London Falling Page 31

  Ross stepped closer, trying not to let the horror of it overwhelm her. It was the lack of any writing underneath the photo that made her ask. She sensed the other two feeling as lost as she was. And she realized, in that second, what must have been done to them all. ‘What’s she called?’ she asked.

  Quill took a moment to control himself enough to answer. ‘Jessica, apparently.’

  Ross looked for the gap in her memory and couldn’t find it. She wondered if she’d ever known that name. She wrote it under the photo.

  He told them about Losley’s threat concerning the footballers. That meant they had forty-two hours until the next home match, with Man City.

  ‘How do we know Jessica’s not . . .’ Costain paused for a moment, then visibly decided it was best to continue, ‘. . . already dead?’

  ‘Losley would have told me so,’ said Quill. ‘She’d want to . . . let me know. It’s as if she wanted this to be a surprise, when I figured it out. Because I think she knew I would. This is her down to the ground, and we should have realized that from what the bloody cat told us. It’s not just about keeping on with the sacrifices so that she has the huge amounts of power she’s going to need to kill every goal-scorer. No, she needed to make this personal. She wanted me to feel it.’ Then he had to stop for a moment. ‘All right, listen, you lot.’

  He sat down at the table, and made them all sit down too. ‘When this aspect of the investigation becomes clear to Lofthouse, as it will when she wakes up this morning and is told that forensics are all over my gaff, then there’ll be pressure on me to step aside. I’m not going to and, going on her past eccentric form, I think Lofthouse might let me stay put. If I could, I’d tell her . . .’ He went to the board and grabbed the picture of the baby. ‘. . . that because I don’t know who this is, I’m only “copper” afraid, that it’s not in here.’ He tapped his chest. ‘Not that I could tell her that. But, if I’m being honest, I think knowing fully what I’d lost . . . I think that’d be . . . better somehow, you know? Natural. What I’m feeling now, there’s no name for it. The only other people who’ve ever felt it that we know of are Terry and Julie Franks. I need to fix it. Sarah needs to fix it. This morning . . . it wasn’t that the veil suddenly dropped from our eyes. We actually had to persuade each other about it. She made me go into the nursery with her, and we looked at the crib. We looked at all the DVDs of Teletubbies and In the Night Garden. We kept having to force each other back to concentrate on it.’ He told them about what else they’d found at the house. ‘Forensics found a pile of soil half-concealed under a hedge in the garden. Sarah might have noticed it if it had been out in the open, since she’s been following the story. As you know, I’ve hardly been home. If I’d just taken one walk out into my own garden . . . or maybe she’d have made it so we couldn’t see that either. If I’d asked any of you lot, you wouldn’t have known, or I wouldn’t have heard you say anything. But if I’d just thought for a moment how I myself might be a target! I’ve constructed this bloke for me to be, out of bits and pieces, and he’s the sort of bloke who never could become a target. This is what I’ve been missing. The fact that I’m a dad.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ said Costain.

  ‘I think I’ll be joining you in Hell,’ said Quill gently. ‘I think I might be on the edge of it now.’ He looked at the photo. ‘I can’t see anything left,’ he said. ‘We could stare at Google and the bill lists for days, but with all her new power maybe she can conceal all that from us now. That cat’s no bloody use. I’m going to be left with this child I don’t know, this little stranger, as my very own bloody ghost standing there in that nursery. I can see it. I can see it. I’ll be able to distract myself whenever I’m here; it’s not going to be following me around like Harry’s dad did. But it’ll be there to remind me when I get home, locked into that particular place. And I’m calling it an it. I’m calling my own baby an it.’ He put a hand to his forehead and grabbed his flesh so hard that Ross was afraid he’d draw blood. ‘We’re helpless. I’m helpless.’

  Ross now found that a horrible feeling was creeping over her. ‘What if . . . it’s not just you?’

  They called up every friend and relative they could think of, including some deliberately distant ones they wouldn’t readily have been thinking of. Ross could see how the shortness of Costain’s list was troubling him. But waking up a distant cousin eventually convinced him. ‘No, Tone, you ain’t got no kids that you don’t know about. Mate, why are you asking?’

  Relief and guilt came with the knowledge that the three others didn’t have any children. Nor did anyone close to them here in London have any that weren’t safely at home. Ross wanted to joke with Sefton that she hadn’t thought kids were likely in his case, but he had such an intense look on his face, as if he was coming to some huge decision.

  As dawn came up outside, Ross went back to the board. ‘How did she do it?’ she said.

  ‘I remember her zapping me with something back in her attic, that first time, just after you told her to go fuck herself,’ Quill glanced ironically at Costain. ‘I thought, at the time, it was just for her to grab the cat.’

  ‘Bitch plans ahead,’ observed Costain. ‘Okay, we’ve got to ask.’ He went to fetch the cat’s cage, put it on the table, tapped it until the animal woke up, and then showed it the baby picture. ‘Recognize her?’

  ‘Oh,’ said the cat, ‘that’s the very young one.’

  ‘When last you saw her, was she still alive?’ asked Quill, all in a rush.

  ‘Yes, I believe so. Mora had quite a business to keep her fed. Oh, the bawling that thing made! That’s why she keeps her in one of the tunnels between houses, as with a lot of the younger children.’

  Quill closed his eyes. Ross went over to him and, against her whole nature and his, took him into her arms.

  In the early light, Sarah Quill stood watching the forensics team combing her back garden. She felt that she should be seeming more desperate, more agonized. She saw the police expressions and saw them wondering why she wasn’t. She realized she was trying to fake it, trying to look like those people you saw in police appeals to the kidnapper. She felt stupidly guilty, and genuinely guilty, and she had no idea how to describe how she felt. She was angry at Quill, and at herself. She made police officers cups of tea, while trying to look devastated, hating the fact that her hands didn’t shake. She kept trying to direct their searches, interferingly, meaninglessly. She kept standing at the door of the nursery as forensics combed it, hoping the details would connect to something. They had used a childminder, apparently, who was struggling to explain why she hadn’t visited the house for weeks, why her books, to her own eyes, showed no sign of the Quills. Neither the census, nor the borough records showed any sign of their child to the custodians, yet they did so to investigating officers. One social worker, it seemed, had kept asking all the others what was going on, to the point where it had become an office joke. Sarah kept looking at the photos that Josh, her nephew in Scotland, had sent. Photos of Jessica, aged eighteen months. She knew this must be a terrible wound that she had suffered. She kept hearing from the family liaison officer assigned to her how Losley kept the children safe. But there was an until involved there. Quill had told her: two days.

  She wanted him to be here, and she wanted him to be out there, along with his unit that these coppers here kept complaining about not being part of, but kept saying was too small to achieve anything further. She overheard these conversations; did they really think she wouldn’t?

  ‘How did she make us forget?’ she had demanded last night. Quill had then told her: everything had finally come flooding out of him. Every detail made her more angry. ‘That happened to you, and you didn’t tell me? Things like that exist, and you didn’t tell me? How could you keep me out in the cold like this? Who am I to you?’ But she believed him very readily, because it was the only option. She got scared at what lay outside, dragged him to the window and made him explain what he could see out there in th
e night. The journalist part of her kept arranging it into tidy questions, but the person she was went deeper than that. Someone who had thought she was married, and hadn’t thought twice really about the strength and quality of that relationship kept ripping those questions up in sheer fury. How dare he? How dare he not have told her about the danger to her child? He just stood there and took it from her. He wasn’t taking on some sort of noble burden, just accepting the truth of it, rocking slightly on his heels.

  She felt the world was against her now. She found it all too easy to see London as Quill described it, as a tentacled monster at the heart of a whirlpool that had snatched away their child. But it was Quill she saw as failing to put a stake into the heart of that monster. It was him whose desperate attacks on the monster had slammed a hole into the ground, who’d caused everything to start whirling around them. He had put an emptiness into the heart of everything, as well as having one inflicted on himself. It was as if something from inside him and his job had spread out into the world and engulfed them.

  She stood against a wall, her body propped at an angle it would never normally have assumed, as if she’d been shot, or was a toddler, and she tried in her head to find her way back to a baby called Jessica.

  At 10 a.m. Detective Superintendent Rebecca Lofthouse was sitting at a table facing the special committee of the Football Association, which consisted of five white men in their fifties. She took a deep breath. ‘With respect, Mr Chairman,’ she said, ‘what the fuck are you doing?’

  The man looked to have faced his fair share of criticism in his time, and he was proud to have done so. But now he was eyeing her with a strange expression, as if he literally didn’t know why he was taking this position. He and his fellow committee members, selected from the high and mighty in the game, had occupied this grand meeting room at Wembley Stadium for three days now, and only this afternoon had she been called in to hear personally the extraordinary news that was about to be given to the press. Now that she’d heard it, she still couldn’t believe it.

  ‘We are not,’ declared the chairman, sounding flustered and angry, ‘giving in to threats.’ And his glance slid sideways towards an empty seat at the table. Lofthouse glanced at the others, saw they were all looking over there. As if someone else had given the orders, which they didn’t necessarily agree with, and then had . . . gone?

  She shook her head to clear it. ‘Mora Losley is now threatening the life of every player that scores even one goal against West Ham.’

  ‘We’re aware of that fact, but—’

  ‘The Professional Footballers’ Association has threatened to strike, the government has already requested you not to continue, and you were agreeing to the point where everyone was sure—’

  ‘We live in a free country, and—’

  ‘All the managers are saying they’ll tell their players not to score against West Ham. These games will be a farce. That’s giving in to threats, making every match about her!’

  ‘We will not—’

  ‘And it’s one of my coppers, one of mine now. DI Quill has had his own child taken.’ She remembered that terrible strain on Quill’s face, that utter lack of his usual brave energy. He’d looked so complicated, so knotted, but he’d asked to be allowed to stay on the case and . . . well, she had felt she had to let him. He’d justified every bet she’d made, on such a flimsy basis. Who knew what horrors he’d already faced, beyond those she knew about? She found her hand going to her charm bracelet. ‘There is a child in Losley’s hands whom she will undoubtedly kill if a goal is scored!’

  ‘We’ve considered that, at great length. We feel it’s your job to prevent that. But we can’t give in to every psychopath.’

  She kept her voice level. She didn’t want this lot accusing her of being hysterical. ‘I’ll have your arses for this. I’ll fill the pitch with coppers if I have to, and arrest the teams before the match begins.’

  ‘Now that,’ said the chairman, ‘would be illegal.’ And he was right. She couldn’t make it happen. Lofthouse thought she heard a laugh from somewhere nearby. She turned to look, but there was only that empty chair. When she turned back, she saw that the committee members were all looking over there too. Only they were all bloody smiling.

  Ross had listened in disbelief as Quill relayed the news that the matches were going to continue. ‘It’s as if football can somehow soak up death,’ she had said, after he’d finished. ‘As if it’s immortal; that a club or a league or a match will always carry on. They’ll just have a minute’s silence and wear a black armband.’

  She’d gone back to her work, aware once more of that clock still ticking, only thirty-three hours to go; aware that the only thing she had to go on – that endless flow of data crossing her screen – probably now had no more secrets to divulge. She looked up from it an hour later, needing to rest her eyes. The air of tension hadn’t ebbed. Sefton was making quick, decisive notes. Quill was pacing before the Ops Board as if something would suddenly leap out at him. Costain had gone to get the cat some more food. Ross watched distantly as he gazed at the animal for a long time, as if pondering something, as if needing something to be fond of and wondering if it could be the cat.

  ‘I thought you’d stop feeding me,’ said the cat, ‘once it became clear to you how little help I can be.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, ‘I thought it was about time someone showed a bit of fucking decency about something.’

  ‘I do appreciate that.’

  ‘You don’t have much of an ego on you, do you?’

  ‘I am, at heart, a dead cat. My mistress has told me, many times, that I am worthless. I am forced to agree.’

  ‘But it’s not about what you are, is it?’ Costain leaned closer to the cat. ‘It’s about what you could be. Imagine being one of the good guys, one of us, fighting the good fight against Losley.’ Ross thought she heard a certain artificiality in his tone, like something he’d voiced or thought of often.

  ‘I really don’t see how. I can only ever agree with her, and thus I believe she should remain at liberty. Though I would . . .’ It hesitated. ‘Well, let’s just say you’re much kinder than she is.’

  Costain reached out and stroked it under the chin. ‘I think it’s time I gave you a name, mate. Do you want to choose?’

  The cat mewed in delight. Ross was sure it preferred to wait to hear what he’d decided to call it. There was something pathetic about its eagerness.

  ‘I think,’ said Costain, ‘I’m going to call you Tiger Feet.’

  He seemed oddly distant from what he was saying. But perhaps that was just what this man was like, how she didn’t feel warmth from him even when he was being kind – or forcing himself to be. She could feel sleep tugging at her again in the afternoon sunlight. They had to find another avenue of inquiry soon, or they’d all break. Well, not her, because she’d do something else instead of break. Or just her body would. Into her mind came the images that kept her going, and the anger about it that she kept trying and failing to project onto Losley, away from its real cause, which was the now unreachable Toshack. There he was again, her dad, hanging from the ceiling. The person that made her, the person she thought of every waking moment, the ghost that—

  She actually fell. She fell off her chair. Her chair skidded across the floor. All the others stared at her. She stood up. ‘I . . . I think I’ve got a lead, only . . .’ She couldn’t say it aloud. ‘Give me a couple of hours.’ She grabbed her coat and put one foot in front of the other, and then she started to run – before Quill could demand good practice from her – out of the Portakabin, out into the meaningless sunlight, sprinting for her car.

  Sefton found that he wanted that to be an excuse. There was something to be done here, so he didn’t have to carry out what he’d now come to the conclusion only he could do. No, not good enough. He got to his feet. ‘Me, too,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He found that he wanted to say something to Costain too. But he couldn’t find the words. He also got to the
door before Quill could start to say anything.

  Quill didn’t know how to feel. He knew that if anything drastic happened to those two, then any knowledge they found would be gone with them. And many other copper rules applied, besides. But he’d been staring at the Ops Board for hours, dealing with calls and emails from other operations that offered up useless lead after useless lead. What his team were doing now, he felt, was away from the board. And that honoured him.

  He looked to Costain. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Actually,’ Costain glanced back towards the cat, ‘yeah.’

  ‘Want to tell me about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay, then.’ Quill flapped his arms uselessly. ‘Don’t get yourself killed.’

  Costain picked up the cat’s cage, the cat inside it already looking startled, and came over. ‘Listen,’ he said to Quill, ‘you and me, I know—’

  ‘Nah, come on. Is this just you doing the right thing again?’

  ‘Well, yeah. But—’

  ‘But we don’t ever know why anyone does what they do, do we? You might have stayed even if you hadn’t felt forced into it. You came back that first time, didn’t you?’

  ‘And now I need you to trust me.’

  ‘I’m watching you heading for the door with something that’s halfway between evidence and a witness, so I think I’m there. Is that it, or are we going in for any more of the touchy-feelies?’

  Costain nodded to him.

  Quill nodded back.

  Costain headed out to his car, taking the cat with him.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Ross stood in front of what had once been her family home, on that corner of a tree-lined street in Bermondsey. It was raining again on this Sunday afternoon. Only a couple of details of the house had altered: whoever owned it now had changed the garden, and put up different curtains. There was, thank God, nothing that looked special to the Sight.