London Falling (21 page)

‘No,’ Sefton shook his head; this was really important to him, ‘it’s the opposite of special. Losley’s not the queen of the entire world, is she? She’s hiding herself in . . . well, okay, several . . . council houses. When I felt this power up close in the street, when I felt it inside that Jack thing, it was sort of . . . angry, dispossessed. It didn’t feel that it was in charge. It felt like what you might be left with if you had nothing else in the world, and if you were desperate enough to turn to it. I think I can just start to see how you could approach the idea of using it, and feel how you might if you weren’t . . . overwhelmed by it. But I think I would still be overwhelmed by it every time one of those sodding monsters or some shit—’

Ross both felt and heard the noise rise from the field and crash through the crowd around them. She and Sefton turned at the same moment . . . and on the big screen saw Linus McGuire again trotting back to the centre spot, his team mates rushing around him. He looked actually burdened now, the laugh he was sharing with them was awkward.

The crowd felt complicated. It hated feeling complicated.

‘Take him off,’ muttered Sefton. ‘You’re two–nil up at fucking West Ham, so sub him!’

‘That’d be visibly giving in to threats,’ said Ross. ‘It’s okay. He won’t try to score again.’ But she knew she was just telling herself that.

They became aware of the chants rising around them. West Ham songs, but also tunes that referred to the current situation – creating waves of horrified, relieved, cathartic laughter. ‘We’ll see you on
Crimewatch
, we will . . .’ To the tune of ‘Que Sera Sera’. Ross saw Sefton start to laugh at that, and then he put a hand to his mouth, altogether too tense to let it out.

‘Anything from the uniforms?’ That was Quill arriving, with Costain beside him.

‘No sightings so far,’ said Sefton, looking up from his Airwave radio.

‘If she is here,’ said Ross, ‘she’s either invisible, or looking different from how the fans normally see her.’

‘At least we’ve forced her to change her habits even that much,’ said Costain.

Ross was struck by a sudden thought. ‘I wonder if she
can
actually still hide from us now? You know, can she shift up another level, past what the Sight can see?’

‘I’ve, erm, been thinking about that,’ said Sefton.

They all looked to him, and he seemed again to regret having spoken up. To him, it was as if there was something shameful about the nature of the speciality he was developing. After all, he’d been the one to say it was the language of the dispossessed, and Ross wondered now how much he included himself in that group. ‘These are all just assumptions, but we said we were doing assumptions, so . . . I don’t think she’ll have done that. Not yet. This is rough stuff, big-button stuff, either one thing or the other. We’ve got the Sight, so we can . . .
see
. It feels as if, to take it up a level, she’d need to counteract that with something else, something bigger, and that would be going out of her way, which she doesn’t want to, you know . . .’ He looked between them, suddenly seeming to realize that they didn’t know, really. ‘Like I said, just assumptions.’

‘I don’t know if she
is
in here somewhere,’ said Quill. ‘But someone else
has
made their presence felt.’ Costain then described his encounter.

Ross got out her laptop, awkwardly held it up with one hand, and ran the PRO-FIT facial description software. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘let’s be having him for the Ops Board.’ And she quickly selected facial composite items as Costain described the man to her. They’d just about finished when a vast, terrible, scared sound burst from the crowd.

They slowly turned. On the pitch, Stoke players were again milling around Linus McGuire, celebrating – but celebrating
at
the crowd, defiant almost, as if violence was going to come and strike down their mate any moment now. McGuire himself stopped moving. He held the others back.

‘Don’t,’ Quill whispered. ‘Don’t provoke her.’

The footballer kissed the badge on his shirt, then raised three fingers. The subdued West Ham supporters’ reaction turned instantly to jeers.

On the big screen above them the replay was running. McGuire was in a scramble on the goal line, a lot of feet and heads sticking out among a lot of defenders, as the ball curved down towards them. Anyone could score. And indeed it was hard to see how McGuire could have, while staying out of it at the back of that mass of bodies. But then the picture flickered, and Ross realized that it was changing just for their benefit, as McGuire was shunted forwards a few feet from where he’d been, his body being flung at the ball like a projectile. His head caught it precisely, and sent it into the top corner. He looked astonished as he landed again, the force that had propelled him sending him skidding along the ground.

Ross felt something looking at them and knew the others were feeling it too. Something enormous was saying hello. Her hand reflexively went to the knife in her pocket.

Among all the swaying, yelling, chanting thousands, there he stood, the man Costain had described, just below the screen as it reverted to being a normal scoreboard. He was smiling broadly.

‘She isn’t here. She was never going to be here,’ declared Costain. ‘This isn’t our trap. It’s his.’

The look on Quill’s face was terrible to see.

Sefton’s Airwave radio hissed with urgent communication from the uniforms. Ross let go of her knife and looked away quickly from that horrifying face, back to her laptop, determined to fix all its details in her memory so they could have him.

She saw that the composite face on the screen was now smiling too.

When she looked up again, the man was gone.

And then all hell broke loose.

FOURTEEN

The crowd rose from their seats amid a vast, jeering roar, Irons fans surging towards the lines of the Stoke fans, as if it was their fault that McGuire had scored. He was immediately substituted, and ran for the tunnel to the away changing rooms as abuse and objects were hurled at him. The uniforms and stewards rushed forward, to get between them, and just about managed to keep them apart. The fans fell back like an ebb tide, bellowing at each other across the lines.

‘Come on,’ Quill shouted, and led his team running for the steps.

Quill burst in through the door of the away changing room, a bunch of uniforms with him and his team, having shoved their way past all the idiots that tried to get in the way. The enormous noise of the jeering echoed all around them. It didn’t seem to be just one opinion of what had happened, but many, all interfering with each other like waves crashing around the stadium. Physios and assistants and players came towards them, all yelling in different languages. ‘Change of bloody plan!’ Quill yelled. ‘Get your trousers on, Linus. You’re going on a long journey.’

And there he was, the player himself, with a grim look on his face, already buttoning his shiny suit. ‘I don’t know . . . Nobody’s said . . .’

‘That’s what we’re here for. Let’s be having you.’ Quill grabbed hold of the man and hauled him to the door, just as Finch, the Stoke City chairman, arrived to get in the way.

‘Now, hold on. We offered you our complete cooperation but—’

‘Brilliant. Try to keep up.’ And they were off and out of there.

Quill spoke quickly into his Airwave radio, as Finch tried to argue in his ear, Costain having to actually grab the star player away from the trailing mass of people who followed them. He could hear Ross behind him, keeping Lofthouse in the loop on her mobile. With the uniforms kept so busy on crowd control, the original plan was shot, and there was no chance of keeping McGuire safe on the team coach. Their only chance now was speed and surprise.

They came out into the fading light at the players’ entrance to the stadium, just as two cars pulled up. They were CID unmarked cars, driven by DCs from the local main office who’d been handy when Quill had started yelling. They’d have to do. Outside the gates, Quill could see the media forming up on the pavements. He found a CID officer, threw a towel over his head, and got the uniforms to form a cordon as the man was bundled over to the first car and shoved in the back. ‘Fast as you can, go visit lovely Swindon,’ he told the driver, then thumped the roof and stepped back. The car headed off out through the enormous gates, the media moving in but then giving way in the face of a blaring of the horn. Costain meanwhile held McGuire back in the tunnel, out of sight.

‘She might buy it,’ said Ross, ‘if she keeps herself separate from the world, hiding away in that room of hers.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

Finch was looking increasingly worried at seeing all these precautions. A growing phalanx of people was gathering around McGuire, looking as if they might lure him away at any moment – agents, trainers, who knew what. ‘Detective Inspector,’ the chairman began, ‘come on, surely there’s no need for—’

‘Shut it,’ said Quill. He pointed at McGuire and gestured for him to come over. ‘This isn’t down to any of that lot. This is just down to you. You want to do all you can to help us catch a child killer?’

‘Absolutely.’ He meant it too. He had a serious look about him, this boy.

‘Then come with me.’ Quill had the uniforms hold everyone else back, as his group led the footballer away from further protests.

They pulled the car into line with a couple of police vans from the regular match turn-out, and walked McGuire out to it, wearing a police uniform, the cap pulled well down over his head. Quill looked at the alert young face of the driver, and realized just how much danger he was going to ask him to walk into, without this officer having been adequately briefed. Or maybe he just felt a need to do this himself, to show that smiling bastard – that even if they’d had their roles reversed, even if the operation was falling apart, even if the tiny hope he’d provided his team with was going to be dashed – someone was still willing to take him on. He felt his hands shaking, and grabbed hold of the door to hide that. ‘Out you get, son, I’ll take it from here.’

Ross stepped forward as he was exchanging places with the officer. ‘This isn’t a good idea. What if she’s after
you
?’

‘Then she gets me.’ He slammed the door behind him, and nodded to Costain. ‘And then you’re in charge.’ Then he turned the car in six cramped points, and drove out of those gates in company with the two vans, past a media crush that didn’t register his passing. As soon as the traffic opened up, motivated by the fear of a witch on his tail, and with the confidence that the traffic cops would let him pass, Quill floored the accelerator.

He took the car up onto the North Circular, where he made a nuisance of himself in the winter dark, weaving in and out of the match-day traffic, yelling abuse and hitting the horn, his lights on full beam. A lot of it was bravado; a lot of it was him knowing they had nothing to feel sure of. She could either see him or she couldn’t, and only speed was on his side. Or maybe she didn’t have enough of whatever this power was to do it this time. Maybe her boss had set her a challenge too? Just get this bloke out of range of Losley’s power, to the point where if she came to visit him up north, it’d just be a little old lady arriving on his doorstep, without her soil all glowing with energy, and they’d have broken her, immediately showing her that she was not going to get to do what she’d always done. Then
they
would have won.
He
would have won. A victory over her, over this strange nothingness that seemed to have leaped out of the corners of his depression and exploded a hole in the middle of his life. Winning this now would make his team feel they could win the entire war, realizing that this was a war, not a nightmare, which would finally engulf them. That was the battle going on in his head, too, every moment since he’d acquired the Sight.

‘You’re taking this really seriously,’ said McGuire.

Quill liked his concern. ‘There is,’ he said, ‘a lot we can’t reveal.’

‘But you’re on top of it, right? You’re going to get her?’

‘Yeah.’ Quill said it determinedly, as if she herself could hear. For all he knew, she could, though he hoped not. ‘Meanwhile, I’m taking you up the M1. Once we get north of Watford, the local uniforms can get you back home to Stoke.’

‘Can I call my girlfriend?’

‘When we get there.’ Because who knew whether Losley could listen in to phone calls? In fact, who knew
anything
?

As he passed Brent Cross, all lit up on his right, Quill started to really deeply
hope
. He was in a modern city,
his
city, in a modern car and, once he just got past this interchange and hit the motorway, he would be up and out and past the M25 in fifteen minutes. And the M25 bloody well should be as far as Losley could use the power of London. His Airwave radio told him the decoy car was already past the M25, going west. He hadn’t lost any lives tonight, either. He glanced at McGuire in the mirror. He was young enough, just about, to be Quill’s own lad. He felt the ache of something missing there. Not that he had a kid, and why not? It suddenly felt terrible that he and Sarah had never gone for it. Between them, they’d have had a wonderful kid—

He realized that McGuire was suddenly staring ahead. ‘What’s that?!’

Quill looked back to the road. Something was shining in the dual carriageway in front of them. And, coming right at them faster than any car, right in his headlights, there was a figure—

He threw the car sideways. Too late.

She rushed through the front of the car. She didn’t break the vehicle as she passed through it. She was going fast and slow at the same time. She trailed lattices of gold and silver that struck sparks off the metal as she passed through it. She brought the stinking beauty of the executioner’s sword. Her hands danced in an intricate pattern. Quill had time to see her fingers pulling at the air, spinning more gold from it. Old books invaded his car, turning it inside out. She turned to look at him, as she moved past at eighty miles per hour, her head cocked to one side again.