London Falling Page 27

  A marked car arrived a minute later, and took them at high speed, blues and twos blaring, through the crowds of people that now lined the roads, straight to Ivydale Road, where the crowds were even larger. Quill saw that some of them had makeshift weapons now: tools and cricket bats. But they were holding back, leaping aside to let through the multiple police cars that were racing down the road towards an intercept point.

  ‘How’s she doing this?’ the driver was yelling.

  Quill’s team jumped out of the car without anyone answering her. They rushed towards where the other vehicles were converging—

  Just as Losley burst through, from a gap between houses that shouldn’t have been there. She spun and looked round with fury on her face, and with a terrible fear that Ross sensed in that second: the hunted animal who would do anything to escape. The crowd roared at her and heaved forward, except at the front, where the people were pushing back, terrified at the sight of her. Terrified but excited and caught up in it.

  Losley looked around at them, at the masses of people and police closing on her from all directions. She looked across the road, from one row of suburban houses to another. She looked at the mob and hissed at them.

  The people in her way broke and scattered.

  She hurled across the road. She went straight through the uniforms. Screams and explosions of blood, and coppers were shouting, She’s got a gun, she’s got a gun. Coppers fell bloodied and injured and crying out but, again, not dead, as if her power was waning at every moment. The crowd began screaming and some of them started running.

  Quill’s team followed, slamming their way through and around members of the public. They were right behind her again. She was running towards a house. She rushed into the garden. She leaped at its front windows, with television light flickering behind them. The glass caved in, and there were shouts from inside, and then screams.

  Quill got to the door and hammered on it. ‘Police!’ he bellowed. ‘Police!’

  A woman opened it. ‘She’s— she’s—!’

  He burst past her. The others followed.

  She was already through the house, and out a back door, now just seconds ahead of them. They could almost lay hands on her. Ross felt her hands clutching at the thought of it.

  Mora ran straight down the thin back garden. They sprinted after her, ducking past a rotary washing line and crazy paving and gnomes and a rotten wooden fence, and at the bottom of the garden there was—

  A high stone wall. And beyond it an expanse of trees. Thick, even with only the bare bones of winter, a black mass against very distant lights.

  With an impossible leap and two upward scuttles like a spider, hand over hand, Mora was over the wall.

  They themselves slammed against it. ‘Where?’ Quill yelled, turning as the family whose house this was came stumbling outside. She hadn’t had a chance to hurt them.

  ‘That’s Nunhead cemetery,’ the woman said.

  ‘Tonight, somewhere in this 250-year-old, thirty-acre cemetery, reopened less than a decade ago and still partly a ruin, the police think Mora Losley has gone to ground. Attempts to seal the site have proved futile, as groups of people have formed and ventured into the cemetery, guided by their phones and portable devices, taking along torches and improvised weapons. They say there’s safety in numbers, but look at them here, as our helicopter shot captures it: all those lights down there are ordinary people taking the law into their own hands. More and more of them doing so as our coverage has continued, though the latest to arrive are being turned away by what’s now an enormous police presence. Our camera crew is there with one . . . I nearly called him a protestor.’

  ‘We’re all of us parents, and we’ve come down here to ensure—’

  ‘Find her! Find her and make sure she doesn’t get away with it!’

  ‘You seem to have weapons with you?’

  ‘The police better hope they get to her before we do. I’ve got kids!’

  ‘Burn the witch! Burn the witch!’ Half laughter in the young voices, but half meaning it.

  ‘I wish they’d stop calling her a witch. I’m down here to point out to people that this ancient and peaceful tradition . . .’

  ‘It’s absolutely unprecedented. Police have sealed off several roads to stop people from other parts of London heading to the cemetery. Tonight the capital is gripped by anger and fear, and it’s all focused on this one woman. I have here a police statement which says she remains only a suspect, she is not to be approached, but I’m hearing . . . is she even still in the cemetery? We’re getting reports in . . . Now we can go to a map, as we’re getting reports of sightings of Mora Losley in Kentish Town, in Clapham, in Brixton . . .’

  Quill and his team looked out over the expanse of the ancient cemetery. Between the trees flickered torches, everywhere they looked. The landscape of graves and vaults and distant buildings rippled with a strange heat amid the cold of winter. The first place they’d headed had been somewhere Sefton had found on his phone in the Wikipedia description of this place: a restored chapel. They weren’t the first to have that thought. Quill had to yell at crowds of angry people with torches, some of them literally old-style flaming torches, all of whom felt they had a perfect right to be here, who wanted to tell him that if he did his job better, that if he knew what it was like to raise kids in London, with paedophiles on the streets, and now a frigging witch—!

  That was when she’d lunged out at them.

  Costain had lashed out, the others had jumped back. But it had just been a sudden vision of her, a hallucination that immediately faded. A trick, Ross had thought, with sudden hope, something she was trying out to put them off the scent. But as they trudged out of the chapel, they started to see that she was everywhere, near every cluster of people. A sudden vision of her here, a glancing visual impact of something like her there. She kept the crowds yelling that there was something over there, in the darkness. All of them, they were chasing shadows and thus . . . making her be here. Ross leaned against a tree, feeling something so hugely despairing lodging in her lungs and head that she felt it could kill her.

  ‘She’s become remembered,’ said Sefton. ‘The masses have got hold of her. These visions aren’t really her. These are people’s ideas of her. She’s—’

  ‘Everywhere,’ said Quill, looking up from his phone. ‘She’s all over London. There are people in Shoreditch who swear they’ve seen her . . . coppers on the street there who say they nearly grabbed her. And meanwhile the real her . . . she could be anywhere!’

  ‘Do you think she did this deliberately?’ said Ross. ‘Or that she knew it’d happen?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Sefton. ‘Not the way she was running.’

  They finally found a pile of glowing soil behind the building. Losley, with the crowd seeing her everywhere, must have laid down some soil she’d carried with her, on top of the local variety, and used it to vanish again.

  Ross felt the others slump. There had been victories tonight – rescuing the kids, catching the cat – but at such a cost. Dead coppers. She could see it on the faces of the other three. It felt to them that their own selfish problem, their speciality, had reached out and slaughtered their brother officers.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ said Costain to Sefton. Ross saw the accusation evident on his face, about himself as much as them. ‘This is what being remembered looks like. “Do you make sacrifice, or are you remembered,” that’s what she said. You’re either someone who boils your kills in a pot, or you’re someone London remembers. Well, now she’s made a big enough splash for all of London to do that. Now she’s got hold of both sources of energy. Now she’s got all the power she needs. And we gave it to her!’

  ‘The bloody general public gave it to her!’ said Sefton. ‘They’re what we’re really fighting.’

  ‘No change there for coppers,’ sighed Quill. His phone rang at that moment. He listened for a few moments, then gave a few curt instructions. ‘I told them it was okay for them
to move Ballackti,’ he said. ‘The match finished two–nil.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  By a few mornings later, on his morning drive to work, Quill was seeing Losley everywhere. For real, not just in the media. Wherever enough people thought they’d glimpsed her, there was a scarecrow of her fixed in the Sight, jerking and yelling, but making ordinary people who walked past unseeing suddenly look sideways or jump at the fleeting image that had somehow intruded into the corner of their eye. She now seemed to be a fixed and central part of this London that Quill was increasingly feeling separated from.

  The forensics people had finished with the house, whereupon Quill and his team searched it themselves. It had turned out to be the same abandoned Losley house as always. ‘When she’s at home, everything’s the same, down to the same head stuck on the newel post,’ said Ross. ‘She’s clearly willing to spend a lot of energy taking it with her, so I think it’s safe to assume that she’s only got the one actual home.’ She was starting up their continual, endless process of debate again, her tone that of someone who insisted on carrying on marching into the wind. ‘It all then gets folded up and transported through that red door. If we got through there, maybe we could get into all the houses she can use to . . . put her real home in.’

  He could feel the same suspicion in her as in himself. It was as if they were fighting all of London now, with a Losley on every corner. ‘Why wasn’t there a hat-trick?’

  ‘The smiling bastard’s stringing her along,’ said Costain. ‘You keep your soldiers on their toes, always let them know who’s boss.’

  ‘I think he’s getting her wound up,’ said Sefton, barely looking up. ‘Pushing her to go even further.’

  They had turned out for the funerals of the officers from Cartwright’s team who’d been killed when Losley made her escape: PC Andy Stinson and PC John Mattheus. It was a dress-uniform event. Sobbing wife and girlfriend and questioning children. A lot of stony coppers throbbing with anger, all directed towards the thing that Quill and his people had not yet caught. There had been a lot of hearty handshakes, a lot of hard-eyed slaps on the back. ‘You nick her,’ one DI urged. ‘You nick her for all of us.’

  Terry and Julie Franks had been reunited with their three children. Quill hadn’t been there to witness that, but he could imagine it. ‘I’ve never seen such family stress,’ the social worker had reported. ‘They seemed really awkward with their own children.’

  A phone call made to the family had confirmed it: they still didn’t remember. ‘I feel so guilty,’ Julie Franks had told him. ‘I don’t know what to say to them, what to do with them. They cling on to us, and we know they . . . deserve to be loved, but it’s like they’re not really ours. We don’t know what to do, and there’s nobody we can tell.’ Quill hadn’t felt able to tell the Franks the truth. Something had been said about blaming drugs, but the Franks wouldn’t believe that; they’d mention what had been suggested to others, and in the end it wouldn’t have helped them cope. The wound Losley had inflicted would fester. He felt for them about what they must be going through.

  Ross and the others had started to study Google Earth pictures of all of London, surveying them methodically, in the same way they were still going over the bills and the closed-case records. But the truth of it was that there was too much data in all three areas for four people to handle. All they could hope for was a stroke of luck. Quill had seen Sefton experimenting with the vanes he’d snatched from his attacker, holding them in different positions, moving around the Portakabin with them, but he didn’t seem to have had much luck yet with getting them actually to do anything.

  And, on Monday night, West Ham were once again playing at home. In an FA Cup quarter-final against bloody Manchester City.

  ‘So she has to get a line of sight on someone to make them forget,’ said Ross now, again become the force that kept them going. ‘But then that must kind of . . . spread out. We know it’s a bit random, from what happened in the Franks case. Schools forget. The paperwork’s still there; it’s not like the way she edits people’s memories, but loads of teachers just can’t see it. We know of social workers who were made to forget, but we know of relatives who weren’t.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Sefton, ‘it’s about what’s in someone’s head when she makes them forget. Maybe it depends on what they think of in connection with what she’s making them forget. It goes out into the world and finds those things and zaps them. If you don’t think of Great-Aunt Nora as someone who knows your kids in that second, then Great-Aunt Nora keeps her memories of them. It’s another pattern that lies under what we’d normally deal with.’

  Silence fell again. ‘All right,’ said Quill, ‘it’s time we interviewed the suspect.’ He walked over to Gipsy Hill and fetched the cage containing the cat, which glowered at him silently all the way back. As they entered the Portakabin, it looked up at its own picture on the Ops Board and curled up into an uncommunicative ball once more.

  He put the cage on a table and the others gathered round. They’d been putting aside their impatience and made the cat wait for this, giving it time to worry about its situation. ‘Hoi!’ he tapped the cage until the cat uncurled itself and stared at him. ‘You’re not staying in the Hilton now. You’re with the bastards who know what they’re doing. No food or drink until you start talking, capeesh?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I understand.’

  ‘Do you know where Mora Losley is?’

  ‘In general,’ it sighed, ‘yes, I suppose I do.’

  ‘Can you tell us how to find her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does that mean you can’t, or that you won’t?’

  ‘It means I am simply not made that way. I am unable, because of the way in which I was constructed, to provide any information concerning my mistress’ whereabouts, or to tell you anything about her which would allow you to impede her movements in any way.’ It sounded, thought Quill, as if it was reading that stuff off a card.

  ‘That’s an interesting way to put it,’ said Ross. ‘She doesn’t mind us hearing all sorts of other stuff about her. All she worries about is us getting in the way.’

  ‘Are you saying she made you?’ asked Sefton. ‘She actually made something with a personality, with a mind?’

  ‘Indeed she did, centuries ago, out of the body of a dead cat. I learned to speak through listening to the wireless, later, when that device was invented and my mistress acquired a set.’

  ‘What are you intended for?’ asked Quill. ‘Spying for her? Warning her?’

  ‘Not at all. I was made to agree with her. The head on the stairs is for warning her.’

  ‘Did she make that too?’

  ‘Why, yes, obviously.’ And now Quill felt patronized by a cat. ‘Only I’ve been incorporated into this body for simply ages, and the head on the stairs has got a new skull . . . well, it’ll be twice now. Every time she has to change residences suddenly. The bodies get left behind, you see, but the information that animates the head goes with the house. Its job is to shout out when there are intruders. Which works well enough, I suppose, if the radio’s not on or if she’s not halfway to another property. It’s a maze back there, moving between all those houses.’

  ‘You’re a very chatty interviewee,’ observed Quill.

  ‘I was hoping for some of that food and water you mentioned. And it’s not as if I can give anything away. Cut my whiskers off and drown me, if you like, but I’m incapable of actual treachery.’

  ‘How many houses does she have?’

  ‘I’m afraid that would count as helping you find her.’

  ‘How do you feel about her boiling children alive?’ asked Costain.

  ‘I enjoy the children petting me and talking to me while they’re held captive, and I also enjoy, during the boiling, the smell and the cries of pain. It’s all rather marvellous.’

  ‘But . . . they’re innocent children—!’

  ‘But in order for my mistress to have the power to do her lord’s will, I’m af
raid they simply have to die horribly. I do apologize, but it is my nature to agree with her.’

  ‘Can you give us descriptions of the children?’ asked Quill.

  ‘Human beings all look rather alike to me – and there have been quite a few.’ They asked it more questions, and its answers continued to be maddeningly polite but, on the matter of how to find their quarry, utterly useless.

  ‘Now, please,’ said the cat finally. ‘You promised food and water when I started talking, and I’ve been going on and on.’

  Quill took one of the cans of cat food he’d bought from the cupboard and spooned some into a saucer, leaving another saucer of water beside it. The cat stepped out of its cage and started eating, pausing only to excuse itself when its stomach made a sudden noise. It looked up when it had finished. ‘I do believe,’ it said, ‘that my mistress would wish you to know more about her. Once you do, you will surely share her point of view and perhaps also, we can but hope, her cause. Allow me,’ it said, licking a claw, ‘to tell you her story.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  FOUR HUNDRED AND

  SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

  Mora Losley stood at the window of the master bedroom, at the top of what the locals called ‘the tower’. She was sixteen years old, full of fear and foreboding. She could feel London in the distance tonight, she was sure. For the first time, she could see the glamour of it, the light of heaven that flickered between the meadows and the villages and the gardens of the great, all the way to the great palaces along the river, York Place and the Palace of Westminster and the Tower, which radiated importance and threat. The musician had claimed it was the light of heaven. She had heard people at court talk about it as the very opposite: as something one must never see if one was to retain one’s soul. Or perhaps it was still only her imagination. Perhaps she wanted too much to be like her mistress Anne, the Queen. She was kinder to Mora than even her mother had been, who had herself served as maid to an earlier Queen. But perhaps this royal kindness would soon result in horror.