The Severed Streets

by Paul Cornell

  * * *

  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 n
ow, 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.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Costain grabbed Keel by the beard and hauled him out of his seat. ‘If you’re lying…!’

  Keel cried out. ‘It’s the truth! I don’t want you coming back here, do I?’

  ‘Names are worth something,’ said Sefton. ‘If you found out who Vincent was down the phone, you found out who the proxy was too. Who was it?’

  ‘I wrote the name down.’

  Ross watched numbly as Costain released Keel, and he went to look in his filing cabinet. They had been played by Russell Vincent. He had given them an ordinary mirror, while he still had a real scrying glass. More than that, he’d employed the man who’d been there when the Ripper had attempted to kill Mary Arthur, who’d bid against them for the Bridge of Spikes. The obvious reason for Vincent to lie was that he was the one who’d been looking into their dreams. The information gained from their dreams had been used to coordinate the Ripper murders and to send Vincent’s proxy after the Bridge.

  The overwhelming weight of circumstantial evidence was that Russell Vincent, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, was, somehow, the new Jack the Ripper. How could they ever prove it?

  Keel had found the scrap of paper. ‘His name was Ben Challoner.’

  * * *

  They got out of there. They left Keel waving to them from the shop doorway, asking if the nice ladies and gentlemen could please return his staff as soon as possible, grinning at how he had obviously rocked them back on their heels. Costain felt like punching him.

  The Armed Response Unit made their apologies, did the necessary in terms of paperwork and left, presumably for awkward afternoons at home or down the pub. The strike was on. London felt silent, waiting. Costain, inside it, felt wired to the point of exploding.

  The three of them marched into the unmarked van and locked the door. Only then did they feel able to talk. It was as if Vincent was already listening. ‘Everything about this operation,’ said Ross, ‘makes sense if the perpetrator is Russell Vincent. I say we now regard him as our number one suspect.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Costain.

  ‘So how does everything fit together if it is him?’ Sefton was looking as strung out as Costain felt. They felt like ants who’d just glimpsed a human being standing above their nest. Mora Losley had had no worldly power, only what her occult abilities gave her. Russell Vincent seemed to have immense power in both spheres.

  ‘If Vincent has a genuine scrying glass,’ said Ross, ‘he could hack people’s dreams like a phone tap. That could be why the Herald’s so famously clean: they get their stories without breaking the law, from the minds of celebrities and politicians.’

  ‘It’s no wonder they got the Ripper message story first,’ said Sefton.

  ‘If it’s him, he deliberately used that message at the crime scene to send us on the wild goose chase of Ripper lore. He would have known from our memories that we didn’t know what a scrying glass looked like, and that even when we found out, we’d assume he was the one who’d been played. It all fits. He tailored the fiction precisely to what he knew about his audience.’

  ‘Just like he does with his newspapers,’ said Costain.

  Sefton made a noise as if he’d suddenly realized something. ‘That PA,’ he said, ‘Vincent had her be there when we visited him, so she could confirm his s
tory about the Ripper coming out of the mirror. She never said she saw the Ripper himself or anything happening with the mirror. It was all over by the time she got into the room.’

  ‘Still,’ said Ross, ‘I don’t believe he was that far-sighted that he staged something to set up his story way back then. Something violent happened to him in that room.’

  ‘And there were genuine traces of the silver goo,’ said Sefton, ‘which Vincent apparently couldn’t see first-hand, only, I suppose, when he saw our memories of it.’

  ‘He was cocky enough to try to play us face to face,’ said Ross, ‘when everything else about him says he’s cautious. Why?’ She suddenly pointed at the other two. ‘Because he wanted something from us. What did he say to us? What did he ask?’

  Sefton found his notebook. ‘He asked whether or not we could … find a missing person using gestures, and if we had any defence against scrying glasses. He must have known we didn’t have the answers right then, but … oh fuck, I know what this was: he wanted us to go away and find out, and then he could look into our frigging brains like we were his own private Wikipedia!’

  ‘At least,’ said Costain, ‘we didn’t take him up on those suggestions.’

  ‘I would have got there with the defences bit,’ said Sefton. ‘And then he’d have known how to get round them, for anyone else’s brain he wanted to look into, if they tried to block him. Shit.’

  ‘So who would he be looking for?’ asked Ross.

  ‘You said you thought the man that was killed in the Soviet bar, Rudlin, wasn’t the target, that it was actually Mary Arthur,’ said Costain. ‘If Vincent is the one controlling the Ripper or being the Ripper or however it works, she got away from him that night.’

  Ross acknowledged that with a frantic nodding. She fell silent for a moment, no longer able to control the movements of her hands as they flexed in the air, the product of her ferocious thinking.

  Sefton hauled himself up and paced the confines of the van, looking more horrified every moment as the implications sank in.