Keel kicked out with one foot, catching Sefton on the thigh, flinging him back.
Sefton jumped back at him inside his leg and punched him in the bollocks. Keel yelled and threw himself forwards again, and Sefton let him, kicking out the inside of his knee to send him falling down the stairs.
Keel struggled to his feet to see armed police officers moving out of cover to take aim at him from every corner of the car park, shouting identification and telling him not to move. But he was thinking about what he could do, his hands not going for his pockets, but moving in the air.
Sefton leaped down the stairs as Costain and Ross burst out of the door behind him, more armed police officers in their wake. He got to Keel first, grabbed his hands before anything could form in them and slammed the man down into the gravel, one knee in the small of his back. Then he rolled off so Costain could haul Keel’s arms behind his back and snap the silver handcuffs on him.
Keel stared up at the circle of police closing in around him, incomprehension adding to his fury. ‘What the fuck do you lot think I’ve done?’
‘You’ve just added resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer to conspiracy to commit murder, mush.’ Costain glowered at him. ‘We’re the law now. Like in the good old days. And we don’t like your beard.’
Sefton made himself calm down to a point where he could speak and carefully started to intone the words of the caution.
* * *
The rest of the shop workers were taken to the Hill for questioning, in a couple of marked vans that rolled up outside on cue. Ross thought they’d probably get only some vaguely interesting general background stuff from these mainstream innocents.
‘Do you want to go with your workers for a proper interview?’ Costain asked Keel, in the privacy of the man’s own office, with the armed officers stationed outside. Ross was aware of the time ticking down to noon. ‘Or do you want to settle things here?’
Keel folded his arms across his chest. ‘You lot really don’t want me to call my lawyer, do you? What was this, just a fishing expedition?’
‘You did the equivalent of drawing a gun on someone you knew was a police officer.’
Keel was staring at them, realizing they were all talking at high speed. Maybe he thought they were trying to get this done before the strike started at noon. He deliberately slowed his speech. ‘The equivalent won’t bloody stand up in court. And you bastards killed my brother.’
‘You don’t want this to go to court,’ said Ross. ‘You don’t want your customers seeing you in the dock, hearing about you being cross-examined, wondering just how many of the community’s secrets you’ve given away. I mean, it’s not like they’re onside with you now, is it?’ She brought to mind the image of the barmaid’s blank features, of how Keel had injured her. ‘You don’t want to lose face.’
Keel considered for a moment. Then he lowered his head. ‘At least you’re in the circle,’ he said. Then he sighed, as if he was talking to children. ‘I mean,’ he translated, ‘the M25. Used to be the North Circular.’
‘The traditions change with the times,’ said Sefton.
Keel looked as if he wanted to spit at him. ‘What do you want to know?’
Ross slapped a printout image onto the table. It showed the mirror standing on the grass outside the Portakabin.
Keel looked puzzled at it. ‘Ordinary mirror. Nothing of my world about that. And I’ve seen it all.’
Ross looked to Sefton, who nodded. That only confirmed what they’d already thought. The idea that the Ripper might have come out of it because of the nature of the object itself had been a long shot.
‘What about the Bridge of Spikes?’ said Costain.
Ross saw Sefton’s expression change. He wouldn’t say anything in front of the suspect, but he was obviously wondering why Costain was asking about something of which he had no knowledge. She and Costain had talked beforehand about this. They might never get the chance to be alone with Keel.
‘What about it?’ said Keel.
Oh, he knew about it. He actually knew! Ross felt the tension in her own chest and appreciated the way Costain was keeping his tone level. ‘Have you ever seen one?’
‘There is only one. And, no, I haven’t. When that was sold at auction, the bidding went on all night. It went into some terrible fucking places. Too rich for my blood.’
‘Is there anything else that does the same job?’
‘Of course there fucking isn’t.’
Ross felt her hope fall away and hit the next level down, like a ball dropping through a maze. Okay. They would just have to find whoever had stolen it from the flat. It would take time, but that would be her life now — the life of both of them, together. She could accept that.
‘Have you ever seen a scrying glass?’ asked Sefton, trying to get back to the plan.
‘Yeah, once. They’re not unique like the Bridge, but they’re pretty rare.’
‘Where did you see it?’
‘At another of the auctions. This bloke on the phone, a proxy for someone, he ran me ragged, beat me to it. Back in those days, we were the only two paying in cash. It was the night the auction was underneath the whale skeleton at the Natural History Museum.’
Ross nodded. ‘That was where our source said he got the mirror we just showed you. That was sold to him as a scrying glass.’
Keel frowned. ‘I don’t remember that. The scrying glass I was after was definitely the genuine article: smaller than a human head, red glass, a thread of blood from an old London family in a phial around the frame. You concentrate on the exact location of your target, and the mirror forms a connection between you and their sleeping brain. Nobody in the know would mistake the mirror in that photo for a scrying glass.’
A terrible suspicion was starting to form in Ross’ mind. ‘What did this proxy look like?’
‘White, late thirties, balding, dark hair…’
Ross asked a few more questions, then exchanged a look with Costain and Sefton. It could be the same man who had bid against her in her attempt to find the location of the Bridge. It would make sense. The owner of the scrying glass was the one reading their thoughts; having discovered their intention to find the Bridge, and what the Bridge was, who wouldn’t send someone to compete to get it? ‘Do you know who was he working for?’
Keel smiled and straightened up, realizing he had something valuable. ‘I do know, because I did the old — ’ he made the ‘bar code reading’ gesture in the air and they all automatically deflected it. But again their phones chirruped. It made him laugh. ‘I felt who was on the other end of the phone and it made me think something big was going down. So. What’s it worth?’
‘We leave you alone,’ said Costain. ‘And we don’t start gossiping at the Goat, or whatever pub that community settle in, about how delighted you were to help out the new law.’
Keel considered further for a moment, then nodded. ‘All right. The buyer was Russell Vincent.’
In the clear summer air, in the moment of silence that followed, Ross heard a nearby church clock, and then others in the distance, all begin to strike the hour of twelve.
* * *
Russell Vincent put his scrying glass onto its stand on his desk. He had his iPad ready beside it. Soon it would all start kicking off in London. The Summer of Blood had reached its apex. The day of the Ripper had begun.
TWENTY-FOUR
Costain grabbed Keel by the beard and hauled him out of his seat. ‘If you’re lying…!’
Keel cried out. ‘It’s the truth! I don’t want you coming back here, do I?’
‘Names are worth something,’ said Sefton. ‘If you found out who Vincent was down the phone, you found out who the proxy was too. Who was it?’