The Severed Streets Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  By Paul Cornell

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Neil, with love and thanks

  PROLOGUE

  London in the summer.

  One fine day and don’t the English go mad? Every square of grass suddenly acquires a PA with a sandwich and a book about bondage. Sound seems to carry further. Music and news catch you unawares.

  ‘Police marching in Trafalgar Square, in advance of the forthcoming vote, chanting they want the right to strike…’

  White-legged men in ridiculous shorts. Socks under sandals.

  ‘In the shadow of that fucking ridiculous—… You know what we need down here? Not an “Olympic Velodrome”! What’s it for now?’

  Pimm’s with the sun shining off the pitcher. Furrowed brows are now white lines on pink.

  ‘Cuts in front-line policing, never mind the specialist units. If the riots continue, if the Summer of Blood arrives, there will be areas where there are riots, where the police will not be able to go!’

  In the evenings, crowds spill out of the pubs onto the warm pavement. At six in the evening, you can hear the number drone of cricket scores on the radio.

  ‘They are expecting us to work for free, when they’ve sold this country…’

  Wimbledon and Glastonbury and the Proms …

  ‘Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!’

  There’s something about the blank summer sky – when the endless dog day, global-warming, tufty storm clouds part and unseasonal shivers give way to proper hay fever – that demands fire. Sparks in the blue black. But sparks sink back to the ground. Where the sparks land, there is fire.

  There’s a car going past the ends of streets. The car is polished so the sun reflects off it. There are pools of shadow at the end of every street. In every corner that stays dark there’s a beggar now, an addict or a whore.

  This is my car. I’m in it. It’s polished like this because of me. It’s a big rich car because of me.

  What? Is that me? Is this me now, in this big car?! How did that happen? Who does this summer belong to? Who’s coming?

  * * *

  Michael Spatley MP, chief secretary to the Treasury, woke with a gasp. He was in the back of his official air-conditioned car, but he was sweating. Light was sliding across his face. He looked out through the tinted windows, and there were the reassuring streets of London. He must have fallen asleep almost immediately when they’d left the House of Commons. They hadn’t even reached Green Park yet. The traffic on Victoria Street was heavy this evening. Spatley loosened his tie and let out a long breath. He’d been having such terrible dreams lately. He always woke up feeling as if he was being accused of something.

  He really should find a weekday flat closer than Kensington. Now he was in the Cabinet, he could afford it, just about. His title sounded so grand, but the pay was actually painfully less than he could have earned in industry. The general public just didn’t get that. An unexpected smell came to him, from outside the car. He hit the button to lower the window. It didn’t work.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Tunstall. Tunstall was Spatley’s regular driver from the Ministerial Car Service. He had a finger to his communication earpiece. ‘I’ve switched on the security features. There’s a problem up ahead. We’ll be turning off in a sec and going the pretty way.’

  ‘Thanks, Brian.’ The smell was of smoke. A big fire – not just wood, but tyres and that stench of hot tar, way beyond the scent of baking streets. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You know – the protests. Okay, here we go.’ He swung the wheel, the angle of light changed across the car interior, and they were off down a side street where shops lined the lower floor of the surrounding tall buildings.

  It was good to be on first-name terms with one’s driver. Spatley liked the way Tunstall dealt with whatever got in their way, as if life in the capital was one big traffic jam to be slipped around. Spatley took his iPad from his bag and checked Sky News.

  ‘… incidents in Peckham, where police have yet to arrive, report residents. Shop owners are taking to the streets in an effort to protect their property, some armed with makeshift weapons. Meanwhile, unscheduled anti-cuts protests by flash mobs have slowed traffic to a halt in parts of central London…’

  That was new: ‘flash mob’ now an offhand part of the news vocabulary. A month ago that would have been ‘so-called’. He watched the images for a while: kids in Peckham in hoods or with scarves over their faces, running, in the sunshine, which looked odd, to see all that energy while it was still light. Cut to a mass of kids who looked much more middle class, bushy beards and skinny shirts, rushing into the foyer of some big corporation. Spatley watched the protestors; many of them were holding their phone cameras in the air, like crosses to repel evil, as they upended a vat of what looked like blood but was surely some sort of dye onto the PA’s chair. That imagery wouldn’t play well for them: a scared black PA, chubby, nice, furious at them. The problem was that you couldn’t see their faces, with the front row of the protestors wearing those aristocrat masks with top hats, some of them sporting the little capes.

  To him, those masks just looked like giving in. As if revealing who you were these days was not just dangerous, as they wanted to imply, but actually impossible. Face coverings weren’t allowed at certain protests now; he’d voted for that legislation. He’d thought of Muslim women as he did it, and hoped for some care to be taken in the specifics, but, well, the debate just hadn’t gone in that direction.

  He noted that there was long brunette hair spilling out of the back of one of the masks in the news clip, small, youthful breasts filling out the crisp white shirt. No silver-topped walking canes this time, though, not since the first of these protests, when the police had classed the canes as weapons and charged right in, and several of the protestors had suddenly understood what they’d got into. ‘Protestors’ – was that the right word, even? I mean, come on, they talked about being against ‘the cuts’ – that was all he ever heard from them, ‘cut cut cut’ – but could many of them even sum up the e
conomic case against? ‘What do we want?’ ‘It’s complicated!’ That had got a laugh and a groan of annoyance at the same time from the audience on Have I Got News for You the other night, as if a satirical show should only have a go at the government and not at a bunch of bloody students. He wished he could sit them down and try to persuade them that he and his colleagues on the Liberal Democrat side of the Coalition were actually doing their best to hold the fucking Tories back.

  Or … well, that was what they kept saying to other people and to each other. It was more that the presence of him and his colleagues made the fucking Tories even more like the fucking Tories, because they had to keep proving themselves to be so damned hardcore. He kept finding the images coming unbidden into his head: people dragged out of shops and put into vans; Orwellian signs about reporting illegal immigrants; reporters being told that they had no right to know. Wasn’t this exactly what he’d campaigned against, not very long ago?

  He wasn’t going to let himself give in to hopelessness. If he could reveal what he’d discovered in the last few weeks, those ‘Toff’ protestors in the masks would be glad he was still in government. Then maybe the Coalition would mean something. Then maybe he would mean something. Because he was actually on the point of demonstrating that there was something much, much worse just under the surface – something he could root out and bring into the light.

  Yes, in the last few days he’d made up his mind about this. He was going to act, and he was going to do it soon. He found his hand going to the inside pocket of his jacket, as it reflexively did when he needed to be reassured about what he had there. He stopped it. He knew what he had. Now he had to act on it.

  They had turned left and were now heading slowly along a backstreet: residential, nice window boxes. That smell was getting stronger, and now he could hear something in the distance: drums and rhythmic shouting. They passed a crowd outside a pub with people in suits enjoying the sunshine, all looking in one direction – the direction they were headed, towards where the sound and the smell were coming from. They weren’t looking nervous, but interested, laughing, raising their glasses. Here it comes, say the British, we love a comfy disaster, spices things up, doesn’t it? The fuckers. Why was it so hard to get any of them to believe in anything positive?

  ‘Brian?’

  ‘We’re heading towards the demo now, but we’re going to turn off down Horseferry in a second.’

  ‘Okay.’

  How would it be if he told Tunstall to stop and open the door, and if he got out and followed the sound of the drums and the smell of the smoke and went and joined in with the protest? Or he could find a box and stand on it and orate to the crowd and say, We’re actually you, we’re the opposition and the government at the same time! Can’t you see that?

  The car moved forwards again. Suddenly, the volume of noise from ahead grew, as if a mass of people had turned a corner. Oh, here came – God, was this them? There were people moving back down the street. Ordinary people, not protestors, trotting out of the way. Then the first of the kids in those costumes, running hard, not after them, but away from something.

  The main body of the protest had presumably run into police efforts to contain it somewhere up ahead.

  ‘What the hell, Brian?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Tunstall looked over his shoulder, wondering about reversing, but they were stuck among cars that were all frantically honking their horns.

  Spatley looked round. Protestors were running the other way up the street now too, appearing behind them, meeting up with those from the other direction, all desperately looking around. Oh, don’t say that the police had kettled them in here, right in this street! In moments the car was surrounded: kids dressed in that Toff costume; kids with placards; kids just looking excited and sweaty, bare chested in shorts, sunburned from the day out, sparkling with factor fifty, scarves ready to be wrapped around their faces, those masks and capes and hats scattered among them.

  A placard slammed against the side window, then the window opposite, then bodies swiftly started to surround the car. His view became obscured as more and more of the kids started thumping against the side of the vehicle. Those masked faces loomed as they tried to peer in, rather intimidating, especially when up close. Those things were such a mistake on their part. They should be trying to make people love them, not be scared of them. They couldn’t see in through the darkened windows. They were just assuming someone important or rich was in here, probably a ‘banker’. Some of them would know what a banker was: Mummy or Daddy. That was maybe why they hated them so much. Tunstall was muttering at them, annoyed. He hit the horn, held onto it. ‘I’ve called for backup; we should have you out of here in a bit. Don’t worry, it’s not as if they can get in.’

  The car started to rock from the weight of bodies against both sides. Then the protestors must have felt the movement, and a cheer went up, and they started to synchronize, to do it deliberately. The ends of placards started to hammer against the windows. There was one of those canes thumping at the glass beside his head. But Spatley knew the glass would hold.

  ‘Little shites,’ called Tunstall. ‘Wish I could reverse into ’em.’

  ‘We can’t, I’m afraid.’ Just for the record. ‘How long until that backup gets here?’ He glanced at the window beside him and didn’t hear Tunstall’s reply, because suddenly his attention was caught by what he saw there.

  It was another of those masks, but shoved right up against the glass. Even like that, you still couldn’t see anything behind the eye slits. Was someone just holding it there? No, there was clearly a body out there too. Spatley leaned closer to examine it. They sold these outfits online; some of them were the proper ones, so called, and some of them were cheap knock-offs. The Chinese were shipping them over. Capitalism in action, on the back of the anti-capitalist movement, straight from the Communists. Anything could mean anything nowadays. The top hat this figure wore was pushed up against the window too. Whoever wore it was almost acting as if he could push his way into the car.

  No, wait, was that…? This wasn’t possible. Was he dreaming again?

  The mask was somehow … forcing the glass inwards around it, the brow of the hat pushing ahead of it, bending only slightly with the pressure, the window becoming a viscous liquid. Was it some sort of chemical?

  There might be genuine danger here. Spatley looked quickly to Tunstall, but he was oblivious, hitting the horn again. ‘Brian!’

  The man looked over his shoulder, looked right at the face slowly pushing through the glass, and it was suddenly, horribly evident to Spatley that the driver couldn’t see anything unusual. ‘They’ll get bored. You hold on.’ He sounded less certain now, nervous even.

  ‘But…’ Spatley looked between the two faces. He didn’t know how to say that he could see something that Tunstall couldn’t.

  Oh. This must be what having a stress hallucination was like.

  He turned back, trying to control himself, to watch as the face shoved itself through the glass, the head almost completely here now. He was thinking about Ann giving birth to Jocelyn, he realized. Was this some sort of dream sign, that he should accept this protest movement or whatever it was into his … his car…? No, no. That was weakness.

  Below the head, something was pushing through the material of the door itself. Of course. If glass could do that, so could metal. Spatley watched it form. It was going to become a hand, he saw. It was holding something, metal flowing all around it. Then the object heaved its way right through the door and into clear view.

  The hand was holding a cut-throat razor.

  Spatley yelled and ripped off his seatbelt. He shoved himself across the seats, scrambling to get his back to the far door. ‘Brian!’ I’m awake, he wanted to yell, I’m awake! ‘Let me out!’

  ‘What is it?’ The driver had turned to look again. He was looking right at where a second hand had pushed its way through the door. The thing’s upper body was now joining the head as it snaked into the car.


  ‘Can’t you see it?! You have to let me out! They’re … they’re getting in!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Spatley closed his eyes tightly, opened them again, and the figure was still there. It slowly and carefully pulled its knees out of the door to kneel on the seat; that mask of a face was looking at him, the razor raised so that the blade was a line in his gaze, the other hand resting on the upholstery. Its meniscus method of entry sealed behind it and now it was entirely in the car with him. Its posture was that of a dancer, of someone playing a part in a mime show. Spatley grasped that feeling desperately to himself – that whatever else this was, there must be a person inside there. He still couldn’t make himself demand that Tunstall see it. ‘I … I…’ Even trying to talk to it felt terrible, as if he was making it real by acknowledging it. ‘What do you want?’ he asked, as quietly as he could. ‘Who are—?’

  It leaped at him.

  He flung up a hand to protect himself, but the hardest punch he’d ever felt hit him in his neck. He screamed at the force of it and threw himself forward to fight. But, as he moved, he realized that something wasn’t right in his throat. Okay, he was injured. He got his fingers to the mask. He tried to prise it from the thing’s face. His other hand grabbed the hand with the razor, but it was as if he was trying to force his fingers into the cracks of a wall. He suddenly felt how huge this thing was, how strong. How … old. The razor hand wasn’t yet moving, but – his throat … he had to look down. Blood was somehow now flowing freely down his chest. He felt the weakness of the blood loss in that moment, the darkness thundering into his head, as if he was suddenly up a mountain and needed desperately to breathe. He tried and couldn’t. The hand wrenched itself out of his weak baby grip. That hard pointed punch landed again, now in his torso. In that moment, Spatley knew he was terribly wounded, knew that the second blow had punctured something far inside him.

  Michael Spatley bellowed with pain. Instead of sound, what burst from his throat was a deluge of blood.

  * * *

  Brian Tunstall looked round at the sudden sound from behind him. In the back seat, Spatley was thrashing around. It was just him in there. It took the driver a moment to take in what he was seeing, to be sure there was nobody else in the car. ‘Medical emergency,’ he shouted into his headset. ‘Ambulance required on scene.’ He was unclipping his seatbelt as he said it, turning to – to do what, exactly?