London Falling

by Paul Cornell

  ‘Yeah,’ said Quill, ‘enough of the heavy breathing. We’ve got a few of your lads down here, causing trouble and, before we give them a good kicking, I thought I’d have a word. Two points here. One: fuck. And two: you. It may not have occurred to you, but us policing the London of the Sight, it’s sort of liberating. We won’t need to be doing so much paperwork. We won’t have to worry too much about the rights and needs of little sods like this lot. We won’t have to watch our Ps and Qs with the cautions. We’re going to be a bit more like policing was when my dad did it. We’re going to be able to kick in a few doors and say, “You with the tentacles, you’re nicked.”’ There’s law now, for you and yours. The same law as for everyone else. Have a nice day, sir.’ And he clicked off the phone.

  Ross found herself grinning, and saw the others were too. Costain threw the thing back among its fellows.

  Quill turned to the old lady. ‘So, love, where to?’

  They got her stuff into the boot, with a struggle. They drove her to a night shelter. They were so forcefully jolly at her that it worried her. They tried to answer her vague questions with the best reassurance they could: that they were on the job now. They left the creatures, whatever they were, running about in the tunnel behind the car, bellowing ancient and unintelligible threats as other cars flew through them, unaware. They’d probably catch up with the old lady. But meanwhile they’d given them something to think about.

  EPILOGUE

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  Quill finally dismantled the Ops Board. He left the photofit that they’d renamed ‘the smiling man’ on it, and the Concepts list that could be applied more generally, but got rid of just about everything else. He ticked the operational objectives they’d achieved before filing that section of the chart. Last but not least, he stuck an X of black tape over Losley’s face, and, with great ceremony, transferred her photo into a file box.

  ‘In order to justify our existence and minuscule budget,’ he announced, ‘we’ll need to become, in effect, a targeted crime squad. So, that means we need to find some other nasty buggers.’ He pinned a new blank card at the top of the board, with a question mark on it where the name of their next operation would be indicated.

  Sefton had come in that morning with the idea of further experimenting with the vanes as dowsing rods. Quill assimilated that suggestion in tandem with Ross’ desire to take a closer look at the Thames, since it had seemed such a source of strange activity during her drive across London. ‘I’ve started a dirty great database,’ she said. ‘We don’t know what half of what we’ve been seeing means. Think of all those . . . stories we glimpsed across London on that first night. The coffins, the bridge gatehouse, those ghost ships. That’s our patch now. And then we have to find out what that bastard’s done to it. What Toshack meant by moving the goalposts. Why he wanted rid of Losley, and why he was glad we did it.’

  ‘And,’ said Sefton, ‘we never found out why it was us who acquired the Sight.’ He put his finger on the word ‘protocol’ on the board. ‘Losley didn’t use that word very much, and when we heard it from her, it sounded awkward. I reckon that’s someone else’s word, an expression she heard once.’

  They went down to Wapping nick, and Sergeant Mehta of the Marine Policing Unit took them out on the fast-response boat Gabriel Franks. Now they’d got used to having the Sight, there wasn’t so much to shock them during the daytime, though those heads sticking out of the mud under certain docks were a bit unnerving. They all took their own special notes, but there was just a bit too much of the pleasure cruise about this jaunt for Quill to feel comfortable.

  ‘This is just a pause,’ said Costain, looking up at the sky, where the sun was struggling to make London anything other than cold and blustery. ‘The world’s still fucked up. They’re still taking the piss. This city’s still going to Hell.’

  Quill could only nod. ‘It’s hard for it to escape the past,’ he said. ‘That’s why they call it “being haunted”.’

  ‘How are you feeling now?’

  ‘Much like you lot, I suppose. But I’ve had a lot more sleep. I’m enjoying Jessica so much, as if she was just born, that she’s wondering why all the sudden attention. That is positively a good thing. And as for all this . . .’ he gestured around him. ‘If I was previously missing having a meaning to life – which feels bloody weird and selfish now, considering I had her – well, here it is. There is a meaning to the world – or at least to London. Granted, it’s a bad meaning, but you can’t have everything, can you?’

  Costain got the binoculars out, and every now and then he’d call one of the others over. Sefton noted the way the vanes turned when encountering every new oddity. Seeing that going on, Quill felt content to just observe with a sense of purpose.

  Maybe that was why he was the first to see it. It was because he’d got used to his ‘new eyes’, he assumed later; because he’d started to integrate them with his copper’s instinct of when something was wrong. He still didn’t have too much of an imagination to get in the way. But, seconds later, Sefton was at his side, indicating there was something important over there, and then the others joined in too, the Sight pulling on them all, in its different ways.

  It stood on the left bank, the Rotherhithe side of the river, and it looked completely out of place. ‘Weird that they’ve left that in such a mess,’ he said, pointing it out to the others. ‘Prime real estate – or is it a historical thing?’

  Sefton looked with surprise at the vanes in his hands. Quill could see they were almost jumping towards what he was pointing at.

  ‘What?’ said Mehta, looking straight past whatever Quill was talking about.

  He then looked puzzled at them when they all turned and smiled at him at once.

  Quill left the sergeant with the boat, docked beside a floating restaurant, and led his team off to have a look. They walked at a pace Ross could manage on her crutches. The anomaly stood on the edge of a great commercial plaza, where new skyscrapers rose, all tall Byzantine curls and gestures towards the nautical. There was a giant anchor here, a flock of seabird silhouettes on the paving.

  Among it all, beside a well-tended little garden, were the remains of a square of walls punctuated with gaps, the hint of a roof surviving at one corner. All of them were bleached white, and it was impossible to tell how old the ruin was. Inside it, now they were up close, Quill could see, to his surprise, a stone table, split in two, and beside it the remains of some chairs.

  ‘Are we sure it’s not some kind of art?’ said Sefton.

  As Quill watched, a young man in a suit, hurrying on his way somewhere, swerved right around the outside wall, without breaking step, contorting his body as if he was water flowing around an island, but with a lack of expression that suggested nothing unusual.

  He hadn’t even noticed there was anything in his way.

  They checked over the ruins.

  Quill was all the time aware that, to any passers-by, they must look like some demented group of mime artistes pretending to look into nooks and crannies in mid-air. By the way the others were looking but not touching, and occasionally straightening up when someone laughed, they felt much the same.

  ‘If we’re going to carry on in this job,’ he said to them, ‘embarrassment is going to have to be the least of our worries.’ To underline that, he called over some distant private-security personnel who’d started to take an interest, and showed them his warrant card. A quick chat with them revealed no local problems except some disturbances involving youths, in the evenings.

  The adjacent garden annex apparently belonged to the nearby firm of De Souza and Raymonde.

  Quill swept his hand over the surface of the table. It seemed to be made of granite. There were traces of a floor underneath it, on which could be glimpsed signs of . . .

  ‘The same pattern that’s on the table,’ confirmed Sefton. ‘That’s a pentagram, such as is used as a protective symbol.’

  ‘Obviously a not very protective symbol,�
�� said Costain, gesturing at the ruin around them. ‘Have you been taking occult evening classes?’

  ‘I’ve been reading up on this stuff,’ Sefton admitted, ‘wanting to, you know, survive.’

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Quill. ‘Give me the who, what, when, why.’

  ‘Relatively recent,’ said Ross, studying the table. ‘There’s bird shit on this thing—’

  ‘Do you reckon the birds can see it?’

  ‘—and, comparing it to this car that’s been sitting outside my flat for the last few months—’

  ‘That’s really the limit of our useful forensics now?’ remarked Costain. ‘That’s going to be an issue.’

  ‘—this has been open to the sky for quite a lot longer than that.’ She put her palm on the surface. ‘But it’s hardly weathered, so we’re talking only a few years that it’s been exposed, not centuries.’

  ‘If I was asked to guess what we’re looking at,’ said Sefton. ‘I’d say it’s some sort of meeting room, with a stone table out of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, out here all on its own—’

  ‘Not on its own,’ said Costain, standing at the far corner and looking towards the long shadow of the De Souza and Raymonde skyscraper. ‘Look at where that path leads. This little room belongs to that enormous building.’

  ‘Right, so we’ll be having a word,’ said Quill. ‘That could be the who of who owns this – scary architects.’

  ‘Masons,’ suggested Sefton. ‘And now we’re in the Da Vinci Code.’

  ‘And as for the why,’ said Quill, ‘this place doesn’t look like a bomb’s hit it. No scarring anywhere, not even on this lovely table; no sign of concussive debris; no fire damage . . .’

  ‘Even if it was attacked with hammers,’ said Ross, ‘where’s the rubble? That’s what makes it look like a historical ruin—’

  ‘Because someone’s tidied up,’ said Costain. ‘Which kind of implies this place was subject to some sort of . . . special attack.’

  ‘But if they could do this,’ said Quill, ‘they could have just left it flattened, couldn’t they? Or left it as a mountain of candyfloss or something.’

  ‘Which then implies,’ said Sefton, ‘that it was left here like this deliberately as—’

  ‘A sign,’ said Ross, ‘a warning.’

  They walked the entire floor, each taking a quarter of the small area, treading with care, staring down at it as they went. Costain brushed some leaf mulch aside with his shoe, and then called out to the others.

  It was a small loop of rope, connected to a metal ring set into one of the larger floor tiles. Costain bent down to pull it—

  Sefton called for him to stop, and went over.

  ‘Okay,’ said Costain, ‘what sort of extra protection have you got for me?’

  Sefton thought about it for a moment. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  Costain let out a long breath and put his fingers into the loop again. ‘I wasn’t feeling as scared, before you did that.’ He heaved on the loop. He grabbed his straining wrist with his other hand and put his full weight into it—

  A row of several tiles flew up, leaf mulch falling from them, and slammed onto the ground like the lid of a chest. The team looked down into what was below. A dark space, that smell of a library—

  ‘There are books down there,’ said Quill, aware of the copper’s relish in his voice. ‘Documents.’

  Ross clomped over to a chair standing in her quarter of the area and moved it aside. It had been in front of a small post with a metal rotary lever on it. ‘I was waiting to mention it until after I’d finished examining my section,’ she said. ‘Could someone please—?’

  Sefton turned the handle. It, too, took a little effort. He leaned on it with all his weight. ‘Rusty,’ he said. There was a sudden noise from under them, and then something rushed up out of the gap in the tiles and into the ruins—

  And came clanking to a halt with a solid click of machinery. Wooden racks that looked to form part of some Victorian library. Containing row after row of cards and documents. Quill let out a long, exultant breath.

  They found spindles full of information, too, that had to be hauled out of the ground, and then spun so fast that, when they slammed to a stop, they swayed as if they were going to collapse. Sefton found himself excitedly moving back and forth between all this information, exchanging glances with Ross, both of them interested by virtue of their own speciality.

  This was what he was now: a police specialist in . . . well, call it the London underworld. ‘There are gaps,’ he announced. ‘Look at it, someone’s been through this.’ He opened up a polished wooden case with brass handles, and found a velvet interior with . . . he put the vanes he’d used to find this place into the gaps, and they fitted perfectly. ‘There’s been a bit of looting but, of course, it’s only been by those who’ve got the Sight. We might get a lot of evidence here, but the site’ll have been filleted for anything that’s powerful in itself.’

  They were going to need at least a large van to take away this haul. The light was failing them, the big shadows of the skyscrapers obscuring the ruin, more and more people passing through the square as they headed home from work. They all looked at them curiously.

  Quill and Costain went to commandeer bags and boxes from anywhere they could, and Ross called Mehta to tell him to take his boat back to his nick. There was no authority onto which they could pass this crime scene, if it was one; no experts to examine all this in situ. Forensics just would not see anything out here, so this had to be their business now, thought Sefton, and theirs alone.

  They started to put everything into the bags and boxes systematically. Until suddenly Sefton realized that, in his hand, he was holding something like a personnel file. He called everyone over. Inside the file were just photographs of five people. The looks on their faces were proud, almost smug. ‘The “Continuing Projects Team”,’ he said, reading aloud. He had a quick look through the job descriptions on each photo and raised an eyebrow. ‘A brief, an architect, a priest, a senior civil servant, even someone from the BBC.’

  Ross looked up from her phone. ‘None of whom are recorded anywhere.’

  ‘All of whom,’ said Quill, ‘have been forgotten.’

  ‘Think of the energy,’ said Sefton, ‘that someone is putting into keeping that going.’ He gestured around him. ‘Into this.’

  They ended up reading by torchlight amid the ruins. They were all too interested to wait until they got it back to the Portakabin. ‘It’s all about . . . buildings,’ said Sefton, ‘shapes. Nothing much here about people.’

  ‘And this lot,’ observed Quill, ‘go on about “protocols” all the bloody time.’

  ‘I think they,’ Ross flapped the folder, ‘must be the “old law” that Losley talked about.’

  ‘And maybe this,’ Costain gestured at the ruins around them, ‘was when those goalposts got moved.’

  They thought about that in silence for a while. Sefton was about to suggest that it was time to pack up and summon that van over, when Ross made a sudden noise. She held up a personnel file with nothing inside it, which she had just found between the remains of two filing boxes.

  On the front of it was written: Detective Superintendent Rebecca Lofthouse.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Quill.

  There was a noise from nearby, and they all looked up. Standing there was Lofthouse herself. She looked very uncertain, and was holding what looked like an ancient key. It had a gravity about it. It was a thing of the Sight.

  ‘Oh,’ said Quill, ‘and I’d seen that on her charm bracelet so many times.’ He stood up, and they all did.

  Sefton suddenly remembered his sensation, inside the circle in the bookshop, that there should be five of them, rather than four. He looked back to the pentagram on the broken table: there had been five members of this team, too. And there had been that weird moment when Lofthouse had got them to sit at very particular places around that meeting table. ‘Five,’ he said to
Ross, under his breath.

  ‘Five is better than four,’ she replied. ‘Like the fortune-teller said.’

  Lofthouse stepped forward, looking between them and the key in her hand.

  ‘There’s something here I can’t see, isn’t there, Jimmy?’ she said.

  Quill could only nod.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘now I know why I’ve been supporting you all this time. This explains a lot.’

  GLOSSARY

  the Admiral Duncan – gay pub in Soho

  Airwave – a type of police radio

  baggy – a plastic bag containing cocaine

  batty boy – West Indian derogatory term for a gay man

  ’blige! – North London expression of laughing astonishment, perhaps short for ‘obliged’

  the Boleyn Ground – alternative name for Upton Park, home of West Ham Football Club

  brass – slang term for a prostitute

  butcher’s, have a – slang for ‘take a look’

  CAD number – Computer Aided Dispatch reference number, which allows police on the move to keep those that need to know informed of their whereabouts

  Chelsea tractor – sports utility vehicles that the upper classes use incongruously to get around London

  chisel – slang term for cocaine

  chop shop – a garage where stolen cars are illegally serviced and altered

  CID – Criminal Investigation Department, the branch of a police force consisting of plain-clothes detectives

  CRIMINT – a national crime database

  DC – detective constable

  DCI – detective chief inspector, senior to a DI

  detective superintendent – or ‘super’, senior to a DCI

  DI – detective inspector, senior to a DS

  DPS – Department of Professional Standards – see below

  DS – detective sergeant, senior to a DC

  estuary English – the sounds of modern working-class speech in South-East London, and areas bordering the River Thames