by Paul Cornell
Was she making herself believe it, or was the pressure of the key slightly more insistent, as if she was closer to her target? No graffiti here, but feet had clearly worn down the way. Too scared to test her weight on her damaged leg, she started to edge along the wall. She was blazingly thirsty, but she had no water now. She tried licking the stone, and after a while, that helped a little. She had no option. She would keep calm and carry on.
Quill entered his own house again slowly, carefully. He looked at Sarah, who was standing in the hallway, her own expression careful, non-committal. The weight of just seeing her again. If he started to apologize, a crack would burst wide open. He was going to do more than that, though, wasn’t he? He walked into the lounge and saw all the familiar furniture, another room with lots of things in it. What he had to work his way back towards was meaning, for himself and between him and Sarah. He went and deliberately sat down in what he distantly knew was ‘his favourite chair’.
Sarah entered with half a smile on her face, probably at how serious he was looking, but that look faded. Laura said she’d go to make some tea, but Quill called her back. He was going to go for this straight away.
Moriarty looked around the lounge door and, unseen by the other two, swept in, with a little snarl of contempt at the accommodation. He had suddenly become a bit of a pantomime villain, Quill realized. Maybe he could only be a monster when he was hidden. Now he was in plain sight, the clichéd details of him felt harmless, even homely. Quill had felt such an urge to gather him up, to bring him in from the cold. This connection he felt to Moriarty, it was as if he himself had . . . created him.
That was an interesting thought. A weirdly clear thought. It felt like the first inkling of something better. But never mind that now. There was something urgent he had to do.
‘There’s a sign,’ he said to Sarah and Laura, ‘over the gates of Hell.’
He said the next sentence. He told them what the sign said. He wondered if he was fantasizing about doing this. No, here he was. Here was the weight being entirely lifted from his shoulders. He couldn’t feel it going. The look on her face wasn’t scared yet. That would take a while.
Laura looked to Sarah, interrogating her about whether this was true, or part of Quill’s delusions. She’d had some time to think about what the revelation might be. She had the perspective to get scared. Quill was relieved, sort of, to see that Sarah believed him. She came to sit closer, opposite him, and took his hands in hers. He started to sob at the touch. ‘No,’ she said gently, ‘listen, listen. You don’t just have to tell me. You can’t. You have to tell your lot. Right now.’
Ross, Flamstead and Costain had stayed in the bar, her talking to Flamstead, Costain keeping his distance, talking to anyone and everyone else, starting up conversations with that easy undercover charm. God, this was like being at school. If she left with Flamstead, would Costain make a fuss? Which version of him would prevail? She felt her phone vibrate, saw who the call was from and scrambled to answer it.
That familiar voice on the other end of the line. Quill. It wasn’t quite him; he talked very weirdly, as if there were pressures on him she couldn’t understand. He asked her if she remembered that he’d been to Hell, and she was saying, ‘Well, bloody of course . . .’ when he came out with his bombshell.
She had to sit down. He repeated it. ‘I heard,’ she said. ‘It’s everyone who ever lived in London. They’re all in Hell. We’re all going there. That’s . . .’ She struggled to find the right words for a moment. It was too big to process. Except with a part of her mind that was always processing things. Which had suddenly realized. ‘That’s something I can use.’
She made sure Quill was with people who were looking after him, talked to Sarah for a moment and said she thought what he’d said was probably true, yeah. Her mind was racing. She finished the call, then called Costain over, turned to Flamstead. ‘We’re all going to Hell. You knew, didn’t you?’
He just looked sad at her.
‘What?’ said Costain.
She repeated what Quill had said. He looked like he couldn’t process it either. ‘This is such leverage, but the three of us can’t bloody use it. This lot won’t believe you or me. Who would they believe? Wait. I know.’ She grabbed the programme out of her pocket, found where the room was and before either of them could ask her what she was talking about, she was on her way out of the bar.
There were five people in the panel room, kneeling in a circle under the light of a PowerPoint presentation, the single slide of which said, ‘Other (?),’ against a bright green background, a pile of small sacrifices being burned in a brazier between them. Ross and Costain quickly joined them. Flamstead stepped into the middle of the circle, causing one of these middle-aged ladies to scream and the others to start shouting. He threw an enormous wad of cash onto the brazier. It erupted into green flame. ‘Come on, then, you irritating bitch,’ bellowed Flamstead. ‘This is me calling!’
When he spoke to others of his kind, Ross noted, he spoke the truth.
She appeared without fanfare – not there one moment, there the next. Her smell was of exotic spices . . . travel . . . dirt . . . Ross realized that the scent itself was dragging her Sighted brain towards horrors, that she would get to thinking of something terrible in just a moment, and consciously hauled her attention away. The figure that sat where the brazier had been had a furious scowl on her face. She was looking angrily at Flamstead. ‘They have to understand,’ she said, ‘you only ever help them for your own ends.’
‘They know that, Brent. Or should I say Mother?’
‘You just told them my name!’
‘I suppose I just did. They’ll find a good use for it.’
The goddess turned to the circle, looking only slightly less angry. ‘I told you before,’ she said, ‘I keep telling you, every time I’m summoned, the things you must do. You never do them.’ Her voice was a mixture of Jamaican, Eastern European; it again started to lead Ross to thoughts of terrible suffering. She brought an awful awareness of that suffering with her. It would be tough, she realized, to keep this goddess around for any length of time. She looked to Costain. He was back to his stoicism, his defence against all things.
Ross turned back to address the summoned goddess. She dared to use the name that Flamstead had just revealed. ‘Brent . . .’ She saw the others in the circle looking at her in awed horror. ‘Tell them what’s on the sign above the gates of Hell.’
The appearance of the goddess visibly warped. She was trying, Ross realized, to get away. ‘They mustn’t know. It’ll crush them. My people most of all. They will think their lives are for nothing.’
‘Right now they are!’ shouted Ross.
‘You’re bound by the circle, Mum,’ said Flamstead, ‘by the size of that sacrifice.’
‘The sign says that everyone who has ever lived in London goes to Hell,’ hissed Brent. ‘It’s true, though it hasn’t always been. It all changed when Lucifer was murdered and something else took his place. There. Now nobody can be happy!’
A couple of the people in the circle stood up. One of them ran for the door. The remaining ones had started to weep, to ask urgent questions. The truth was out. Christ, what weight had Jimmy carried all this time? No wonder he’d broken and fled.
With a great yell, Brent threw up her hands in a gesture of disgust and vanished. The brazier fell, and smoke burst into the room. The fire alarm sounded, and water started to pour down from sprinklers in the ceiling. ‘How dare you compromise her like this?’ yelled Costain. ‘Get her away from this downpour!’
Ross was utterly bemused as Costain squared up to a pleased-looking Flamstead, both getting sodden with water. That was so different from his normal way of speaking, and he now didn’t seem to need the slightest cause before charging into battle on her behalf like a smitten teenager. What the fuck? But she had much more urgent things to worry about. Coughing, she allowed Flamstead and Costain, actually shouldering each other for the privilege, to lea
d her out of the room. ‘I need . . .’ she coughed as they all stumbled out into the corridor, the alarm lights flashing around them, ‘I need to find Tock.’
He was in the car park, as was everyone else as they streamed out of the hotel. He was being surrounded, Ross saw, by a swiftly growing crowd of people, all of whom seemed to be telling him and each other the terrible news. Some of them actually ran up and made to attack Flamstead, as he followed Ross and Costain, but he shouted to them about whether or not they believed Brent, and him knowing her name held them back.
Tock glared as Ross reached him. ‘So this isn’t a trick of his?’ He was pointing at Flamstead.
‘The Other said it,’ an exasperated woman shouted beside him. ‘She was bound by the circle: she had to tell the truth.’
‘All right, all right.’ He ran a hand over his thinning hair, like a gorilla making a blunt gesture of aggression. ‘Well, we’re fucked, aren’t we? That’s what happened a few years back – that was the big change, our souls all being chucked into the shitter. We had our conference and we got our answer.’
‘You don’t know who we are,’ said Ross.
‘I don’t want to know who you are, love.’
Ross looked to Costain, who hesitated, so she reached into his jacket and grabbed his warrant card. ‘We’re the law now,’ she said. ‘We’re part of what you’re having this conference about.’ A reaction spread through the crowd: angry, mixed up, not understanding.
‘I’m on their side!’ called Flamstead.
‘You heard him lie then,’ said Ross. ‘He’s not with us, he’s just helping us with our enquiries. We have access to the Continuing Projects Team’s files, some of their equipment—’
‘You’re lying,’ said Tock. He pointed to Costain. ‘He doesn’t use blanket. We check for coppers, and he isn’t one.’
‘I realized after failing to use blanket a couple of times,’ said Costain, ‘that I’m safe without it. I guess I give off a vibe that’s more . . . criminal.’ He looked a little lost to Ross. ‘Now you know. I didn’t want you to. I would give anything in the world for you not to—’
‘It’s because he was an undercover,’ she said, cutting him off before he went on and on. It was a working theory, but still it left questions to answer. Later for that. ‘Listen, our boss is Detective Inspector James Quill. He went to Hell and he came back. He nicked Mora Losley. He put the Ripper back to bed.’ Neither of those were strictly true, but it was all close enough to satisfy the crowd around her, who were busy slapping her with gestures to check her veracity. ‘Our specialist is Kevin Sefton, who’s met with Brutus and the Rat King.’ She was talking and talking. It was time to move away from detail and get to people. ‘We want to be the law for you lot. We know how much you used to hate us. And “used to” for you lot takes a long bloody time to go away. But’ – she gestured around her at the increasing size of the crowd, the rising feeling of panic – ‘you know now how desperate the situation is. You need someone to be a respected and recognized authority that you consent to, that you want in your lives. And we need you in return.’
‘That’s a nice speech—’ Tock began.
‘Yeah.’ She stepped into his face, desperate now. ‘Yeah it was.’ He was, she was sure, one of these blokes who needed to be able to say he liked people who stood up to him, when that was just his mechanism to save face when he lost. She had to give him that way out.
‘We don’t like being told what to do. We don’t like someone having a hold over us.’
‘That’s not how policing works. Police should be answerable. You should have some hold over us.’ She realized as she said it that her own needs and the needs of her team had just at that moment come together. The size of what she could grab here staggered her. She ploughed on, kept talking. ‘You reckon you’re going to spread a little bit of happiness among this lot? How far will that go, compared to guaranteed Hell? Wouldn’t you rather have a friend in law enforcement who’s working the crime of the afterlife?’ She looked him in the eye, hoping against hope that this was going to come down to being about people. ‘Wouldn’t you rather I owed this whole community an enormous debt?’
He thought for a long moment. Then he reached into his jacket. Of course he’d have it on him.
He took out her happiness in a small clear bottle with a gold cap. He held it up in front of her. He taunted her with it. ‘You’re going to owe us big time,’ he said.
She held out her hand. ‘That’s always the deal,’ she said.
He made her feel it, that enormous hole in her life, for a second more. Then he gave her the bottle.
She didn’t look at Costain or Flamstead. She had no idea what her colleague would think of her speaking for the entire Met like that, but she had meant what she said. At least this was a debt she was prepared to repay. She unscrewed the top of the tiny bottle. She fixed her lips carefully round the top. She poured the liquid onto her tongue. Suddenly, there was much more of it than could fit into her mouth!
It erupted, not out of her, but into her, into her head and her body. She sucked on the bottle like a teat, feeling it, oh, feeling it, the difference, so much! She drained it. She lowered the empty bottle. She stumbled.
She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth.
She started to laugh.
TWENTY-FIVE
As soon as he got the call, Sefton went over to Quill’s place. Sarah opened the door for him, a woman she introduced as her sister, Laura, with her. It was close to one in the morning, but as Laura said, nobody was likely to be getting any sleep.
Sefton went into the lounge, to find Quill drinking very carefully from a cup of tea, his hands shaking. He looked up, nodded, hesitant to do more, as if Sefton might not be real. Sefton marched across to hug him, but then jumped at a sudden movement in the air between them. ‘What is that?’ He was looking at a dark, somewhat hunched individual who’d leaped into existence as he crossed the room. Its beady eyes were sizing him up.
‘My Moriarty,’ said Quill, without humour.
‘I should think,’ said Sarah, ‘you’ll want a cuppa yourself?’
Slowly, Quill managed to talk about everything that had happened, both in Hell and since he’d fled. Sefton asked questions like this was an interview, and Quill seemed calmed by the process, allowed himself to be led. Sarah and Laura listened, the latter sometimes holding on to her sister’s hand, Sarah sometimes trying to restrain her tears, sometimes failing.
The idea they were all going to Hell was too big to deal with. It seemed slight and distant, almost, compared to Quill’s pain. Still, every time they got back to that, they fell into silence. Quill took his story back to what they could use in their current operation, and Sefton tried to make that as easy for him as possible. ‘All those clues at the murder scene,’ Quill whispered. ‘I worked them. They worked me over. They all have to mean something. Don’t they?’
Sefton wondered if he could safely answer that. They were in professional mode, though, so he felt he had to. ‘I’m not sure, Jimmy, but I think maybe most of them were put there deliberately to distract us from looking for what wasn’t there: Watson.’
‘An orgy of evidence. That’s what my old boss used to call a crime scene like that, a room that had too much in it.’ Quill sounded like he’d just been slapped around the face. ‘It was all for . . . for nothing!’ He realized he’d shouted. He put down the cup of tea. His hands clasped the arms of the chair. He tried to control his breathing, his eyes closed. ‘What about that cyclist?’
‘I think some bolshie courier carrying a package that might have looked like a cosh . . .’
‘Oh fuck,’ said Quill. ‘Oh fuck.’
Sefton looked over to Sarah. This was so hard on her. Sefton almost didn’t want to vocalize his next thought, because it felt like it might lead Quill the wrong way, but it also said that not everything he’d done was meaningless. ‘But I also think some of the clues you found did mean something.’ Quill’s eyes snapped open a
nd he looked afraid at this sudden hope. Like devils were going to rush in. ‘For a start, that blade really did have the weight of something Sighted about it. It probably does have a “spiel” attached. Some of the other stuff you worked out, that was the old Jimmy Quill brain still doing its best—’
‘Don’t!’ snapped Quill. Then, a second later, more calmly, ‘Just tell me.’
‘Missing Room Ltd, that really was a reference to a rock band called Moriarty. Which might be an amazing coincidence if not for Dean Michael, which also genuinely points that way, his name being the first names of two famous Moriartys, one fictional and one an actor. Putting those two names that way round seems deliberately chosen to cue us towards thinking it wasn’t a real name, because he could equally have called himself Michael Dean, and there are probably loads of those. I would also agree about the astronomical photo, except that, like Sarah said, it doesn’t show the right bit of the sky for the asteroid named after Moriarty to be on it. What that means I don’t know, but still . . . I think someone sorted out that room to firstly set us off on a lot of wild goose chases – which had a terrible impact on you – and then, as we got deeper, to get diverted into suspecting Moriarty.’
‘Just the sort of thing I would do,’ chuckled Moriarty.
Sefton looked at him in shock.
Quill looked over at his new friend. ‘I didn’t know you could talk.’
‘I heard it too,’ Sefton quickly said to Sarah and Laura, to reassure them. ‘He’s sitting right there.’
