The Severed Streets

by Paul Cornell

  Gaiman took a deep breath to calm himself. Then he switched on the engine once more, checked the rear-view mirror and drove off.

  TWENTY

  Dr Piara Singh Deb, forensic pathologist, let out a long breath as he looked at these two young coppers and their intelligence analyst. He remembered the last time they had come to see him, when they had been driven, burdened, more passionately engaged with the Mora Losley case than was useful for them professionally. He had been pleased to hear the subsequent reports of them having succeeded in saving children from the fate of those whose skeletons he had examined for them on that occasion. Now they looked just as fraught, but in an entirely different way. The young woman had a terrible expression on her face as she looked at the body on the slab in the forensic laboratory. She kept her jaw tight shut as if she was about to explode with rage, and her eyes shone with it. He expected some variation: perhaps this was the prelude to tears, but none came. She didn’t talk at all as they viewed the body. The stockier black copper had a more conventional grief, which was somehow reassuring. He was pale, he hadn’t slept, you could feel the tension in his neck. Their DS did all the talking. He asked a lot of questions. He seemed determined to remain calm and businesslike – something Singh had seen a lot in the way police dealt with horrifying deaths. But he was talking a little too fast, there was a touch of desperation about him. He was playing host today, in these terrible circumstances, to a superintendent as well as the three of them. He suspected the deceased, James Quill, had also been a friend of hers. The last time Singh had seen him, he’d been suffering somehow, lost. Now he was lost completely.

  ‘The body was found at oh-four-twenty-eight this morning, having caught in the moorings of a tourist vessel near East India Dock. Exposure to the water indicates he can’t have been in there for more than about nine hours.’

  ‘That’s before when he was last seen alive,’ said the DS.

  ‘Various other tests concur that death might have occurred soon after he was last seen. You tell me these are the same clothes he left work in. He was dropped into the river from some considerable height. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was told that was off one of the major bridges upstream from where he was found. Needless to say, he was already dead.’ Singh moved to look into the dead man’s face, remembering how it had looked in life. ‘Cause of death: shock and massive blood loss due to repeated lacerations of the torso and gross injuries to the testicles and lower abdomen.’ The body was white, even the wounds pale. ‘These injuries are precisely in keeping with the MO of the suspect you are investigating in connection with the previous murders.’

  ‘Does he seem colder than he should?’ That was the other black copper, who had kept his eyes fixed on Quill’s face, as if making himself not look away. He’d changed since last time Singh had seen him. More certain. Harder.

  ‘That’s interesting. My thermometer doesn’t say so, but…’ Singh ran his hand over the chilly surface of the chest. ‘I feel he is. No, please don’t write that down, that’s ridiculous. Why do you ask?’

  The DC just shook his head. So Singh had to move on.

  ‘I do see some indications, such as traces of fibre beneath the fingernails, that the victim was killed inside a car. The hands seem to have clawed at a seat, and we see leather and other indicators of a luxury interior.’ Looking at Quill’s hands, he recalled his own, a couple of hours ago, pulling a sheet back from this same face. That had been when Quill’s wife had come in. It never stopped being hard to do that. ‘Is this your husband?’ he’d asked then.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ the wife had said, very quickly. In order to be doing all she could. He’d heard that sound so often. He’d stepped back then and let her do all the other things they sometimes did: put a hand to the deceased’s face; kiss his brow, and, in this case, his lips. Sarah Quill looked exactly like the other widows he’d met, yet each of them was unique. Death was the most common thing to human beings, and still enormous for everyone. Dr Singh had a young family and had never known the death of someone he loved. He hoped his job would prepare him. He knew it would not.

  She hadn’t started to cry. Some did, some didn’t. She was one of those for whom it was going to take a very long time before it hit her.

  Now he turned to these others who had loved James Quill, wishing he had it in him to be a minister of some kind, a counsellor. But he knew nothing of death. He said the same to them as he’d said to Sarah. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  * * *

  Ross put a hand over her eyes as they left the lab. She didn’t want people looking at her. She didn’t want to look at people. Or at anything. She felt Costain put a hand on her shoulder, felt the years ahead of her without happiness properly now for the first time. How terrible Quill’s last moments must have been. Now she would never see him again.

  Unless. Unless. Unless …

  She couldn’t look at Costain. The Ripper might come for the rest of them at any moment. Costain would be considering the very real possibility of suddenly being sent to Hell, at any moment. If she was in his shoes, what would she do? Would she immediately do her best to go and take the object, right away, intending to use it to protect herself? Or would she use it to bring back their colleague and friend, not just because he was their colleague and friend but because, in dying, he might have discovered information that could save them all? Or would she give it to her lover, so that a dead father might be returned to life? Not that there would be happiness for that lover in any of these outcomes.

  The meth pumped up every negative she felt. She couldn’t look at him because she would always be looking at the calculations on his face now. But she also could not let him out of her sight. She made herself look. She saw him only looking back with concern for her. But she kept on looking.

  * * *

  Sefton was watching Costain and Ross. He wanted to ask what could possibly be going on between the two of them that they seemed distracted from Quill’s death. But he was full of grief and guilt, and he couldn’t be sure of anything he might glimpse around the edge of that. His ridiculous presumptions of occult defence had failed entirely. Quill had looked to him to be the specialist, and his so-called expertise had provided him with a few stupid trinkets. The Ripper might come for the rest of them at any moment, and there was nothing he could do about it. It almost felt as if he’d killed again.

  ‘Listen to me,’ said Lofthouse. They all turned to her. The expression on her face was all business. They were not going to see her emotions. She was toying with that bloody key on her charm bracelet. Sefton wanted to shake her and demand to know what she knew that they didn’t. ‘We have every reason to think,’ she said, ‘that you three will be the Ripper’s next targets. Normally I’d say let’s get you into protective custody, but I think if I did that the results might be bloody terrifying, for you and for London. You’re going to need to look out for each other. Is that clear?’

  They all nodded, numb. Sefton wondered exactly how they were supposed to do that.

  ‘What could you see that Dr Singh couldn’t?’

  ‘The body is, Jimmy is … covered in silver,’ began Sefton, haltingly, ‘head to toe. More than any of the others were.’ He’d felt the cold shining off Quill’s body.

  ‘Do we have a crime scene?’

  ‘We’ve checked all the major bridges for silver,’ said Costain, ‘and haven’t found anything. If we can find this car, the interior should be covered in it.’

  ‘We went straight to where the body was found,’ said Sefton. ‘Everything Jimmy had on him – phone, wallet, notebook and so on – was missing from the body, which might be designed to make this look like a robbery—’

  ‘But of course it isn’t,’ finished Costain.

  ‘You will have everything you need,’ said Lofthouse. ‘Even when the strike starts at noon tomorrow there are plenty in the Met that’ll still turn out for Jimmy Quill.’ Quill’s death was all over the media. The Ripper had struck at the heart of the establishment aga
in. As if Jimmy was just that, a shape for a story. Lofthouse had provided what she’d called the usual quotes. ‘Jason Forrest sends his deepest condolences. He says he knew something was wrong when James was late for a pint. The main investigation team are now busy looking into connections between him and the other victims.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ said Sefton. He wanted the Ops Board in front of him right now, wanted Quill to be standing beside it too, but he couldn’t see what good it or anything else could do. ‘I followed the pattern of those flash mobs on Twitter. The original tweets about them are from a variety of accounts, but they all use similar language. The first one of them always said something’s about to happen in a particular place – where Jimmy was – and then, minutes later, Toffs from nearby started arriving, ready for action. Nothing impossible about the distances travelled, and it might have been harder to do if it had been a weekday lunchtime, but it’s definitely a phenomenon. And I think whoever was sending the tweets must have known where Jimmy was, must have been trying to provide cover for the attack, at least at the start, and on the occasions when the Ripper found him again.’ He remembered the sound of Quill’s voice on the other end of the phone, the desperation.

  ‘I’ve put in a new Data Protection Act request asking for account information about the tweets,’ said Sefton, ‘but with the DPA backlog and the strike, I don’t know how long that’ll take.’

  ‘All right.’ Lofthouse closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again, as if willing herself to keep going. ‘You’re our only hope of catching this thing that killed James. I doubt I have to give you a motivational speech about doing that.’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ whispered Costain.

  ‘And if you do catch the Ripper, things might get better, am I correct?’

  ‘That’s the hope we’ve been given,’ said Sefton.

  ‘DS Costain –’ she put a hand on his arm – ‘I’d normally appoint a new commanding officer from outside your team, but I’m going to tell anyone who’s interested that getting up to speed with your unit would waste valuable time. So you are now in charge of Operation Fog. Are you okay with that?’

  ‘Ma’am,’ Costain nodded. Sefton was pleased to see no triumph or annoyance in him. There was only the anguish they all shared.

  * * *

  Sarah Quill had woken a neighbour, asked her to stay in the house in case Jessica woke up, and then driven through the scarily empty streets of London into a building that was far too busy, where she had seen her dead husband’s body on a tray.

  She had expected him to wake up. That would have been terrifying, but then, a second after, it would have been wonderful.

  It had occurred to her, in that moment, that perhaps he actually might wake up, because now she knew impossible things could happen. But he didn’t.

  She hadn’t wanted to touch him, but she had: she had pushed her head down and made herself kiss him, fighting awful horrors in the depths of her about this being the last time she would see … the body. Him. Calm voices told her that wasn’t the case.

  There would be a funeral.

  She was given a hot drink and asked if she was okay to drive. He was still in there, still just over there, in the other room. Still, incredibly, not breathing.

  They hadn’t wanted to say how he’d died, but she’d understood what was under the sheet. That hadn’t hurt her at all. That was just a detail that her brain had gently put in a place where it couldn’t yet hurt her.

  But it would. That detail had joined a list. They were all coming to get her.

  She drove herself home. She thanked the neighbour and shook her head when the neighbour asked what had happened. The neighbour said Sarah was as white as a sheet.

  So Sarah had been there when Jessica had woken up, like on any morning.

  Jessica had come downstairs shouting, which turned into singing something off the telly. Then she had immediately said, out of nowhere, as if it was a certainty, that Daddy had already gone to work.

  Somehow, Sarah was still sure it was all a mistake, but that was just trying to keep at bay this awful thing … which was true.

  She was tempted, just for a moment, as she got Jessica ready to go to nursery – while Jessica talked and talked about Disney princesses and how she wanted all of them and that they could afford it, a word she’d only learned this week – to tell her that, yes, Daddy had gone to work.

  But no. No.

  The weight finally reached her, for the sake of their child. A child in whom she was seeing Quill’s face. She had to make herself not cry. She stopped dressing her, she had to tell her first. There would be no nursery today. There would just be the two of them.

  She didn’t want to scare her. She took Jessica’s hands and looked into her face, forcing herself to smile. ‘No,’ she said, and found that she was going to tell the same lie that so many children had been told. Because she was such a coward. Because she didn’t want to hurt her with something she would herself have to take on first. ‘Daddy’s gone … on a long journey.’

  THE PREVIOUS NIGHT

  Gaiman heaved Quill’s corpse up against the parapet on the side of Westminster Bridge. Around him, the night-time traffic was absolutely still, as if in freeze frame. There was no sound except his own breathing and the scraping of the dead body being moved across the stones. Had whatever was doing this brought time around him to a halt, or was he moving very fast? He looked down the river; without movement it looked as unreal as a movie backdrop, the lights somehow no longer alive.

  He looked back to Quill, and put out of his head, as he had so many times, the knowledge that this man had a family. They would suffer for a while, but everything would end the same way for everyone. That was the excuse he allowed himself. That justification had let him do all this. He had found Quill, he had anonymously texted the person who controlled the Ripper, telling them where his victim was going to be. He was doing this for the greater good. But that was what everyone who did terrible things told themselves. To take comfort in that would be wrong. Instead, he accepted his guilt. He was an accessory to murder.

  He took everything out of Quill’s pockets and found the detective’s notebook. He had to follow specific instructions in disposing of that.

  He took a last look into the man’s empty face, to make sure he wasn’t sparing himself anything. He grabbed Quill by the legs, heaved him up the parapet like a sack and used his shoulders to push him over. The body fell into the river. He watched it hit the water and could still see it for a moment as the current carried it away. Then it went under and was gone.

  There was silver on him, and in the car. He would have to clean it all. He had been forbidden to give himself up. The deal outlined by the ghost that had been sent to meet him was very detailed, but it hadn’t, curiously, made any mention of how Quill was going to die, only that Gaiman would lure him into it. Gaiman got the feeling that the details had been improvised, a reaction to events.

  He looked up and saw that the man who had offered him the deal, who had stood beside that ghostly visitor, was now nearby, in the middle of the road. He was well dressed, powerfully built, with a receding hairline and cold grey eyes. Whenever Gaiman had seen him he’d had a broad smile on his face; that was also the case now.

  ‘I did what you wanted,’ Gaiman said. He was shocked somehow to find his tone was still reasonable, that he sounded questioning, merely amazed at himself.

  The man inclined his head, still smiling. Yup, I guess you did!

  ‘Everything I’ve read tells me you keep your side of a bargain. That you don’t, in fact, twist deals to your advantage like the Satans of literature. I want you to tell me again that, in return for Quill’s life, the people I named have now been freed from Hell.’

  The man nodded. Perhaps, if he ever spoke, his voice would destroy all who heard it.

  ‘I told Quill’s team that if they caught the Ripper, they could start turning things around. There was nothing in your contract to say I couldn’t o
ffer them hope.’

  The man shrugged. His smile remained untroubled.

  Gaiman took a last look around the artificial stillness of the bridge. Once more he made himself feel the full weight of what he had done. Then he got into his car and drove off. After a moment, the lights of London started to move again behind him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Costain drove the others back from the pathologist’s lab to Gipsy Hill. Sefton kept trying to find something on the radio other than bad news.

  ‘… actually one of the detectives working on a related inquiry, with no other apparent links to the other victims…’

  ‘That it’s come to this, that a Metropolitan Police detective inspector can be stabbed to death by what certainly appears to be the very suspect he’s pursuing, because he was the leader of a team of only four officers, working out of a Portakabin, with almost no resources. No, I am not using his death for political ends, whatever that means; I’m saying that with better funding he would have had backup, he would have had team members around him…’

  ‘This vote to strike has no weight in law, but what it does is bring this government up short, faces them with the idea that they might actually, amid increasing riots and protests, have to declare that officers who mount wildcat strikes have taken illegal action and have them suspended or even arrested.’

  ‘One less. That’s it.’

  ‘These people don’t speak for us or our movement. We do not advocate violence. Many of us who were here at the start are desperately trying to discourage the use of the Toff costumes, which are now widely seen as a sign of violence. There is no leadership structure, we’re not a hierarchical organization, no, so … let me finish … no, we have no power to enforce that…’

  ‘Britons, Londoners, we implore you – the police won’t protect you, the urban rioters seek to burn your honest businesses, the work of centuries – get out onto the streets and stand up for what is yours. What’s the face behind that mask, the killer of police officers and those who’ve worked hard all their lives to make good? I think we all know the answer, but so few people are prepared to say the words out loud. International financiers are looking to see this city burn, and then step in to plunder what’s left at knock-down prices. Don’t let them. Secure your own streets.’