The Severed Streets

TWELVE

The following evening, Sarah Quill watched her husband silently drink his coffee at the kitchen table. She never liked it when he was silent. ‘So they didn’t find an easy exit to the brothel?’

‘Nah, but I’m not ready for Christmas presents in the middle of summer. We spent the day trying to find the woman from the Ripper attack on the Soviet bar and her male friend, but we don’t really have enough to go on.’

‘What are you going to do next?’

‘Prepare to send Costain and Sefton in. Continue to pursue an interview with Vincent. Continue to search the victims’ histories for some connection.’

‘The announcement of the result of the postal ballot of Police Federation members is tomorrow.’

‘Yeah.’

‘If they have decided to take industrial action, coppers coming out illegally, won’t it all contribute to how bad London is feeling right now?’

‘And therefore to this ostentation malarkey. The thought had occurred to me. London will have been told it can do what it likes. And so it will. I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen.’

‘The driver, Tunstall — you think he must have been in on it?’

‘It looks that way. We looked over Spatley’s two other offices, his constituency one and the one in the House, and didn’t find anything there. We spoke to the chief whip, and he told us that, if anything, Spatley had been focusing himself, cutting down on constituency work.’

‘To prepare for some sort of fight.’

‘Yes, but in politics you’d normally need to gather allies, put a gang together — that was the feeling I got from every civil service bod we talked to. Spatley, paranoid as he was, hadn’t told anyone what he was about to do, as far as we can tell. We got into the business of Spatley’s phone with SO15, Counter-Terrorism Command. They have serious hackers, and they took his mobile apart. There was nothing.’

‘And what about your phones?’

He smiled. He was always pleased when she worked something out. ‘Them too. And again, a clean bill of health. We had SO15 sweep the Portakabin for bugs while they were at it. That caused a few raised eyebrows. Nothing found there, either.’

‘So let me get this straight. You talked out loud about reinter-viewing a witness while you were in the Treasury, a place which is, security-wise, presumably as safe as the proverbial Bank of England, and the witness you talked about interviewing is killed the next morning.’

‘With us having only talked to each other about it, on phones which have definitively not been hacked.’

‘But, dear God, somehow you’re being listened in on.’

‘It looks that way, yeah.’

‘Maybe whatever evil shit you’re up against this time is all seeing and all powerful?’

‘Let’s hope so. Then we can just retire and leave them to it.’ He looked a little happier now. ‘I always like it when we talk things through like this. We should have an Ops Board at home.’

‘Really,’ she said, ‘no.’

* * *

Ross stood on her balcony, listening to the summer sounds of her suburb: the distant music, the cars racing by with conflicting tunes blaring from them, nearby laughter, the pubs, ambulances over the hill. Distant sirens spoke of continuing violence, which hadn’t yet reached Catford. She’d stopped watching the news. It was all uniforms with shields and helmets and the surging of huge masses of people, and then fires and running kids with looted televisions. She’d thought there was a limit to how long it could go on; seemingly there wasn’t. It was turning out to be a long summer. The Summer of Blood. Whoever had coined that phrase had — if what Gaiman said about ostentation was true — helped in a tiny way to make it happen.

She was dressed for the underworld again, in costume. The only advantage she had tonight was that, unless he’d looked it up — and he might well have done — Costain didn’t know where her dad was buried. If she got the Bridge of Spikes, she’d have to get there fast and activate it, without Costain following her, she hoped. She didn’t have any idea how the device actually worked. Presumably, if it was in the auction, it would come with instructions. She hoped Costain was also uncertain about that.

She would keep her knife on her tonight, in case she got hold of the Bridge and Costain tried to take it, in spite of all his promises. She was prepared to hurt him. She wouldn’t back away from that possibility. She was doing this for Dad, and she wasn’t going to stop now.

Alongside that, it was also going to be their third date. If he was being honest, if he was now genuinely on her side, they might end up together, might get to celebrate together. The possibility of that had turned her on all day, whenever she thought about it. She’d even gone out and bought some underwear.

It almost made her smile. Talk about all or nothing.

When he arrived, she opened the door to him and would have been happy to let him kiss her. But he didn’t. He looked calm and serious and committed to her cause. The librarian look he once again sported helped with that. ‘Let’s get this done,’ he said.

* * *

The map on the card had surprised Ross when she’d compared it to Google Maps. The location given hadn’t looked promising when she’d checked it out in person, either. But she supposed it made a sort of sense.

How thin the Millennium Bridge across the Thames felt as they walked over it that evening. Perhaps it was because with every step Ross felt something enormous growing all around her. The sun was still a way above the horizon behind her, making her shadow sharp on the new stone. The full moon was in the sky ahead, the base of it still hidden behind the buildings. She found that Costain, beside her, had slowed his walk too. She looked over the rail, to the river itself. It was sparkling in the combined light, a reminder of the great river of silver and gold that lay beneath all things in London. Tonight it felt as if it was simmering with the million sparkles on its surface, preparing, flexing like a muscle. It was uniting with the sky above, creating this enormous sensation of a waiting, observing, presence.

She could feel London tonight as if she had her palms against the heart of a wild animal. She could sense it watching them. She supposed it was because she herself was on the edge of a precipice. Maybe all Londoners felt it at times like these. Maybe this was how some of the Privileged felt all the time. It wasn’t the first time she’d thought of them as lucky. This was the truth that was under everything.

If she looked down into the detail at the water’s edge, she’d see terrible things, but that would be the truth too. To be part of a city was to be a cell in a bigger animal, an animal large enough to have a conversation with the sea, which the river moderated, and the sky, which the river reflected. To be part of a city was to have an index of your mortal life right in front of you: as you got older you’d start saying you remembered when it was all different around here.

She understood why those who had the Sight felt the need to hang on to the past. She herself, she realized, was trying to get back to when her dad had been alive. It was as if she was trying to begin her life again, even when everything about a city said the world went on without you.

She slowed to a stop and Costain halted too. They were halfway across the bridge. Where they stood, people had attached padlocks to the horizontal wires, usually with the names of couples on them. It was a gesture that was supposed to be about eternal love, but it had always felt a bit creepy to Ross, suggesting that locks had anything to do with love. Every month, the City of London Corporation sent people along with bolt cutters to remove them.

She understood now that she had no idea about that sort of love except as something people talked about. She’d always hoped if she ever felt like that, it’d be free of the locks she’d made for herself, of the burdens of her own quest. That it would be freeing.

She felt now how small her mission was. Just one person — her dad. She was prepared to harm Costain, to do anything, for that one tiny being. She could give all that up and choose love instead, the river seemed to be saying to her.

No, all she knew about London said the opposite: that the actions of one person could be remembered. Saving her dad was who she was. Sorry, she said now to the glory of London, I am what I am and I will do what I am going to do.

The glory of London seemed to worry in reply, to flex its river muscles anxiously, to fret about what she was going to contribute to its history tonight.

‘What are you thinking?’ asked Costain.

She turned to look at him, and was sad for him because he was with her. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.

* * *

They finally made their way to the end of the bridge, and thus to the enormous square and ugly building that had once been Bankside Power Station. ‘The Tate Modern art gallery,’ said Costain. ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’

Ross got out the card again. The vortex on its surface was twisting, reaching forwards, the map distorting more and more as they got closer. ‘Incredibly,’ she said.

The art gallery was open late for a new exhibition: Metaphysical: The Nostalgia of the Infinite. The poster had made Ross wonder if, despite the occult underworld’s problems with the whole concept of modernity, this might in fact be an exhibition that suited it. What she took from the accompanying leaflet: the concept of items or buildings being placed to overshadow and influence people — surely that struck a nerve with them? The Turbine Hall was packed with people queuing to get up to level three, where the exhibition was. Ross recalled seeing something about this having suddenly become one of those summer art ticket rushes London had, with staggered entry and sweaty groups of people craning to look at the paintings, even as the suburbs burned.

Thankfully, their destination was down in the Tanks, originally underground oil reservoirs, some of which were now used for exhibitions themselves, but not all. They saw more of the Sighted sort of people as they made their way through an installation where projectors would suddenly display random film clips of people talking about dead relatives. The Sighted they saw, in their ragged period costume, were sighing or walking quickly through or even sniggering at the exhibit. ‘It’s sort of like a half-hearted version of our lives now,’ said Costain, standing in the light of a woman sobbing uncontrollably, holding up a picture of what must have been her dead teenage son. ‘No wonder they don’t like it.’

‘I think maybe,’ said Ross, ‘they just don’t like modern art.’

She found the side door she had located a few days before, which had now been left unlocked, and followed a furtive-looking group of the Sighted through it.

There was nobody checking invites at the door. To know where the auction was seemed to be enough. The room they entered didn’t look as if it was part of the Tate — more as if it might still be a working part of a power station. Perhaps the pipes overhead did gleam a little too brightly, and the wall that seemed to be taken up with one big engine did so a touch artfully, but it was considerably more authentic than its surroundings. Right beside it, yes, Ross could feel it through the wall, they were up against the river here. It roiled and fretted just feet away.

She recognized several faces from the crowd that had been at the Goat and Compasses. Judging by the startled looks among those people, they were recognized in return. They had something to do with the death of Barry Keel. There were none of the wannabes here from the top floors of the pub; they were amid the serious people now. Among the crowd, though, were a scattered handful who looked a bit different: smart people in business suits finding quieter corners to talk on their phones. Ross glanced to Costain, who shook his head, neither of them had any idea what that different demographic was about. Ross felt a few attempts to ‘read her bar code’ and used Sefton’s blanket technique to foil them. They died down after a few moments. If only Ross could read bar codes herself.

Ross saw that people were starting to look at the fob watches they’d pulled from their ancient pockets, and that a crowd was forming in front of a low wooden stage. In its normal life, this place must be some sort of lecture space used by school groups and the like. There was no sign of any chairs, so the crowd stood, or in some cases just sat on the ground, presumably ready to haul themselves up when an auction item they were interested in was announced. Ross and Costain got as far forward as they could, to a place where they could see the stage.

A door at the back of the stage opened, and without any ceremony, into the room walked an elegant elderly woman with long silver hair, dressed in a grey ball gown that was actually covered in cobwebs. Ross could see a couple of spiders on it; one of them was moving.

‘Madams and Messiers!’ the lady called. Her accent was pretend posh, not even an attempt at French, a music hall barker, playacting ‘above her station’. The crowd applauded. ‘Welcome once again to this high point of the Seen season, the place to be Seen, our quarterly quantifying of quality, your refreshment on the way to your revels, a palimpsest of prognostication, prestidigitation and parsimony!’ The crowd went ‘ooh’ at every long word. The host leaned closer to someone in the front row, and put her hand to her mouth in a stage whisper. ‘It’s the stuff of London, on the cheap, dear!’ Then she straightened up again. ‘The truce is in place, so mind your fucking manners. I am your ’ost, Miss Haversham with an “er” as well as an aitch, not Havisham like that berk Dickens ’ad it.’

Ross heard the crowd chanting along with that bit, a mantra they’d obviously heard many times before.

‘I can tell you good people are itching to begin. Bit hot out there, innit? Bernie the Bitch, distribute the catalogues!’

A very thin middle-aged man dressed as a waiter, with bicycle clips on the bottoms of his trousers and a hangdog expression, entered at that same instant through the door behind the stage. In his arms he carried a pile of papers, which were eagerly snatched up by the audience. When Ross got hold of one, she saw that this list of auction items had been printed very roughly, as if from some form of mechanical copier, the faded ink pink and purple. The pages smelt of chemicals. There were over fifty items listed. There were no descriptions and no pictures, just the name of the object beside each item number. She found herself desperately looking down the list. She looked once, she looked twice. Then she threw the piece of paper at Costain. ‘It’s not there! That barmaid said it would be. She said she had “a strong feeling”. She said it like she knew!’ Costain grabbed the paper, looked quickly down it himself, as if he might see something she hadn’t. On the stage, Bernie had joined Haversham, carrying an enormous ledger and a quill pen in an inkpot, which he set up on a small lectern.

Ross looked at the crowd and the hosts as they prepared to begin. She couldn’t just walk away. She marched up to the stage. Costain quickly followed. ‘The item I’m after,’ she called, ‘it’s not here.’

Miss Haversham looked at her, and Ross had, in that moment, to use the blanket harder and faster than at any time previously. ‘We’ve had no withdrawals, have we, Bernie? Are you sure it was meant to be on sale tonight?’

Truly, she wasn’t. She’d been caught out, she realized, by assumption. It made her want to laugh and not stop laughing. But still she answered yes.

Haversham sighed. ‘You aren’t, you know. We get quite a few like you here, following one of the ways that happenstance and aim interact in the metropolis. They all find their just deserts.’ She added a big stage wink, then turned away.

Ross wanted to yell at her. She could feel the crowd looking at her with pity, shame and — given what had happened the last time she and her mate were about — worry. Costain now had a grim look about him. Was he distraught for her, or for himself? She put that thought aside, because a new idea had come to her. It had brought the sudden pain of new hope with it. They stepped aside from the crowd to talk in private. ‘That book…’ she said, ‘that’ll be, what, a record of sales?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And it’s bloody huge.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So maybe what I’m after has already been sold at one of these auctions, and the details of whoever bought it are written down in there. Maybe that’s what the barmaid meant. Maybe she’d seen my future.’

‘That warning we got during the Losley inquiry about someone close to us dying, that was as if someone had seen the future, so I suppose it’s … possible.’ With a lurch of her stomach, Ross knew from his tone exactly what that grim expression of his meant. He was thinking that she might have deluded herself, that she’d aroused false hope in him, put him through the emotional wringer for nothing. Was he about to walk away, to reveal that his attempts to be close to her were all a lie? No, even if that were true, he didn’t quite have reason enough to do that, not yet.

‘Look, even if the Bridge isn’t there, that list would be a treasure trove of background sources for our team. If it turns out that I can’t do anything for myself here-’

‘Then we should do something to help our guys. Yeah, I agree.’

That would mean she could tell Quill where they’d been, make this secret excursion something the two of them had pursued of their own volition, like when Sefton had gone off after Brutus.

The crowd quietened. The auction was beginning. Ross fought down her fury and disappointment and tried to keep her hope in sight. The rushing of the water nearby spoke of power that was nearly hers, but might never be.

‘Everything is allowed,’ said Haversham, clearly reciting from a familiar ritual, ‘anything can be dealt in here and, as I’m these days forced to add — ’ and she made a significant pause before adding it — ‘anything can be bought.’ There came grumbles from the audience, but angry shouts of support too. ‘Although, for the first time in a decade, for obvious reasons’ — was there a glance in Costain and Ross’ direction then? — ‘the Keel brothers aren’t present this evening.’

Again, there were both catcalls and cheers.

Bernie, having donned white gloves, held up what looked to be a small piece of tarred wood with splinters sticking in all directions. Ross felt the Sight swing to it, as if he was waving around a lantern in a darkened room. ‘Lot number one,’ said Haversham, ‘a piece of the sign that was fixed to Tyburn Tree when it was first blooded by William Longbeard, declaring him to be a heretic. Is the provenance felt as well as signed for?’

‘The provenance is felt,’ called out a man in the front row who was wearing what looked like an ancient agricultural smock; a few others joined in.

‘We start the bidding with small beer, small favours or…’ again that hesitation, ‘… two hundred pounds.’

Ross watched, fascinated, as the crowd started to yell out the names of everything from material goods to body parts to immaterial concepts. ‘A pinch of plague dust!’ ‘My last good tooth!’ ‘An hour of suicidal depression!’ One of them, as if representing his faction as well as making a bid, insisted on that ‘two hundred pounds!’

With what was clearly an extraordinary skill, or the power of some whispered word or subtle gesture, Haversham decided the money was outbid by the depression. ‘With the man in the tricorne hat.’ The demographic in the suits, she saw, had their phones out now and were listening to them, occasionally bidding themselves. So they were proxies, agents for buyers not actually present, people hired in who … well, who knew what they believed about what they were participating in? Ross wished she could make use of that version of the ‘checking-out’ gesture that could investigate a mobile phone. The identities of those bidders might well be good background info.

The bidding continued for three more rounds, with the lot finally going to the man with the money. Groans came from the crowd as he pushed his way forward to shove the notes into Bernie’s hand. Bernie kept his gloves on for that.

‘The movement of money around London must be like another force on the city,’ said Ross. ‘You’d think they’d be more up for using it.’

‘Except money stays modern,’ said Costain, ‘because they change the designs every few years, and new notes are printed all the time.’

The next few lots showed the same pattern: items from the distant past of London being bid for by both this strange form of barter and by money. Haversham seemed to try to treat both systems equally. The successful bidders who had bought lots for intangibles were taken into the back room by Bernie, each for an illusionist’s moment: the door opened again to let them back in at the very moment it had shut. Each item was handed to the successful bidder as soon as their business was concluded, and several people left early, having presumably won or failed to get what they’d come here for. Ross recognized a few of the items: there was a Tarot of London pack of a different design to the one she’d seen previously and an old hardback Book of Changes. Finally, the last item in the catalogue was accounted for.

‘Why do you think they keep records of the bidders?’ whispered Costain.

‘Maybe they keep track of the provenance of each item, from owner to owner, just in case someone manufactures something that only looks old.’

‘Or contains a trap.’

‘So that ledger of sales records is indeed the purest imaginable juice, the most valuable object here.’

‘So, what? Are we going to try to nick it?’

‘There’s probably some fucking terrifying security in place.’

‘Yeah, and we’ve no time to scope it out. Maybe we should find out when the next auction is, and-’

‘No.’ The path that led to a different sort of life for her was too tempting. She was shaking her head even as the thought struck her. She knew what she was going to do. It scared her. ‘Haversham said anything could be bought.’

‘But-’

‘Does anyone have any further business?’ called Haversham, returning to the ceremonial tone, clearly expecting that to be the end of the auction.

Ross stepped forward before she had time to think, shrugging off Costain’s slight attempt to restrain her. This was her only chance. This was clearly what the barmaid had meant in sending her here. Or if it wasn’t, this was her trying to tell her own story. ‘I do,’ she said.

‘What do you offer or wish for?’ Haversham sounded as if she sort of knew, as if she was willing her on. Was that real, or was it just for the sake of spectacle?

‘I wish for … that book.’ She pointed at it. Bernie raised his eyebrows in shock. There was a combination of amazement and amusement from the audience. Haversham raised a finger and they were silent. ‘We’ve heard that before, haven’t we, ladies and gentlemen and others? Please, young lady, before you begin anything you can’t finish, understand the value of what you seek.’ She went over and held up the ledger. ‘This book is a cornucopia, a concentration, a concordance of what are known in the vernacular as right proper names. My own name, Haversham, is a nom de gesture’ — she again pronounced the words as if they were English — ‘because I don’t want this lot knowing what I was born as, in case there’s a dispute and it’s used against me. My real name is as valuable to me as my life. This volume contains more than a thousand such names. Do you really think you have anything to offer, girl, that could convince us to sell it to you?’

‘No. Which is why I don’t want to buy it. I know the object I’m after only arrived in Britain in the last five years. So I only want to see those entries. I want … the chance to read that book for fifteen minutes.’

Haversham let out a bemused breath. ‘You’ll still need an offer of enormous value. But…’ Ross got the feeling she was making use of some internal power rather than merely deciding. ‘It’s possible you may have something worth it.’

Ross could see, out of the corner of her eye, Costain looking sidelong at her, wondering what she was going to offer. She glanced at him, asking him the question first, then back to the auctioneer. They were about to find out if he really did have any secret funds. ‘What’s the opening bid,’ she asked, ‘in cash?’

The crowd groaned. There were shouted insults at her, but also scattered cheers. She got the feeling this would be the furthest anyone had tried to push the imposition of monetary value on this community.

Haversham thought for a moment, her inner power doing the maths. ‘Twenty million pounds,’ she said.

Ross felt a hollow open in her stomach. She slowly looked to Costain, who was staring back at her. He shook his head. Come on. As if.

She had no idea what to do.

No, no, she did. The audience was laughing at their reaction to the size of the sum. Some of them were yelling about how absurd it was to put a price tag on such things, an obscenity. There was factional sympathy for her. There was outright cynical mockery too.

She had to find something else to offer. Something huge.

Haversham was looking at her like a judge. Not unkindly.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I offer…’ She found herself breathing more quickly, wanting to be sure she knew the size of what she was doing, making herself accept it, for the sake of her father. ‘My left hand.’ She felt Costain beside her start to react and pushed her fist into his arm to make him shut up.

‘My left hand and a finger from the right!’ shouted a voice from behind her.

The crowd roared with laughter. They were laughing at both bidders. At them being so wide of the mark. She turned to see who else had bid so guilelessly, and realized, with a shock, that she recognized who she was looking at. He must have come in late and stayed at the back, and the truth was that they’d been concentrating on fitting in rather than examining the crowd. White, late thirties, five nine, large build, no visible identifying marks, balding, dark hair, off-the-peg suit, and, yes, she had previously been looking at him on grainy CCTV footage.

It was the man who’d been talking to the woman in the Soviet bar, who’d left before the murder of Rupert Rudlin. He was meeting her gaze now, unsurprised by it. They were competitors — that was all. Or perhaps they could both win this, if they reached the reserve price. There was nothing to stop him looking at it for fifteen minutes too. He wasn’t pleased she’d led him into being laughed at. She glanced back to Costain, and saw that he’d recognized the man too.

So this was going to be difficult. Their duty was clearly to apprehend this person of interest.

‘That’s nowhere near what’s required,’ said Haversham, bringing Ross’ attention quickly back to the stage. ‘Are you wasting our time?’

She thought quickly. ‘A year of depression and paranoia.’ She could face that. Of course she could. There would be an end to it. Unlike Dad’s time in Hell.

‘Two years of that!’ The man from the bar again. He was actually trying to keep up with her. He didn’t care what the rest of the room thought. He would wait until she found the right level, if she ever did, and then make sure he matched her. Damn it!

More laughter, but it was dying now; the crowd saw both of them as merely hopeless, no longer even funny. Haversham didn’t answer.

‘Me,’ said Ross. ‘I mean, you know, a night with me.’ This was surely much bigger than anything else she’d offered.

At least it made them laugh louder again. Among the laughter, Ross was actually pained to hear the man making the same offer, his voice breaking as he did so. She looked back to him again, and saw how desperate his expression had become. What was driving him, that he’d prostitute himself like she just had? In his case it looked more as if he was motivated by fear than by need.

‘You can’t offer yourself to London,’ said Haversham, now starting to get annoyed at Ross’ naivety and the way the man was parroting her. ‘We’ve seen what happens. It’s not allowed, which normally goes without saying.’

‘You know who you might really be giving it up to,’ whispered Costain in her ear, furious. ‘That smiling bastard. Would you just think before you-?’

‘No.’ She stepped forward out of his ability to stop her and did what she had to do. ‘I offer my future happiness. All of it. For a lifetime.’

There were actually gasps. Various members of the audience turned to look at her, some with new respect, some with a sort of vertiginous horror at what might be about to happen to her. They were shaking their heads, appalled by the harm she was doing to herself. This from people missing fingers and teeth. She was scared now to see those looks; she’d thought she’d be past that. It was too late now.

She and the whole room turned to look at the man from the bar. Ross could see now that he was shaking. That he was on the edge of tears. ‘Sixty million pounds,’ he said.

The room went silent. The audience had been startled by his sudden shift from one faction to the other. Ross looked back to Haversham, who was considering, using whatever hidden power worked out conversion rates for her. Her decision here might well affect the future of this community. ‘I do not think,’ she said finally, ‘that a lifetime of happiness can be equated with such a small sum of money.’

The crowd exploded in anger and applause.

Ross looked to see what the man was going to do. He was looking right at her, imploringly, and now she saw that expression fade into fury and defeat. Abruptly, he shook his head. He walked quickly towards the door. She couldn’t follow him — that would be against the rules at any auction, this lot would surely prevent her from leaving. She looked to Costain, because he had to get after him, but Costain was just staring at her, an agonized, empty expression on his face.

‘Don’t you care that he’s leaving?’ she whispered.

‘I care about you,’ he said.

Ross looked round, but the man had gone. She turned back to the stage. Haversham was looking horribly sad for her. She felt terror in her throat and stomach but she stood firm. She had done this. She would not retract it. Even if she could.

Haversham waited for a very long moment. As if she was hoping for an interruption. ‘Any other bids?’

There was absolute, careful, silence.

‘Going once,’ said Haversham.

‘Withdraw the bid!’ hissed Costain.

‘Going twice.’

‘We withdraw the bid!’ yelled Costain.

Haversham ignored him. ‘Going three times.’

The moment stretched. Ross wanted to yell for her to get on with it.

‘Gone,’ said Haversham.

Silence.

Ross numbly stepped forward. She didn’t want to look at Costain. She headed for where Bernie was looking sympathetically at her, beckoning her towards the back room. He led her through the door.

* * *

She was in an absolutely black space that felt roomy, with air blowing in from many directions. She suspected that this was like Losley’s tunnels between houses. Bernie closed the door behind them, but somehow Ross could still see. He reached into his waistcoat and produced a tiny brass item, something like a curled-up trumpet. He held it up to her. ‘I’m sorry it has to be like this,’ he said. ‘It’ll be easier if you don’t struggle, but I appreciate that you won’t be able to avoid it.’

She watched as he approached and lifted the object towards her face. It wasn’t obvious what she was supposed to do. This felt like a dream, as if what she’d done couldn’t possibly be as bad as it seemed to be. She wanted to protest, to say she hadn’t meant it, but the whole difference between being an adult and a child was that she could do this, she could make this sacrifice-

The device suddenly sucked at her face.

She cried out. Bernie slammed a hand onto her shoulder as she tried to twist out of the way. He was strong, he was infinitely strong! That was good, because she couldn’t help trying to pull herself away, and she couldn’t stop what was happening. It was pouring out of her nose. It was forcing its way up out of her throat, and forcing her mouth open, and … here it came! It was like throwing up and drowning at the same time. It started squirming out of the corner of her eyes a moment later. It was being sucked into the metal shape. And now she could almost see it! It was-

It was happiness.

She couldn’t quite see what it looked like, but she knew what it was. In this space it was mentally labelled for her, in the same way that something in a dream is instantly recognizable. He was pumping joy out of her. She had been full of happiness and she hadn’t known it. She had been full of joy.

Losing it now, she suddenly realized, was much worse than the physical feeling of it being wrenched out of her. It took her back to a sudden, pure moment of horror from her childhood, when she’d let go of a balloon that her dad had got her at a fair. She’d grabbed for it and missed and it had floated higher and higher and she’d started to scream, because it was going and she’d never get it back! Never! Never!

Bernie held her there as the terror of loss became too much to bear.

Then it passed and was gone, into memory. The last bit of joy was taken from her.

He put the device back in his pocket, and took out a big crimson handkerchief of absolute cleanliness, and wiped her face with the care of a father as she staggered, leaning against him. Then he put the cloth away in the same pocket, and she realized that it would be taken to the same place as the device. Her scraps were to be taken to the table too. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but you asked for it.’

* * *

She walked back into the room to find the audience waiting for her. She had only been gone, to them, an instant. They wanted to stare at her. They parted for her, their gazes examining her. She could still feel. She’d expected to be utterly numb, had looked forward to it, even, during her sacrifice. Instead she could feel annoyance at them looking at her, fear at what she’d done to herself, even a sort of calculating hope for what this would mean for her plans for her father … and there was Costain, not angry now, just terribly worried for her, and she felt a swell of relief, even, as … there was a reaction in her to his expression.

Perhaps the device had gone wrong.

No. She wasn’t that lucky. Perhaps this just wasn’t so bad as it was meant to be. Perhaps ‘happiness’, for this lot, was very narrowly defined.

No, something inside her said, this is grief protecting you. The full meaning of it hasn’t hit you yet. Relief is not happiness. Hope and lust are not happiness. Perhaps you are already losing sight of the thing you lost.

She went to the book on the lectern. Haversham took a fob watch from a pocket of the spidery gown. Ross found her own notebook, but Haversham raised a finger. ‘You are not to take notes,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t part of the bargain. You have fifteen minutes. From now.’

Ross opened the book and found the pages to be smooth with dust. The lists were written in a precise, looping hand, the scratches of the quill visible. There were, as with the catalogue, no pictures and no descriptions. She noted the dates on the pages and saw that the auction was four times a year, yes, on the solstices and equinoxes, so she had nineteen to search. She flipped back, started with the first of them, and worked forwards in time, running her finger down the lists. She knew what the thing was called in the translations she read, the Bridge of Spikes, and had seen a few variations. The familiar name of a person leaped out at her. There were sometimes celebrities at these auctions, then. At the winter solstice auctions in particular, there were a number of them. Four years ago, a famous singer had bought … something the name of which meant nothing to her. What he had offered? Oh, that was so terrible for him.

She stopped at the winter solstice of three years ago when she saw another familiar name. Oh. Oh, but that meant…!

It meant she had found something useful for the investigation. She had come here for her own ends, but here, in what she was staring at in amazement, she had found something new to go on for her team, some startling new leverage they could apply. What could she do about it?

She called Costain over.

‘You can’t show him-’ began Haversham.

‘I can tell him!’ shouted Ross. She whispered the name and item and given address in his ear.

He stared at her, astonished, started to say something.

She pushed him away and quickly turned back to the book. She had to put that out of her mind now and get back to her original aim. The object she was after wasn’t in the first two years of auctions she looked through, to the point where she started to panic at the thought that she’d missed it, because she wasn’t going to get to the front of the book before the time ran out, but then-

There. Her eye had gone past it then instantly been drawn back. She realized she was breathing more deeply, her fight-or-flight reflex set off just by seeing the words on paper. Anna Lassiter was the name of the purchaser, at 16 Leyton Gardens, with a postcode that put it in Kentish Town. Sixteen flowers, laid on, Leyton, she ran a mnemonic around her head a few times, piling associations on the address and the post code. She should tell Costain this too, have two brains remembering it. She looked over to him. He’d seen that she’d found something.

No. Still no. She still could not trust him.

She slammed the book closed and grabbed her notebook, ripped out a page, pulled out a pen and wrote the information down before he could arrive beside her. She folded the paper up and shoved it into her waistcoat breast pocket.

She had it. She knew the location of the object that could bring her dad back to life.

It made her excited. But it didn’t make her happy.

She headed for the door; Costain followed at a run.

* * *

He caught up with her in the Turbine Hall. ‘So what’s the plan? Are we going straight there?’

She didn’t want him going with her. She didn’t want to tell him that. She felt emotionally exhausted, and she was aware of a terrible numbness that had taken hold of some part of her personality like an anaesthetic. Besides, though she really did want to go straight to the address and at least look at where this precious object might be, it did make more sense to use all the tools at her disposal to learn everything she could about the place beforehand.

She turned to look at Costain and saw that he was prepared for disappointment here, prepared to be disbelieved, as he’d been doubted all his life.

She put her hands on both sides of his face and kissed him.

He kissed her back. Then he stopped. ‘Lisa,’ he said, ‘we have to talk about-’

‘No,’ she said, ‘we don’t.’

* * *

She took him home. He kept on kissing her as she slowly pushed him up against the wall, but he was not going to go any further. His expression said he wouldn’t let himself unless she gave him some sort of signal. She took his hand and put it not on her breast as she’d thought to do, but on second thoughts, between her legs. They stood there awkwardly, him looking at her, still questioning, even at that, him cupping her. She found her body was moving unconsciously against him. She opened her mouth to say — God, did she have to give him permission aloud?

Something suddenly changed in his expression. He took the hand away and went to unbutton her, to start to undress her, quickly, roughly. She raised her arms to let him.

He manhandled her and turned her body and opened her with his hands. He spent so long licking her, expertly, but agonizingly too long, too precisely. He was still fully dressed, even. He needed to keep his control. She grabbed his hair, and looked into those deeply worried eyes. Wasn’t he hard? Hadn’t she made him hard for her? ‘For God’s sake!’

He looked at her as if he was convincing himself this was real. He was so unused to being wanted. Suddenly, he got to his feet.

She watched him, wondering if he was going to leave her there.

Slowly, he started to take off his clothes. When he was naked, he put a hand on his cock, showed her how hard she made him. He was shivering.

She reached into her bedside table and took out an unopened packet of condoms. She opened it; her eyes kept darting between her short-nailed fingers slipping on the cellophane, his face, his cock. She kept expecting to find laughter somewhere in all this, but, no, it was all deadly serious. She supposed this was what it was going to be like for her always now.

She had sold happiness for-

No, she didn’t want to think about that now.

She took out a condom packet, ripped it open and reached out. She held him, pleased at how hot he was, at how steadily hard she’d made him. At the feeling of him pulsing in her hand. She rolled the condom over him, and pulled it to cover him, tight. She looked up at him again and took a deep breath.

‘It’s okay,’ she said.

His lips bruised hers as he slammed her back into the pillow.

* * *

They lay there afterwards, feeling the cool through the open window, the sounds of summer and of distant violence still outside. Costain slowly ran a hand down her back as she lay on his chest. He felt that he should now show how gentle he could be. Here was a woman who’d just suffered a huge emotional loss, and he’d … had he taken advantage of her? He looked at her face. She looked calmly back. He already thought that perhaps she seemed different, not quite displaying all the emotions he might expect. But then she wasn’t like the other women he’d been with, and he didn’t know what was normal.

He still felt that this was … uneven. That he should somehow … pay for what he’d just done. Either guilt had become so much a part of his life now — living as he was with the prospect of Hell — that it had infested this moment too, or maybe this was something more natural, how he felt now he was with someone … for real. Maybe for the first time. Maybe this sort of guilt was what most blokes dealt with when they were in their teens.

God, they were both like children. ‘I want us to be together,’ he said. ‘Do you?’

She paused for a long moment. When she said it there was no happiness in her voice. ‘Yeah.’

‘So we keep telling each other it’s okay.’

‘Okay.’

‘And tomorrow we talk about-’

‘We’ll talk about everything.’

They slept.

* * *

In the early hours, Costain woke from dreams of being closely investigated, explored even. He got up to go to the toilet, and he walked over the pile of her clothes, the underwear that couldn’t have been her usual choice, which she must have worn for him, and there was the waistcoat which had, in its pocket, that piece of paper with the address where the item that could keep him out of Hell was located.

She had left it there. She wouldn’t have done that offhandedly. She had decided to leave it there. She had stirred as he’d got up and she was probably awake now. Watching him to see what he’d do. He had to prove himself.

He stepped on over the waistcoat, went to the bathroom, came back.

She was looking at him, sitting up, entirely awake. ‘You didn’t look at the piece of paper.’

‘No.’ He went to sit beside her on the bed. She lay against him once more. He looked at her. He could see that frown on her face in the darkness. He’d always found how solemn she looked kind of horny, now he thought of it. That seriousness had indeed extended to how passionate, how committed, she’d been. But the idea that she would now be like that all the time … the hurt she’d done herself felt enormous. That was the biggest reason he wouldn’t look at the address: the high price she’d paid for it to be hers.

‘I’m never going to be happy,’ she said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘I’m satisfied. Calm. Peaceful. But not happy. It turns out that happy is an active sort of thing.’

‘Would even getting your dad out of Hell make you happy now?’

She shook her head.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I tried to stop you.’

‘You shouldn’t have. I don’t regret it.’

‘Okay,’ he said.

They were silent for a few moments. ‘Go and get the piece of paper,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘You have to. We need to trust each other.’

He hesitated. Then he went over to her waistcoat and came back with the paper. She switched on the bedside light.

They looked at the address together: 16 Leyton Gardens. It seemed a small thing to base such trust on. He looked at her face and saw the intensity of her expression still. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

She looked almost angrily at him. As if she was already wondering if she’d made the right decision. ‘We work a full day tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We don’t put this before the job.’

‘Right.’

‘Then we go to this place, research the buyer, make them some sort of offer.’

‘Or-’

‘I don’t want to think about that until we have to.’

‘Okay.’

‘Then we resurrect Dad. We go to where he’s buried and dig him right out.’

He kept his voice even. He was amazed at such trust. He was going to be worthy of it, he was. ‘Absolutely.’

‘Right. So there’s something else we need to do, right now.’

He found his phone and started texting Quill. ‘You’re sure about the details?’

‘Yeah. I found in that ledger the name of an item purchased at one of those auctions two and a half years ago, a “scrying glass”. The name of the buyer was Russell Vincent.’