by Paul Cornell
All right, she was going to test this. She’d been aware for a long time, had kept in her back pocket, that there was an intelligence analyst building a reputation up north who had a personal connection to the Toshack family. Damaged goods, undoubtedly. Maybe even a mole for Toshack, because he had to be doing something incredible to keep avoiding jail. Should Lofthouse include this person who’d named herself ‘Lisa Ross’ in her as-yet-unnamed operation? She put the question concretely to herself.
Yes, came the answer from the charm bracelet, in the form of a definite movement and a little frisson of pleasure, like the memory of a good day out with the children. She found herself feeling tense at what she was about to do, but she did it anyway. No, she thought to herself, I can’t possibly do that. I won’t use Ross or Quill—
She burst into tears. The sheer despair that that decision had caused to explode inside her. She stumbled to the wall and leaned against it, sobbing helplessly.
Could it be this obvious? Why were the key’s reactions to this particular decision so much more intense?
OK, OK, so she was going to include Ross and Quill in the team . . .
Endorphins flooded her body. She fell back into her seat. Such immediate bliss, such release from pain.
She grabbed her handkerchief and angrily wiped her face. She ripped the bracelet from her wrist, put it down on her desk and actually spoke out loud to the key. ‘You bastard,’ she said. ‘I know now, don’t I?’
She wasn’t going mad. This was real. This thing wanted her to choose Lisa Ross, wanted her to choose Quill. Somehow.
So when she’d gone to meet Ross, she’d gone with the same expectation she’d had when she met James Quill, that perhaps this person would know something about the key. She’d played with it in front of Quill, as she asked if he felt he was drawn to this job. But he’d just been enthusiastic to get Toshack, in an everyday way. She’d worried about the key making her behave ridiculously in his company, but it turned out as long as she was on the right track, as long as she behaved, it left her alone. At least its conclusions about what was best for the operation seemed to match her own.
When she finally met Ross, Lofthouse found her much stranger than Quill. She looked like she’d seen some shit, with her nose askew and one eye a different colour to the other. Lofthouse asked her if there was anything she felt she couldn’t tell her. Ross denied there was, but Lofthouse never quite lost the suspicion that she was lying, that here was someone who might have seen some things as strange as her key.
Initially, she left the selection of the two undercovers to Quill, but, at the key’s prompting, again intervened about his choices.
When Toshack died in custody, Lofthouse waited until she was sure she couldn’t be overheard, then threw the charm bracelet against the wall. ‘What are you working towards?’ she demanded. ‘Are you some sort of . . . curse on me? I will drop you in the sea! I will be free of you, because what use are you?’
She put a hand to her head, convinced she was going mad, but once again she forced herself to deny that possibility.
‘In the next few days,’ she said, ‘I’m going to come up with a new operation, and this time I want you to bloody sing along at the top of your voice, or you’ll be taking a swim in the English Channel.’
Lofthouse woke the next morning with a genius idea fully formed in her brain. ‘This is genius,’ she said to herself in the bathroom mirror while brushing her hair. ‘This is absolutely brilliant.’ It took until she was brushing her teeth for her to realize the truth. She stopped, and stared at herself in the mirror, foaming at the mouth. ‘It’s not my idea,’ she said, looking to the bracelet on her wrist and the key on it. ‘I asked for your help and you’ve come up with something and you’ve planted it in my head like it’s my own idea. And it’s bollocks.’
She tried to decide against it, and in consequence spent the morning wracked with such depression and fear that she couldn’t leave her office, until at last she told the key she’d go along with it, and once more experienced immediate relief.
She stood nervously as the second undercover entered the hotel room where she’d gathered Ross, Quill and the first undercover, Costain. Kevin Sefton was his name, and he reacted exactly as Costain had. He was terrified at his real identity being suddenly revealed to a whole team of people, certain she was mad. Now, however, Lofthouse felt she’d made her choice.
What followed was like a nightmare unfolding itself into the waking world. Quill and his team uncovered a serial killer who became known to the media as ‘the Witch of West Ham’. Like Toshack, Mora Losley seemed capable of impossible escapes. When Losley suddenly appeared somewhere that didn’t fit with where Quill’s team had just encountered her, Lofthouse forced herself to face the possibility that if Losley really was a witch, then perhaps Lofthouse really did have a key that wanted input in the planning of operations. That a key was interested in catching a witch indicated a whole unseen world of possibilities.
Whether or not that meant Quill and his team had any knowledge or experience of the impossible stuff, or whether the key had just put together some ordinary coppers to bring down Mora Losley was a question Lofthouse asked herself every day. She kept failing to find a safe moment to ask them questions that would make her sound insane. The key, annoyingly, seemed satisfied with how things stood.
Then, weeks after the end of the Losley case, Lofthouse heard that Quill and his team were exploring an empty area of Docklands. The key screamed at her to go and see.
Something that looked like her husband walked onto the screen of her computer. He started to tell her she was indeed connected to impossible events, and that the one thing she must above all never do was to try to remember.
TWENTY-ONE
Quill couldn’t quite remember how he came to be watching the sun set with his back against the door of an access stairwell, on the roof of a tower block, somewhere in Docklands. This was a bit like being drunk. Everything in his head was in a different place. His memory was here somewhere. He couldn’t find it. Just . . . being felt like hard work, all the time. It tensed his muscles; it made his heart race; it made him breathe too fast. He shook his head, kept shaking it, until the clarity was gone. He was angry, almost all the time. He was sitting here, panting, and he didn’t know why.
He could just about see what had been following him. He could see him. He stood over there; yes, that wasn’t a shadow now; that was a figure standing outside the shadow of that air vent. He was watching Quill. The silhouette had a top hat on, and a long coat. He had his hands together in front of him. All cleverness was in that figure. He was whole and satisfied and comfortable. He had arranged everything so Quill was not.
He had to stop Laura from moving to London. That was why he’d come up here. How that fitted together . . . he didn’t know, but he might remember. There was a long list of connections that made that plan work, somewhere.
He slid up the door, until he was upright, leaning on it, then let his weight tip him forwards, until he was standing. He was in a warm coat. He didn’t know where he’d got it. It smelt terrible. How he smelt now was not important.
He pointed at the figure. ‘Hoi! You! Moriarty! I got your number, sunshine!’
No response from the silhouette. Quill took a step towards it. It didn’t move. He was getting angry again, too angry to speak.
He ran at it.
It was gone. Had he gone straight through it?
He was at the edge.
He scrambled to a halt. He was teetering. There was London below, Hell below, all the old buildings growing among the new, over the new. He watched the tiny people below, the damned, between the toes of his boots. They wouldn’t see him up here. He could piss on them. He could join them.
No, fuck Sarah. Fuck Jessica. What help had they been to—?
He was crying again. The tears got in the way of him seeing where he was. He lurched. He couldn’t find anything to grab.
Oh, he could feel that sod b
ehind him now. So he’d reappeared? That was the plan, was it? He spun suddenly, trying to take him by surprise. He landed on the gravel of the rooftop, and for a moment wondered if he’d landed on the concrete below. No, there was that familiar air vent again.
There was the figure again. Moriarty. Quill smiled, pleased at how in control he was now. Oh yes.
Ross attached a new victim thread from Ballard to their enormous horizontal range of suspects. It was dark outside now. ‘Clearly,’ she said, ‘our attempts to set a trap for the suspects have now also been used by said suspects to further their aims.’
‘Fucking clearly,’ said Sefton.
‘Hey,’ said Costain.
‘Sorry.’
Ross felt it like they were all feeling it. Everything they did seemed to be part of the plans of their enemies. It made them feel small, and compromised. As if their actions were now actually making things worse. Nothing helped. She was fucking a god and that was not helping. Quill was gone; Lofthouse was completely absent. Their backs were against the wall and soon now the Met mainstream would start asking questions about their startling lack of success. Clarke would take some of the heat, but she wasn’t a charity that helped weird units with questionable budget allocations.
Sefton walked in a small circle, then deliberately began again. ‘We’re not being bugged,’ he said. ‘I’d swear to it. Last time I set up defences around here, I thought about that.’
‘The next Holmes stories,’ said Ross, ‘are “The Gloria Scott”, outside London, “The Musgrave Ritual”, which has a murder, but is also outside London, “The Reigate Squire”, outside London, and “The Crooked Man”, same again. So the next point where we’ll have a chance to intercept is “The Resident Patient”.’
‘What happens in that one?’ asked Sefton.
‘A mock trial and hanging,’ said Costain. ‘The target will ideally be a private doctor who once played Holmes, or who now could be forced to play him. It’ll be somewhere near a medical practice in Brook Street in Mayfair. The main inquiry are all over this and are already staking out the options.’
‘How many stories are left?’ said Sefton.
‘Thirty-six, and two novels, and that’s assuming they’re sticking to the Conan Doyle, ’cos there are lots of other authors who then wrote Holmes stories,’ said Costain.
‘There’s a major point in Holmes’s life coming up soon,’ said Ross. ‘We’re getting close to him going over the Reichenbach Falls, seemingly to his death.’
‘Tough for him to do,’ said Costain, ‘considering he’s already dead.’ He looked down at a message on his phone. ‘The warrant to search Ballard’s premises has come through. So that’s our last thing before the weekend.’ Ross thought for a moment she saw a flash of guilt on his face. This weekend, they were going to leave Sefton behind, at this lowest point of their investigation, and pursue her own selfish ends. The look was gone again a moment later. Costain was too good an undercover to show his true feelings like that.
She turned back to the ops board. If only she could say the same.
Ballard had said he had many homes, but the one Costain had the warrant for was the one he’d claimed as his main address, an apartment in the Heron building at Moorgate. Looking up at the black-and-white, chilly facade, which was like a pile of metal packing crates, shining industrially against the night sky, Sefton was once more reminded of how being a copper was to continually be a beggar at the feast, an unwelcome visitor to places in which one could never hope to live.
They entered the building, found they were facing, weirdly, an enormous fish tank and took quite a while to find someone they could talk to about their warrant.
The apartment took up a whole floor of the building, the twenty-eighth. The elevator opened onto a lobby area, and the key cards they’d been given operated both the lift itself and the door on the other side of the elegantly designed space. It already looked like the home of a collector, with what looked like some sort of fossil shell perched in front of an enormous picture window, and paintings, all of London subjects, on the walls even here. The weight the Sight gave to what lay beyond was the total of what Sefton had felt on approaching the building. He’d felt it above him as they’d entered the tower, and all the way up in the lift. ‘He’s got some shit in here,’ he said.
They donned evidence gloves and opened the inner door. Inside, it was immediately obvious that the place had been searched. Drawers were open; a desk had been taken apart. There was no wreckage. The door of the wall safe, unhidden, obvious, was still closed. In the movies, such searches were often meant to have happened at speed, and for some reason those searching usually seemed to have just broken things for the hell of it. This one looked to have been thorough and to have time taken over it. There must have been some sort of ticking clock, though, or why leave evidence that it had been done at all? Unless the searchers were so confident in their power they just didn’t care. Sefton quickly went to one of the inner doors and listened. Was anyone still in here?
Costain came over, listened himself for only a moment, then opened it. It took just a few moments for them to be certain they were still alone. ‘Any sign of walkthrough?’ he asked. He went to the walls and started to look for signs of a chalk door, then stopped himself. ‘Of course not – we’re on the twenty-eighth floor.’
‘Don’t beat yourself up about it,’ said Ross. ‘Sooner or later we’re going to encounter a suspect who can fly. But, couple of steps less amazing, if they can walk through walls, maybe they can also hack a key-card system.’
‘It’s weird,’ said Sefton, ‘that Ballard didn’t have better defences.’
‘When I was with his lot,’ said Costain, ‘he was always saying about how few people knew about this shit, how he was just about the only big boss left. Though he may have been deluded about that. Besides, we only learned where this was when he had to give an address on arrest. He never told us lot about it.’
They started to examine what had been searched. ‘There must still be significant stuff here, or what are we feeling with the Sight?’ said Sefton.
‘So maybe the searchers weren’t Sighted?’ said Ross.
‘Good assumption, but noted as one.’ Costain knocked her familiar caveat about assumptions back at her.
Sefton closed his eyes and let his sense of balance lead him across the floor to where he felt the Sight was indicating the greatest power was, through into the bedroom. There was something under the bed. Feeling a bit vulnerable once again, Sefton looked under the bed and saw, as well as a collection of what looked like bondage gear . . .
He could feel the presence of something beneath the polished wooden floor. He swept away the cuffs and straps, and found, with his Sighted fingers, an indentation, a panel. It didn’t give at his touch, of course.
With the help of the others, he moved the bed aside. Sefton felt out the dimensions of the anomaly. It felt like it was hiding rather fearfully, like it was thin. He’d never before found himself ascribing emotions to planks of wood. This was how the Sight was changing him. In their business, you couldn’t even rely on what was under your feet not to have an opinion. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. He stood up, raised his boot and brought it down in the middle of the spot. The floor broke. They were rather more careful in excavating the pieces, making a pile of them, still with their evidence gloves on. In the shallow compartment beneath was a single piece of paper. Ross picked it out and read.
It was a list of artefacts, with locations given beside them, including the ‘draft for healing once’ with the location given, Ross confirmed, being the lock-up where she and Costain had found it.
‘Jackpot,’ said Sefton. ‘One item on this list was kept in this apartment. I wonder if they found it.’
The item was a ‘bastard scourge’. It was meant to be in a hidden compartment in the desk. They found the compartment, but it was empty. ‘This list is a major step forward, anyway,’ said Ross. ‘There’s no reason to think our opponents know about
these. Does anything on here sound like it could help with the current operation, or in finding Jimmy?’
They studied the list at length. Most of the names of the objects were pretty straightforward descriptions of their function. None of them sounded like an item for finding anyone, which meant that Ballard had either been lying about his capacity to do that or had still more caches elsewhere.
Ross finally sighed. ‘I don’t think anything here is of immediate help.’
‘In that case,’ said Costain, ‘rather than rushing about now, I’ll spend Monday and Tuesday visiting these locations and bringing the haul back to the Hill.’
‘We can help with that,’ said Sefton.
Costain shook his head. ‘I’m keeping the grunt work off you two. I think that’s what Jimmy would do. I hope it is, anyway. I hope at some point we find a whole bunch of stuff to crack whatever this gang of murderers shit is, and something to get Quill back and make him better, and then . . .’ He finally gave way to a grin. ‘Then I can stop bloody trying to lead.’
Sefton put a hand on his shoulder and smiled back. ‘We’re all,’ he said, ‘looking forward to that.’
Lofthouse was glad of her torch. She was picking her way down through absolute darkness, in what she was sure now were natural caverns, carved by water. The path she followed, however, had been made by the erosion of feet. What could it have been like for the first person to do this? When would that have been? Would they have been from some tribe, seeking to go into the earth for their religion? Was that religion anything to do with what Jimmy’s team encountered these days?
Her mind was going to wander, she realized, and she better let it, because otherwise she would only fret on the multiple risks she was taking. If she was lost down here, nobody would ever find her, and that bastard inside Peter might hurt him out of spite. Beside the path, at intervals, had been left offerings, long-crumbled sprigs of plants, rings and coins all snapped in two. There were things written on the walls too, like tourist graffiti, but of a very specialist sort, some in English, but also in German, Spanish and in Japanese characters. Some of the writings replied to each other, like a conversation carried on over decades. ‘Not long now until the drop.’ ‘Don’t hack your karma like that.’ ‘Fuck the Rat Queen.’ ‘Is that an order?’ Most of what they referred to was gibberish to her, but Kev Sefton would love this stuff. Her map had turned out to be only a very rough description of the terrain. Of much more help were the path itself and the urging of the key on her bracelet, which she could feel straining on her wrist like a terrier heading for the park.
