The Severed Streets

by Paul Cornell

  Quill was starting to wonder at how calm the man seemed. ‘Don’t you want … I don’t know, revenge for what Vincent did to you?’

  There was something a little cracked in Spatley’s smile in return. ‘Look at where we are. Here I am, making a difference. I don’t think I’d better allow myself thoughts of revenge.’

  Quill wondered at the plasticity of mind of this politician. ‘I gather you lost the card with her employer’s phone number on it?’

  ‘Yeah, somewhere in my office, I think. Though I kept wondering if it had been taken, because I often got the feeling that the place was being searched. It didn’t matter. I’d written down both the number and the address of the establishment.’

  ‘Ah. We never found that.’

  ‘I kept it on me at all times. In my jacket pocket.’

  Quill frowned.

  ‘Anyway, neither seemed likely to be useful going forward with the inquiry; the number always went to a blank answerphone, and if I wanted to have another go at convincing Mary to talk, I didn’t have to go via what I presume was her brothel – I’d written her number down too.’

  Quill failed to stop himself looking surprised. ‘You wrote down her number?’

  ‘Yes. On the same piece of paper.’

  Quill put a hand over his eyes. He was pained by now having hope again. Hell told him he could have all the hope he liked, he was never going to get any of this information to his colleagues. ‘I don’t suppose—’

  ‘Oh yes, I can tell you it. I looked at it so many times, and I’ve got a good memory for numbers. But surely, we’re both dead now, so it hardly matters.’

  Quill leaned over the table and pointed into his face. ‘It matters to me.’ He made Spatley tell him the phone number, and wrote it on the back of his own hand. As he went on his way, he started to repeat the number to himself, his own mantra, his own tiny hope.

  * * *

  Staunce was actually quicker to find, now Quill had got into the ways of this place. He was a retired grandee, working on endless charitable schemes that always came to nothing, all the Hell money spent on them frittered away in graft, as he always complained at many luxurious dinners. After those dinners he would suffer days of indigestion and acid reflux that would leave him gasping on the floor of his study, unable to reach for water. He could have paid for water, but it seemed he was unwilling to do so. Quill found him in that condition, but, even curled up around himself like a wounded animal, he wanted to be interviewed. He wanted to talk to anyone. ‘He paid me to tell him things which only the police knew,’ he said, ‘back in the day. Particularly gossip about celebrities. They deserved what they got. And it was harmless. Argggghh!’ He gasped and curled up around himself again. ‘But I stopped! I stopped because I knew it was wrong! Is no one listening?’

  ‘Who paid you?’ asked Quill.

  He was told the name, and about how Staunce had taken another payment, and what it was for. ‘You sold us out,’ Quill said, ‘to Russell Vincent.’ He looked up to see an enormous roast being brought in by Staunce’s servants.

  ‘But … but I thought about turning the tables. I thought about turning him in, taking the evidence to the cabinet office…’

  Quill straightened up and nodded to him. ‘Thanks for that. I’ll leave you to it; I don’t want to get in the way of your dinner.’

  * * *

  Tunstall was in a workhouse, walking on an enormous wheel that was slowly grinding a millstone. He wore a long coat made of weights. Quill wondered aloud if this was something he was doing to himself.

  ‘No,’ the man sighed, ‘this is very much something being done to me by others.’

  ‘What got you killed?’

  So Quill was told about a working life spent making some extra cash on the side, necessary to keep a home for his wife and child. The man had, as Quill suspected, been the one who searched Spatley’s office. ‘Not very professionally, I should think, but pretty thoroughly.’ Quill was amazed, distantly, by the idea that Tunstall might still take pride in the quality of such a job. Tunstall had been told to stop the car, when he’d been driving Spatley, in a specific place at a specific time. ‘We’d already worked out where security might send us if a particular road got blocked up. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was so shocked after … well, I didn’t even know if that had been what the bloke I was working for had planned…’

  Quill asked for a description, and recognized the man who’d met Mary Arthur at the Soviet bar.

  ‘So I said what I’d seen happen, straight off. I suppose part of me thought I might get off because it was all so mad, though I was being well paid to take any fall. We was sent a lot of money in a way so my wife could get hold of it. We needed that money. You don’t know how hard it is; they expect you to live in town … But then you lot turn up, saying you actually believe me, and you get me off. And I go home and … and it’s all shit. I couldn’t keep Spatley’s face out of my head, how scared he was when he was killed. I did like him, all right? But I’m holding on for my family, it’s all I ever did. Until you lot want to interview me again, and I start thinking I’d feel better if I told you everything. And then … then the Ripper came for me.’

  ‘You want to come clean about everything now, then?’

  Tunstall seemed to understand what Quill was talking about. ‘I did something else on orders. When he was lying there dead in the back seat … I reached into his jacket pocket, and my hands were shaking, I tell you. I took out this piece of paper I’d been told was there, and I … I ate it. I was told that was the only way to get rid of it without tipping anyone off that anything had been there. Burn it and there’d be, you know, the smell. They didn’t even want to risk me crumpling it up and taking it with me. I can still taste it.’ Quill could see the tears welling up in the man’s eyes. ‘I mean, my mouth’s still full of it. It’s all I can taste.’

  Quill went on his way and left Tunstall to his walking.

  * * *

  He found Rupert Rudlin in the middle of a crowd that kept grabbing him and hauling him over to waterboard him in a barrel of beer. Quill spared him that for a few moments and asked him his questions.

  ‘No,’ sobbed the young man, ‘I don’t know why I was killed! I don’t!’

  The crowd grabbed him from Quill again and kept on with their torture.

  * * *

  Quill discovered, much more easily than he expected, that the real name of the final person he wanted to interview was Eric Wilker. He was something of a celebrity. Quill arranged to meet him in a pub. He was a small man with threadbare clothing – someone so average that it took Quill a while to pick him out in the crowd. ‘People tell me there’s all this kerfuffle about me,’ he said, sipping his half-pint of mild and bitter. ‘I thought it’d all die down when I did. Back in 1888, I killed them filthy whores as a public service. One of them they say were mine wasn’t, I can’t remember which. Two more they say were other people were me. All the time I was working as a draper’s assistant. I just did what I felt like with them after, and I laughed when I saw what they all made of it. Didn’t mean nothing. I never sent no letters to anyone, I never wrote no message on any wall, I ain’t daft. I stopped when it got too hard. Every now and then I was tempted, but then I thought, no, I’ve done my bit. I died of a fever when I was in my sixties. Thought about telling my old lady on my death bed. Decided against. Ended up here. And younger, which is nice. And here I get to keep on doing what I’m most famous for. Only, every now and then, they get a chance to do it to me. We take it in turns, you might say.’ He took a slow, sad sip of his beer. ‘All a bit pointless, really.’

  That was true of Quill’s investigation as well. He’d interviewed everyone he could find who was involved in the case. He was aware of Hell laughing at him for how short a distance that small hope had taken him. Now that small hope was gone. He knew who was guilty, but he had no way to tell anyone.

  * * *

  At one point, as Quill was walking down the
street, picking his way through the enormous crowds, someone grasped him, flung him to the ground and started kicking him. ‘It’s your fault!’ screamed Barry Keel. He seemed to be an alderman now, smart in his coat and tails. But his eyes were lost to madness.

  Quill grabbed his leg, rolled it over, and slammed the man into the shit, his hand in the middle of his back. He was aware of whistles and of suddenly efficient hellish coppers running towards him from all directions as the crowd helpfully shouted all the details to them. ‘I don’t want to find out what they’ll do to you,’ said Quill, ‘for assaulting a police officer.’ He let the man go and kicked him on the backside, off into the crowd.

  Quill supposed that bloody Mora Losley would be somewhere in this lot as well, and Rob Toshack and Harry and Harry’s dad and a bunch of others who might bear him a grudge, but he wasn’t planning on trying to find them.

  * * *

  Quill walked to where he thought Bermondsey should be, and asked around for Ross’ dad, Alfred Toshack. He was directed to a small park, where he found an enormous tree that grew to a tremendous height above all those around it. Putting a hand to his eyes to shield them from the dull glare of the sky, Quill looked up into its highest branches and found a noose there. But there was nobody hanging from it. Alfred had, according to the passersby Quill stopped and asked, been ‘sent to the Tower’.

  Quill went to the Tower of London, but his authority wasn’t enough to get him in. Walking away from it, though, he had an idea. According to Ross, Alfred Toshack had been able to see every detail of what was going on in the everyday world from his vantage point in Hell. It was part of his punishment. If Quill could find somewhere high enough that he could access – in his condition he didn’t fancy trying to climb that tree – perhaps he could duplicate that. Perhaps he could find out, from Hell, things he wanted to know about the real world.

  * * *

  He was told the centre of London was where, in the modern version, the Centre Point building would be. He went to see what was there, and Hell anticipated that, enjoyed it. He wondered if it would be a tall building.

  He felt the shadow a long time before he saw, over the buildings, what was making it. At the centre of Hell’s London stood an enormous statue of the Smiling Man. There was an entrance at its base. Like the Statue of Liberty, it seemed, one could walk up inside it and, yes, he saw movement behind them, look through the eyes.

  He discovered, when he got to the entrance, that to do so would cost him. Of course it would. But he needed to do this, so he paid. Hell had known that he would.

  He climbed the stairs inside the statue, which took all his energy, emphasizing each of his pains – of course it did.

  He reached the top and looked out of one of the eyes. Beside him, helpless, sobbing newcomers were doing the same from the other. They had come here, like him, in a vain search for hope.

  Quill looked out over Hell’s London. There it was: not just this outer borough beneath him, but, at an angle to the horizon, the real London. He was looking down on it. London in summer, a blissful aerial view that made Quill feel an agony of wanting and loss. He could see it in several different ways, he realized. There was the physical city, there was a sort of contour map of rushing energies, and there was … as if it had been built there, a great wheel, the structure of which was threaded through everything, that cut across everything. The wheel was made of ideas made by people, or imposed on them. It had gone wrong, he saw: it was moving the wrong way. Right now, there was nothing he could do about that, so eventually he looked elsewhere.

  He could see Jason Forrest’s limited point of view, the history of the historical Jack the Ripper, the warring viewpoints of the occult community. He could see whatever concepts he wanted to see. He found himself automatically thinking about Sarah, and then suddenly he was looking at her, and he knew where she was on the map as he pulled his attention away from her.

  Oh, oh, that was too painful. If he stayed here he was going to have to do it again. Again and again. What could he look at that was more practical, that could give him a despairing hint of his duty again? He looked again at the back of his hand, at the phone number he’d written there and memorized through repetition.

  He looked back to the real London to find all the places Russell Vincent might be.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  EARLIER ON THE EVENING THAT QUILL RETURNED TO LIFE

  Costain drove the van into the car park of St Gertrude’s Church in the part of Enfield known as World’s End and parked. He composed himself for a moment. Then he got out.

  The facade of the church was bathed in spotlights on this still not very cold night. They threw deep shadows across the porch. As he approached the building, Costain saw a figure standing there, then stepping out to meet him. It was a young woman in clerical dress, a worried look on her face.

  ‘Reverend Pierce?’

  ‘You must be Sergeant Costain. Okay, let’s not waste any time.’ She sounded like an Oxbridge graduate, calm and professional. She was somehow more modern than Costain had expected her to be.

  ‘I was surprised when I read you did this.’

  ‘I don’t like the fact that one can do this. Very few people know. Priests who apply to be the vicar of this parish are warned off it, and only if they persist are they told the nature of the geography here, and only if they then still persist are they trained to make use of it. Turns out I’m rather pig-headed. We’re told it’s for the health of London. There used to be some sort of body overseeing it, but for some reason no one now seems to know how to contact them. I’m quite interested to see whether it still works.’

  ‘Me too.’

  She led him not inside the church, as he’d been expecting, but around it, to a side of the churchyard where there were no spotlights and the shadow of the building cut a straight line between light and absolute darkness. There they stopped. ‘Here we are.’

  ‘Have you done this before?’

  ‘Twice. My predecessor only did it once. Demand seems to be on the increase.’

  He showed her the Bridge of Spikes. ‘I thought this was unique, or at least just once a century.’

  ‘It might be. I don’t know what it is.’ He quickly explained to her, and she raised an eyebrow. ‘In every previous case I’ve dealt with, and in all I’ve read, these are only visits. You think that this object offers … a permanent solution?’ She sounded not only dubious, but worried at the implications.

  Costain found he was suddenly angry. But not at her. He could only hope he hadn’t sacrificed so much for something brief and terrible. ‘Whatever. Come on. Let’s do it.’

  ‘All right.’ She closed her eyes, said some prayers under her breath and made the sign of the cross. ‘If you know what to do with that thing, do it now.’

  Costain took a deep breath. He only had a feeling for what had to be done. The sphere seemed to be telling him. If he was to use it on himself, this is what he’d have had to do at any point before he died. He supposed you could even do it way in advance. He put the sphere in the palm of his left hand, and then, decisively, crushed it in his grasp. For a moment, nothing happened, and then—

  He stared in shock as he saw the spikes burst through his flesh. It was as if his hand had turned into a golden sea urchin, every spike dripping with blood.

  Then the obvious agony of that hit him, and he had to fall to his knees. He grabbed his left wrist with his right hand, staring at it. Blood was gushing around the spikes now, surely from some major artery! He was panting. The meth both amplified the shock and deadened it, let him see past it. But … it was … only pain. He somehow knew he hadn’t been horribly wounded, that the Bridge had prevented that.

  He managed to open his hand … the Bridge had vanished. He was sure, though, because it was telling him, that it had done its work.

  The reverend was crouched beside him, he realized, looking desperately at him, wondering how she could help. ‘Do it!’ he bellowed.

  ‘It’s done
,’ she said. ‘Can I get a dressing for—?’

  ‘Not until I know!’ Costain forced himself to look up from his own blood splattering onto the gravel of the church path. He looked into the darkness. He could see something moving there.

  ‘The Maori of New Zealand believe their dead leave a pohutukawa tree at Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island for a journey back to Polynesia – actually back to where they came from, historically,’ said the vicar, staring into the void as Costain was, now fascinated. ‘There’s a river in Japan which is also, physically, the border between this world and the next, so they say…’

  Costain watched as the vague shape resolved itself into a figure. He wasn’t sure now if the uncertainty about it was in the world or in his head. He’d lost a lot of blood to get him to the point of being able to see this. The figure wasn’t stumbling. It was walking quite purposefully, marching, even. It was familiar.

  With a determined look on her face, Pierce went to the edge of the light and held out her hand.

  * * *

  Quill didn’t know if he could trust this. He had found, standing in the head of that statue, that he was being forced to close his eyes, and when he’d opened them he was elsewhere, looking at a strange figure. The ferryman was, depending on which side you saw him from, either a cloaked figure with skeletal hands or an Asian cabbie with tobacco stains on his fingers. He was pushing the boat forward across the river of silver which warped under and around them, his staff of many wrapped dimensions made out of the pink flatness of the Hammersmith and City line as seen on a tube map. Or he was driving across a bridge that didn’t exist, going north across the Thames, the road lined with a million spikes, the tarmac ahead red with blood that was flowing down to meet them. ‘I don’t normally go south of the river,’ he said.

  * * *

  Costain watched as the figure reached Pierce and grabbed her hand. He willed its features into being those he wanted to see. He hoped he had given enough.