The Severed Streets (13 page)

This time she wasn’t playing a role: she was herself, off duty.
But – and she’d known in advance this was going to be a problem – she had no idea how that was supposed to look.
She was the one who’d pointed out that the persons of interest they’d met at the New Age fair had made statements with their clothing.
She normally made none that she was aware of.
Quill had agreed that, while still being themselves, he and Ross should both dress with the style of the ‘occult underworld’ in mind.
Take care to not obsess about it, he’d added.
So those had been mixed messages.

She’d last tried to dress to specific effect when she’d been persuading the Toshacks that she was a normal teenager, a credit to their family.
This was going to be entirely different from that.
She’d found the waistcoat in a market two days ago.
She made herself up in the way she had when Toshack had expected her to ‘go to discos’, not with her adult eye.
The results were … oh, God.
But this would all help.
She was both herself and a newcomer in this culture.

As she entered the downstairs bar she’d remembered that last time she’d moved amongst these people, at that New Age fair, she’d felt some kinship with them.
She’d recognized a certain look about them, but not many of those people were here now, she saw as she entered.
Instead it was mostly bloody hipsters, that weird ‘oh I’m so awfully British’ look that had come along around the time of the Olympics and the Jubilee and was probably supposed to be ironic.
Beards that looked halfway between Edwardian and pirate.
Great rolls of hair in mock Mohicans.
She’d gone to the bar and let herself be chatted to by some bloke and did all the things that let him think this was worth continuing with, which was also the real her.
At least it had been, sometimes.
It meant that she didn’t stand out by rebuffing him.
She’d waited for that feeling of air pressure, of someone checking her credentials, but had felt none.

‘So what made you interested in, you know, our jolly old sort of thing?’

Really?
He’d said ‘jolly old’ and added distance and irony as he’d said it.
The fortune-teller Ross had met had been desperate and honest about her use of dead speech patterns.
If this man was typical, this place didn’t look too promising for the operation or for her own aims tonight.

Ross laughed in a way that said she was laughing with him rather than at him.
‘Oh, you know, you read a few books…’ She realized she hadn’t attempted, as Quill had advised them all, her own equivalent of ‘jolly old’.
But, okay, she was being herself.

‘Did you see one of the fliers?’

‘No.’
Lying, she had been told, was entirely out.

He fished one of them out of the pocket of his waistcoat.
‘Only given out to the right sort of people in the right sort of places.’
He handed her one with a flourish.
‘There you go.’

The flier looked like a music-hall poster.
In that Victorian font it promised, in big letters,
The Secret Metropolitan Gathering of which you Have All Heard so Much.
Lesser attractions in boxes were noted as
Invitations to Further Delights, That which Dare Not Speak its Name
and
Rum.

‘That which dare not speak its name?’
Oh.
That had been a question, hadn’t it?
But surely she would ask
some?
If she was being herself.
Playing a part.

He feigned shock.
‘I dare not say.
Obviously.’

‘Only, that was what Oscar Wilde called being gay…’

‘That’s mainstream now.
This is … truly blinkin’ underground.’

She laughed again and carefully slipped the flier into her waistcoat pocket.
‘Right.’
The people from the New Age fair wouldn’t have allowed themselves a flier.
She looked around the room.
Had they even got the right place?
Maybe this was just a sort of … copy, a cargo cult, weekend punks.
She saw Costain.
He had been looking at her.
He’d told her not to worry if she happened to look at him.
Being herself, she would sometimes look at him.
He looked weird, all buttoned up like that, his head bent over his book while all around him people were chatting.
She saw one of his fingers resting on the words, and wondered if he was really reading them.
He moved his fingers as if he was, and then he delicately turned a page.

She looked back to the bloke at the bar, because he’d started to look in the same direction, and then took her own gaze over to the bearded bloke by the stairs.
He was still reading too, paying absolutely no attention to all the bright young things who were gathering around him.
He looked up from his book, as if feeling her watching him … and, oh, that might actually be true … and made eye contact with her for a significant length of time.
She tensed, expecting him to check her bar code.
He didn’t.
He looked back to his book again.

*   *   *

Sefton had been tempted to ask Joe’s opinion as to what might make him look the part tonight, but that would have only made Joe worry, without saying he was worried.
In the end he’d chosen a battered leather jacket he’d had at the back of the wardrobe, which he’d got from a second-hand shop, so probably qualified as vintage.
The inner pockets were thick enough that the flask containing silver goo didn’t feel continually cold against his chest.
He put the vanes the bloke at the New Age fair had attacked Quill with in the other one.
He still had no idea how to use them as a weapon, but they might be a useful sensor.
He put the jacket on over a bland polo shirt.
He was meant to look as if he didn’t give a damn.
His character had been established as in your face at the shop, so in your face he would remain.
It was quite crowded by the time he arrived.
He didn’t look for Costain and Ross, and didn’t find them.
He’d waited across the street until he’d seen beardy waistcoat, his mental shorthand for the bloke from the occult shop, enter, and followed.
There he was now, at the bar, talking to a very severe-looking young woman.
She was the real thing – the most interesting by far of all those who’d arrived.
She wore a black dress so old that the seams and creases were white.
Her hair was a black mop, tufts in all directions, completely unstyled.
She couldn’t have been more than twenty, but she looked sour, with great rings of sleeplessness under her eyes.
Beardy waistcoat was looking shocked at her, shaking his head in mute astonishment at whatever she’d just said to him.
Sefton went straight to them, but then made sure to stop when beardy saw him, as if registering only in that moment that the man had company.
Beardy waved him over.

‘Glad to see you,’ he said.
‘What are you having?’
He wanted to get Sefton away from the woman, whom it seemed he’d just met, but was already having difficulties with.

‘Who’s the cunt with the sun tan?’
she said.
Her accent was full-on Eliza Doolittle, and Sefton actually had to restrain a laugh.
Wow.
That
sort of old-fashioned racism?
Was this how it was going to be tonight?
He let the other half of what he felt hearing that, the sudden bleak anger, show on his face.

The man shook his head.
‘Oh, for God’s sake.
She was like that with me, too.
Would you please just—?’

‘What?’
The woman looked calm and empty as she said it.
She was, weirdly, taking no pleasure in this.
She seemed utterly sober.
‘He’s a fucking nigger.’

‘What the fuck?’
said Sefton.

‘I-I think maybe it’s—’

‘You don’t know shit, you look like shit, you’re talking shit.’
Again, precise, resigned to what she was saying.
There were signs of old bruises about her throat.
Was it likely that she was throttled on a regular basis?
Maybe it was some sexual thing?
It was as if she had Tourette’s or something.
There was a sense of harm about her, of harm that was done to her rather than what she’d do to others.
But he couldn’t let this go, could he?
Every character he’d played before, especially he himself, the real him, would have shrugged this off, but this one—

He made his decision and stepped into her space.
‘Are you asking for a beating?’

She closed her eyes, her teeth bared, wincing, preparing herself to be hurt.
She took no pleasure in that anticipation, like some people Sefton had met, facing the prospect with a sort of grim determination.
He saw that one tooth in two was missing, that there was weird bronze stuff screwed into some places there.
She broadcast dental pain.
When it was clear that he was hesitating, she spoke again.
‘You know what wog stands for?
Westernized Oriental Gentleman.
That’s what they say.
That’s what you are.’

‘Oriental?’

Beardy tried to step between them.
‘Listen, I think I know what you’re doing.
We all find our own path to studying the ways of London, but—’

Sefton let his body react.
With a straight arm, he pushed beardy back.
This was between her and him.

She opened her eyes, and now her gaze was dancing over his face, taking him in as she spoke quickly under her breath.
‘Cockney rhyming slang: Berkshire Hunt, cunt.
It should be “bark” for “Berkshire”, but the meaning is only conveyed if you change the pronunciation.’
It was as if she was reciting something to herself, a mantra or a prayer, while expecting to be beaten.
If you didn’t count the words, everything in her body language was pleading with him not to hurt her.
What sort of character was he playing, who couldn’t rise above it?

‘
You’re
a fucking berk,’ he said.
Which was slight.
Not enough.

She let out a long, relieved breath.

‘I think she’s dedicated her speech to breaking off her every social relationship,’ said beardy waistcoat.
‘It’s a sort of sacrifice.
I’ve read about—’

‘Fuck you,’ said the woman, mildly, and then nodded to Sefton.
‘And you and all, you fucking flid fucking nigger fucking twat.’

He let himself make understanding eye contact with her.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘How nice for you.’
He hoped she knew that was what the Queen was supposed to say when she didn’t like someone.

She gave him a relieved smile and a nod of appreciation.
Then she turned on her heel and was gone into the crowd.

*   *   *

Quill had never paid much attention to what he wore.
Now he was feeling awkward, walking down the steps into a boozer in what felt to him like something his old man would have worn on a night out after nicking the Shantry gang in 1983.
He’d stuffed those rather too well-upholstered abs of his into a waistcoat that was a bit too tight.
He’d found some natty striped trousers of which he was rather proud, and a jacket that swung under its own weight, all poured into a pair of brothel creepers.
‘Fancy dress party?’
Sarah had asked, and so he’d told her.
‘Just because you’re going as Gene Hunt,’ she’d said, ‘don’t act like him.’

It was sound advice.
That Seventies TV copper was the part of his dad he sort of was but tried not to be.
The place was rocking.
He immediately clocked where his officers were, got a pint of something filthy and went to look at the paintings that lined the walls.
Supernatural subjects: watercolours of graveyards; wood-cut prints of dancing skeletons; occult modernist pieces that were all clashing shades and angles.
He checked out the juke box.
It was the modern sort, millions of choices, probably downloaded from somewhere.
The list of suggested tracks demonstrated an interest in the spooky, from mockery like ‘The Monster Mash’ to Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.
He hit a button, and found … two pounds a play – bloody hell.
It had been a while since he’d used one of these.
The introduction to ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ rang out under the noise of the crowd.

*   *   *

Costain had noted the arrival of the rest of his unit.
It was getting too crowded in here to be doing what he was doing.
Already all the other chairs had been taken from his table, on two occasions without asking, with just an annoyed glance in his direction.
He put his book back in his pocket and stood.
That bearded bloke across the way who was now obviously watching the stairs hadn’t been disturbed similarly.
He was still reading, a discreet space kept around him even now the bar was packed.
He had been, for some minutes now, making eye contact with Costain every now and then.
Now the undercover watched as a young woman approached the man directly and he looked up.
He … oh, there we go, he’d done that checking thing Sefton had mentioned: there had been just a little hand gesture, a curl of the fingers in a sort of well-practised spiral, and then he’d nodded.
The woman walked down the stairs and out of Costain’s line of sight.

He turned to look at a noise from the bar.
A group of lads, well dressed but very modern, in jackets and jeans, were suddenly laughing and whooping as if a goal had been scored.
They were pointing in the direction of where the woman had just gone.
‘Vanished!’
he heard them yelling to each other.
‘Right through the floor!’

Okay.
Those were guys without the Sight, and the stairway downwards was something of the Sight, invisible to those without the ability.
He looked back.
The bearded man, who was obviously some sort of gatekeeper of that stairwell, was looking pained at the celebrations by the bar.
Very gauche.
They were letting the wrong sort of people in here nowadays.
The man visibly sighed, then slowly and purposefully closed his book and looked expectantly at the crowd, making eye contact once more with all those Costain had noticed earlier.
They were the ones, Costain was sure now, who could see what he was sitting beside.

Costain stood.
At the same moment, many others moved too.
The people separating themselves from the throng formed not so much a queue, but an awkward spread, waiting for their turn.
The ones who had wandered over … yeah, he could feel the sudden shift in gravity … you couldn’t tell if an individual had the Sight, but when they all moved together … They were, largely, the ones who looked poor or wore older clothing.
He looked back to the rest.
There was a real anger in the room about what was happening now.
A couple of the better-dressed people had marched over to insert themselves into this rough queue, and there was mocking laughter, rolling of eyes, people turning away in annoyance.
Costain could feel the social forces in conflict here, a frustration that, if it had been later in the evening, might have led to something kicking off.
Hence the bouncer – he’d woken up a bit and was looking around.