London Falling

by Paul Cornell

  Costain threw himself at her and sent her rolling into the table before she could dash her brains out. The table flew towards the woman. He was desperately holding Ross down.

  ‘Let go!’ she yelled. ‘I have to—!’ And then normal awareness rushed back into her head. ‘The suspect!’ she shouted. ‘Stop her!’

  Costain eased off just enough to see that Quill and Sefton had already pushed the table aside—

  To reveal that the woman had gone, like a dove out of a conjuring trick, taking her equipment with her, leaving only a spray of blood across the white cloth. There came cries and shouts from all around, as people who did and didn’t know the truth of it gasped.

  EIGHTEEN

  They sat on the steps outside, the Houses of Parliament looming behind them, the office lights coming on in the afternoon twilight. Big Ben began to strike four, and Quill could swear he heard the echoes reverberating through this new London he was learning about. They sounded to the depths and resonated back off the sky. They rang through people and memory. ‘The woman at that table turns out to have paid them in cash and provided a false address. Bloody sketchy description you got of that bloke who left the . . . bomb or whatever it was.’

  ‘I reckon he disguised himself,’ said Costain, ‘like Losley did.’

  He looked to Ross. He’d have expected her to have got her laptop out by now, but she was just staring into the distance. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘so that woman told Ross that we’re going to have to be like Sherlock Holmes to win: hardly a revelation. She also said that five is better than four, whatever that means. We’ve also discovered that there used to be some form of law enforcement among this community, but that’s gone now. And we’ve found that stuff associated with London, made in London, about London – that stuff seems to have power in London. I got these things too.’ He took the vanes from his pocket and, meeting Sefton’s gaze, handed them over to him.

  ‘And there’s going to be a death close to us,’ muttered Sefton, accepting them. He’d retreated into his shell again.

  Quill closed his eyes for a moment, as that statement put a weight in his stomach weirdly beyond what he’d expect to feel at a threat. He felt he should know what it was about, and was feeling vulnerable that he didn’t. ‘Yeah, but . . . later for that. Lisa, what aren’t you telling us?’

  She composed herself for a moment. ‘My dad,’ she said, ‘he was Toshack’s “good sacrifice”. He was sent to Hell, and Toshack got Losley’s services in return.’

  They were all silent. Quill looked at Sefton, who was silently disapproving of their terminology again.

  ‘Which makes me realize something,’ she said, making him look back. ‘Everybody thought my dad committed suicide. Including the coroner. So this stuff can close cases that should have remained open. We’ve only instructed the databases to look through open cases, so how about we look at closed ones, too?’ Quill made to put a hand on her shoulder, but her expression deterred him.

  That evening, Quill oversaw the rewriting of the Ops Board. ‘Speaking in tongues’ and the three items Ross had consulted through the fortune-teller were added to the Concepts list, as were ‘London items’, ‘old law’, ‘five over four’, ‘tile bomb’, ‘vanes’ and ‘someone close’. ‘Remembered’ had been expanded to include Sefton’s ideas about the memories of the masses and the dead. Photofits for new suspects Fortune-Teller, Windy and Bomber had been put up, unconnected to Losley so far.

  ‘We’re going to end up with a whole other board just for speculation,’ he observed.

  But then, with shaking hands, Ross took down the speculative card under Toshack, picked up a piece of card marked ‘Alf Toshack’, and attached it to Rob’s picture by a victim thread. Then she stood looking at it for a few minutes, as if she could rip up time and have him at her mercy by sheer fury.

  West Ham were playing at home on Wednesday evening. It took until Monday afternoon for the list of closed cases of missing or murdered children, enormous as it was, to be sent to the Portakabin. It wasn’t just a computer file, since Quill had asked for the search parameters to go back to the very start of when records were kept. A van arrived, with two archive clerks from Hendon carrying boxes of papers. The computer file included a lot of cases where the perpetrators were currently serving jail time. Ross, who until then had been obsessively trawling the list of bills again, started there, getting the others to begin on the physical files.

  ‘One thing I’m after,’ she said, ‘is Caucasian, red-headed, parents of three siblings. The parents of those kids in the cauldron. With the older files, you’re looking to match up the descriptors we’ve got of the older victims longer ago, particularly the siblings taken in threes. The cases are now closed, so the authorities at the time will have come to a solid conclusion as to what happened to them. We’re looking to prise that open, and see Losley.’

  Quill didn’t suggest that it was a meagre hope. He made them stop every hour for a cuppa, and they worked on into the night. Until—

  ‘Got one,’ said Ross. Quill and the others went quickly over to see. ‘Tereza Horackova was her name, a redhead – look at that photo. She was serving time in Holloway prison for multiple murder of children, before committing suicide a couple of years ago.’ She went on to the internet. ‘She was convicted of killing her own children,’ she continued, her voice starting to crack. ‘Three of them, and the ages fit, but she always insisted she didn’t have kids.’ She looked up the DNA swab details and emailed them to Dr Deb before his office closed for the night. ‘I’ve got her home address.’

  Quill didn’t want to argue with that look on her face. Instead he went to get his coat.

  The house in Acton was now occupied by a Bangladeshi family who spoke little English and were reluctant to let them inside. They managed to find a translator from the local nick, and that way eventually got granted access. They did only a cursory search, but Quill had got what he needed from the garden, where there were the faintly glowing remains of soil pushed to the side of where a patio had been installed.

  ‘She kept rigorously to her story,’ said Ross, ‘insisting that she had no children. She couldn’t explain the many signs suggesting the opposite, up to and including the slide and playhouse in her garden. Losley came here all those years ago, she took those children, and she made that woman forget them. That’s how she manages to steal kids and nobody notices.’

  ‘Bloody excellent,’ said Quill. ‘Coppers are bound to remember cases like that. We’ll find a few more.’

  ‘It’s just a pity,’ said Costain, ‘that this is close enough to Losley’s Willesden house for her to have operated from there, so we don’t have a sniff of another base.’

  Quill put out the call to every nick in London: they were after current or recent cases where parents of missing children claimed not to have any kids. Especially anything that had just come in. Ross had found them something vital with that obsessive determination of hers. It put hope back into him. But, as Quill walked out of the gate of the semi, he was struck by something: a sudden fear that made him look back. He paused, his eyes searching the garden, finding nothing. It was . . . just that feeling of missing something. Again, that echo resonating inside him. Sooner or later he’d figure out what it meant. Maybe all this was just telling him that as a person he was built on nothing. Well, he knew that, and he’d keep going anyway. He headed back to the car and ordered the others to go and get some sleep.

  On Tuesday morning they had a reply from the pathologist, stating that the swab record from Horackova was indeed a match for the mitochondrial DNA found in the kids in the cauldron. Quill called up the arresting officer of the time and filled him in, just in case Horackova had relatives who should be contacted and could be interviewed. But there were none. And, so far, there were no replies from any of the London nicks that had been forwarded his message about anomalous perp statements. ‘If we don’t get a lead by tomorrow night,’ he told his team, ‘I’ve put a plan in place for any footba
ller that scores a hat-trick.’ He handed a folder to Ross. ‘It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were going to call me,’ said Joe, eyeing Sefton over his pint. They’d been talking about pretty well nothing for an hour. And Sefton was getting more and more tired, and more and more certain of what he needed. And he was so aware of ‘We smell death near you soon,’ and he needed to find some way past all of this.

  ‘I’ve been busy.’

  ‘You look like . . .’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me anything?’

  ‘Yeah.’ So he told Joe everything. Copper: he showed him his warrant card, because he wanted to establish a baseline for the shit to follow. UC. Losley. Everything. He was totally breaking the rules, thus leaving himself entirely vulnerable, but, what the fuck? Joe’s expression grew worried, then scared. ‘Walk away if you want to,’ Sefton said. ‘I need to tell somebody or I’ll go mental. I need someone to talk to about this, to bounce some ideas off, and . . . just to talk to. I’m not being listened to, and we’re running out of time. It’s match day tomorrow and we might be going to hear about some kids being fucking boiled alive.’

  ‘So this is why a lot of the news about Losley makes no sense.’

  ‘You believe me?’

  ‘I think . . . I’ll reserve judgement. Maybe this is . . . a sort of a metaphor for something, but I saw you when you met “Jack” that time, and you weren’t faking that. The least I can do is listen.’

  Sefton grabbed him by the back of his head and kissed him. ‘Okay,’ he said after, ‘maybe that’s not the least I can do.’

  On match day, Ross woke to her alarm, aware that she’d had terrible dreams, but not remembering them. She went in to work with her iPod playing loudly in the car. Not using the radio, because then she’d hear about Losley. She didn’t want to hear about Losley until she walked into the Portakabin, and then it was all about Losley. Because at that point she could do something.

  Do something about Losley? It seemed even more deferred now. That discontinuity was sinking deeper and deeper into her, so she felt that it would one day reach her heart and kill her. What did getting Losley matter, if her dad was in Hell? Continual torment. No passing of time. No ending. She had felt it distantly. She had heard Costain describe it. She could imagine it. And imagine it she did, till she stopped herself. She thought instead of the kids they were trying to save. Then she felt guilty. And so that cycle went round and round.

  The newspapers were full of anticipation, a pile of them sitting on the table. That Losley face was everywhere, today looking like a badge in the top right-hand corner of the Star. The Sun had put a green filter over the photo.

  ‘It’s as if she’s become a cartoon character,’ said Quill. ‘Except people are also terrified of her. Families are taking their kids out of school and moving off to the country—’

  ‘The rich ones,’ said Costain.

  ‘—but the public deal with it by making her into . . . I don’t know, Mr Magoo with murder too. She’s bloody everywhere.’ He must have seen the look on Ross’ face, because he led her over to where Sefton had placed his holdall on one of the tables.

  ‘If we find her today,’ said Sefton, stepping forward, ‘we’re as ready as we can be.’

  ‘If this was an episode of CSI, we could use that single photo of her to find her in databases, crowd scenes, bloody . . .’ Quill waved a hand to finish his sentence. He looked as if he’d had a few last night.

  ‘I think that feeling,’ said Ross, ‘of not being able to control things is why people started doing stuff like Losley does, way back when. That’s why it’s town stuff. Everyone going back and forth in the city, doing deals, getting one up on each other, when maybe you were used to how it was in the country, just working your land and stuff, same thing happening every year . . . The city makes you want it now, makes you want it easier. But the bureaucracy of the city also grinds against that, makes you look for a way to get round it.’

  ‘Dark satanic mills,’ said Sefton. ‘But the city changes all the time. And the users we’ve met dress old. It’s as if, long ago, a few people worked out some ways to use this stuff, which worked back in the day, and they’ve been passing those methods on. Maybe this lot are bottom of the food chain. They’re just . . . living in the ruins, playing out the same old games.’

  ‘They’re like junkies,’ said Costain. ‘They’re not really using it. It’s using them.’

  ‘Maybe they’re still getting used to their new freedom, if someone was previously policing them. I wonder who that was? The bigger dogs? I think Losley’s the only one of those we’ve had a scent of.’

  ‘It’s a pity,’ said Ross, ‘that we can’t tell the public about the forgetting, however she manages that.’

  ‘Thankfully,’ said Quill, who had been reflexively checking his emails again, ‘coppers have less imagination than the general public. We’ve got something here.’

  Late last night, Terry and Julie Franks, who lived in Brockley, had been arrested on suspicion of murder. Mr Franks’ brother, puzzled, amazed and then outraged when he’d continually asked about his nephew and niece, and been rebutted with increasing vehemence, had finally gone to his local nick. ‘’Cos the Franks,’ said Quill, ‘have insisted they don’t have any children!’

  ‘She wouldn’t want to keep them for long,’ said Costain, ‘so she’s taken them ready for tonight.’

  ‘I’d say she won’t kill them until she knows she needs to,’ said Ross. ‘She must know that taking them, even with this forgetting bit, is the most dangerous thing she does. Most of the long boiling process must therefore happen post-mortem. No hat-trick, she hangs on to the kids for next time.’

  Quill got on the phone and started yelling. ‘No, tomorrow’s not good enough. I want them put in a fucking van and brought over here for interview right now. You read the papers, don’t you? Yeah, bit of a hurry on here!’

  Sefton was pinning a map of London to the wall. He stuck a red pin in Willesden. Ross realized he was indicating where Losley’s houses were, and she looked up the other addresses to add further pins. Sefton finally added a speculative white pin at the Franks’ address in Brockley. ‘Look at how far away that is,’ he said.

  ‘Indicative of a new base,’ said Costain. ‘Fucking A.’

  Ross brought up the council bill records for Brockley, and started spooling through them, though that was going to take her hours.

  Quill suddenly shouted incoherently. ‘Patterns!’ he continued. ‘Patterns with the victims! This is what I’ve been missing! Frigging map!’

  Ross swiftly brought up a list of where every victim with a pile of the soil in their garden had lived. They grabbed yellow-headed pins and, between them, covered the map.

  Then they stepped back.

  And inclined their heads and squinted, as if they were looking at a particularly difficult piece of modern art.

  ‘It’s sort of like a . . . jumping horse,’ said Sefton. ‘Maybe?’

  ‘There’s a kind of concentration around . . .’ began Quill.

  ‘Storks on the roof,’ said Ross.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Is there a genuine correlation between number of children born in Dutch houses and the number of storks that come to nest on the roof, supposedly bringing babies?’ said Ross. ‘The maths says, “God, yes”; it screams out at you. But that’s because bigger houses equals richer families, equals more incentive to breed. At least, that was the case back when rich people did breed more. Here all it means is that, yes, this pattern isn’t completely random, there is a concentration here, but that’s only because those are upmarket areas where footballers and gang bosses might live. Money is a hidden power too. And everything’s within reasonable reach of Losley’s known addresses. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation.’

  Quill slumped, and Ross thought she could see something terrible appear in his face. That wasn’t what he’d been missi
ng. And whatever that was, it was getting harder for him all the time.

  ‘Pity,’ said Costain. ‘I’ve always wanted to be working on a case where the dots on a map formed a pattern.’

  Ross called the Brockley nick, and got photos of the suspects’ house sent over. ‘Look there,’ she said, for there was that glowing soil shape in their garden.

  The match was due to kick off at 8 p.m. And, of course, it was going to be broadcast live on Sky and Radio Five. Purely for the sport, of course. As the hours ticked away, and all four of them continued looking through the council records for the boroughs around and including Brockley, and started pulling out the many sighting reports of Losley from around that area, Ross found that she was developing stomach cramps. It hadn’t even occurred to her to eat, and she wondered if any of the others were managing to do so. It took until bloody nineteen-thirty for a van to arrive outside the Portakabin, bringing with it the two suspects, Mr and Mrs Franks. Their brief had arrived also, Janice Secombe from Mountjoy’s, stepping carefully out of her car and raising an eyebrow at the stretch of mud between her and the cabin itself.

  ‘Ross,’ said Quill, picking up the tape recorder he’d borrowed from Gipsy Hill that morning, ‘you’re with me in interview room one. By which I mean the far corner here. You two, keep checking those records and loom menacingly in the background.’

  Quill knew Secombe from many such encounters. She was obviously loving this bizarre lack of the usual form, knowing how it’d play before a jury. But Quill was pretty sure these two weren’t destined for a trial. He set the tapes running with all due procedure, then he studied the suspects sitting across the table from Ross and himself.