London Falling

by Paul Cornell

  ‘That’s what we’re here for. Let’s be having you.’ Quill grabbed hold of the man and hauled him to the door, just as Finch, the Stoke City chairman, arrived to get in the way.

  ‘Now, hold on. We offered you our complete cooperation but—’

  ‘Brilliant. Try to keep up.’ And they were off and out of there.

  Quill spoke quickly into his Airwave radio, as Finch tried to argue in his ear, Costain having to actually grab the star player away from the trailing mass of people who followed them. He could hear Ross behind him, keeping Lofthouse in the loop on her mobile. With the uniforms kept so busy on crowd control, the original plan was shot, and there was no chance of keeping McGuire safe on the team coach. Their only chance now was speed and surprise.

  They came out into the fading light at the players’ entrance to the stadium, just as two cars pulled up. They were CID unmarked cars, driven by DCs from the local main office who’d been handy when Quill had started yelling. They’d have to do. Outside the gates, Quill could see the media forming up on the pavements. He found a CID officer, threw a towel over his head, and got the uniforms to form a cordon as the man was bundled over to the first car and shoved in the back. ‘Fast as you can, go visit lovely Swindon,’ he told the driver, then thumped the roof and stepped back. The car headed off out through the enormous gates, the media moving in but then giving way in the face of a blaring of the horn. Costain meanwhile held McGuire back in the tunnel, out of sight.

  ‘She might buy it,’ said Ross, ‘if she keeps herself separate from the world, hiding away in that room of hers.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  Finch was looking increasingly worried at seeing all these precautions. A growing phalanx of people was gathering around McGuire, looking as if they might lure him away at any moment – agents, trainers, who knew what. ‘Detective Inspector,’ the chairman began, ‘come on, surely there’s no need for—’

  ‘Shut it,’ said Quill. He pointed at McGuire and gestured for him to come over. ‘This isn’t down to any of that lot. This is just down to you. You want to do all you can to help us catch a child killer?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ He meant it too. He had a serious look about him, this boy.

  ‘Then come with me.’ Quill had the uniforms hold everyone else back, as his group led the footballer away from further protests.

  They pulled the car into line with a couple of police vans from the regular match turn-out, and walked McGuire out to it, wearing a police uniform, the cap pulled well down over his head. Quill looked at the alert young face of the driver, and realized just how much danger he was going to ask him to walk into, without this officer having been adequately briefed. Or maybe he just felt a need to do this himself, to show that smiling bastard – that even if they’d had their roles reversed, even if the operation was falling apart, even if the tiny hope he’d provided his team with was going to be dashed – someone was still willing to take him on. He felt his hands shaking, and grabbed hold of the door to hide that. ‘Out you get, son, I’ll take it from here.’

  Ross stepped forward as he was exchanging places with the officer. ‘This isn’t a good idea. What if she’s after you?’

  ‘Then she gets me.’ He slammed the door behind him, and nodded to Costain. ‘And then you’re in charge.’ Then he turned the car in six cramped points, and drove out of those gates in company with the two vans, past a media crush that didn’t register his passing. As soon as the traffic opened up, motivated by the fear of a witch on his tail, and with the confidence that the traffic cops would let him pass, Quill floored the accelerator.

  He took the car up onto the North Circular, where he made a nuisance of himself in the winter dark, weaving in and out of the match-day traffic, yelling abuse and hitting the horn, his lights on full beam. A lot of it was bravado; a lot of it was him knowing they had nothing to feel sure of. She could either see him or she couldn’t, and only speed was on his side. Or maybe she didn’t have enough of whatever this power was to do it this time. Maybe her boss had set her a challenge too? Just get this bloke out of range of Losley’s power, to the point where if she came to visit him up north, it’d just be a little old lady arriving on his doorstep, without her soil all glowing with energy, and they’d have broken her, immediately showing her that she was not going to get to do what she’d always done. Then they would have won. He would have won. A victory over her, over this strange nothingness that seemed to have leaped out of the corners of his depression and exploded a hole in the middle of his life. Winning this now would make his team feel they could win the entire war, realizing that this was a war, not a nightmare, which would finally engulf them. That was the battle going on in his head, too, every moment since he’d acquired the Sight.

  ‘You’re taking this really seriously,’ said McGuire.

  Quill liked his concern. ‘There is,’ he said, ‘a lot we can’t reveal.’

  ‘But you’re on top of it, right? You’re going to get her?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Quill said it determinedly, as if she herself could hear. For all he knew, she could, though he hoped not. ‘Meanwhile, I’m taking you up the M1. Once we get north of Watford, the local uniforms can get you back home to Stoke.’

  ‘Can I call my girlfriend?’

  ‘When we get there.’ Because who knew whether Losley could listen in to phone calls? In fact, who knew anything?

  As he passed Brent Cross, all lit up on his right, Quill started to really deeply hope. He was in a modern city, his city, in a modern car and, once he just got past this interchange and hit the motorway, he would be up and out and past the M25 in fifteen minutes. And the M25 bloody well should be as far as Losley could use the power of London. His Airwave radio told him the decoy car was already past the M25, going west. He hadn’t lost any lives tonight, either. He glanced at McGuire in the mirror. He was young enough, just about, to be Quill’s own lad. He felt the ache of something missing there. Not that he had a kid, and why not? It suddenly felt terrible that he and Sarah had never gone for it. Between them, they’d have had a wonderful kid—

  He realized that McGuire was suddenly staring ahead. ‘What’s that?!’

  Quill looked back to the road. Something was shining in the dual carriageway in front of them. And, coming right at them faster than any car, right in his headlights, there was a figure—

  He threw the car sideways. Too late.

  She rushed through the front of the car. She didn’t break the vehicle as she passed through it. She was going fast and slow at the same time. She trailed lattices of gold and silver that struck sparks off the metal as she passed through it. She brought the stinking beauty of the executioner’s sword. Her hands danced in an intricate pattern. Quill had time to see her fingers pulling at the air, spinning more gold from it. Old books invaded his car, turning it inside out. She turned to look at him, as she moved past at eighty miles per hour, her head cocked to one side again.

  ‘Do you know how I do this?’ she said.

  Quill didn’t answer. He was trying hard to move, desperately to put himself between her and the boy. But he was caught in a different sort of time, a slower sort. He was impotent. He was deeply, deeply a fool. His pride had now brought him and an innocent to slaughter. He was almost, horribly so, pleased for himself. To get to the end. He was anticipating the car crash that was about to happen to him, that was already happening to his body.

  ‘I make sacrifice to my lord of the pleasant face, that is how things work. Three more children went in the pot so I could do this. If you keep attempting to limit me, I will have to make more sacrifices. And therefore many children will die because of you. My lord of the pleasant face told me how this would be tonight. He appeared to me – in so rare a visit. He told me not to return to the football matches.’

  Quill tried to say something. He wanted to yell at McGuire to get himself out of it.

  But then time was gone again in a flash and McGuire’s body was hitting the roof of the car and hot da
rkness had burst up from the ground and a scream fell away into the depths. The boy exploded with blood. The liquid splattered onto the window, passing Quill. He had lost control dreamlike ages ago. And he wondered, at the last moment, why he hadn’t been taken too.

  Losley vanished through the back of the car, her laugh staying as an echo that fluttered as the metal burst open around it.

  The car spun back into complete time, hit the pile of soil that stood in the road, slewed across it, and ploughed into the crash barrier.

  Costain got out of the marked car in which he’d been a passenger, Sefton and Ross walking quickly beside him. They showed their warrant cards and were allowed through the cordon. The dual carriageway had been shut down on the northbound side, and cars were backing up on the southbound, to get a look. It had started to sleet, the drops of ice in the air reflecting the bright lights. Ahead of them a spent pile of Losley’s soil shone dully.

  ‘He won’t move from there, sir,’ said a uniform. ‘He could . . . I mean he’s . . . not hurt, somehow.’

  Forensics were already swarming around the car, with an ambulance standing uselessly nearby. The crashed vehicle had compacted, and the remains of McGuire were being picked out of a back-seat deceleration area where he would surely have been killed anyway. The windscreen had collapsed into daisy chains of cellular glass spreading out across the road, reflecting light in all directions, like Christmas. The front seats were crushed, airbags inflated. And impossibly, beside the car sat Quill in the cold and wet, with no expression on his face.

  They helped him up. Costain let Quill push him away, starting to stumble away on his own. ‘I felt it hit,’ he said suddenly. ‘I knew I was going to die. But she didn’t let me. Because she wanted me to know about the children.’

  FIFTEEN

  Dr Piara Singh Deb, DMJ, was a forensic pathologist working out of Lambeth, and he knew about coppers. He knew they reacted only slightly to the dead. That they rarely expressed anger at the perpetrators, whom they seemed to view as a sailor would view sharks. That their dark sense of humour concerning corpses always sought out new depths to plumb. And that, despite being so unlike how they were portrayed on television, they always expected him to have coffee and sandwiches handy.

  Singh had never before been part of an investigation that had received such media attention. The free tabloid that had been thrust into his hand at the tube station this morning had carried that photo of Mora Losley on its front cover, and so did every other newspaper he saw as he headed for St Pancras Mortuary. Singh supposed that this represented the mother lode for any editor: a serial killer who murdered children, gangsters and footballers. His daughter had asked him earlier about Linus McGuire. The canteen here was full of gossip. For this hour, and probably just this hour, the bulletins were leading with a story on one West Ham supporter who was claiming, dubiously, that Losley had offered to babysit.

  Singh found the team from Toto quite surprising. He could see they were tired, and so he expected the usual crudity and impatience, the usual blank reaction to bodies unless he showed them injuries done to testes or breasts. But these four . . . for a start they looked like junkies. As if they’d slept regularly in those suits. Their eyes were red and they stood looking about to fall over at any moment. They’d reacted hugely when he wheeled out the corpses of the three children. That wasn’t odd in itself. Police officers, in Singh’s experience, tended to be ‘lookers-after’, meaning the oldest sibling in their family, or the sort of only child who takes on the responsibilities of its parents. The woman here, though she wasn’t a police officer, had some of that about her, too. More than anyone, they didn’t like harm done to children, because they always felt that something could have been done, and therefore they sought – and he’d heard this feeling expressed in the most extraordinary ways – to blame themselves for it. But this time the reaction was different. They were horrified, yes, but it was as if they’d expected to see something more than what he was actually showing them, and were angrily frustrated at the mere sight of the bodies. One of the two young black men stayed absolutely silent. He looked lost, as if he desperately wanted to help but didn’t know whether anything he could say might prove worthwhile. The other was very proper, addressing Singh by his full title, all please and thank you. But there was something odd about that, as if he’d been ordered to do so, and resented it. The analyst did most of the talking, and she seemed to be the one with the greatest command of the situation, but even she spoke in a clipped monotone. The DI looked completely out of it, seemingly forcing himself to listen, putting a hand to his brow, appearing stressed to the point of distraction. Singh wondered if he was grieving privately, and persisting at work despite that burden.

  He had to make himself stop paying such watchful attention to these strange coppers, and more to the work confronting them. He felt a little worried as to how they might react to his conclusions, which were so grim that they’d laid a considerable weight on his own shoulders. The three victims, he announced, were two boys and a girl, aged from four to seven years old. Their teeth featured dental work that looked British to Singh, including a filling that was less than a year old. He hadn’t found any unique skeletal markers, dental implants, diseases that affected the bones – the sort of thing that would help with identification. They were all Caucasians (he pointed out the smooth nasal sills and the u-shaped palates), and the remaining strands of hair indicated that all three were redheads (he’d found enough of it to harvest mitochondrial DNA). He’d pulled teeth from the bodies and found – and it had been a bit of a lottery whether or not he would, considering that there was none left anywhere else – nuclear DNA in the pulp, so he was certain in stating these three children were siblings. If they found a candidate for a mother, he’d be able to make a positive identification from a mouth swab. His office was already checking the DNA against the NDNAD database, and would let them have the results as soon as possible.

  ‘What were the circumstances of their deaths?’ That was from the analyst.

  ‘There are traces of flesh, so the skeletons weren’t picked clean, and there are no indications of sharp-force trauma, no knife or tool or tooth marks.’

  ‘So not cannibalism?’

  ‘I’d be inclined to say no, despite the media speculation. Were any internal organs found separately? We didn’t receive any.’

  The analyst shook her head.

  ‘Yes, I was afraid that might be the case. And I think I know the reason. The bones show signs of pot polish, meaning they’ve been softened by heat and then collided repeatedly with the walls of the cauldron in which they were found. Look at the pale coloration of the bone, which is a sign of exposure to steady heat. And look at this, too.’ He indicated the small bones of the fingers and toes, some of which had been found in the cauldron alongside the skeletons. ‘There are small fractures on several of these. This is peri-mortem damage. Living bone breaks like this, in splinters or fairly straight lines. And among the small bones we found a lot of shredded and split fingernails. He held one up with tweezers. ‘This is evidence of a struggle, in close conditions, where the victims were so concerned about escape that they were willing to harm themselves. I think it’s possible that these three may have been . . . boiled alive.’

  By the way they reacted, he had indeed added to their burden – a burden which he was sure he didn’t fully understand. They clearly knew horrors beyond even what he had just described. He felt for them.

  The one young black detective thanked him very properly, the other stayed silent. The analyst merely nodded to him, and then they were on their way. The DI didn’t look back.

  Singh found himself wondering if this investigation really should be left in such trembling hands.

  Sarah Quill sat at her desk in the newspaper office, thinking about Saturday night.

  She had heard about what had happened to Linus McGuire, but she’d had no idea that Quill had also been in that car, until he got home, supported by two uniformed polic
e officers. She’d wanted to yell at him, and felt horribly guilty at such an impulse. How dare he risk . . . himself. Them. And what they were. That had suddenly felt like so little; it should be more. He’d just waved the coppers away, and they went off, and he’d been left there looking lost. Again he looked as if he’d been drinking, without actually having been drinking. Not a word had come to his lips, none of the usual bollocks. He’d finally let her hold him, and they’d stood like that for ages.

  ‘Talk to me,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I can’t. I don’t want to lie to you.’

  ‘Why do you feel you’d have to lie to me?’ But he’d been silent, then, and nothing she could say would make him change his attitude. She’d heard what his mates at Gipsy Hill sometimes said about being married to a member of the press: rather you than me. But she could tell there was more to it than that, and it scared her. This was going to eat away at him.

  It had been the next morning when he’d tried to say a few funny things, but kept coming up short. It had been the next night when he just seemed lost again. She missed that act he put on, and was horrified that there was something big enough to make it fall away from him. She didn’t want to keep asking, but she knew she would persist, because it was all she could do.

  She could feel it in herself too. It seemed that Quill was trying to be honest, but she’d meanwhile managed to bury something inside her. The way they stared at each other as if they were angry and scared by each other, by what was missing between them. It felt now that the Quill she knew might go missing forever.

  Sefton stumbled out into the mortuary car park, the other three beside him. The rain lashed down on them. ‘The noises in there,’ remarked Costain.

  ‘That was what it was like at the psychiatric hospital,’ said Ross.

  ‘Boiled alive,’ Quill whispered. And that made Sefton feel it again, the horror of those bare skeletons. He saw the others reacting as well. They’d had their sense of distance taken away. It felt as if they were all rookies again. ‘If that’s what she does every time . . . think of all those kids.’ He remained absolutely still for a moment, as if he had lost everything, every hope. They’d been running on empty, and they’d known they were. It had been Quill who’d kept them going. Now that he was like this . . . they seemed to be carrying on only because they had no other hope. At least now they had a few days’ grace. The next West Ham fixture was an away game against Liverpool. Which meant that even if a player did score a hat-trick against them, it might take a while for him to next come to London. If the Losley case had been big in the media before, now it was huge, the sheer impossibility of the killing of Linus McGuire slamming it to the top of every website, every news bulletin. And the bullshit they were coming out with – about hurled grenades, mines planted in the road. Sefton wondered how far Losley would have to go before the media just caved in and started saying she could walk through walls and destroy cars with her body. Finch had given a couple of interviews that had started to suggest Quill was at fault, that the death of his player was down to dangerous driving, but Lofthouse, without prompting from the investigation team, had got the mayor of London to call the chairman at home, and that had put an end to that. It had been Ross’ idea to visit the mortuary and look at the skeletons again, though none of them had any thought as to what the Sight might reveal about them. Again it turned out that they’d been pinning their hopes on nothing.