London Falling

by Paul Cornell

  ‘No,’ he managed a smile, ‘depends who I’m with, yeah? I definitely stand straight among this lot. Not like the way police do, not like I’m in a club, just . . .’ He indicated his own stance, which just looked normal to her.

  ‘You’ve thought about this a lot.’

  ‘Done it more than thought about it.’ He inclined his head towards the crowd. ‘One o’clock.’

  It was a man who was trying to laugh along with his mates, but on his shoulders he carried a dead child, the boy’s legs beating against his chest with every step, his hands clasping his hair tightly at the scalp.

  ‘Fuck,’ whispered Ross. Just a moment of random chat, and then it had all come crashing back.

  They’d seen a few such things among the crowd, but not everything leaped out at them this way. The variety of things the Sight showed them included some quite subtle effects – stuff that your eye could miss. Or maybe they were just starting to process it as they would through normal vision. As a test, they’d popped into the club shop and asked to buy some soil. It wasn’t on sale now, they’d been told, because of health and safety. ‘True, that,’ Sefton had remarked. But they’d glimpsed a few sacks of it behind the counter, and it didn’t seem to have any power associated with it.

  ‘If it did have power in itself,’ Ross had then said, ‘this stadium would be like a giant searchlight. It has to be something specific about the soil and her.’

  Costain had meanwhile been patrolling the concrete caverns of the stadium, and now he headed up the steps to the Bobby Moore Stand. He looked out over the enormous crowd that had now filled the stadium, just as the tannoy announced that the minute’s silence for Losley’s victims was about to begin. The huge sound of so many people swiftly quietened, became an almost unnatural emptiness of distant coughs and shuffles. People looked at the ground or closed their eyes, appearing pious to show they could be, not knowing – because nobody knew – who those child victims had been. There was something defiant in the completeness of it. This lot were determined that Losley wasn’t part of them. It wasn’t that he could feel that same emotion inside them as individuals, not quite. He could almost . . . see it. But it didn’t feel great. It felt like a vacuum, a need to feel. The whistle blew for the end of the silence, and a vast roar rose all around him, another empty assertion of togetherness.

  Costain had grown up as an Arsenal fan, and his dad had often expressed a hatred of West Ham. These days he could just about name the squad, and he watched it on TV if it was on, but he’d still been kind of dreading this moment. The crowd all started to sing, all at the same moment, as the club song came on the tannoy: I’m forever blowing bubbles . . . They had one attitude, one purpose. They were one thing. And Costain, standing among them, felt his undercover hackles rise as never before. Here he was, an away fan, secretly one of the great enemy, possessed of the Sight. It was like being in the mouth of some giant animal. He could feel the vast potential hatred for yet another facet of what he was, though it was deeply buried inside him. It hit him like thousands of tiny blows, beating against his skin. He was the enemy: the other. Well, it was what he was used to. He now did what he always did. He took a deep breath and joined in with the song.

  The Sight didn’t like that. He could feel something huge and unknown, something beyond what these thousands of small people knew, reacting to it. Or maybe that was just the feeling of gears slipping inside his head, as he pushed against the tide.

  The song came to an end, and there was an enormous, explosive cheer. Costain walked to the end of a row, to look over to where Losley’s season-ticket seat had previously been. They’d taken it out, and every seat beside it or behind it, including Toshack’s and all those to the distance of one seat away. As if even where she’d sat was infectious. Now a steward stood to one side of the gap, in case anyone . . . well, who could guess? He wondered how pleased those other seven season-ticket holders had felt to be relocated. The authorities must have made a decision as to how far to take that dislocation. It suggested a sort of rough instinct about the kind of thing the Sight revealed, that everyone had an inner knowledge about evil that didn’t reflect science at all. Nobody in that meeting of directors would have said ‘Leave it, it can’t do any harm, it’s just a seat’. That viewpoint could only reassert itself a few seats further out. They knew, but also they didn’t.

  There was a well-dressed, powerfully built man walking purposefully along the same row of seats. He was keeping his head down, therefore Costain couldn’t see his face. He was walking in a way that was out of the ordinary, something coppers always noticed, but it took Costain a moment to work out what exactly was odd. He didn’t seem to be having to edge around people’s feet, or get them to lift up their plastic beer glasses out of his way. He was heading for the little square emptied of seats, and nobody seemed to be paying him particular attention. And surely they would be. Maybe they knew him, as a director or something. But, no, then they’d be shaking his hand. But there was nothing of the Sight about him. It was as if he was . . . beyond all that. Costain started to get a terrible feeling about the body language of this figure. He didn’t want to see that concealed face. Sod that. He himself started to move along the row, towards the group of missing seats, but in his case that meant doing all that awkward stepping and looking down that the other figure had somehow avoided.

  He took a glance up. The figure was now standing in the middle of the empty square where those seats had been, looking away from him, into the main body of the stadium, seeming pleased with himself. The steward clearly wasn’t seeing him. The crowd wasn’t berating or applauding him, so they weren’t seeing him either. Costain increased his own pace, determined to get his hands on him.

  And then the man turned and looked straight at him. And he smiled an enormous smile. It was a smile of recognition.

  Costain collapsed. He fell among the feet of fans who started bellowing at him. He felt as if the entire stadium was suddenly tilting on its side. He had a vision of it rolling downhill. The sky was spinning overhead. Costain couldn’t allow this. This fucker was goading him now, challenging him. Just because of where I saw him last, he thinks I’m his bitch, to knock over with a bloody smile? Fuck gravity! He launched himself forward, hauling himself from seat to seat, having to push his way past every intervening foot, making the people he was getting past yell at him, the force of the crowd around him turning against him in an outraged roar as they saw where he was heading. And, all the while, that bugger kept smiling at him, and the force of that smile was like a gale in itself.

  Costain finally burst out at the end of the row. He was about to yell at the man, and land a hand on his collar.

  Only suddenly he wasn’t there.

  He collapsed again, this time inside the empty area. He was dragged to his feet by the steward, who was yelling something at him. And the crowd all around were yelling too, booing and starting to throw things, coins and wrappers, now he’d ventured in to the place of taboo. Costain grabbed his warrant card and brandished it at the steward, who backed off, his hands in the air. He felt like turning in a circle, holding it up to all of them. See? See? I’m actually one of the good guys! The catcalls and yells subsided, but only a little.

  Quill eventually found him leaning against a concrete wall, somewhere in the depths of the building. The match had started, and Costain could hear and feel it ebbing and flowing above them, the sound and sensation resonating through the stone. Costain reported his encounter in the correct manner, like a good copper, but he couldn’t help mentioning the thought that had slammed into him through that gale of public opinion caused just by an invisible smile. ‘Listen, what if what we’ve discovered . . . what if this is the reason everything’s so shit?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This evil shit that nobody knows about, this is real reality, isn’t it? We do our best, we give to charity, we put in our shifts, we fucking recycle. But all the time this is what the world’s about. That bastard was in charge of that
stadium, and his . . . gang – Losley and people like her – are the ones with the power to run reality, the way drug gangs run countries. Maybe they’re the reason why the banks got fucked up, and politics is corrupt, and there’s war all the time, and frigging global warming, and every year a new epidemic. If the boss then decides really to put the screws on, in a few years’ time everyone is just going to be fighting each other over the last few fucking scraps left!’

  Quill held up a hand to stop him. ‘I have thought about this,’ he said. ‘And I think that if it’s all true, which it won’t be, ’cos everything’s got a bit of front to it, then it’s a good thing.’

  Costain stared at him.

  ‘If this is why the world is shit, then . . . don’t you get it? We’ve been given the greatest opportunity any coppers have ever had. We’ve seen the cause of all human evil. And we can nick him.’

  ‘You’re saying, we could nick—?’

  ‘Best not name him. It might be like in Harry Potter. No, I reckon that’s why he showed up now. We met his enforcer, but we didn’t run away and hide. He’s wondering if he’s got a game on.’

  Costain couldn’t help it: he started to laugh. ‘Bloody hell, Jimmy—’

  ‘It’s a way to go, anyway, right? Thinking that? Trying that? Tell me that’s not a way to go.’

  They both jumped at the sudden noise erupting above them. The slam of a thousand boots, and a horrified pulse of group emotion that had stabbed straight downwards towards them. And then they heard and felt the rumble that came afterwards: the yell of anger, the collective fire of being hurt. Costain closed his eyes, now the moment of release was over. ‘One–nil to Stoke,’ he said.

  Ross was on the other side of the stadium, with Sefton, watching the crowd and not the match. They’d quartered up the audience, and through binoculars studied every occupant of every seat. But while there’d been a few things noticeable from the world of the Sight, none of them was Losley. They turned as the goal went in. The celebrations among the away fans were muted, and Ross watched as the player, Linus McGuire, ran quickly back to the centre spot, keeping his head down. The display on the big screen showed laughter from his team mates, however. Careful you don’t get two more, mate!

  She realized that she hadn’t just intuited that emotion, but she’d felt it from the crowd. She glanced over to Sefton, who nodded. ‘I can feel this kind of . . . raw group desire,’ he said. ‘We’ve got senses other people don’t have, now. I think this is how Losley knew . . . about my private life. I don’t think she actually read my mind, or any shit like that. One of those gestures she made kind of read my barcode. Excellent gaydar. We’ve just had the first hints for ourselves of what it must be like to see things as she does, like big crowd emotions we’d probably get anyway, or how we could have gone up to that guy and already known he was a grieving dad. God, I’m just talking and talking—’

  ‘You’re doing analysis, is what you’re doing. We should work out how she does it. Or maybe you have to be . . . I don’t know, special like her.’

  ‘No,’ Sefton shook his head; this was really important to him, ‘it’s the opposite of special. Losley’s not the queen of the entire world, is she? She’s hiding herself in . . . well, okay, several . . . council houses. When I felt this power up close in the street, when I felt it inside that Jack thing, it was sort of . . . angry, dispossessed. It didn’t feel that it was in charge. It felt like what you might be left with if you had nothing else in the world, and if you were desperate enough to turn to it. I think I can just start to see how you could approach the idea of using it, and feel how you might if you weren’t . . . overwhelmed by it. But I think I would still be overwhelmed by it every time one of those sodding monsters or some shit—’

  Ross both felt and heard the noise rise from the field and crash through the crowd around them. She and Sefton turned at the same moment . . . and on the big screen saw Linus McGuire again trotting back to the centre spot, his team mates rushing around him. He looked actually burdened now, the laugh he was sharing with them was awkward.

  The crowd felt complicated. It hated feeling complicated.

  ‘Take him off,’ muttered Sefton. ‘You’re two–nil up at fucking West Ham, so sub him!’

  ‘That’d be visibly giving in to threats,’ said Ross. ‘It’s okay. He won’t try to score again.’ But she knew she was just telling herself that.

  They became aware of the chants rising around them. West Ham songs, but also tunes that referred to the current situation – creating waves of horrified, relieved, cathartic laughter. ‘We’ll see you on Crimewatch, we will . . .’ To the tune of ‘Que Sera Sera’. Ross saw Sefton start to laugh at that, and then he put a hand to his mouth, altogether too tense to let it out.

  ‘Anything from the uniforms?’ That was Quill arriving, with Costain beside him.

  ‘No sightings so far,’ said Sefton, looking up from his Airwave radio.

  ‘If she is here,’ said Ross, ‘she’s either invisible, or looking different from how the fans normally see her.’

  ‘At least we’ve forced her to change her habits even that much,’ said Costain.

  Ross was struck by a sudden thought. ‘I wonder if she can actually still hide from us now? You know, can she shift up another level, past what the Sight can see?’

  ‘I’ve, erm, been thinking about that,’ said Sefton.

  They all looked to him, and he seemed again to regret having spoken up. To him, it was as if there was something shameful about the nature of the speciality he was developing. After all, he’d been the one to say it was the language of the dispossessed, and Ross wondered now how much he included himself in that group. ‘These are all just assumptions, but we said we were doing assumptions, so . . . I don’t think she’ll have done that. Not yet. This is rough stuff, big-button stuff, either one thing or the other. We’ve got the Sight, so we can . . . see. It feels as if, to take it up a level, she’d need to counteract that with something else, something bigger, and that would be going out of her way, which she doesn’t want to, you know . . .’ He looked between them, suddenly seeming to realize that they didn’t know, really. ‘Like I said, just assumptions.’

  ‘I don’t know if she is in here somewhere,’ said Quill. ‘But someone else has made their presence felt.’ Costain then described his encounter.

  Ross got out her laptop, awkwardly held it up with one hand, and ran the PRO-FIT facial description software. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘let’s be having him for the Ops Board.’ And she quickly selected facial composite items as Costain described the man to her. They’d just about finished when a vast, terrible, scared sound burst from the crowd.

  They slowly turned. On the pitch, Stoke players were again milling around Linus McGuire, celebrating – but celebrating at the crowd, defiant almost, as if violence was going to come and strike down their mate any moment now. McGuire himself stopped moving. He held the others back.

  ‘Don’t,’ Quill whispered. ‘Don’t provoke her.’

  The footballer kissed the badge on his shirt, then raised three fingers. The subdued West Ham supporters’ reaction turned instantly to jeers.

  On the big screen above them the replay was running. McGuire was in a scramble on the goal line, a lot of feet and heads sticking out among a lot of defenders, as the ball curved down towards them. Anyone could score. And indeed it was hard to see how McGuire could have, while staying out of it at the back of that mass of bodies. But then the picture flickered, and Ross realized that it was changing just for their benefit, as McGuire was shunted forwards a few feet from where he’d been, his body being flung at the ball like a projectile. His head caught it precisely, and sent it into the top corner. He looked astonished as he landed again, the force that had propelled him sending him skidding along the ground.

  Ross felt something looking at them and knew the others were feeling it too. Something enormous was saying hello. Her hand reflexively went to the knife in her pocket.

  Amon
g all the swaying, yelling, chanting thousands, there he stood, the man Costain had described, just below the screen as it reverted to being a normal scoreboard. He was smiling broadly.

  ‘She isn’t here. She was never going to be here,’ declared Costain. ‘This isn’t our trap. It’s his.’

  The look on Quill’s face was terrible to see.

  Sefton’s Airwave radio hissed with urgent communication from the uniforms. Ross let go of her knife and looked away quickly from that horrifying face, back to her laptop, determined to fix all its details in her memory so they could have him.

  She saw that the composite face on the screen was now smiling too.

  When she looked up again, the man was gone.

  And then all hell broke loose.

  FOURTEEN

  The crowd rose from their seats amid a vast, jeering roar, Irons fans surging towards the lines of the Stoke fans, as if it was their fault that McGuire had scored. He was immediately substituted, and ran for the tunnel to the away changing rooms as abuse and objects were hurled at him. The uniforms and stewards rushed forward, to get between them, and just about managed to keep them apart. The fans fell back like an ebb tide, bellowing at each other across the lines.

  ‘Come on,’ Quill shouted, and led his team running for the steps.

  Quill burst in through the door of the away changing room, a bunch of uniforms with him and his team, having shoved their way past all the idiots that tried to get in the way. The enormous noise of the jeering echoed all around them. It didn’t seem to be just one opinion of what had happened, but many, all interfering with each other like waves crashing around the stadium. Physios and assistants and players came towards them, all yelling in different languages. ‘Change of bloody plan!’ Quill yelled. ‘Get your trousers on, Linus. You’re going on a long journey.’

  And there he was, the player himself, with a grim look on his face, already buttoning his shiny suit. ‘I don’t know . . . Nobody’s said . . .’