Quill glanced through the big window at a hungover early summer morning. A police line was keeping an enormous scrum of press back from the scene of the crime. Forrest himself was now striding about the room, looking at where the body had lain, with Lofthouse at his side. There was no message this time, they were certain, having examined every inch of wall.
‘It all fits the profile,’ said Costain.
Ross was frowning. ‘White men is a big profile. It’s everyone who’s not “the other”.’
‘Rich white men isn’t as big,’ countered Sefton. ‘There’s a reason why they’re called the one per cent.’
‘Was Staunce rich? Was Spatley rich?’
Quill recognized that Ross was sort of talking to herself out loud.
‘Privileged, then,’ said Costain.
‘Usually means the opposite in our world,’ said Sefton.
‘Great,’ said Quill, ‘we’re in a land of things meaning their opposites. What about the woman who was attacked?’
‘She wasn’t among those who stayed behind and were interviewed and processed,’ said Ross, looking at her own copy of the notes. ‘We have some descriptions — wildly varying, of course. There is, hooray, security camera footage of the whole bar.’
‘Hooray indeed.’ Quill looked up and grimaced. ‘Gird your loins, here comes trouble.’
Forrest had arrived, Lofthouse beside him. ‘It took us a couple of hours to sort out the scrummage outside before we could even get in here,’ he said. ‘Multiple arrests, protestors and now, dear God, rival right-wing protestors.’ Quill recalled seeing graffiti about ‘kikes’ on buildings around the square. ‘That’s rare to the point of unique for round here. The hard cases in my cells are saying they’re aiming to break up every Toff gathering.’
‘Just what we bloody need,’ sighed Quill.
‘What, they’re onside with the bankers?’ Ross had a look on her face as if reality was lying to her.
‘What we’re getting out of their online forums is that they think the Ripper message indicates that these killings are all a Jewish conspiracy, and that by wearing that mask, the Toffs are supporting the secret powers that rule the world.’
‘Which in previous decades would have been associated with the bankers themselves,’ said Ross.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Quill, ‘now it’s like anything can mean anything.’
‘The Ripper really should have been more specific with that message,’ said Sefton. ‘Then at least we’d only have one side to deal with.’
‘So, DI Quill,’ said Forrester, ‘what can you bring to the table?’
Quill had prepared this report mentally over the last few days. ‘We’ve placed undercovers in relevant communities and are already hearing useful chatter, though none yet of operational relevance.’ He wished he could mention the silver, but couldn’t think of a way to do it.
‘So, you’ve got fuck all?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Fantastic. Keep up the good work.’
‘Any fingerprints here?’
‘No matches with the others, no.’
‘May I ask, sir, if, given this, we’re still building a case against the driver, Tunstall?’
‘Of course we are. Logically, he must have been involved in the first crime, and it beggars belief that we won’t have him for it in the end. When we’ve got enough evidence we’ll rearrest him, and he’ll eventually give us his accomplices. End of.’ With an ironic glance at Lofthouse that looked to be about Quill’s bizarre querying of that certainty, he was off.
‘To be expected,’ said Lofthouse, reassuringly.
‘Yeah,’ said Quill. ‘He has someone he fancies for it. I’d probably see it like that myself. Let’s check out the security camera footage, shall we?’
* * *
They had a few different angles to choose from this time. There was the young woman: white, late teens, five four, slim build, no visible identifying marks, long brown hair, here in a pony tail, dressed reasonably expensively and fashionably, sitting at her table. There came Rupert Rudlin, the victim, to talk to her. Standing up was the woman’s male companion: white, late thirties, five nine, large build, no visible identifying marks, balding, dark hair, off-the-peg suit, glancing at his watch, saying goodbye to her and heading off. They followed him across the bar and out of the door, shaking his head at door staff, pushing his way through against their urging him to stay inside, actually going out into the riot. Then light arrived in the corner of the frame and the shining figure in the shape of the Ripper leaped lightly into it. The assailant had landed on the table, causing the drinks and empties placed there to fly off, wounding the bystander as the witness had stated. The young woman had tried to aid the wounded man and been slammed up against the wall, where the assailant indeed held her for twenty seconds, as Rudlin got to his feet.
‘Look at how much silver gets spilled on that wall,’ said Sefton. ‘A bigger deposit than any we’ve seen.’
‘Spilling fuel,’ said Sefton, ‘like something’s going wrong.’
Rudlin had indeed gone to help and had been attacked as per witness statement. This was the first time Quill and his team had seen the Ripper at work. They watched the shining shape of a razor sweeping through the air, cutting and cutting. There was an unhinged rage to it, but also a terrible precision. There was a sudden hauling of the razor that made the victim scream silently on the footage like a slaughtered animal. Then the Ripper was bounding off and the young man had collapsed into a pile of his own bloody insides.
The woman had stayed put for a moment after the Ripper had dropped her, unharmed, then she’d hauled herself to her feet and run for the door. She also had got through the door staff, who were reacting to the violence now happening inside their establishment, and was gone into the night.
‘I want a word with her,’ said Quill. ‘She’s experienced that thing close up, and it let her off. And she saw fit to run, immediately, through more trouble.’
‘The bloke who was with her too,’ said Costain. ‘Would you walk out into what was going on outside that bar?’
‘I would need,’ said Ross, biting her bottom lip, deep in thought, ‘a reason.’
* * *
The team circulated the description of the woman and her companion among the witnesses. A few people had seen them, but nobody knew who they were. They weren’t going to be able to get the main inquiry to put pictures of them onto the news, Ross realized. All Forrest would see on this CCTV footage was the sort of headache-inducing visual lie that she and her colleagues had experienced during the Losley operation before they’d got the Sight. To see even as much as he had — a young woman being thrown against the wall by something invisible — their witness must be somewhere on the lower end of the Sighted spectrum. Most of those working the main inquiry would interpret the same scene as her being thrown to the floor, or something like that.
Ross wished she could feel comfortable around Costain. His expression when he glanced in her direction, that shared secret, made her wince inwardly. She wished they could have had that kiss without having the prospect of the auction hanging over them. That look on his face, if she could ever think of any expression of his as genuine, said he wasn’t feeling comfortable either, that maybe he was as vulnerable as she was. Yeah, maybe.
They found the woman’s original companion, the balding guy, on CCTV camera footage from outside as he left the bar, skirting the edges of the clash between protestors, and then they managed to follow him, camera to camera, to Old Street, where he’d caught a taxi heading towards town. Ross noted down the registration number. Checking earlier CCTV footage from the bar, the man had paid only with cash, damn it, and not a card they could check for at the bar. They’d at least have a record of where he’d got out of the taxi. The woman’s path from the bar was caught on a couple of cameras, but then she’d vanished into the backstreets. Ross knew from previous experience that the CCTV footage wouldn’t be good enough for the facial recognition software used by the Photographic Intelligence team to be any use, but she sent images of both patrons to them anyway.