‘I wrote the name down.’
Ross watched numbly as Costain released Keel, and he went to look in his filing cabinet. They had been played by Russell Vincent. He had given them an ordinary mirror, while he still had a real scrying glass. More than that, he’d employed the man who’d been there when the Ripper had attempted to kill Mary Arthur, who’d bid against them for the Bridge of Spikes. The obvious reason for Vincent to lie was that he was the one who’d been looking into their dreams. The information gained from their dreams had been used to coordinate the Ripper murders and to send Vincent’s proxy after the Bridge.
The overwhelming weight of circumstantial evidence was that Russell Vincent, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, was, somehow, the new Jack the Ripper. How could they ever prove it?
Keel had found the scrap of paper. ‘His name was Ben Challoner.’
* * *
They got out of there. They left Keel waving to them from the shop doorway, asking if the nice ladies and gentlemen could please return his staff as soon as possible, grinning at how he had obviously rocked them back on their heels. Costain felt like punching him.
The Armed Response Unit made their apologies, did the necessary in terms of paperwork and left, presumably for awkward afternoons at home or down the pub. The strike was on. London felt silent, waiting. Costain, inside it, felt wired to the point of exploding.
The three of them marched into the unmarked van and locked the door. Only then did they feel able to talk. It was as if Vincent was already listening. ‘Everything about this operation,’ said Ross, ‘makes sense if the perpetrator is Russell Vincent. I say we now regard him as our number one suspect.’
‘Agreed,’ said Costain.
‘So how does everything fit together if it is him?’ Sefton was looking as strung out as Costain felt. They felt like ants who’d just glimpsed a human being standing above their nest. Mora Losley had had no worldly power, only what her occult abilities gave her. Russell Vincent seemed to have immense power in both spheres.
‘If Vincent has a genuine scrying glass,’ said Ross, ‘he could hack people’s dreams like a phone tap. That could be why the Herald’s so famously clean: they get their stories without breaking the law, from the minds of celebrities and politicians.’
‘It’s no wonder they got the Ripper message story first,’ said Sefton.
‘If it’s him, he deliberately used that message at the crime scene to send us on the wild goose chase of Ripper lore. He would have known from our memories that we didn’t know what a scrying glass looked like, and that even when we found out, we’d assume he was the one who’d been played. It all fits. He tailored the fiction precisely to what he knew about his audience.’
‘Just like he does with his newspapers,’ said Costain.
Sefton made a noise as if he’d suddenly realized something. ‘That PA,’ he said, ‘Vincent had her be there when we visited him, so she could confirm his story about the Ripper coming out of the mirror. She never said she saw the Ripper himself or anything happening with the mirror. It was all over by the time she got into the room.’
‘Still,’ said Ross, ‘I don’t believe he was that far-sighted that he staged something to set up his story way back then. Something violent happened to him in that room.’
‘And there were genuine traces of the silver goo,’ said Sefton, ‘which Vincent apparently couldn’t see first-hand, only, I suppose, when he saw our memories of it.’
‘He was cocky enough to try to play us face to face,’ said Ross, ‘when everything else about him says he’s cautious. Why?’ She suddenly pointed at the other two. ‘Because he wanted something from us. What did he say to us? What did he ask?’
Sefton found his notebook. ‘He asked whether or not we could … find a missing person using gestures, and if we had any defence against scrying glasses. He must have known we didn’t have the answers right then, but … oh fuck, I know what this was: he wanted us to go away and find out, and then he could look into our frigging brains like we were his own private Wikipedia!’
‘At least,’ said Costain, ‘we didn’t take him up on those suggestions.’
‘I would have got there with the defences bit,’ said Sefton. ‘And then he’d have known how to get round them, for anyone else’s brain he wanted to look into, if they tried to block him. Shit.’
‘So who would he be looking for?’ asked Ross.
‘You said you thought the man that was killed in the Soviet bar, Rudlin, wasn’t the target, that it was actually Mary Arthur,’ said Costain. ‘If Vincent is the one controlling the Ripper or being the Ripper or however it works, she got away from him that night.’
Ross acknowledged that with a frantic nodding. She fell silent for a moment, no longer able to control the movements of her hands as they flexed in the air, the product of her ferocious thinking.
Sefton hauled himself up and paced the confines of the van, looking more horrified every moment as the implications sank in.
Costain didn’t like the silence; it made him aware of the terrible fear that was rising up in him. ‘How the fuck do we nick him?’ he said. ‘We’re going to have to fall asleep sooner or later. When we do he’ll know we’re onto him, and send the Ripper after us. We can’t go after him without some insane level of proof, and with his lawyers, it’d still take years.’ Also, he thought but didn’t say it — and this was the most frightening thing of all — Vincent knew about the Bridge of Spikes. What would such a powerful man be willing to do to avoid death?
‘Oh shit,’ said Ross suddenly.
Costain was scared again by the expression on her face. ‘What?’
‘Keel said, to use a scrying glass, you need to know the exact location of your target.’ She looked between them. ‘That bastard knows where we live.’
‘How?’ said Sefton.
‘Fuck,’ said Ross, ‘fuck.’ She leaned on the wall of the van, and her face contorted into an expression of anger, but also, Costain was pleased to see, comprehension. ‘Staunce,’ she said, ‘dates … fuck, this meth is getting in the way, it’s all getting jumbled up, I keep forgetting bits-’
‘What?’ asked Sefton.
‘I need a table,’ she said.
* * *
They took the van through the quiet streets, parked on another double yellow and, near Bloomsbury Square, spotted a pub that was open. They found a corner of the empty cellar bar, and drank their double Red Bulls as Ross constructed a mobile version of the Ops Board. She finally placed it on the table as four sheets of A4 and put down coloured marker pens beside it. Costain felt something once again give inside him at her continuing professionalism, found himself looking up into her serious expression, hoping as always now for a smile that would never come. He knew that something terrible might soon come between them. The fear of it was rising up in him, making his hands play a clatter on the table surface.
‘Staunce,’ said Ross, ‘Commissioner of the Met, could find out our home addresses, easy as breathing. We know he was being paid by someone. Those original payments stop…’ she slid her finger down a list in one of her enormous rough books ‘… one day after Vincent bought the scrying glass at the winter solstice auction three years ago.’
‘Because, if you can look into people’s dreams,’ said Sefton, ‘you don’t need sources for secret gossip any more, including police ones, so Vincent could dispense with Staunce’s services.’
Ross added an association line connecting Staunce to Vincent. ‘But then suddenly Vincent does need Staunce’s information again, because he needs our addresses. He can’t just look into Staunce’s head and find them, because Staunce doesn’t actually know them offhand; he needs to be told what to go and find out. So Vincent pays Staunce one more time — ’ she looked again at her list of dates — ‘at 2 p.m. on the day he died.’