London Falling

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 afraid 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.’