by Paul Cornell
For a moment, in his mind’s eye, he saw blood bursting from their faces.
This was going to be such a long shot. Despite the briefing notes they’d prepared on a few things they could have a go at, there were whole areas which, especially with a brief present, could not be touched on. Not without having these two immediately set loose with one hell of a story to tell the press, one which would snare the team and stop them from having the freedom to do what they had to.
‘My clients,’ began Secombe, ‘are the victims in a missing persons case—’
‘No we’re bloody not!’ said Terry Franks.
‘—who have suffered severe trauma—’
‘We haven’t!’
‘They . . . agree with me, however, that there is no justification therefore for treating them like criminals. And I personally fail to see what they might have to do with the case you’re obviously pursuing here.’
That aspect must be freaking her out. They’d hidden the Ops Board before this lot had arrived, but Secombe knew which of them was working on what. Terry and Julie Franks looked as if they hadn’t slept recently. They were both in their late twenties, him with a number-two haircut that was growing out a bit, earring, white jacket, T-shirt with something pretty on it. If his mobile rang, it’d be something r&b. She was in a grey top that looked as if she’d worn it for three days. Layers in the hair, but no makeup today. She hadn’t been bothered. She wasn’t trying to put on a front, and hadn’t even done the tiny modest stuff that she would have done to attempt to indicate she deliberately wasn’t trying to put on a front.
Innocent, both of them. He wouldn’t normally have let that supposition mean anything, because you always worked the facts in front of your accumulated experience, and he had in the past met many seemingly innocent fuckers who’d done some terrible shit. But in this case he knew it to be genuine, and – had he a heart to break – it would have done so. They were saying something to him about himself, but in ways he couldn’t understand.
‘All right,’ said Terry angrily, ‘what’s going on?’
‘They keep saying we’ve got kids,’ interrupted his wife, still trying to be reasonable while he was already worked up. There was half a laugh in her voice. ‘It’s bureaucracy gone mad! As if we wouldn’t know. But I’m glad we can sort it out now. It’s some sort of error in the paperwork.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Franks,’ said Quill, ‘but it isn’t.’
Terry immediately started to speak, but the brief cut across him. She said, ‘We’re still trying to establish the facts in this case, aren’t we?’
Ross put copies on the desk of what the brief and the Franks pair had already seen: birth certificates for Charlie, aged five, Hayley, six, and Joel, seven.
‘We keep saying there must be a mistake,’ Terry continued. ‘Just the same name . . . maybe they used to live at our address.’
Ross, with no expression at all, put the photos on the table. They’d been taken both from what had been found during a search of the Franks’ house and from the albums of the children’s uncle and other relatives. They showed Terry and Julie with three happy, messy, gurning children at a theme park, by the sea side, on the deck of a cross-Channel ferry, wearing stupid hats.
The couple stared at the photos, as dumbfounded by them now as they must have been when first they saw them. ‘That’s just it – why would someone go to all that bother,’ Terry protested, ‘to Photoshop these? We are obviously being set up for something!’
‘If you don’t have any children,’ said Quill, ‘why is your house full of toys? Why, on several occasions during the last year, did you hire your niece as a babysitter?’
‘First Craig, and now you lot!’ The man was getting shrill, as if he could fight reality back to what was normal. ‘We get so worked up, we can’t hardly hear what people are saying, because they keep going on and on! You think we might just let these kids you think we have wander off, and forget about them? Forget about them after they went missing? Our own kids? Do you really think anyone would do that? Is that how far you think we’ve sunk?’
‘Everyone is looking at us funny,’ said Julie, more carefully, ‘and there’s something they’re not saying. It’s like they think we’re . . . paedophiles. And we’re not! We’re terrified of people like that.’
‘Why?’ said Ross.
The couple were suddenly silent.
‘Why would a couple without children be terrified of paedophiles?’
The silence continued, while their mouths worked as if they were trying to find something to say.
Julie finally raised her hands. ‘I have . . . been thinking about this,’ she said. ‘We’re not . . . Whatever you may think of us, we’re not stupid.’
‘I didn’t say you were,’ said Quill gently.
‘I remember buying the . . . I suppose you’d call them toys. Over, well, years. I remember buying this . . . junior tennis set from the pound shop. Just this pair of yellow plastic rackets and a soft ball. Perfect, I thought. Only now . . . now I can see that seems weird, because we don’t use it, do we?’
‘It’s not a crime,’ muttered Terry, ‘whatever this is, it’s not a crime.’
‘And I have to . . . to try really hard to think about that. It’s like if I don’t think about it, it goes away again. Like my brain doesn’t want to think about it, because maybe there’s something . . . terrible. Please . . . Please tell us. Are we . . . living wrong? Is there something . . . wrong with us?’
‘Mrs Franks—’ began the brief.
‘There can’t be something wrong with both of us!’ explained Terry. ‘Everyone thinks we’re lying—’
‘I don’t,’ said Quill, causing the brief to look startled.
He put a photo of Losley on the table. They’d wondered if making this connection would get some huge and terrible reaction out of the couple, so they’d left it to last.
‘Who’s that?’ said Terry.
‘I gather you haven’t been paying much attention to the news?’
‘We read the paper,’ said Julie, sounding as if she wondered what they were being accused of now. ‘The Mirror, every day, cover to cover. Though Terry starts at the back, don’t you?’
‘Then you should remember Mora Losley, the witch of West Ham? She’s been featured on the front page six or seven times, as the single biggest story.’
The couple glanced at each other, and then back at Quill, a look on their face that was half fearful and half wondering if he was joking.
‘Never heard of her,’ said Terry.
Quill and Ross stared at each other. And then at Costain and Sefton, who were coming over to boggle at this incredible news.
They all said it together. ‘Oh . . .’
They sent the Franks and their brief over to the nick for a cuppa, the uniforms from the van escorting them. The football had started, and Sefton set the PC to stream it, so it became a noise in the background. Ross realized that they’d hear any goals just from the crowd volume going up. It caused sheer stress, but they had to do it.
‘She made them forget her too,’ said Quill.
‘Which means it wasn’t a snatch-off-the-street job,’ said Ross. ‘We don’t know how it went with Horackova, but the only reason I can see for making people forget Losley herself is that they would have seen or known something important about her, something that could be used to help us.’
‘Maybe we can hypnotize them or something. Maybe that’s exactly what she does.’
‘Long-term, maybe, but does science even work against this? If hypnotism is even science. No, fuck that . . . fuck that. The shape of the hole can tell us. The hole is what she took from their memories; we have to think about that shape.’ Ross realized she was pacing back and forth, waving her hands wildly. But sod how she must appear. ‘How does she make them forget?’
There was a sudden roar from the PC. ‘And it’s one–nil to Norwich City!’ yelled commentator Alan Green. ‘Tony Ballackti, that’s five goals in
three games for him. And, only five minutes in – who’d bet against him doing it again in this match?’ And that sarcastic suggestion in his voice echoed what everyone else in the country was feeling. ‘Some people in the crowd are already shouting for them to take him off, but they’re being roared down by the Norwich fans. Ballackti himself is shaking his head. He wants more goals! They say any hat-trick player has got a helicopter to take him out of here straight after the match, that Cardiff themselves have hired private security. They say lots of things but they’re not telling us which of them is true.’
‘Exactly,’ said Quill.
Ross found that the thoughts in her head had now jammed. A terrible silence reigned.
Then Sefton kept going, and she loved him for that. She sagged against the wall and listened.
‘She must use one of her bloody gestures on them,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s done anything that wasn’t line of sight, even if you count text messages. She appeared in their garden, and . . . no, like with Toshack, she couldn’t do it through the wall. She needed to get inside—’
Ross let out a little noise from her throat and considered. Eighty-three more minutes. Two more goals. A prolific scorer. A defence with holes in it. And then three more children to be boiled to death. Charlie, aged five, Hayley, six, and Joel, seven, whose faces they’d seen in those photos. And only them to stop it happening.
‘She doesn’t need to be invited in,’ said Quill. ‘She’s not a vampire. She’ll just walk through the wall.’
‘Waste of energy, though,’ commented Costain, ‘waste of soil. She’s in a war, so she doesn’t waste ammunition. If she can get them to open that door, she will.’
‘And walking through the wall, unseen,’ said Ross, forcing herself back into this discussion, ‘would not necessitate her having to get them to forget about her.’ She paused suddenly, realization dawning. ‘Maybe they saw part of her MO! Something she doesn’t want known, something she wants to be able to do again.’ Ross had started to shout, and she knew it but she couldn’t stop it. ‘That’s the shape of the hole. What wouldn’t she want us to know? Maybe she’s . . . pretending to be something?!’
‘Not the babysitter,’ said Costain.
‘Don’t tell me those two have a cleaner,’ said Sefton.
Quill grabbed his phone and told the uniforms to get the Franks back over. The four of them actually met them halfway to the Portakabin and marched beside them on the way back inside.
Quill was already firing questions at them. ‘Who,’ he said, ‘has access to your house? Not individual people, but types of people.’
The couple looked at each other, feeling increasingly scared. ‘I suppose . . . the social workers?’ suggested Julie.
Quill didn’t bother asking why such people would visit a ‘childless couple’. ‘In the plural? Can you describe them?’
‘There are two,’ said Julie. ‘One’s Maria, who’s a . . . coloured lady, in her forties, going grey a bit before her time. And the other . . .’ She suddenly stopped. They were now standing at the door of the Portakabin, Ross shivering with both the cold and the tension, the sound of that bloody radio washing over them. ‘It can’t be only the one, because Maria was asking me about the other one . . .’ She put a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh God!’
Quill darted into the Portakabin ahead of the others. He’d made sure there were no more details to be had from them, and then sent a screaming Julie and her husband back to the van, back towards a legal process that he would try to make sure didn’t hurt them. In his hand he held the business card of social worker Maria Sutton. Her mobile rang six times . . . then she answered. Quill put the conversation on the speaker.
‘I only know about it because other people on my list mentioned her,’ she said. ‘There was quite a scare about it locally, over the last couple of weeks, what with this old woman showing up and claiming to be a social worker. And I did wonder about Mora Losley, because it was all over the local papers. But this woman looked nothing like her, and it never seemed to come to anything, since no children were taken.’
‘She was preparing for lots of sacrifices,’ said Ross, too far away to be heard by the woman on the phone. ‘She was sorting out where the local kids lived, and she didn’t make them all forget. She didn’t need to.’
‘Other people on your list: have you got that list in a document you can email me right now?’
Sefton went to Google Maps on his phone, and zoomed in on the area Maria Sutton now described, two or three of the poorer neighbourhoods of Brockley, presently being squeezed out by the continuing gentrification of the area. There were open spaces here: Crofton Park, Telegraph Hill Park, Peckham Rye Park. All Quill could think about, as he finished the call, was how that would give Losley room to lurk – lots of places for her to connect her remaining West Ham soil to the ground.
‘She’s in there,’ said Ross. ‘The bitch is in there somewhere.’
Quill looked to his email and found the address list. ‘There’s only about twenty of these.’ He drew with his finger, on the screen of Sefton’s phone, a rough square. ‘If she kept this close to home—’
‘And Tony Ballackti has been brought down in the penalty area! The referee is pointing to the spot!’
They all fell silent. ‘Don’t choose him to take it,’ said Costain helplessly. ‘Don’t.’
‘And there is despair at the Boleyn Ground now. It feels as if this is going to go on and on, with a parade of goals. The fans here, they’ve been hit hard by the press stories of the last few weeks. Speaking to some of them, they think they’ve been tarred with the same brush. And now Norwich are showing no mercy. It’s Ballackti to take the penalty, because it would normally be. It has to be, I suppose, if we’re not giving in to fear.’
‘You don’t know anything about fear!’ yelled Quill. ‘You don’t fucking know about fear!’
‘Ballackti puts the ball on the spot, brave in the face of all this. And I’ve never heard such sounds from a football crowd.’
Quill could imagine the smiling man somewhere among them, revelling in it.
‘There are West Ham supporters, here and there, not barracking Ballackti exactly, but shouting to him. They’re trying to tell him not to take it, to miss it deliberately. They’re pleading with him.’
Ross grabbed the phone from Sefton so quickly that it nearly made him drop it. ‘We can see what she’s done to the records! What about the internet?! Try Google Street View!’
‘But Ballackti steps up, he places the ball . . .’
Ross pinched at the screen, making agonized expressions as each zoom-in took seconds to load. ‘I think I can see something. In those streets, just a dot.’ She zoomed in closer. They all craned to look.
‘He’s taking his run-up—!’
‘Where is it?!’ asked Costain. ‘What’s the address?’
A roar from the crowd. What sort of roar? They already knew.
‘And Ballackti’s put it away for his second goal! Surely they must take him off now? Surely, if they don’t, he’ll score again!’
But now they could all see it, as they’d seen the house in real life. As they’d seen Losley on that camera footage. The obscene light shone out of the screen at them: glistening and slick, an abomination in this world. From one particular suburban street. One particular house.
Sefton grabbed his holdall and the team ran for the door.
NINETEEN
Quill had asked for a BMW 5 Series from the motor pool, and had it parked outside last night. Now they all leaped into it, Sefton throwing his holdall in the boot. It was getting dark.
‘I’m the best driver,’ said Costain, almost pushing Quill out of the way.
‘I’ll assume you mean you’re a level-two driver, cleared to handle this unmarked car.’ Quill reached up to slam the magnetic blue light on to the roof, and plugged it into the ‘Kojack’ electrical socket in the dashboard. ‘I’ll get us a CAD number so you can jump the lights.’
‘Whatever.�
� Costain looked over his shoulder and checked that the others were wearing their seatbelts.
‘Shall I say ETA twenty minutes?’ called Ross, already hitting buttons on her phone.
‘Twenty minutes? Sod that.’ Costain pushed down on the pedal, and mud flew from the wheels as they accelerated towards the gate.
Quill called Lofthouse first. ‘I want uniforms ready down there, ma’am. I mean a lot of uniforms, as suspect is armed and dangerous and has potential victims on the premises. Scene commander to let me know RV point—’
Ross didn’t register what he was saying. She was talking to Brockway at West Ham. ‘So Norwich haven’t taken him off?’
‘The fuckwits,’ whispered Sefton beside her.
‘We strongly advise . . . we officially advise . . . Okay, they know that, okay.’
‘What’s causing that?’ said Costain. ‘They’d never normally do that. Something’s influencing them.’
‘If he does score a third time,’ Ross continued, ‘as soon as he comes off the field, he stays put, security detail to surround him. Have you got everything we asked for ready?’ The West Ham chaplain was ready to bless the player, the room and the said coppers. Quill had speculated that, while being at the West Ham ground itself would presumably give Losley a great deal of power, she had so far proved unwilling to do anything awful there, and might not want to harm anyone directly connected with the club. Ross had already sold this approach to the club on the basis of what Losley herself believed. She now received assurances, switched off the phone, threw it down – and then grabbed it up again.
Quill switched the radio on, and they all fell silent, listening until it was clear a third goal hadn’t been scored. ‘If there’s a hat-trick, I’ll send whatever uniforms are at the location straight in, whether we’re there yet or not. She’ll be able to hold them off, we’ll likely lose a few, but I’d rather that than losing the kids.’ His tone didn’t sound to be inviting debate. He was again taking that responsibility on himself.