London Falling Read online

  Now she looked up from where she was checking the emails on her phone. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘It is what she does every time.’

  They stood outside the Losley house that Costain and Sefton had visited in Wembley, under a vast polyurethane tent that had been put up to obscure the site, the rain pooling in its canopy. Forensics workers had uncovered a pit in what had been the garden. The sides of the pit revealed strata of bones, including small skulls. It was like an archaeological dig of a battle that had only involved children. Working to a pattern as they did so, the forensics teams had found a similar collection of skeletons at all of Losley’s houses, almost simultaneously.

  ‘That would have taken . . . centuries,’ said Costain, ‘she’s that old. She’s been doing this all that time and . . . nobody’s noticed.’

  ‘Sod starting with 1900, I’ll pull all the parameters off my searches, start them at the year dot,’ said Ross. Now she sounded to Sefton to be deliberately trying to energize the rest of them. ‘I haven’t found anything odd in the list of bills from the councils yet, apart from for all the houses we know about, but I will. We’ll have loads of nuclear DNA by now. Those kids in the cauldron were taken during the last year—’

  ‘And we’d find three new ones,’ said Quill, ‘if we could locate her new house.’

  ‘So bells will start ringing on the NDNAD, and we’ve put out the word for open cases featuring missing kids.’

  ‘No,’ he sighed, as if Ross was a fool. ‘She’s fixing this. We’d have heard something straight away. Three from the same family? Who can lose three kids and not report it?’

  ‘Jimmy,’ said Ross, raising her voice, and that was the first time Sefton had heard her use Quill’s name, ‘we’ll have her.’

  Quill seemed to be on the verge of bellowing something, as he stared at the bones, but when he actually spoke his voice was again just an urgent whisper. ‘How?’

  Sefton decided that now was the time for him to speak up. He’d been sitting on what he’d been working on, expecting that any moment a lead would come up through traditional police work. Talking about what he’d been doing seemed . . . obscene in comparison to what they’d just witnessed, but he couldn’t see another way forward. He didn’t know if what he was going to offer was just a distraction, but even that might do some good right now. So he made himself speak. ‘While we’re waiting for more evidence,’ he said, ‘maybe we can . . . work the background?’

  He didn’t feel any more confident as he showed them, back at the Portakabin, what he’d found. He felt that he was risking something again, showing them the part of all this that, for some reason, felt most personal. But this was all for those kids. Everything they did now had to be for them. The Ops Board had only changed in that it now had that photofit picture under the heading for Losley’s lord, and a much bigger piece of card ready for a list of her victims.

  ‘Jack,’ he said, showing them a picture on a London folklore website. ‘That thing I met, its full name is Jack in the Green. Sort of like a big tree.’

  ‘Those are legs sticking out,’ said Ross, studying the photo. ‘You’re not saying it was a bloke in a costume?’

  ‘’Course not, not what I ran into, but it can be. People dressed like this still lead May Day parades. They have since the sixties, a revival of what used to go on in London every year, centuries back. He’s something the old trade guilds put together, as a big showpiece. They went from house to house, all of them in different sorts of costume – dames, princes – to collect a kind of tip, their only extra for the year. Happened a lot around Soho, so he’s still in the right place. They used to stop at the end of the circuit and all dance around Jack, as if he was a kind of mobile maypole.’

  ‘And someone got sacrificed at the end of it?’ said Quill. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

  Sefton paused. ‘Everybody says stuff like that . . . that this must go back to before the Romans, but . . . you don’t often find any evidence. I looked up those ships of yours as well,’ he looked to Ross, ‘HMS London and HMS Victoria. The first,’ he found the photo of what looked like a computer simulation of the ship on the bottom of the river and read from the text, ‘escorted King Charles II back from Holland at the Restoration, then it blew up in 1665, and sank in the Thames Estuary.’ He went to the next image. ‘The second, on the other hand, was the most powerful ironclad afloat, specially named after the Queen on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee . . . but it sank in a collision with another British ship, in the Mediterranean even, in 1893.’

  ‘So these are ships haunting the Thames?’ suggested Quill. He sounded impatient, but he was at least waiting for Sefton to get to the point.

  ‘It’s more complicated than that.’ Sefton looked hopefully around at their bemused faces. ‘I think I’ve got a good example we can look at. And it runs on a timetable.’

  But why did it have to be here?

  As he led the other three along the tree-lined avenues of Kensington in the rain, Sefton wondered if there was anything more than coincidence to this. The winter rain was pissing it down on houses that had flights of steps leading up to their front doors, and three different kinds of compost bin in their forecourts. Exactly the sort of place he’d grown up in. Just round the corner, in fact, was the building where his dad had used to rent the upper-floor flat with the roof garden. Sefton had regularly stood in his school uniform at a bus stop a couple of streets away, and been literally spat at by the kids walking past as they headed for the local comprehensive. That London accent they used, it was the same one his tormentors at school had used – and he’d ended up using it, too, as a way of life.

  A bus stop. Waiting for a school bus. That connected to something very particular in his head. And now this case had brought him back here. It seemed that coincidence definitely should be part of this stuff. But if you started paying attention to all possible coincidence, finding meaning in everything, then you’d be fit for the loony bin. And that would be worse for them now than for anyone else.

  The others were all checking their phones, every other minute, for news from the DNA databases. Sefton found the bus stop he was after and checked it against the website on his phone. Yeah, this was the one. The four of them managed to cram into the shelter beside two nannies talking in what sounded like Russian, and an elderly man in a dufflecoat that smelt of beer. The display showed nine minutes till the next scheduled service. But what they were after, if the internet was to be believed, would come along a couple of minutes earlier than that. There was no reason why they couldn’t try to see it at a whole variety of places, but here was special somehow. It was only here that he’d read about it actually appearing to other people. Who knew if having this ‘Sight’ would make it different for them? This would be a first experiment . . . if this stuff could be experimented on at all.

  On the bus itself was where everything had been worst for him. A small bunch of kids, who’d all found their different reasons to pick on the posh little black child, had built up complex narratives of abuse, rhymes, stories and things they’d make him do that were repeated many times a week for five years. Many different drivers had all ignored it. Hell is other people. That bus was the cauldron he himself had been boiled in, and that had made the UC.

  He forced those thoughts out of his head and concentrated on the job at hand. He looked again at his watch. ‘One minute.’

  They all craned their heads to look out of the shelter and along the suburban street.

  ‘It’s not due yet,’ said the man in the dufflecoat.

  Sefton nodded in reply. Through the rain that was bouncing off the trees and floating across the street, there appeared shining ancient lights, shining too brightly while yelling about what was approaching . . . and a grey shape, red faded to dust-coloured, was emerging, approaching faster than any vehicle should.

  Coming out of the rain, a bus roared into sight. The number 7 with its final destination, Russell Square, indicated on the front, and adverts for O
valtine and Guinness along its side. There were the silhouettes of a driver and his passengers. It was only the age of the vehicle which made it seem like a ‘ghost’. But it was obviously something to do with the Sight. Sefton took a quick look at the other people at the bus stop. The Russian nannies were looking straight through the bus and past it, as they continued talking, but the old man . . . no, he wasn’t like that side-stepping bloke in Soho, because he wasn’t so certain, but nevertheless he had turned his head quickly as if to follow the movement, as if he’d just glimpsed something but wasn’t sure. Then he’d looked away again.

  Not giving anything away, Sefton let his gaze follow the departing bus, glimpsing only shadows inside, through the entrance leading to the stairway at the back. And suddenly he shuddered at what he felt there. He’d had a sudden flashback to that dark warm void below him. Not that he believed in Hell – he was sure Costain had come to the wrong conclusion about what he’d seen – but he knew what it would be like for himself: a bigger bus, with more people inside to contrive torments for him. What would have happened if he’d raised his hand just now and requested it to stop? Where would it have taken him? Probably not to Russell Square.

  He watched the bus vanish into the rain again, the cloud of water that had parted for it dropping like a curtain and filling the space where it had been. He had to grab hold of the bus shelter to stop himself shaking.

  They found a Starbucks. ‘In June 1934,’ Sefton read from his laptop, ‘London Transport held an inquest into the death of a bus driver who’d been killed at the junction of Cambridge Gardens and St Mark’s Road, after he swerved violently for no apparent reason. Other drivers testified at that inquest that they had also had to swerve at that spot, to avoid a double-decker bus, a number 7 to be precise, in the livery of the General Omnibus Company – which had become part of London Transport the year before – which “whizzed out at them”, and then disappeared. These appearances happened at two particular times of day, there being a morning service and an afternoon one.’

  ‘So the bus driver that got killed didn’t stick around to become a ghost,’ said Costain, ‘but we just saw the ghost bus that killed him.’

  ‘My point,’ said Sefton, ‘is this. You hear stories like that all your life and think: cool, a ghost bus. But now we have to look at this stuff analytically . . . a ghost bus?! The “ghost” of a motor vehicle? A public conveyance, presumably, which didn’t head towards the light, move on to join the choir invisible in . . . bus heaven, the great terminus in the sky, where all good buses go when they . . . I don’t know, break down, but instead is doomed to . . . drive eternally the streets of Earth! How can there be a ghost bus?!’ He looked between them, hoping they were getting this. ‘There isn’t even any record of a number 7 crashing.’

  ‘There very probably would have been at least one death occurring on any particular bus route—’ began Ross.

  ‘So one death onboard is all it takes to make an entire bus into a ghost? Why not ghost houses where people died, or ghost hospitals? Every bit of London would be full of them. Listen, what about those ships you saw?’ He felt the risk of pursuing this, the risk of losing them with theory rather than the sort of factual detail coppers worked with. But Ross had said they should allow assumptions. And more than mere assumption, he was certain, he was starting to put together a working hypothesis. ‘They must have had lots of passengers on them but, in their case, as in the case of that particular bus, we don’t see any of those people sticking around to become ghosts. We see the vehicles themselves. Even if we agree that vehicles can “die” and come back to “haunt” places, one of those ships was sunk somewhere else! So what’s it doing on the Thames? We could find, if we wanted to search the bottom of the sea, what remained of the actual hull of one of those ghost ships of yours, haul it up, restore it to full working order and launch it here, and then there’d be the real ship and its ghost floating on the same river! How does that work? And what about that Jack thing I met? He’s not even a real . . . person, or vehicle or anything that you might even think could die and haunt somewhere, he’s just an . . . idea!’

  ‘You’re saying it’s not always about something that’s died and stays on here afterwards,’ said Costain.

  ‘But sometimes it is,’ said Quill, ‘like with Harry’s dad, or the kid that bloke at the football match was carrying.’

  There was silence as they considered that.

  ‘That old fellow at the bus stop saw it,’ said Costain.

  ‘Yeah, he did,’ Sefton found himself pointing at Costain as if he’d got an answer right in a quiz game, and realized how patronizing that looked and lowered his hand. ‘But only for a second . . . and that’s another thing. I don’t think this is about who’s got the Sight and who hasn’t. I think it’s a . . . spectrum of who can see what, when and where. That place, for some reason, is where it’s easier for people without the Sight to see the thing. And then it vanished for us too. But maybe we could follow it and see it elsewhere. Or maybe we could see it all the time if we used some of those hand gestures.’

  Ross managed one of her awkward smiles. ‘You’ve got something going here,’ she acknowledged. ‘Go on, establish the narrative.’

  Sefton shared that look with her, feeling relieved.

  He took them to Charterhouse Square near the Barbican and, as the rain battered down on them, they bent down to hear more clearly the agonized, continual screaming under the carefully mown grass. Quill got quickly to his feet and walked away a few paces. ‘A plague pit,’ explained Sefton. ‘Some of them are meant to have been buried alive.’

  ‘Ghosts again,’ said Costain.

  ‘Yeah, sort of. It’s meant to be the ones who were still alive doing the screaming.’

  Quill sighed. ‘Fuck me. I wish there was some point at which this team of ours could decide to go off duty, ’cos I need a pint.’

  Sefton nodded obligingly. ‘We can do that, too, and continue the demonstration.’

  They ended up drinking at a pub called the Sutton Arms. And Sefton felt an awkwardness as they had a pint without having officially come off duty. But Quill was right. With just the four of them in the only unit pursuing this, they could never really go off duty, so they had to cut themselves some slack. There still hadn’t been further word from the database searches. He asked the pub regulars what their ghost ‘Charley’ was like, and then led the other three as they looked around the place, finally finding a shimmering man with a ruddy face sitting on his own in a corner, staring wide-eyed at every woman. He looked part funny and part scary, in a ratio which changed, Sefton thought, almost every second.

  ‘Definitely scary,’ said Ross when he asked her. And, in that same moment, Sefton watched as the man’s leer became less a thing of seaside postcards and more like something you’d imagine on the face of a rapist. ‘I wouldn’t mind interviewing him, mind. What could one of those things tell us, if they’ve been hanging round for centuries?’

  ‘Harry’s dad wasn’t much use.’

  ‘That might not always be the case, though. Maybe I should work out a questionnaire.’

  They sipped a careful two pints each. Quill hesitated a moment when Sefton said they’d get a better look now it was dark. But finally he followed them. Sefton took them to the Charterhouse itself, off the square of the same name.

  ‘I looked up some of the most historical places,’ he explained, ‘by which I mean places where terrible shit happened. Places that are meant to have ghosts. This was originally a priory, like a monastery, and it’s been used for all sorts of stuff since.’ They entered the complex of cobblestone courtyards and old buildings, with signs pointing to restaurants and toilets, and still a few hardy tourists. Immediately Sefton pointed out the wraithlike figure of a monk drifting through the grounds. They watched for a minute as it repeated the same pattern of movements. Quite a few tourists seemed to look round as it passed them, but none of them stopped and stared. Conditions, whatever they were, obviously weren’
t right for them to see it entirely.

  ‘Now that,’ said Costain, ‘is a ghost.’

  Sefton consulted the website map, and walked them over to a specific stairwell inside the main building. He leaped back as a man dressed like something out of Shakespeare walked out of it, with his head tucked underneath one arm.

  ‘Even better,’ said Ross.

  ‘That,’ Sefton said, ‘is Thomas Howard, the fourth Duke of Norfolk.’

  ‘And he is—?’