The Severed Streets

by Paul Cornell

  He glanced at his watch, which seemed to be working so slowly, and was relieved that the time had arrived when they might do something about all this, even if it too turned out to be a futile gesture. ‘Okay,’ he said.

  * * *

  London was tense, waiting, as they walked up those steps once more. The summer air was still and warm. It took Ross a moment to figure out what had changed. The lights in all directions were now dulled by a fine veil of smoke.

  They took up positions around the exit that someone in Challoner’s seat would most likely use, and they waited as they heard final applause roaring from inside the building, and then that sound turn quickly into the noise of people moving, of doors banging open. ‘They’ve made their gesture,’ said Costain, ‘now it’s a race to try and find a taxi.’

  Sure enough, very soon the first people started marching out of the exit past them. They checked out every male face, mentally comparing them to Challoner. Then—

  Positive ID. There he was, walking quickly along, his arms stiff by his sides, looking all around. He looked scared and puzzled but, based on previous experience, Ross got the feeling that was how he always looked. She made eye contact with the other two, and they converged. Sefton got in front of Challoner, while Costain slapped a hand onto his shoulder. Challoner halted, and the crowd flowed around them, more and more of them every moment. It was going to be difficult for him to do a runner.

  ‘Who are you?’ He looked between them as if he was instantly guilty. Then his gaze locked on Ross and Costain as he recognized them.

  Costain flashed his warrant card. ‘Police officers. Come with us, please, sir.’

  He did, but only a few paces, out of the way of the crowd. He kept looking back over his shoulder. ‘Please, in there—’

  ‘What are you afraid of?’ asked Costain.

  Challoner looked round again. ‘They put the masks on right at the end. I think it’s a protest.’

  Ross heard murmurs and exclamations from further up the steps. She spun to look. There they were. Out of every door of the Albert Hall was bursting a horde of Toffs in masks, with placards and banners. The rest of the crowd were drawing back from them, afraid. There came more and more of them. An army of them. They filled the space at the top of the steps and then started marching down them, towards the group around Challoner.

  ‘That was organized using something other than Twitter,’ said Sefton. Either Vincent had decided not to alert them in the same way, or the demonstrators had known that the substitute security forces in London tonight would be keeping an eye on social media.

  Ross turned quickly to Challoner, knowing they had no time for subtlety now. ‘We know about Russell Vincent—’

  ‘What?’ Challoner was now looking seriously afraid. He didn’t know whether to be more scared of them or of the Toffs.

  ‘We know everything, sunshine!’ Costain grabbed him by the lapels and roared into his face. ‘We know why you’re worried about that lot! He uses them as cover, doesn’t he? Do you know how many of his employees he’s killed?’

  ‘I-I don’t know what you’re—’

  ‘You just happened to be in that bar, just happened to be chatting to Mary Arthur – yeah, we know about her too! We know she was meant to be the Ripper’s target.’

  ‘We know you go to the auctions,’ said Ross, ‘as a proxy for Vincent. You’ve seen us there too. We’re the coppers who know about the terrifying shit of London. We’re your only chance.’

  ‘You tell us fucking everything and you might get to walk away from this. You might get to live. Because is Vincent worth it?’ Costain had dropped his voice and was looking the man in the eye. ‘You have risked everything for him, offered your own body for him, and what do you get back in return? Just every day a sense of dread. You come and work with us, you know you’re on the right side, you will make a difference. It’ll be you that brings him down.’

  He was talking so fast, improvising at high speed as the wave of Toffs approached them. Challoner was shaking his head. ‘We need to get away from here.’

  ‘How does he do it?’ shouted Costain. ‘How does Vincent send the Ripper?’

  Challoner looked startled to hear the name. He looked over his shoulder again, and now they could all see it. The approaching crowd of Toffs were throwing long shadows down in front of them. They were being illuminated from behind, by an unearthly light.

  The Ripper was among them.

  Challoner made to struggle out of Costain’s grasp, but Costain held on. He must be on the Sighted spectrum. Perhaps that was why Vincent had chosen him. ‘Too late. Chicken run. You reckon he’s coming for us or for you? Tell us something we can use!’

  ‘He … he makes things happen in London!’ yelled Challoner. ‘He goes on social media, he has all these fake accounts! He uses the Toffs and the skinheads as cover! He starts a riot happening, and then he sends the Ripper to kill whoever he’s after, and then he can blame the Toffs for it! He needs to know roughly where his target is going to be—’

  ‘You assumed you’d be going to the Proms tonight with Vincent,’ said Sefton. ‘When he didn’t show up, you started to wonder why.’

  ‘Good little boy stayed in his seat,’ said Ross. ‘You brought Mary Arthur to that bar so that she could be attacked, didn’t you? You kept her there. And then you got out of there, because you knew what was coming!’

  ‘Yes, yes!’

  ‘How does it work?’ yelled Sefton. ‘What is the Ripper? How does he control it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know!’ Challoner was squirming in Costain’s grip now. The light was getting closer.

  ‘You can see that, can’t you?!’ bellowed Costain. ‘Will you testify to anything we can get a jury to believe?’

  ‘Yes! Just, please—!’

  Ross looked in the direction of the light again. One of the Toffs was emphasized to her by the Sight, was something extraordinary. It was coming slowly down the steps among the others, moving first to one side, then to another, looking right at the four of them, like a predator sizing up its quarry. She could see the mask clearly now, see the silver falling from its eyes like uncontrollable tears. Suddenly, the figure lurched towards them.

  ‘Run,’ said Costain.

  They sprinted sideways, out of the flow of the crowd down the steps, around the curve of the hall, hauling Challoner along between them. They were aiming for the van parked nearby. Costain was planning to take the wheel, and they would see if the Ripper could match their speed along the empty streets.

  But the light was already flaring around the corner of the building. Something shot over their heads.

  The Ripper was on them.

  It sliced the air with a razor that seemed to cause the air itself to scream and part, like lightning. The first blow cut Costain’s jacket, and he let Challoner go. The man made to sprint away, back into the fringes of the crowd, but before Ross could even shout, the Ripper had spun, leaped up, and come down on Challoner like a cloaked bird of prey as his victim looked up and screamed.

  They all started forward, but the flashing of the razor pumped faster than the eye could follow and blood burst from Challoner’s torso and throat.

  That was the end of their lead, of their hope, of the little man’s life of service.

  The crowd parted, yelling and screaming, leaving a clearing into which the body fell. There stood the Ripper. It turned to face Ross and the others.

  Was that it? Was that all it was here for? Challoner had been a loose end to tidy up, a thread that could lead back to Vincent. But what about them? Had Vincent tried to access their dreams, never found them asleep, and started to wonder if they’d guessed his secret? Was the Ripper actually him or someone, something, he’d hired or created? The shape of the body didn’t look right for Vincent, if that meant anything. If he was in communication with, or actually was, this assassin, he’d just realized that they’d found Challoner, that they were that close to Vincent himself.

  Th
e Ripper took one decisive step towards them. Then another. It seemed to be hesitating. Ross could see the silver pouring down its face now.

  ‘He’s losing a lot of silver,’ said Sefton. ‘Maybe he’s not doing so well.’

  ‘You reckon we could take him?’ said Costain.

  ‘With what?’ asked Ross.

  The Ripper launched itself forward. It had its arm raised, the razor ready to strike. It moved in a blur.

  Ross found herself stepping into the way in reaction, like returning a tennis serve. She hadn’t thought about it. She flinched, expecting an impact—

  But the Ripper had stopped. It had no momentum. It had halted like a cartoon. It was poised above her, arm back, ready to strike. Its mask was a mass of silver. It looked contorted, almost expressing emotion. It slowly raised its left hand, as if balancing itself, willing itself to attack. The skin of the hand, Ross was close enough to see, looked desperately human, wrinkled.

  Ross suddenly understood why it might have stopped. Why, like a character in a video game, it was slowly starting to work itself back and forth now, trying to edge around whatever prohibition was stopping it from attacking her, to get to Costain and Sefton. ‘Tony, Kev,’ she said, ‘get behind me.’

  They did so. The Ripper stopped trying to jerk forwards.

  ‘It doesn’t want to attack women,’ said Ross. ‘Not Mary Arthur, and not me.’

  The Ripper seemed to vibrate with tension for a moment. Then, with a movement so swift that Ross couldn’t see in which direction it had flown, it was gone.

  They sagged together for a moment. They composed themselves. They looked around, making sure it wasn’t going to come back from another direction.

  It didn’t. They were safe. For now.

  What did they have now? Did they have anything?

  ‘Thank you for that,’ said Costain. He held Ross. She kissed his cheek, feeling his fear. She felt only professionally satisfied that she might have saved him. She was acutely aware of the missing emotion. She felt the shock entering her and being amped up by the drugs, and she knew there’d be no happiness in the future to balance it, that there was increasingly nowhere left for her, emotionally or, she was starting to feel, physically.

  * * *

  They went to look at the victim’s body, around which a crowd was now hesitantly gathering. Costain looked through his pockets and found a phone: a brand new cheap one, the sort you could get from a market stall, with no contacts in the memory. ‘Bet he was told to ditch the old one right before tonight,’ he said, ‘so there’d be nothing to associate the corpse with Vincent.’

  The concert audience was shying away from those Toffs who had stayed, some of whom had now taken their masks off, to reveal students and a disparate range of mainstream London faces. Some of this lot would be coming forward in a moment to say that a Toff had done this. ‘We need to find out if we can pin the purchase of that ticket on Vincent,’ said Sefton, sounding as if he knew how little a thing that would be.

  ‘Already put in the request,’ said Ross, looking up from her phone. With shaking hands, she took her rough books and portable Ops Board from her bag. She sat down on the steps and drew some satisfyingly certain lines across the Ops Board, the only control over anything she could have now. ‘It refuses to kill women,’ she said. ‘So Mary Arthur is safe. If only we bloody knew how to find her.’

  * * *

  They waited until the paramedics had arrived to deal with the remains of Challoner. Ross felt gutted at the idea of putting a body, a crime scene and evidence into the hands of people other than police and associated specialists. The medics looked surprised that coppers were actually here. One looked pleased, the other disgusted.

  What could they do? What was left?

  They decided to at least go and check out Vincent’s mews flat, just in case he’d been foolish enough to use it again. Costain insisted he could drive and the others just nodded. He drove them through a London where something worrying could be glimpsed down the end of every side street. It was as if their own experience of having the Sight was starting to be translated into the mainstream world. The feeling of impending chaos was worse for them, because they all instinctively wondered what the wider implications might be, how London would react to amplify it, what the Smiling Man would make of it. They tried to keep talking to each other, shouting to each other, even, to stay awake. They took more of the meth. The intensification of the fear of London beat through them now too.

  On the radio news, and on the police frequency, they heard reports of police officers putting on uniforms and turning out to help the army. There were rumours that the Police Federation was going to call the strike off early, point proven, themselves horrified at how the riots in the further boroughs had started joining hands, were becoming what the few news commentators actually out there rather than at home reading Twitter were calling a ‘ring of fire’, moving in towards the centre of the cities of London and Westminster. The schools would be closed tomorrow, the news was saying, the post offices and buses and underground too, as the people that ran these things decided that safety now meant staying at home. Ross wondered if she was watching a metropolis swiftly crumbling, a culture flying apart.

  The news of Challoner’s murder was fighting the riots for the lead on all the websites, as if the Ripper was leading the charge, the symbol of everything that was happening tonight. The Herald was going big on that version of the story, inevitably. Its editorial was demanding that the army flood the streets with soldiers and impose martial law, because the government was clearly incapable of restoring order.

  ‘There’s another one,’ said Sefton, who was also looking at his phone. ‘Another Ripper murder.’ Ross went straight to the Herald’s site, because of course that would get it first. The new victim had been identified as a former stringer for various newspapers. Christ, here was another one: a private detective. As soon as Ross had started to read about that killing, Sefton shouted there was another, a financier.

  ‘It’s because of us,’ said Costain. ‘He’s killing everyone that could lead us to him.’

  ‘Does that mean we’ve scared him?’ said Sefton. ‘Or has he now got the luxury of tying up all his loose ends?’

  Ross got an email and recognized the name. ‘The first of those victims,’ she said, feeling as if they were rats being pursued into a corner, ‘that’s the person the Royal Albert Hall say purchased the ticket for Challoner tonight.’ She slammed the seat with her fist. ‘No wonder the Herald kept pushing the “mob did it” angle about the killings. Vincent used them as cover for every murder. And tonight he’s got that cover just about everywhere.’

  * * *

  They reached the mews flat and parked outside. It was silent and dark, and through the windows that didn’t have curtains they could see only empty rooms. An estate agent’s board indicated it was for sale. They could hear the distant sounds of chaos moving closer. Costain felt a helpless fury marching back and forth inside him as he looked up at the building. The billionaire had many properties, in London and round the world. He also had an organization which could keep the Met in general – never mind one small unit with a bizarre story – at bay forever. He’d had a good long look at the way Costain’s team did things and had used tonight to make any possibility that they might get him into court recede into the distance at the speed of light. Even the phone number Vincent had given to the Quills didn’t connect now. Mary Arthur might have gone into hiding, never to be heard from again.

  Eventually they would sleep.

  ‘There’s been a Ripper attack in Manchester,’ said Ross, looking up from her phone. Costain went over to see, while Sefton went across to try the door of the building. The story checked out, the MO just the same. As they’d suspected, Vincent could reach them even if they fled London. Their only chance was to hide, to give his vast media network, used to pursuing disgraced celebrities, no clue as to where they were. They might need to live the rest of their lives in fear.
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  Again Costain considered his options. As terrible as it was, as horrifying as the line of dominoes that would now fall would be … he now had no alternative. He’d made his decision.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Ross.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I have to go.’

  She had a look of perplexed horror on her face. He didn’t let it get to him. He would see much worse soon. ‘What? No! We can’t split the team up now…!’

  He kissed her again, against her words, held her tightly to him, despite her moving away, her needing to know what he was going to do. He drew comfort from her and desperately wished he could offer some in return.

  ‘I’ll come back, I promise.’

  He wanted to say this wasn’t the scene where the hero marches off to make a heroic sacrifice. Except in a way it was. He was also about to do the most selfish thing he had ever done. He looked again at the wonderful shape of her face. He remembered her passion. He saw how her character informed that. She was the first woman who’d ever truly allowed him inside. Even as she was now, without happiness, when even saving her father would bring her no happiness, still her whole being was something vast and meaningful to him.

  He turned and headed back to the van. He looked back to see Ross staring after him, to see Sefton going back to her, wondering what was going on. He kept walking.

  * * *

  Ross’ mind was racing, trying to work out what could take Costain off alone. She could only make puzzled eye contact with Sefton. Hadn’t she and Costain shared every secret? Was he … was he just fleeing? She watched him drive off, making herself give him the benefit of the doubt. He had told her he’d be back. This was something their team did. She had to trust him.