The Severed Streets

TWENTY-THREE

Sefton woke up. He looked around. It was early evening. He was sitting on the pavement, just along from a bus shelter. People were walking past him without looking at him. He sniffed. He’d pissed himself. So much sweat as well. He realized he knew this place. This was exactly where he’d come back last time he’d taken a trip to the outer boroughs; he was near Cannon Street tube. Why this place? He had no idea.

He remembered what had happened and urgently looked inside his jacket. There was Quill’s notebook. Incredibly. He’d brought back evidence from outside the world. Somehow. He was exhausted, beyond fatigue, but he’d done it. He’d done it. He felt … too tired to come to any conclusions about how he felt, but there was a kind of level playing field in his head now. He had sorted something out inside himself. He reached for his phone, but his fingers were too numb to dial. He felt his throat and was sure he wouldn’t be able to say anything if he could.

A car pulled up beside him. The window slid down, and to his surprise, there was Superintendent Lofthouse. ‘Get in,’ she said. ‘I put some newspaper on the seats.’ She sniffed. ‘Now I realize why.’

* * *

She drove him to Gipsy Hill. He drank strong sweet tea from a flask as Lofthouse let him know what had been happening with the others. He let the drink start to warm the terrible cold inside him. His legs kept cramping, and his stomach was tied in knots. Costain and Ross were waiting back at the Portakabin, Lofthouse said. She’d managed to call them and order them to come back in. She wouldn’t say how she’d known where to find Sefton. Whenever they stopped at the lights, she’d toy with that key on her charm bracelet. Sefton finally managed a whisper, because he was so angry at her keeping secrets from them. ‘Five is better than four,’ he whispered, his throat aching. ‘Told that. Meant to be team of five. Like the Continuing Projects Team were. Right now, there’s just three. You could at least make us four.’

She was silent for a long moment. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Not now. You’re just going to have to accept that. If, that is, you want me to keep helping you.’

* * *

When Sefton stumbled into the Portakabin, Ross came straight over. ‘Oh my God, Kev,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘We both are,’ said Costain. ‘We had to go; we thought we were onto something.’

Had they really? There was that look on Costain’s face that Sefton knew not to trust. He fell into a seat and Lofthouse asked the others to get him a blanket and a change of clothes and a cup of strong coffee. He wanted a shower, but didn’t feel able to walk over to the nick to get one. Slowly, as he was provided with those things, his voice came back to him and he spoke about where he’d been. Ross added the notes to the concepts column of the Ops Board. Did she seem even more distant than usual? He was so unequipped to tell right now. With his hands shaking, Sefton took out Quill’s notebook, was gratified by their astonished reactions. He read out the last page: ‘Met the suspect in a dream. No clue who. Fell into the figure. Back in time. Longbarrow. Fingerprints on the wall. Dead woman. Locked up. Angry. Dreaming.’

‘Oh, James,’ said Lofthouse, ‘what the fuck?’

‘“Back in time”?’ echoed Costain. ‘Was it him who was locked up?’

‘So Jimmy encountered whatever’s been visiting us in our dreams,’ said Ross, ‘“fell into it,” and … went back in time? Or did he have to get back here in time to do something?’ She made a few attempts at adding new entries to the concepts list, crossing things out a couple of times before she was satisfied.

‘It must be important,’ said Sefton. ‘That’s what I brought back. It was so hard…’ He found he could hardly continue. ‘The secret to all this is in those notes.’

‘“Longbarrow”,’ said Ross. ‘That limits what he was dreaming about to a set of specific places. Maybe he was trying to tell us where to find the Ripper.’

‘With fingerprints on the wall,’ said Costain. ‘So that’s something we can follow up on. I’ll bet there are records of fingerprints found at prehistoric sites. We find out where that longbarrow he mentions is; if it’s real, at least we can go and see it, maybe find out why it’s relevant.’ He did an image search on his phone for barrows with handprints and showed them three pages of results. ‘Doesn’t really narrow it down,’ he said. ‘Six of these are in London, and four of them are now buried under shopping centres and stuff like that.’

‘Send the pictures of those prints to Forensics,’ said Lofthouse, ‘they’ve got databases of fingerprints going back centuries, maybe some connection will leap out at us.’

Ross did as she asked.

‘I really want to go to sleep,’ said Sefton. ‘I should think you lot do and all. But now I know what Jimmy knew. Now we all do. If that’s what got him killed…’

Lofthouse nodded. ‘This better be on my head,’ she said. ‘I’m ordering you all to take the meth.’

Sefton found himself desperately wanting to say no. As an undercover, he’d always turned down drugs, plus he wasn’t sure if his system could stand it. But what was the alternative?

Costain got out his packets and looked to Ross with a raised eyebrow. ‘Orders are orders,’ he said. She just looked coldly back at him.

They all sniffed the powder. Sefton erupted into a coughing fit and hated the sharp feel of it up his nose. But after a moment … yes, it did make him feel better.

Lofthouse didn’t partake. ‘So,’ she said, ‘James said your next move should be to raid the Keel shop?’

Costain nodded, a bit too quickly. ‘Yeah. Okay. Okay. We can interview Keel about scrying glasses: if he’s got one; who else does he know who has; if there’s any defence against them.’ He gestured to the mirror that stood outside the window. ‘We can ask what that thing is — if it’s just a fake that Vincent got stuck with, which just happened to have the Ripper come out of it-’

‘Or whether the object itself was actually a trap,’ said Lofthouse, ‘using the Ripper, maybe set up by those “dark forces” Vincent thought were working against him. Either way, you might get a lead on who was trying to kill Vincent, why that was so long before the other attacks, and why, uniquely, that one failed. And we might find some way to protect you three.’

‘The strike starts at noon tomorrow,’ said Costain, looking interrogatively at her. ‘Noon. Tomorrow. Do we do this off the books? Do we even have time to do it any other way?’

‘Let me talk to my friend the judge. I may have to bend the vernacular a bit to find just cause, but I’ll come up with some legal reason for the raid.’

Costain paused. Then he nodded, again a bit too quickly. ‘Ma’am.’

* * *

While Lofthouse got on the phone, Ross stared at the board, hoping something would leap out at her. Once the prospect of a raid on the Keel shop would have made her wonder if there was anything there like the Bridge of Spikes, but the unique nature of the item had been emphasized by everyone they’d talked to, Lassiter included. If she’d been writing this story, then Keel would have bought the Bridge from whoever had stolen it from Lassiter, but Ross knew coppers and their friends could never be that lucky. She’d started to appreciate the feeling of the meth keeping her pulse racing. That was a bad sign. It was like a distant echo of happiness. She would have to make sure, after all this was over, that she never got the chance to be tempted by it again. After this was over. It didn’t feel as if it ever could be. If it was, what would she do with her life? Be with Costain. Be unhappy.

It took an hour for Lofthouse to find and persuade a member of the judiciary that she had an urgent lead concerning the murder of James Quill, that they had evidence to suggest that senior members of the organization behind the Toff mask protests, which had obvious connections to the Ripper, could be found at a particular shop premises, where the masks were on sale. No, she hadn’t had reports of any, but it was obvious there’d be some there, wasn’t it?

Ross thought she saw an admiring look on Costain’s face as he watched Lofthouse deliberately venture into what was very dodgy territory for a police officer: making up connections that weren’t yet suggested by the evidence but that you assumed would be provided by the raid yet to come. Except in this case — and she was surely risking her career to do this, even with the blurry distraction the strike would provide — she was obviously not even imagining that the scenario she was describing was true.

She finally put down the phone having gained a search warrant. ‘I feel dirty,’ she said.

‘Is that really different from turning the place over without any authority?’ asked Costain.

‘It is, because we have a piece of paper. I decide the meanings here. Now, how do you propose to conduct this raid of yours?’

* * *

They worked through the night. They took a lot of meth. They managed to find an Armed Response Unit in central London who, while they didn’t want to be blacklegs, were relieved to be rounded up for an operation that would be going down an hour before the strike. Lofthouse got her call to Forrest answered at 6 a.m. ‘You’re getting in under the wire,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you need to do this now?’

‘I am. Operation Fog will of course report back to you with everything it finds.’

Ross got an email at nine o’clock that made her heart sink once again. The fingerprints that had been taken at Anna Lassiter’s flat didn’t match those of anyone in the records, and certainly weren’t a match for those left at the murder scenes. There were some glove marks, but no DNA other than that of the resident. Ross supposed Lassiter didn’t get many callers.

* * *

At 10.55, on a brilliantly sunny morning, where the light seemed only to illuminate how nervy and strung out the city felt, an unmarked van pulled up on double yellow lines on a side road near the Keel occult shop that Sefton had visited undercover. This was the place that a ‘customer seeking urgently to sell some items’ — actually Costain — had been told he could find Mr Keel. Costain had seen from the windows of the van as they drove through the centre of London how quiet the streets were, how many businesses were boarded up or operating through side doors or had private security standing there already. The strike had put fear into the metropolis. He felt that tension in his head alongside a thumping in his heart from where he’d partaken again of his supply. London seemed to be as on edge as he was.

A traffic warden banged his knuckles on the side window. Costain pulled down the window and shoved his warrant card in his face. The warden just raised his eyebrows and wandered off: strange to meet a copper on the streets these days. ‘We cut them off from the back of the shop,’ said Sefton from the back of the van. ‘That’s where the serious shit is.’

‘Right,’ said Ross. ‘Okay. Okay.’

Costain didn’t like her looking as focused as this. It was as if she was slowly getting less and less range of expression. She finally saw him looking and managed a deliberate … well, it wasn’t quite a smile. It seemed that she was already forgetting how to do that. Sefton opened the rear doors and got out, headed off on his part of this mission. Costain leaned in and kissed Ross, then she too got out and headed off.

Dear God, the last few days had damaged them all so much. Costain got out of the van and locked it. He himself had a terrible choice to make. He’d done something terrible. Again. It kept going round and round in his thoughts. The meth meant he couldn’t trust how he felt about anything. For the hundredth time, he put it out of his mind. He took out his Airwave radio and called the Armed Response Unit, who confirmed they were in place, and on a clock counting down to noon, when the strike began. He was certain that if they ended up in a fire-fight, the unit weren’t just going to down tools on the hour, but still, their clock-watching didn’t fill him with confidence. He waited for Sefton and Ross to get to their destinations then headed towards the shop. To walk felt too slow, so he started marching.

* * *

Sefton entered the small car park at the back of the Keel store, used jointly with a patisserie next door. There was a lower door and a fire escape leading up to an office level, as their research had indicated. He felt like death, he didn’t like the fire of the meth coursing through his system, and he knew sometime soon he was going to crash. But he was doing his duty, working for Jimmy and Joe and everything he stood for in this town, and he was content with his own head now and would keep going. If London survived, he could just about glimpse a future for himself. He’d called Joe and shut down all his fearful questions, and reassured him he was okay and then said he had to go. He couldn’t help but look behind him to where the unmarked van containing the Armed Response Unit was sitting ready.

He made sure nobody was about and tried to steady his breathing, but failed. He got out the London Olympics branded water carrier with a picture of that weird cartoon alien on it dressed as a copper and, his hands still shaking, started sprinkling its contents around the frame of the door. The water he was dosing the door with was from the underground river Neckinger, which met the Thames at a point where criminals were hung. Ross would be doing the same thing to the front door at the same moment. He finished with the lower door and headed for the fire escape, aiming to climb it as quietly as he could, aware that his limbs were shaking.

* * *

Ross entered the store and went to the counter. She managed what she knew wasn’t quite a smile at the young woman serving there. She managed to stop her teeth chattering. ‘I would like to make a complaint,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry to hear that. What’s the nature of your complaint?’ The assistant was genuinely eager to please. They must get a lot of mad shit in here.

Ross lifted the cage she’d brought in onto the counter. ‘It’s about this.’ She pulled off the cloth covering it and revealed the stuffed bird therein. It had been the weirdest London-related thing they could find in the dusty corners of the Hill’s evidence room in the early hours, though it didn’t actually have anything of the Sight about it.

‘Is that … a crow?’

‘A crow!’ Ross was following through on an agreed-upon script, not feeling it herself. But what she did have flowing through her veins was the feeling that she was onstage and wowing the crowd. It didn’t make her happy, although it clearly should, and that disconnect was yelling at her continually, but it was certainly keeping her awake. She thought she probably looked and sounded more like a homeless person than anything else. ‘This, young fellow-me-lad, is a raven. One that has recently departed the Tower of London. Much as it has departed this mortal coil.’ She glanced across the shop and saw that other assistants were already looking over, taking an interest, amused. She wished she could feel the same. If it had been Jimmy doing this, he’d have enjoyed it, part of the great Met tradition of taking the piss. The assistants were probably getting overtime pay to come in today, with the strike about to break; besides, this place was most likely something like a home to them, somewhere they’d run to rather than away from. Again, she wished she was part of such a community. They’d be up for a bit of light relief.

The shop girl had got the joke, was trying not to smile. ‘And did you purchase it here?’

‘Well I wouldn’t be coming to you to complain if I’d bought it elsewhere, would I?’ She realized she was trying to sound like Quill.

‘So … what’s the problem?’

‘The problem is that when you sold it to me, you did so on the basis that it was a live Corvus corax, beloved of Bran the Blessed, kept by the Yeoman Warders to ward off the destruction of the British Isles. Does this look live to you?’ She gave it a poke and it fell sideways off its perch. ‘This is an ex-raven!’

The other shop assistants had come and gathered round, forming an audience to what they were sure now was a deliberate performance, and not an embarrassing or threatening one, for once. Despite the staring demeanour of the performer. Ross looked the assistant in the eye and hoped she’d go for it.

She did. ‘But it’s got lovely plumage.’

‘I demand,’ said Ross, ‘to see the manager!’

Of course, her face then immediately clouded, because Keel wasn’t going to be up for this. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘he’s not to be disturbed.’

‘We’ll see about that.’ Ross got out her phone and sent her prepared text to Costain. It just said, ‘He’s here.’ She didn’t look around as, unobserved, Costain walked quickly in and headed for the back of the shop.

* * *

Costain was trying to keep his thoughts from racing, to keep his mind on apprehending Terry Keel. He walked swiftly under the CCTV cameras beside the expensive stuff without breaking stride, hoping that would get him past the owner’s notice. Keel had no reason to be particularly on guard this morning, after all. He wasn’t the sort to worry about the police’s ability to protect his premises. He was pretty certain of doing that himself.

He walked straight through a door marked ‘Staff only’, found nobody there now that they were all watching Ross’ show with the bird, and headed up the stairwell. He was breathing too fast. He got out his Airwave radio once more. On the floor above was a toilet and an office. Costain stepped carefully as he reached eye level with the top floor. He couldn’t hear-

Terry Keel stepped out from the office, an expression of cold fury on his face. ‘You fuckers!’

‘Go go go!’ Costain yelled into the radio.

The window beside Keel burst inwards. Two Armed Response uniforms were bringing their weapons to bear. ‘Armed police officers!’ But Keel was already running, yelling, right at Costain. Something in his hand glowed like a hot coal.

Costain didn’t fall back as Keel expected him to, making himself an easy target when Keel got to the top of the stairs. Instead he heaved himself forwards and grabbed the man’s wrist. He slammed the hand with the fire in it into the wall. But Keel was a powerfully built man. With a cry, he shouldered Costain aside, rebounding from the folded copies of the Police Gazette from the 1840s that Sefton had stuffed into Costain’s jacket as an occult London version of body armour.

Keel threw himself towards the fire door. Costain kicked himself off the wall and followed, knowing as he moved that he was in the line of fire between Keel and the armed officers, knowing they wouldn’t shoot.

The weight of Keel’s body slammed the door open.

* * *

Sefton was ready as Keel sprinted out onto the fire escape. But even Keel was surprised as the fire he held in his hand burst into smoke and steam. Sefton grabbed him by the lapels and swung him up against the wall.

Keel kicked out with one foot, catching Sefton on the thigh, flinging him back.

Sefton jumped back at him inside his leg and punched him in the bollocks. Keel yelled and threw himself forwards again, and Sefton let him, kicking out the inside of his knee to send him falling down the stairs.

Keel struggled to his feet to see armed police officers moving out of cover to take aim at him from every corner of the car park, shouting identification and telling him not to move. But he was thinking about what he could do, his hands not going for his pockets, but moving in the air.

Sefton leaped down the stairs as Costain and Ross burst out of the door behind him, more armed police officers in their wake. He got to Keel first, grabbed his hands before anything could form in them and slammed the man down into the gravel, one knee in the small of his back. Then he rolled off so Costain could haul Keel’s arms behind his back and snap the silver handcuffs on him.

Keel stared up at the circle of police closing in around him, incomprehension adding to his fury. ‘What the fuck do you lot think I’ve done?’

‘You’ve just added resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer to conspiracy to commit murder, mush.’ Costain glowered at him. ‘We’re the law now. Like in the good old days. And we don’t like your beard.’

Sefton made himself calm down to a point where he could speak and carefully started to intone the words of the caution.

* * *

The rest of the shop workers were taken to the Hill for questioning, in a couple of marked vans that rolled up outside on cue. Ross thought they’d probably get only some vaguely interesting general background stuff from these mainstream innocents.

‘Do you want to go with your workers for a proper interview?’ Costain asked Keel, in the privacy of the man’s own office, with the armed officers stationed outside. Ross was aware of the time ticking down to noon. ‘Or do you want to settle things here?’

Keel folded his arms across his chest. ‘You lot really don’t want me to call my lawyer, do you? What was this, just a fishing expedition?’

‘You did the equivalent of drawing a gun on someone you knew was a police officer.’

Keel was staring at them, realizing they were all talking at high speed. Maybe he thought they were trying to get this done before the strike started at noon. He deliberately slowed his speech. ‘The equivalent won’t bloody stand up in court. And you bastards killed my brother.’

‘You don’t want this to go to court,’ said Ross. ‘You don’t want your customers seeing you in the dock, hearing about you being cross-examined, wondering just how many of the community’s secrets you’ve given away. I mean, it’s not like they’re onside with you now, is it?’ She brought to mind the image of the barmaid’s blank features, of how Keel had injured her. ‘You don’t want to lose face.’

Keel considered for a moment. Then he lowered his head. ‘At least you’re in the circle,’ he said. Then he sighed, as if he was talking to children. ‘I mean,’ he translated, ‘the M25. Used to be the North Circular.’

‘The traditions change with the times,’ said Sefton.

Keel looked as if he wanted to spit at him. ‘What do you want to know?’

Ross slapped a printout image onto the table. It showed the mirror standing on the grass outside the Portakabin.

Keel looked puzzled at it. ‘Ordinary mirror. Nothing of my world about that. And I’ve seen it all.’

Ross looked to Sefton, who nodded. That only confirmed what they’d already thought. The idea that the Ripper might have come out of it because of the nature of the object itself had been a long shot.

‘What about the Bridge of Spikes?’ said Costain.

Ross saw Sefton’s expression change. He wouldn’t say anything in front of the suspect, but he was obviously wondering why Costain was asking about something of which he had no knowledge. She and Costain had talked beforehand about this. They might never get the chance to be alone with Keel.

‘What about it?’ said Keel.

Oh, he knew about it. He actually knew! Ross felt the tension in her own chest and appreciated the way Costain was keeping his tone level. ‘Have you ever seen one?’

‘There is only one. And, no, I haven’t. When that was sold at auction, the bidding went on all night. It went into some terrible fucking places. Too rich for my blood.’

‘Is there anything else that does the same job?’

‘Of course there fucking isn’t.’

Ross felt her hope fall away and hit the next level down, like a ball dropping through a maze. Okay. They would just have to find whoever had stolen it from the flat. It would take time, but that would be her life now — the life of both of them, together. She could accept that.

‘Have you ever seen a scrying glass?’ asked Sefton, trying to get back to the plan.

‘Yeah, once. They’re not unique like the Bridge, but they’re pretty rare.’

‘Where did you see it?’

‘At another of the auctions. This bloke on the phone, a proxy for someone, he ran me ragged, beat me to it. Back in those days, we were the only two paying in cash. It was the night the auction was underneath the whale skeleton at the Natural History Museum.’

Ross nodded. ‘That was where our source said he got the mirror we just showed you. That was sold to him as a scrying glass.’

Keel frowned. ‘I don’t remember that. The scrying glass I was after was definitely the genuine article: smaller than a human head, red glass, a thread of blood from an old London family in a phial around the frame. You concentrate on the exact location of your target, and the mirror forms a connection between you and their sleeping brain. Nobody in the know would mistake the mirror in that photo for a scrying glass.’

A terrible suspicion was starting to form in Ross’ mind. ‘What did this proxy look like?’

‘White, late thirties, balding, dark hair…’

Ross asked a few more questions, then exchanged a look with Costain and Sefton. It could be the same man who had bid against her in her attempt to find the location of the Bridge. It would make sense. The owner of the scrying glass was the one reading their thoughts; having discovered their intention to find the Bridge, and what the Bridge was, who wouldn’t send someone to compete to get it? ‘Do you know who was he working for?’

Keel smiled and straightened up, realizing he had something valuable. ‘I do know, because I did the old — ’ he made the ‘bar code reading’ gesture in the air and they all automatically deflected it. But again their phones chirruped. It made him laugh. ‘I felt who was on the other end of the phone and it made me think something big was going down. So. What’s it worth?’

‘We leave you alone,’ said Costain. ‘And we don’t start gossiping at the Goat, or whatever pub that community settle in, about how delighted you were to help out the new law.’

Keel considered further for a moment, then nodded. ‘All right. The buyer was Russell Vincent.’

In the clear summer air, in the moment of silence that followed, Ross heard a nearby church clock, and then others in the distance, all begin to strike the hour of twelve.

* * *

Russell Vincent put his scrying glass onto its stand on his desk. He had his iPad ready beside it. Soon it would all start kicking off in London. The Summer of Blood had reached its apex. The day of the Ripper had begun.