London Falling (11 page)

‘Okay, taking that onboard. Intense, you are.’

‘Tell me about it.’

It was crowded on the pavements tonight as they wandered along: encountering unlicensed cab offer,
Big Issue
seller, old man in white gloves, beery students; gay, gay, not sure, gay, straight, straight, straight; hen night, Japanese couple, religious ranter; stall selling something that looked like shite and smelt like toffee . . .

And, suddenly, who they all were and what they all wanted hit Sefton like a punch and he wanted to hide hide hide go undercover be someone else quickly before they know you before they get you because you can feel how they might hate you if they saw the real you and if they turned on you with this gaze and this power and his vision went weird and he had to fall back against the window of a Turkish convenience store and the man behind the counter inside started tapping the window saying what are you doing because he was bumping the back of his head regularly against the glass and he was quite conscious thank you absolutely together but he couldn’t stop and Joe was staring at him not yet completely freaked out and the force of it was because there was something nearby . . .

He took a breath, closed his eyes.

The fucker must have put something in my beer. Oh God, is this Ketamine or some shit? Is this a sex thing, or was I followed and targeted, and is that the guy whose house I’ve been in? My warrant card’s in my sock. Get to a taxi, show the warrant, go to Paddington Green or somewhere
—

But Joe wasn’t looking dangerous; he seemed really worried now. So he didn’t do this. What did this?

Something was approaching. Something was heading towards him, and that was what had sent him slamming back against the window. Because his body was afraid of what was coming. The owner was coming out now. People inside, buying samosas, were looking out at him. Mad guy. But something was coming. That was what had sent him slamming back away from it. He hadn’t realized. Something was coming and this lot were all in danger. Never mind that they were all terrifying, the force of all of them combined that he wanted to hide from. They were all in danger.

The owner of the shop grabbed his shoulder to push him away into the crowd, towards the thing that was coming. Joe started to get in the way, to rail loudly at him: it’s not drugs, look at him, he’s ill—

Sefton pushed himself away from the shop owner, away from the window, with Joe rushing after him. Get away from this thing. If it was only after him, then get it away from them.

And then he realized that it had changed the direction it was coming from.

It was coming straight through the crowd in front of him. It was here!

It walked through the crowd. It walked right through them, their bodies passing through it, mostly, for there was one old man stepping round it . . . but enough of that, just look at it – look at this mother, it’s ten feet tall and it’s a plant, it’s like a tree but with a mass of green on top, and are those human arms? That’s a bloke in a costume, no it isn’t, it’s bringing with it—

Smell of park, not just grass, not countryside, park. More than smell. Something got park into my head, beyond the smell. There’s money and servitude and that anger, all that anger, all that anger at doffing your cap and lowering your eyes as the bastards go past and they’re throwing a coin for you and this is you at their houses, Jack in your green Jack after their maids Jack your only day hidden in here Jack get up to all sorts in here, and Sefton thought,
Not me mate, I’m like you whatever you are, money thing, servant thing, old lady remembering thing, city remembering thing
—

He’d locked up again, his hands shaking in front of him like he was having a fit, and it was rushing at him, aiming to go through him—

A moment of smelling, or seeing, all those things at once, in the many corners of his eyes, as if his eyes were suddenly stars and pricked with corners, and it was all those things at once and terrifying! And so cold, made out of cold—

And it was into the crowd again, part of them again, and it hadn’t been after him at all, and he staggered.

Joe caught him.

‘He still thinks you’re bent,’ said the man whispering in Harry’s ear. ‘All those years you’ve been kissing his arse, and this is how he repays you.’

Quill had stumbled back to his seat, saying, yeah, he had been in the pub a while. He’d been so freaked out he couldn’t deal with it. But he wasn’t about to run out screaming yet. He sat there and listened to what Harry was saying, numbly nodding along, checking out his surroundings all the time. If he was hallucinating, if he’d got something in his bloodstream, perhaps scratched himself on a nail or something inside that house, breathed something in . . . but he didn’t feel woozy, apart from the beer, and he knew what beer felt like, so it gave him something to compare this to. Quill gradually became certain that he was in his right mind.

So what was this fucker he couldn’t touch? Who kept on spouting this shit? And Quill was sure now that Harry was hearing it, too, as he could see tiny reactions to it on his face. But it was very subtle. He got the feeling that, even if the man suddenly shouted, Harry wouldn’t have leaped up. This seemed to be something Harry was deeply used to. Quill decided that he’d do what he always did whenever he didn’t understand certain aspects of a situation. He’d plough right on through. Which meant, for a start, not putting up with this any longer.

‘Listen, Harry,’ he said, ‘nobody thinks you’re a bent copper.
Nobody
. And especially not me, all right?’

Harry looked surprised, they’d been talking about something else. ‘Thought never crossed my mind, Jimmy,’ he said.

‘Oh, look at you, lapping up the scraps from his table,’ said the old man. ‘You’re ten times the copper he’ll ever be. Look at him, playing the role, saying all the right things. He’s just copying his dad. He gets all the attention because he looks right and he sounds right, never mind the fact that you’re more talented. He gets promoted just because of how he acts, not for what he does.’

Quill realized that he’d only just restrained himself from yelling at the strange man, letting out his fear and anger. But that wouldn’t get him anywhere, because this . . . this ghost, or whatever it was . . . it wasn’t trying to bait him. Its attention was entirely concentrated on Harry.

‘But you’re the one who does all the hard work and, you’re the one they don’t notice. It’s always him they talk about, while you stand in his shadow. What’s he doing in charge of you? How is that fair? And this new operation – you should be in on that!’

It dawned on Quill that he himself had come to expect that Harry would never say thanks after he’d paid him a compliment or reassured him like that. Maybe now he knew the reason, and he felt like he should hold it against him. But this wasn’t
Harry
, was it? It was . . . whatever this thing was. ‘Like I said, I asked for you,’ he began, taking care to talk to Harry rather than to the older man. ‘But we’re being kept apart from you lot, like we’re contagious, and . . . well, you know who I think the bad apple is. I think maybe that’s the reason. Or maybe . . . now I’m thinking that maybe there’s something more to it, and that Lofthouse had a plan.’

No reaction from the stranger. He was listening, his face set exactly like Harry’s. He was kind of one-track, wasn’t he?

‘But that’s no comment on you, either. We’re both the sons of coppers, Harry. We know the form. Here, remind me – when did your old dad pass on?’

The man turned to look at him, a snarl on his face. And Quill felt the slight relief of having made him do that.

Got you.

In the car heading back from the Losley house to the Hill, Ross had realized there was something wrong. It was as if something was moving inside her head, and she couldn’t push it down. She’d understood the stress of her chosen path, but the trouble was that she’d always expected catharsis at the end. She’d been running for the line, while now she was just working – and then working at home too – until she fell asleep. This couldn’t last. This had to end badly. Maybe this was the start of that ending.

She had first felt it when the car turned into Kilburn High Road. It had felt somehow that gravity had changed, that there was something pressing her down into her seat. She had looked to the others, and then out of the window, and became aware that she was starting to see . . . fleeting things moving along and among the shopfronts . . . odd things that the car was going too quickly for her to see, and she felt suddenly glad about that. And the shopfronts themselves, most of them with just overnight lights on now, there were . . . like all sorts of them all laid on top of each other, at different levels, even, as if suddenly her eyes were offering her options. She had wanted to close her eyes, but she also didn’t want to because, if this was a form of mental illness, it was as frightening as she expected, but also really interesting. Her hand had gone instinctively to the knife she always kept in her pocket, but then she had let it go again. Best not play with that right now.

She had felt cars and buses pass that somehow felt more
weighted
than others. The underneath of the Marylebone flyover had been, in the looming darkness, exploding fireworks of tracks, of traces . . . of cars crashing, she realized; as if every accident, over decades, had left some sort of record. That must be the delusion she was experiencing, that everything mattered, that everything was recorded, so guilt could never escape, so it was cared about still. Unlike in the real world. She hadn’t wanted to say anything to the others because, if her mind was disintegrating, she wanted to have it happen in private. It came as a relief, almost.

She had felt huge things passing high over the roof of the car. She had felt joys among the fears, even, but it had mostly been just fear. There had been motion between the trees of Hyde Park, and strange lights manifesting, in colours she wasn’t able to put a name to. Things moved between the trees faster than was possible. There had been unexpected structures in silhouette. Shadows lurking under shadows.

And then there had been a feeling of some huge, doom-laden presence somewhere distantly on their left, just as the car took them down Grosvenor Place. The car had felt to be teetering on the edge of it, affected by its gravity, sling-shotting around in that whirlpool—

‘What’s that over there?’ she’d managed to say, hoping that some part of the distant light she could see was real.

‘Buckingham Palace,’ said Costain.

She had kept herself a little apart from all she was experiencing, as if recording and reporting on her own fascinating breakdown. This familiar stance had calmed her a little. Never mind that all this reminded her of . . . well, it would, wouldn’t it? She had imagined
that
, and she was now imagining
this
. It had probably been set off by those bodies in the cauldron. That had been the knife that had severed something she had herself stretched very tight.

The car had proceeded through Victoria, full of tourists, full of unknown shapes moving among the sightseers. And then up onto Vauxhall Bridge Road. Maybe if she went to sleep and woke up again, her brain would reset and it would all then be gone . . .

No, it wouldn’t. She knew it wouldn’t. She glanced at Costain and Sefton. Sefton looked calm enough, playing with his phone. Costain had fallen asleep.

She had known, rather than saw, that up ahead stood a building: a house with stark angular walls and five chimneys. A bad place. The weight and impending sight of it had told her so. Then the car had gone through what felt like a gate, but there was no gate here in . . . in the real world.

And then there had been hands. Hands of air, snatching at them!

She had reacted, of course, she hadn’t been able to stop herself, but she’d contained it enough so the other two hadn’t noticed, because they really couldn’t see.

The hands had let go, too weak to hold on against the speed of the car. But Ross had seen the five coffins that contained the five perfect corpses, their breath rising in dust, the same dust that killed—

And then the car had taken her out of that vision too, and they were now passing over Vauxhall Bridge. The Thames stretched underneath: such a huge new weight, she’d felt it writhing in her stomach. It hadn’t given her time to stop breathing hard, to stop reacting to those clutching hands taking her back to when she was a child, to a point where she was almost expecting the blows to fall across her face. It was as if she could hear – the vague sound, but not the details of – distant songs, as if all the associations and memories in London ran down to here, collected here. There were churning shapes down there, yet more shadows in the water. Everything she was seeing, she had understood with that detached part of her, was all part of the same thing. These were the symptoms of one big thing. Maybe that big thing was her mind falling apart. Or maybe this was her looking at something to do with what lay at the centre of the enigma she’d described at the crime scene. This was what they’d been missing. Or maybe what she was seeing here was all just a metaphor for the problem she was working on, as if she was a genius in a detective series. Only – she had found she was smiling, her awkward-shaped tooth biting at her lip, her image reflected in the horrible lights from outside – only she was no genius.

Then a ship, an old sailing ship with three masts, was speeding down the river, faster than any ship should be able to move. Its masts were too tall to pass under the bridge. It was going to reach the bridge at the same time they passed over. She had looked in the other direction. Another ship was speeding towards them. This was a steamship with a funnel, smoke coming from it, and a single mast. It looked like a warship but old, primitive. It was moving as if it was in an old film, speeded up, chuffing, impossible—

She’d looked back. From the other direction, the sailing ship was flashing forwards now. She’d made herself not yell, not grab her head and hide like a frightened animal, but just look, keep looking, be ready to tell someone else what she was witnessing—