‘That silver stuff,’ said Sefton, who looked like Quill felt. He took a pen and added to the concepts list, which had already gained several new entries this morning. ‘That’s the major connection to Operation Fog. It’s not just something that occurs at the Ripper crime scenes, but, I’d speculate, and note that I’m speculating-’
‘Noted,’ said Ross.
‘-that it’s the fuel which powers occult London.’
‘It was in the cracks of the made-up levels of the bar,’ said Costain. ‘Like the surface had fallen off and you could see the real power underneath.’
‘Right,’ said Sefton. ‘I don’t think, when everything’s working as it’s meant to, that you’re supposed to be able to see this goo. Like with blood in a human body.’
‘So, applying that to the Ripper case,’ said Ross, ‘I think it’s possible that it means that our supernatural assailant got wounded in the struggle with either the first or both of the victims.’
Quill nodded. ‘What the hell,’ he asked, looking to Sefton again, ‘was that enormous river of the stuff?’
‘Maybe the source of all this power? I have no idea what it is, or where it is, or even if there … is a where…’
Quill saw the sleeplessness around Sefton’s eyes, the burden on his shoulders. He’d never killed anyone himself. He’d known a couple of coppers in firearms units who had; it had never left them. He wished he could help Sefton with that burden. He hoped that maybe there was something in his philosophy, in the fact that he was the one who looked more deeply into the occult stuff, that could help him, but Quill suspected there couldn’t be. ‘Did you see the gold stuff threaded through it?’
‘Yeah,’ said Ross, and held up a page in her notebook. ‘It looked like what was on the walls of Losley’s house, on her pile of soil-’
‘On what we thought was a sort of hyperlink in that book in her lock-up,’ said Costain.
Sefton went back to the concepts section of the board. ‘If the silver goo is the power source, the fuel…’ He wrote two headings in the concepts column. ‘Then maybe the gold thread is the software, the instructions.’
‘So that could be what we touched when we touched the soil?’
‘Maybe. And perhaps if we’d looked at that soil at a microscopic level once we had the Sight, we’d have seen silver goo in it too. The software and the power source.’
‘Perhaps. But that still doesn’t tell us why it was just us four, does it?’
There was silence for a moment. Quill supposed the others felt like he did about that central question of their existence. They all needed to know, at heart, if they’d been chosen for some grand quest or had been the victims of an accident. He wondered again if Lofthouse knew at least that much.
‘John, the Rat King,’ said Sefton, starting a new topic, ‘seemed to me to be … not actually a real human being — he said so himself — something like that bouncer, but with … consciousness, ideas of his own, a character, not limited like they were in the bouncer — more like Brutus.’
‘He went away downstairs,’ said Ross. ‘The bearded gatekeeper seemed calm enough to evacuate that way, so I think we can assume any lower floors just detached themselves and weren’t destroyed in the explosion.’
‘The Rat King had several features of interest. I’m pretty sure he knew I was a police officer as soon as he saw me. He had that kind of … greater power that Brutus had too. But he said he wouldn’t give me away, and didn’t.’
‘So he knows about someone just by looking?’ said Costain. ‘He’d be the ultimate source, the fount of all info.’
‘He indicated he didn’t know who the Ripper was,’ said Sefton, ‘so his knowledge has limits, but, yeah. I just wish I knew how to find him.’
‘That’s still brilliant work,’ said Quill. ‘I asked you to find us background, and you got us tons of it.’ He turned back to the board, knowing he wouldn’t get an answering smile out of Sefton right now. ‘Now, I asked a favour of some mates at West End Central and had a couple of uniforms take a turn past the Goat and Compasses and the Keels’ biggest shop. The Goat has opened as usual today, and a car belonging to Terry Keel is parked round the back of his store in a parking place with his name over it. In short, it doesn’t look as if he’s scarpered.’
‘There seems to be some sort of generational conflict going on in what I think we can now call the occult underworld of London,’ said Ross. ‘The Keel brothers, or now just Terry-’ She stopped, realizing she might have said the wrong thing.
‘It’s okay,’ said Sefton.
Ross nodded. ‘They’re on one side, the newer side, happy to use money in transactions. A lot of the regulars at the Goat seemed against that, wanted to keep with older laws about the use of barter.’
‘Losley,’ said Quill, ‘if you remember, went apeshit when we dared to suggest she might be “employed”.’
‘Terry Keel,’ said Costain, ‘talked about a feeling that everything changed for this lot a few years back, but that the new generation have taken a while to take advantage of it.’
‘Maybe that’s about what destroyed the temple in Docklands,’ said Sefton. ‘If the Continuing Projects Team were the old law, and there’s been nothing to replace them, then this lot found themselves free to do what they liked, only they didn’t know it. I wonder why.’
‘Maybe the Continuing Projects Team worked more like under-covers than beat coppers,’ suggested Costain. ‘Perhaps you only knew they were there when they nicked you.’
‘I do wish,’ said Quill, ‘that we could find some good old-fashioned good and evil in this generational conflict, that we could say the barter people are the good guys and the money lot are bad. Because in my copper heart I have been waiting with baited breath to discover supernatural good and evil and the simple joy that would bring. But the barter people included Losley, and the money lot included your beardy waistcoat mate. So nuts to that.’
‘That would be good,’ agreed Sefton.
‘I expected one side or the other to be all about the Smiling Man,’ said Quill. ‘But from either of them I only heard references to sacrifices being made “to London”.’
They compared notes and found that was true for all of them.
‘I don’t think they know about the Smiling Man,’ said Ross. ‘Maybe he stays behind the scenes in that community too.’ She found the relevant page in one of her notebooks. ‘We still know almost nothing about him.’
‘Things we did learn,’ said Sefton, finding a page in one of his own scrawled notebooks and reading from it. ‘Losley needed a line of sight on her victims, but nobody else seems to. I kind of thought that might be unique to her after that threat against us that was written on a note when we were at the New Age fair. Whoever wrote that could “smell death” near people, which is not a line-of-sight thing.’ He obviously saw the slight smile on Quill’s face. ‘This is the sort of detail I keep track of.’
‘What about Neil Gaiman?’ asked Quill. ‘Him we can find, presumably, and he seemed in the know. We ought to get a statement.’
‘I’ve put a call in to his agent,’ said Ross. ‘Let’s hope he hasn’t flown back to the States.’
‘Yeah,’ said Costain, ‘it’d be awkward to have to bring this up on his blog.’
* * *
Sefton realized that there was something he’d expected Ross to have mentioned by now, yet she hadn’t. ‘The barmaid gave you something,’ he said to her.
‘Yeah.’ Ross raised a finger, wait a sec, as if she’d forgotten. Sefton was pretty sure she hadn’t. She found it in her bag and pinned it to the board. It was a colourful flier for the pub evening. ‘I think that was her way of saying that, no matter what had happened to her, I was welcome in that pub.’
Sefton didn’t know why he felt worried at her poker face. An alert went off on Ross’ phone. She looked at it. ‘DCI Forrest’s office. The fingerprint results have been checked between both crime scenes. And … we have a match.’