‘You can get your drinks here,’ she said, ‘you don’t have to keep going back upstairs.’
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘thanks.’ If she’d been all old-fashioned with her speech, he’d have matched it.
He bought a vodka and Coke, and went to sit at a corner table, facing the door. A new-looking menu advertised cocktails. The Cemetery Jitters. The Last Rites. The Night Terror. He checked what the top-end champagne was. Blimey. Bollinger Blanc de Noirs Vieilles Vignes Françaises 1997, £400 a bottle. That was well at odds with what they’d encountered at that New Age fair. The poverty of the fortune-teller Ross had met there had been evident. The team had been working on the theory that the occult underworld, if it existed, was made by and for the disenfranchised. Maybe that wasn’t always the case. He flipped to the back of the menu. You could, it seemed, ‘order’ The Damned to come to your table and perform ‘Grimly Fiendish’ for ‘prices starting at £15,000’. Getting much pricier if they were away on tour or something, presumably.
He took a glance at his phone, to make sure Quill hadn’t sent him a last-minute no-go message, then dropped it back into his pocket. No showing-off of modern devices. Of the four of them, only he and Sefton were even carrying their phones tonight, in case they went deep and needed a way to call for backup. He looked back to the young man at the bar, now chatting to the barmaid. So, okay, there was a lot of retro styling to him, but he was fundamentally a modern young man with some cash to spare, out on the town. Maybe the dude was on his way to a party, just a part-timer here. So how about the older one? Costain looked over to the corner. There was something of the unkempt about the man, the quality that they’d all glimpsed amongst the serious players at the New Age fair.
Neither of them had attempted to ‘read’ him. Or if they had made some sort of gesture, he hadn’t felt or noticed it, and they now knew all about him. He hoped that his undercover experience meant they might read the role instead of the real bloke, but if they had they weren’t acting on it. He had no cause to raise the alarm.
Costain took from his pocket the book that Sefton had given him, the small paperback edition of The Stratagem and Other Stories by Aleister Crowley, first published in 1929. It was something a newbie with possibilities might pick, both harmless and indicative. He held it so people could see it was old and crumbling. He started to read, glancing up every now and then. Over the next half-hour he noted a number of people entering, a few who seemed interesting. Soon his lot should start … yeah, there was Ross, entering with the look of a scared rabbit about her. Good acting. Or maybe she was just letting her usual poker face drop. Kind of disappointing, if so. She wore a colourful waistcoat, a big puffy shirt and tailored trousers, halfway between a waiter and a gunfighter, all a bit Nineties. Kind of lesbian. She’d put on some make-up, which looked so weird on her he couldn’t tell if he liked it or not. But she looked good. A natural, in an eccentric get-up like that. As if she was about to walk into a spotlight and start singing, but obviously also someone who didn’t quite know how to fit in here. So not playing a role, not doing anything she couldn’t handle. It suddenly occurred to him that, ironically, it meant that he was possibly seeing something like the real Ross here. Or a guess on her part at what the real Ross might be. He was careful to keep watching her sidelong, not look straight at her. When she turned away, he realized he wanted to see her from behind. He did, and felt awkward at having done so; he went back to his book. Those trousers suited her. Good bit of tailoring there. Well cut.
He remembered how it had been when he’d last been undercover. Some undercovers had wives waiting for them at home, who they went back to at weekends, on the other side of the country. Costain, with what he’d started to recognize had actually been an excessive sense of self-preservation, had always thought that sounded risky. It hadn’t ever seemed an option for him. He’d never met anyone he was interested in while being himself. Or he’d never given himself the chance. What was ‘being himself’? There wasn’t anyone he’d ever properly opened up to. That had been how he was long before he’d become a copper. At school, he’d dance with girls, make out with them … Beverley Cooper … yeah … but when they started to want to go on dates, to hang around, he’d back off. They always took that as him being macho. But really … he had no idea what it really meant. He didn’t know why he was the way he was.
In the Toshack gang, he’d received enough attention, but on nights out with the other gang soldiers he’d always acted boozy and boorish, distancing himself from women while appearing to be up for it. He’d got close to a couple of toms, actually, found that paying them let him carry on playing the part of the gang soldier while getting some … not sexual release, you could do that with a wank, he never understood blokes who went on about that … some emotion, some closeness. They’d laughed a lot in bed, Sam and Jo, whichever of them had been around; he’d always paid them well enough so they’d stay.
Why was he thinking about this now?
He had looked at Ross and felt guilt about what he was considering.
He realized he’d been staring at one page of Crowley’s rather too pompous writing without reading it. He looked over to Ross again and saw that the bloke with the moustache was talking to her at the bar, and she was delighted, taking in every detail of his face, nodding along.
Costain closed his eyes for a moment, then made himself open them again, and made sure he kept reading.
* * *
Ross had made notes on Costain’s instructions about how they all had to look, and she had taken them out when she’d sat down in front of the bedroom mirror that evening. This took her back. She’d been told, years ago, during her training, that police social functions were quite expensive and entirely optional, not the sort of thing analysts did, but she’d wanted to go to one. She’d created her new life, she’d thought then. She had colleagues now, she wanted to do the sort of things they did, to show, as part of her determination to get Toshack, that she was on their team. She’d bought two evening dresses, had taken bloody ages deciding which one to wear, and then in the end had spent a really boring evening trying to find anyone who wanted to talk about operations or methodology.
This time she wasn’t playing a role: she was herself, off duty. But — and she’d known in advance this was going to be a problem — she had no idea how that was supposed to look. She was the one who’d pointed out that the persons of interest they’d met at the New Age fair had made statements with their clothing. She normally made none that she was aware of. Quill had agreed that, while still being themselves, he and Ross should both dress with the style of the ‘occult underworld’ in mind. Take care to not obsess about it, he’d added. So those had been mixed messages.