Quill looked to Sarah, who was obviously making a split-second decision about telling truth to power. ‘Yes.’
‘Good! Good! Why?’
‘It makes them look stupid.’
‘So you might be moved to complain to the advertising standards authority?’
‘I don’t know if I’d go that far.’
‘We’re hoping some people will. That’s why that’s the cheap one. The idea is that it gets banned, we make a great fuss about it, how we thought we’d made a very liberal choice to hire a bunch of black actors. The headline on the paper, that’s to lure people into that way of thinking too. I think if the headline had been about bananas or something, then it would really be racist, not just pretend racist. I’m of Jewish descent myself, so…’ He left that with a shrug. ‘If it’s banned it gets talked about in pubs, replayed on YouTube endlessly, it gets a sort of fascinating sheen to it. It makes us look young and rebellious, which is what our research tells us is what we’re most seen as not being. It’s called “outrage marketing”.’
‘Ah,’ said Sarah, ‘right.’
‘Hmm. You’re still against us showing the clip, though?’
‘Yeah.’ She said it as if it was just narrowly the best of no really good options.
He laughed. ‘This is all good. I need you to be honest with me.’
‘What’s the music about?’ asked Quill.
Vincent turned to him, and Quill found himself being sized up. ‘Something with no relation at all to the subject matter: Herb Alpert. People will ask exactly that question. Again, it’ll stick in their heads, but that effect fades quickly. If we kept doing adverts with that attached, it’d stop being jarring and start just being our tune. These days anything can come to mean anything. Sorry, you must be … no, don’t tell me — James, yes, I recall. And you are a … police officer, are you not? A detective. Right, hence the question. It’s your job to sort through a huge number of signifiers, many different people and events, and work out which of them means anything to you.’
‘I suppose,’ said Quill, slightly dreading what might come next, and already tired by how fast this man spoke. He hoped that at no point would Vincent ask him to give him the inside track on anything. Although this bloke was supposed to be the only newspaper proprietor who didn’t do stuff like that, he was obviously a bit of a shit, and probably guilty of something. But then Quill thought that about most of the general public.
‘What I like about the Met,’ said Vincent, ‘is that it’s still a meritocracy.’
Quill suppressed a cynical laugh, and managed a tilt of the head that he hoped indicated nothing in particular.
Vincent seemed to notice the half-heartedness of the gesture. ‘Well, that’s what senior officers always tell me. I started out as a copy boy; I’ve been an editor all my life. Oh, here’s another one.’
He looked back to the screen and started to narrate what he saw in this next advert. ‘Handsome young chap, smart suit but not expensive, down-to-earth London accent but not faux Jamaican youth accent, more the sort of voice kept alive by soap operas, so he’s doing what the audience want to do and could actually do, leading them into thinking that if they copy him and buy the paper, they’ll be free and happy like him…’ Quill noticed that the finely ironed copy of the Herald the man flapped open had the same headline as in the last advert. ‘He’s our aspirational cheerleader figure, he’s in all the rest of these, which will actually get on telly and push the brand along in the spotlight.’
‘Interesting,’ said Quill.
‘We’re really in the same job, James. You notice meaning, I try to make it.’
Quill wanted to ask if a newspaperman’s job shouldn’t be to report the news, but, aware of Sarah’s tight-lipped smile, contented himself with a chummy laugh.
‘Well, I must go,’ said Vincent, ‘if those above you ever grind you down…’ He took another card from his pocket and placed it in Quill’s palm.
Quill looked at the card and his eyes widened. He looked up at Vincent. ‘Tell me,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘Mr Vincent, have you ever experienced anything impossible?’
Sarah’s face was suddenly a picture.
Vincent seemed to falter. Here, Quill was sure now, was someone who knew exactly what he was talking about. ‘I … I don’t know what that is, and I don’t have time to get into it. Sarah, James, good evening.’ He moved swiftly off into the crowd.
Sarah looked aghast. ‘What the fuck, Quill?’
Quill took the business card from her hand and held it up beside the one he’d been given. To his eyes and his eyes alone, they were both spattered with freezing droplets of silver.
TEN
‘How did Sefton end up with “severe bruises on his arms”?’ asked Lofthouse.
Quill didn’t quite feel able to share all the details of Sefton’s experiment. ‘He failed to see a man about a bus,’ he said. The two of them were walking down a corridor in the Treasury, all polished wood and the smell of a carpet that was cleaned daily. Quill had asked her to come along to give him as much political clout as possible in what looked likely to be a difficult day. What they’d seen on the way in — protestors gathering in Parliament Square — had put them all on edge. This time the youths in the masks had been carrying an enormous puppet of the Toff character, held up by sticks. It held a bloody razor, doubtless made of felt. To Quill it felt as if this new Ripper was being elevated to the status of minor local god, a god that demanded sacrifice. Perhaps literally.
There was something else that was weird, too. As soon as they’d stepped into the precincts of the Houses of Parliament, he had felt a sudden lack of something, as if he’d walked into a recording studio and the ambient sound of the world had cut off. It had taken him a few paces to realize what was going on, then he’d walked back and stepped back and forth, oblivious to the glances he was getting, until he’d found a specific line where it happened. ‘It feels … safe in here,’ he’d told Lofthouse, who had raised an eyebrow at his performance. ‘Like past this line the power of London doesn’t work.’
‘That has to be deliberate.’
‘It does sound like the sort of thing those who laid down the law in past centuries might do: protect the centres of power from occult dodginess.’ They’d gone out again and walked around the boundaries of the old buildings, Quill finding that the force field or whatever it was approximated to the walls in some places but not in others. The modern additions weren’t covered. Everyone inside was lucky in ways that the vast majority of them didn’t appreciate. He noted that this wasn’t something that Lofthouse had known previously. When she said she knew less than they did, she seemed to be telling the truth. So why couldn’t she tell them what she did know?
Finally, they’d had to head in again because it was time for their appointment. ‘You’re trying to get a meeting with Vincent?’ asked Lofthouse now.
‘I have a call in with him, as they say. He’s obviously had an encounter with something from the Sighted world and, given that our suspect is the only thing we’ve seen so far that splatters, maybe even the Ripper himself. And Vincent radiates dodgy. The number on those business cards turned out to be just his PA, but that’s closer than most people get.’
‘Last time a fully armed parliamentary inquiry went after him he came up smelling of roses. Tread very gently.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Did you find the taxi that picked up the male witness from the bar?’
‘We did, but unfortunately he paid in cash, so we’ve just got a few extra lines of description from the foggy recall of a taxi driver. He bloody got out near Tottenham Court Road too, right in the middle of town, and we lose him on camera somewhere in the shops. So no indication of home address.’