‘Why does Vincent get interested in us then?’ asked Costain. ‘What did we do that day?’
‘We interviewed Tunstall that morning,’ said Sefton.
‘So somehow Vincent knew about that,’ said Costain. ‘No, never mind somehow, there’s only one way this guy learns secret stuff: he must have used the scrying glass on Tunstall when he went to sleep after we saw him, and he’d have seen Tunstall’s memories of Jimmy telling Tunstall we believed him, and that we had abilities other units didn’t. Bloody hell.’
‘Staunce always took an afternoon nap,’ said Sefton. ‘First Vincent pays him, then he checks up on his motives, discovers something amiss, has him killed that same night.’
‘When do we start feeling shit going on in our dreams?’ said Ross.
‘From that night,’ said Sefton. ‘I think.’ They compared notes. None of them could pin it down exactly, but the date seemed right. They swore and got up and had to talk each other down from the fear, until Ross started shouting at them to let her finish. Quickly, they sat down.
‘Why was Vincent listening in on Tunstall’s thoughts?’ she asked.
‘Tunstall, like Staunce, was receiving under-the-counter payments,’ said Sefton. ‘If those were also from Vincent, maybe he wanted to make sure Tunstall wasn’t going to tell anyone about them.’
‘And he wasn’t,’ said Costain, triumphantly. ‘At least, not at first.’
He was pleased at the puzzled look that got from Ross. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Because it took Vincent so long to kill him. If you’re a gang boss, sometimes you suspect someone in your organization has grassed you up, and so you kill them, torture them, whatever. But if you had the power to know absolutely who was loyal and who wasn’t, to know who was even thinking about betraying you-’
‘You’d drop a lot fewer bodies,’ said Ross.
‘We were about to interview Tunstall again,’ said Sefton, ‘about the brothel business card. Vincent must have seen that Tunstall was wavering, that he might crack during that interview, and finally decided he wasn’t worth the risk.’
‘It’s kind of humane,’ said Costain, ‘compared to what we’re used to.’
‘And he waited to kill Jimmy,’ continued Sefton, ‘until Jimmy encountered him in his dreams and made some potentially incriminating notes about long barrows. Whatever they mean, those are the most important things. If Vincent knew now that we’d seen them, maybe he’d kill us too.’
Costain suspected now that what had kept him and Ross alive had actually been their quest for the location of the Bridge of Spikes, the success of which Vincent would have had a serious interest in, but he couldn’t share that with Sefton. Maybe Vincent had been interested in what Sefton’s occult researches might reveal. To Vincent, Quill would have been the one whose dreams were least likely to reveal anything useful. ‘So let’s assume — assumption noted — that Tunstall was being paid by Vincent to, maybe among other things, search Spatley’s office…’
‘To find, we think, a card that had been lost,’ said Sefton. ‘So its location wasn’t in anyone’s memory that Vincent could search.’
Ross made a fist in the air at that one. She was drawing new association lines at high speed across her pieces of paper, pushing the pen down too forcefully, occasionally tearing the paper. She’d drawn Vincent as a big blue whirlpool in the middle. ‘Vincent kills Tunstall because he’s about to reveal their connection. He kills Staunce, well, we don’t know, but we might imagine Staunce was thinking about coming clean too. Rudlin is killed by accident when Vincent is really trying to kill Mary Arthur. We still don’t know his motivation there, and we don’t know why he failed. We think Vincent killed Jimmy because Jimmy had seen something key to his power and written what turned out to be bloody cryptic notes about it. And we still have no idea why he killed Spatley in the first place.’ She held up her piece of paper. ‘This is getting beautiful. But it’s so fucking useless. Oh God, we’re going to die.’
Costain slammed his fist into the table, as much for his own benefit as for hers. ‘We still have three leads,’ he said. ‘We need to find those two people from the Soviet bar: Ben Challoner and Mary Arthur. And we need to work out what the fuck Jimmy was on about in those notes. Okay.’ He looked up Challoner’s name on his phone and found there was only one adult of that name in Greater London. ‘He lives at 56 Flaxton Road, Clapham. We need to get him. Right now.’
* * *
Flaxton Road in Clapham was a row of terraced houses which had once been smart little family dwellings, in the era when ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ was the standard phrase for the everyday Londoner. Now they had rows of doorbells on every porch — upper flat, bottom flat, basement flat — and the boards for estate agents were all the best kind of firm. This was the sort of place, Costain thought, where you found Pret A Manger wrappers blowing down the street. The street was silent in the summer heat, with only distant sounds of televisions from behind closed doors. The security bolts would have been slammed shut already. Costain thought of the team as little creatures running at high speed through the maze that Vincent, looming over London, had made of the place. He wondered if little creatures could do Vincent any damage. Even actually finding him, among all his properties, would be hard. Was there really anything they could offer or do to Challoner to change this situation? Of course, there was something that could be done. But Costain would wait until there was no other hope before he would consider that.
‘This isn’t the sort of place anyone with seniority in one of Vincent’s companies would live,’ said Ross.
‘It’s student land,’ said Costain, ‘young Toffland, more ways than one.’
They rang Challoner’s doorbell. No reply. Costain then rang the other two doorbells and when the intercom went live said, ‘Police.’ A high window opened, and he showed a warrant card to whoever was above on this simmering afternoon, waiting for the evening to start boiling.
* * *
‘He’s quiet … keeps himself to himself,’ said the stressed-looking young woman in the flowery dress. The team looked at each other knowingly, recalling, thought Ross, the number of times they’d heard that about various guilty bastards. ‘Is he in trouble?’
She watched Costain limber up like a method actor, letting a troubled expression cross his features and then killing it, all a bit jumbled by the meth. ‘We don’t know what’s happened to him,’ he said. ‘Are you sure he’s not in his flat? Have you heard any … noises?’
‘What sort of noises?’
‘How thick are the walls in here? I mean, if he was shouting for help…?’
‘Shouting for-?’
‘Listen, we don’t have time for — I’m sorry — do you think he might be in immediate danger?’
‘Well, he might be…’
Costain looked to Sefton. ‘The lady here thinks Mr Challoner might be in immediate danger.’
Sefton nodded frantically. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘so we have to do our duty and take a look.’
* * *
They went down the stairs to the basement flat, and Costain tried the door. It gave a little even as he pushed it. He retreated up the stairs, took a run down, and kicked at the lock, which left him lying there on his arse, and the door swinging open.
Ross led the way into the flat. There was a living room, clean, with a flat-screen TV, Xbox, a small sofa and a table at foot level. A bedroom: lived in, but tidied up. Man smell. Joop. No woman. A narrow kitchen that didn’t look as if you could cook in it, microwave and fridge. Costain found inside it the contents of the Abel and Cole vegetable delivery box that lay in a corner of the lounge. A bunch of the more exotic fruit and veg had started to rot. A small back-room office, with a PC, shelves. No books, not even a magazine.
Costain picked up a pile of papers from on top of the printer. ‘Challoner keeps it tidy,’ he said, ‘doesn’t have a lot to clutter it up.’ He nodded towards a camera on one of the shelves. ‘Luxury goods, which he probably couldn’t afford. The rent on this place looks to be a step up from the income level of the person who bought the furniture.’