been close enough once. The more he’d thought about it, the more he’d found there was now this . . . hole in the middle of their relationship. It was as if it had taken him witnessing the impossible to make him realize that. But he had no idea what the vacuum between them was, or how to start fixing it. Sorting stuff like that out was something he wasn’t naturally equipped for. He and Sarah had always just got on with it, and neither of them liked the deep and meaningful. Which was awkward now that life had got deep and meaningful.

  ‘Love,’ he began, ‘listen, I’ve been thinking about us moving out of the city, Reading or somewhere, me commuting in—’

  ‘Have you?’ She was thinking that his suggestion was way beside the point.

  ‘Yeah, look, I’ve been trying to call you. That was me in the middle of the night—’

  She looked round at him. ‘Yeah, I guessed that because it was your number on the phone. Me being a brilliant detective.’

  ‘You’ve seen the case we’re working, how big it is—’

  ‘And it’s just you, is it? There aren’t other shifts who could take over from you?’ She had worked up to full-on anger now. And she was so beautiful. And he wanted to cry. They’d always fought a lot. And, until very recently, he’d thought that was good somehow. Again, he didn’t know why that had changed, and it felt like the reason had fallen down the hole.

  They continued the row into the early hours. It exhausted them. They were silent for a while, but the row erupted again in fits and starts, and then died. They made a really late supper together. She tried to tell him about how the delivery firm for the local paper she worked for had started to throw bundles of copies away rather than bothering to distribute them. How that made her wonder why she herself was bothering. Her newspaper, she said, like everything else, was going the way of the dinosaur, but it didn’t mean they should just run away out of London. ‘We’ve got a life here, haven’t we, Quill?’ Quill couldn’t answer.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said to her in bed, near dawn, when he woke from a terrible nightmare and realized that loads of it had been true. But he said it so quietly that he almost wondered if he was talking to himself.

  In the anonymous safe house that had become his home, Costain lay awake listening to the traffic outside. He’d fallen asleep, but woken and dozed again in fits and starts. He didn’t want to sleep, because sleep felt like death. He kept thinking back to that house, and what he’d seen beneath him. That man, just a man in a suit, smiling up at him. But what was fixed in his mind was different to what the others had described. It was something particular. Something personal.

  He could try to do the right thing as much as he could – the right thing as others described it – and it lost him his freedom, it cut his bloody balls off, but okay. What he couldn’t do was make up for the endgame he’d prepared as insurance, his escape route from both the Met and the Toshack mob. It was too risky to go and unearth it right now and, even if he did, just having arranged it counted as a strike against him. Only, every day he kept it would weigh more and more heavily at . . . at the moment of his death, he guessed. The others had seen speculation. They were being fed to a void. He’d seen a prediction: something already prepared for him.

  At 4 a.m. he got up and shaved, then he drove out to Gipsy Hill, looking calmly at the horrors of the night that appeared to him. They were nothing now, compared to what was in his head.

  Quill stood in the director’s lounge at the Boleyn Ground, Upton Park, looking at the assembled directors and chairpersons and hangers-on, including Brian Finch from visiting Stoke City, and Peter Brockway, chairman of West Ham itself. From a great window behind them, he heard and now felt the gathering force of a Premiership football crowd assembling. On the table lay the morning papers. The headline of the Metro read: Mora: Score a Hat-Trick and Die. ‘They’re already on first-name terms,’ he observed, picking it up. ‘I know what you’re thinking: why couldn’t she be like most Londoners and support Man U?’

  ‘So, let me get this straight,’ said Brockway. ‘She kills criminals, coppers, kids and footballers who score hat-tricks. She uses poison . . . or a bloody cauldron. Is there anything you’ve ruled out?’

  Quill thought for a moment. ‘Not a lot,’ he said. ‘But we do know her behaviour pattern indicates she’ll very much want to be here. And we think she might try to access the pitch. Which is why we’ve had uniforms watching it since the early hours, and why we’ve now cancelled all leave and got more bodies in the ground than in Highgate Cemetery.’

  Brockway didn’t look particularly satisfied. ‘May I remind you, we had to ask you to bring in sniffer dogs. I should think she won’t get further than the turnstile. Still, me and Brian have come to a gentleman’s agreement.’

  ‘I’ve told my players that if any of them puts two in, they’re to hang back and not go for a third. That’s all you’re getting. It’s against the FA code of practice, as it is. And it’s giving in to terrorism.’

  Quill managed a smile. He took the bottle of water from his pocket, drained it in one swallow, and handed it to a PA for a refill. ‘Got any more of that coffee?’

  ‘You’ll be going all through the match,’ remarked Finch.

  ‘I hope,’ said Quill, ‘I won’t have to.’

  Ross, with Sefton beside her, watched the hordes pouring in through the home supporters’ entrance, just inside the tower-like gates on Green Street. They stood with their backs to a wire fence, watching the warm bodies pass them, in their claret and blue. ‘Dad was always Arsenal,’ she said, feeling the need to say something. It was hard not to push herself back into the fence. The sheer . . . weight that this mass of people brought with them, now that she was seeing them with the Sight . . . it was sort of like an expectation, a shape that demanded a response from you. It felt terrible, like the raging of a mob, the sort of thing that could push you towards the kind of cynicism that coppers felt about the general public all the time. But when you looked at any of these individual faces, they were just people looking all the different ways people looked. There were also unifor
ms everywhere, a density of them she’d never seen before.

  The plan was to defend the pitch if there wasn’t a hat-trick, to grab Losley if she tried to get more soil, to take her down by sheer numbers. If she was invisible when she did that, there would be one of them watching the match at all times, and they’d send in the army of uniforms at any sign of pitch disturbance, and the stewards had also been told to pile in. If there somehow was a hat-trick, and thank God that was very unlikely now, that defensive pattern would be altered to form an army around a much smaller target. The four of them with the Sight would be watching every aspect of the audience in the stadium, hoping to pick out Losley.

  Ross felt pleased at the size of the organization. It was a warm feeling of being in the Met mainstream. At the end of all this, though – and it felt like a risk to even hope there was an end in sight – she was still going to have to deal with having been denied her revenge. But she had at least found a new depth to the world. And she would have helped rid it of something terrible.

  ‘Well, duh,’ said Sefton, ‘I’m surprised your uncle got away with being an Irons fan in Bermondsey. I kept wanting to say something about how odd that was, when I was acting as one of his lads, but, you know . . . guns.’

  ‘Listen to you,’ she said, ‘sounding more camp.’ Then she remembered she didn’t know him at all well enough to say stuff like that. ‘Sorry.’