London Falling

by Paul Cornell

  And then suddenly he was somewhere else.

  He hit a wall. He swore . . . fell . . . landed. And looked around him, scrambled to his feet, exulting.

  They came through one by one: Ross then Costain then Sefton. They took standing leaps.

  ‘Don’t take a run up at it!’ Quill had shouted back to them.

  They all landed against the wall and steadied themselves with their outstretched palms.

  Quill stood there watching them, holding his bruised nose. They found themselves in a lock-up, what looked like the inside of a unit in a storage compound somewhere. The only light was from under the door. He found a switch and suddenly he could see properly. They’d come out of a vortex that looked just like the one they’d jumped in to, except that it seemed to revolve just the concrete floor here, rather than any boxes. It kept going, now they’d exited. It operated in a space that looked specifically cleared for it, because every inch of the rest of the unit was full of other cardboard boxes, metal chests and shelves packed with books.

  ‘Aladdin’s cave,’ said Quill. ‘There you go, Harry.’ He saw Ross looking around with that expression on her face which said she was inside yet another part of what she’d grown up among, and yet of which she’d been unaware.

  ‘This is where Toshack vanished to all those times, when he wanted to consult his “advisers”,’ said Costain.

  ‘Meaning,’ said Sefton, ‘he had a way of finding Losley from here.’

  Quill looked to Costain, who checked the locator bug monitor, and shook his head. ‘Let’s get to it,’ he said.

  As they began to search at high speed, with Ross taking the lead, Quill found himself working beside Sefton. ‘What about your expedition?’ he asked. ‘Did you find anything?’ The young DC had come in earlier, gone up to the Ops Board, stared at it for a while, and then just ended up doodling surreal swirls around the outside of it. Quill was still wondering if he’d gone a bit mental.

  Sefton turned to him, still with that bloody Obi-Wan Kenobi expression of his. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m still working it out.’

  The GPS on Costain’s phone indicated they were in a trading estate near Heathrow. The contents of the lock-up turned out to be frustratingly mundane, which wasn’t how Costain would have seen it just a few weeks ago. Back then they’d have thought of this place as the mother lode of all evidence. There were records of bank accounts that they’d never dreamed of, a full set of accounts books, too. There were bundles of cash, in Euros and Canadian dollars. It was the most thoroughly equipped bolt-hole, containing what a boss put aside for his last rainy day.

  ‘Look at this,’ said Quill, having heaved open a metal chest with a crowbar. He lifted out boxes of ammunition, an entire stack of them.

  ‘All different calibres,’ said Costain, taking one from him, ‘for all sorts of different types of guns. Not like him to bother, since the soldiers tended to keep their weapons at home.’

  Sefton pointed to a note on the boxes – the manufacturer’s address. ‘Made in London,’ he observed. ‘Like at the New Age market. It’s the London stuff that works.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Rob had obviously worked out enough about Losley to get himself a bit of an insurance policy, ammo for whatever he was packing at the time that might actually give him the drop on her. Only we nicked him and he couldn’t use it.’

  ‘Objective seven on the board,’ said Ross, stepping over. ‘Maybe we could have her with those.’

  ‘If,’ said Quill, ‘we could ever persuade an Armed Response Unit to shoot an unarmed granny. And maybe shoot her many times.’ He looked between them. ‘What . . . any of you lot got guns at home? Thought not.’

  They went back to their work. Costain found himself feeling desperately conflicted. There was currently something he had to do urgently, as a way out of everything that loomed above him, but what they were in the middle of was just as urgent. As he searched along the shelves of one of the metal units, suddenly Sefton was beside him, working the other way.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What?’ said Costain.

  ‘I kept trying to . . . write off what you experienced. And I’ve just discovered that . . . some of this stuff presents itself in different ways to different people, yeah? I still think there’s only science. I still don’t think there’s a God – at least not like people think there is. I’m going to keep on being proud to say that. I have to. I think I’ve started to . . . know something about that now: what Rabbi Shulman called a “deep understanding of the natural world”. Only I’m just starting, at that. I’ve got a lot to sort out and that might take me forever. But . . . when you saw Hell . . . I think it might be one of many things that aren’t hanging over just you, but over all of us. I know what’d be in my own version. I’m saying . . . I think you saw something real.’

  Costain stopped, not wanting to reveal how he was feeling. ‘Mate,’ he said, raising a hand.

  ‘Skip.’ Sefton clasped it.

  They looked round at the sound of Quill’s sudden exclamation. They went over to see, along with Ross. He’d just found a cluster of five much smaller cardboard boxes, the kind you’d keep business cards in. He’d put them together in an X, as with the larger boxes, and, as they watched, this also began rotating. And from the air above it fell a steady stream of white powder.

  Costain took a pinch of it between his fingers. ‘Heroin,’ he said. ‘Rob’s supply.’

  ‘And I don’t think it’s being made out of thin air,’ said Ross. ‘Losley must have set that up for him – and the one that got us here too. On the other end of that’ll be somewhere in Burma or Thailand—’

  There was a sudden noise from the smaller boxes. It was an outburst of foreign voices. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Quill, ‘they heard us!’ He reached out suddenly, as if to grab whoever was on the other side—

  Costain pulled him aside at the last moment, as the boxes flew apart and the heroin puffed up into the air with a sudden release of pressure.

  Quill looked furiously at where the boxes had been, rubbing his hand as if his fingers had been nipped. ‘Ta,’ he said, ‘could have been nasty.’

  They tried to put the same boxes back together, but they wouldn’t shunt into place. Presumably, whatever was on the other end had been pulled apart. This sudden resumption of interest after such a big gap in communication, Ross thought, would have made the suppliers immediately suspicious. Bloody shame, though. If they’d known that was going to happen, at the very least they could have thrown a locator bug through.

  Aware of the clock ticking down towards the start of the match, they got back to work.

  Ross was making her way along a row of books, mostly ledgers, when she felt it. It was a feeling born of the Sight. It involved a gravity about this one particular nondescript volume resting beside her hand. But it was more than the familiar feeling that there was something unusual about this book. She called the others over. ‘Do you feel it too?’

  They all took turns to touch the book. Right up close to it, and only then, there was a kind of . . . nausea. Not sickness, but—

  ‘It scares me,’ said Sefton, ‘just on its own. It feels like . . . the edge of a rooftop. My eyes keep trying to work out where the threat is.’

  ‘Booby-trapped,’ said Costain. ‘Like that tile.’

  ‘There’s something . . . familiar about it,’ persisted Ross.

  ‘You mean you saw it when you were a kid?’ asked Quill.

  ‘Not saw it, but I think it must just have been around sometimes . . . in his pocket.’

  ‘My day for doing this,’ said Quill. He grabbed the book by its spine and threw it off the shelf and onto a nearby desk, as if it was hot. They all leaped back, but nothing happened. Then he took a step towards it, and nodded when Ross asked if he was okay. They all leaned over the desk. The book was The West Ham United Football Book, No. 2, by Dennis Irving, with a foreword by Geoff Hurst.

  ‘Why is that evil?’ asked Costai
n.

  Ross pointed at the top edge of the book. There were some pages of a different colour sticking up at the back of the text. ‘There’s something else in there.’

  ‘We need protection,’ said Sefton. ‘What is there we could use for protection?’ He fumbled for his special notebook, and started leafing through the pages. Ross noticed that they were covered with notes added later, so that it looked as if it was starting to become a bit of a grimoire itself.

  ‘Salt,’ he said finally. ‘That’s the best I can do. The Met chaplain said that was always regarded as a protection against evil. “Always” is good for me. And my mum always threw some over her shoulder, to get in the eye of the devil.’ The twist in the floor was still revolving, making a breeze that, when combined with the cold air coming in under the lock-up door, fluttered everything that wasn’t boxed up. Sefton gingerly jumped back into the middle of it, and returned a few minutes later with some salt from the Gipsy Hill canteen. ‘We’re going to be looking at manufacturers’ addresses a lot, yeah?’ he said, pointing at the container.

  ‘Packaged in London?’ said Costain. ‘Is that going to be enough?’

  ‘That means it’s got a bit of London-ness about it,’ said Sefton. ‘And what else have we got?’ He poured some of the salt in a circle around the book, to no effect that Ross could sense. Then he poured some over it. Ross then felt maybe a slight diminution of the power of the thing. Sefton put on his evidence gloves, and gently opened the book, sprinkling salt over every page. ‘It is exactly what it says it is: no marks made on the pages. I’m going to turn to the back.’ He threw a larger amount of salt onto the last page as soon as he got there, and stepped back. When nothing happened, he opened the book again. Inside it were two flattened-out pages of very old paper, brown, cracked at the edges, brittle like leaves. ‘Don’t even breathe on them,’ he said.

  Ross could feel the threat crackling from the first page, which looked to be handwritten in some form of old English. She could still make out a few words underneath the salt, but it was the diagram that made her stop and stifle her reaction. It was a drawing of some oddly calm-looking medieval peasant hanging by a noose from the ceiling. There was a wound on his head, and a wound in his side, which was oozing huge drops of blood. A similarly calm man in a robe stood back, a sword in his hand, the other hand in the air, fingers splayed in an unusual gesture. To the left of the hanged man there stood a horned, dog-legged devil with a forked tail, his tongue curled ornamentally. He was spilling coins from a sack, obviously intended as a reward to the man in the robe. Sefton pointed to the page of text facing the loose sheets, where the picture of some long-haired footballer holding a cup had been stained brown.

  ‘This has been concealed in here for a very long time,’ Ross declared.

  She closed her eyes. So this was it, the idea that had killed her father. She could imagine Toshack finding this book in some antique shop. Had it been left there specially for him to find? Maybe. Or maybe this temptation was waiting around to snare just anyone, but Toshack had been ready to receive what was hidden in its pages: a guide on how to sacrifice a man and gain power in return. She could imagine him glancing, curious, at these strange ancient sheets, then starting to read them in detail. The ancient words they contained would have spoken to him, got into his head, whispered to him – as she felt them whispering now. Here’s how you reverse the fortunes of the firm, my son. All it’ll take is the sacrifice of your own brother. That sacrifice of her father had got Toshack his meeting with the smiling man. And the smiling man had then given him Mora Losley. And all Toshack’s riches had flowed from that.

  Someone put a hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes and saw that it was Costain. ‘The fucker,’ he said, and she knew that he’d understood what she must be feeling, having finally seen the cause of her misery all this time.

  Sefton turned over the page and scattered the salt again. Something golden and fearful bloomed out of the book. It was a name, scribbled in a hand that looked much more modern than anything else here, written right across the diagrams and words of the second page, as if none of that remained important now. It said ‘Mora Losley’.

  ‘That’s Toshack’s handwriting,’ said Ross, for she could see it now. Him taking this book along to the match that the smiling man had told him to attend; Losley sitting in the seat beside him; the conversation they would have held in whispers, her telling him to take out his pen and write down her name.

  ‘There’s some power to the paper itself,’ observed Sefton. ‘She must have got him to write it there in order to use that. And now it’s like . . .’ He dared to move his finger closer to it, then pulled it away, suddenly more careful now. ‘I can feel it tugging at me. It feels like . . . being on the perimeter of those rotating boxes we used to get ourselves here. I think this is . . . sort of like a hyperlink on a website. You touch it and go somewhere else.’

  ‘Losley wouldn’t be up for him summoning her,’ said Costain. ‘He’d have to go to her.’

  Before any of them could stop him, Quill slammed his finger down on the golden words. Then, with a yell that shocked Ross, he withdrew it. He made as if to stick the finger in his mouth, but Sefton grabbed his hand to prevent him. ‘Stop doing things like that!’ The finger was badly burned. Ross looked back at the sheet of paper. The name on it was swiftly fading, as the power dissipated. Then it was just ink.

  Quill was shaking his hand in the air, furious with himself. ‘Of course that didn’t bloody work. He came back here before we nicked him, so he would have tried that if it would! And I didn’t see a burn on his fingers, because he knew better than to . . . knock on a locked door, or something! Fuck!’

  Costain was again checking the monitor. When he looked up from it, it was obvious that nothing had changed. Except that his own expression had hardened, and he looked to have made a decision. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we’re going to have to move as soon as this bug shows the cat’s been picked up. If it is. So’ – he handed the monitor to Ross – ‘there’s something I can’t put off doing any longer.’

  And, before anyone could stop him, he stepped over to the spinning boxes and vanished.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  At 6 p.m., with twenty-six hours to go until the start of the match, Costain marched towards the office unit of a plastic-sheeting company on an industrial estate in High Barnet. He’d kept his phone switched off. He didn’t want the others to know where he was or what he was doing. Not yet. The manager of the company was trying to keep up with him. ‘It’s now been a few weeks, and nobody’s been in touch. But you needn’t worry. We didn’t disturb anything. We don’t even know what you left in there. Please could you . . . could you pass that information on, higher up the . . . organization?’

  Costain turned to look at this nervous little man, lost in his baggy suit, unexpectedly having to deal this evening with someone to whom his usual signifiers of power didn’t apply. He’d called earlier to summon the man over here from his home. And he tried not to enjoy the experience of dominating him, while looking him up and down. Perhaps he should say something reassuring? That would be the good thing to do. But, no, that would be breaking character, and also working against a greater good. This man still thought of him as an enforcer called Blake.

  ‘Leave it with me,’ he said instead, and reached out a gloved hand. The man put a bunch of keys in it, then quickly retreated to his car.

  Costain unlocked the door of the unit, and locked it again behind him. The interior smelt of newness. Certainly it didn’t feel as if anyone had been in here lately. So that meant he was still safe. Hmm. The thought made him smile grimly for a moment. He ignored the office and found a back room with an aged carpet, a sprinkle of loose plaster, a stack of three chairs with a corporate desk calendar on top, and a kettle. He pulled aside a thick-piled rug that smelt of dog, uncovering a stack of metal chests of the sort photographers used. He opened the first with one of the annoyingly many keys, and inside saw . . .

&nbs
p; They were still there. He let out a sigh of relief. He’d picked this place because the manager had been on Rob Toshack’s protection list, after a few of his illegal Chinese employees had suffered nasty accidents, but had only had contact with himself and a couple of the other soldiers. At this stage, the man didn’t know who he was paying off, and that’s how it would have stayed until Rob had got confidently used to his reliability. Then this site might have indeed become a drop box for Rob, for certain items that needed to be kept far away from Bermondsey. ‘Anthony Blake’, on the other hand, had immediately decided that it would do for his own purposes.

  He pulled the two Heckler & Koch MP7 personal defence weapons from the case, possessing the firepower of an assault rifle, but easily concealable. And now, having just seen boxes of ammunition in the lock-up they’d accessed by the spinning boxes, Costain had a supply of it for these babies. Rob must have commissioned that London ammo manufacturer to make suitable rounds, ones that could potentially take down Losley.

  Costain put the guns on the table, then found the second box. He couldn’t resist a smile at what he’d left hidden inside it: six kilo bags of cocaine hydrochloride. Not cut with anything. It would have been assumed, by whatever remained of the Toshack set, to have been stashed in a particular satellite house when the final raid against the firm went down, and thus now seized in evidence. But actually it had been here, as a result of a little juggling act that could only have been performed by someone with his facility of access. He’d set this up as his last payday and, if required, his emergency exit. Two hundred and forty grand of coke, and who knew how much value for the guns? It had been a game he’d been looking forward to playing, taking them to a port somewhere up north and spending a weekend operating as an arms dealer. Yeah, his comrades had been, to some extent, right about him all along. But now he had to do the right thing – with a gun to his head, as Sefton had said.

  He stopped suddenly, stock still. He could sense that there was someone else in the room with him. There had been just that little change in the air pressure, a little moment of cold. It was something derived from the world of the Sight, but it was very subtle. Was it that smiling bastard come for him, now he could be found red-handed? No. He’d always appear red-handed to that one. And, anyway, he knew who this was going to be, didn’t he? He’d known it when Ross had told them about seeing her dad. He knew who, in his own life, filled that special place of pain.