‘He’s losing a lot of silver,’ said Sefton. ‘Maybe he’s not doing so well.’
‘You reckon we could take him?’ said Costain.
‘With what?’ asked Ross.
The Ripper launched itself forward. It had its arm raised, the razor ready to strike. It moved in a blur.
Ross found herself stepping into the way in reaction, like returning a tennis serve. She hadn’t thought about it. She flinched, expecting an impact-
But the Ripper had stopped. It had no momentum. It had halted like a cartoon. It was poised above her, arm back, ready to strike. Its mask was a mass of silver. It looked contorted, almost expressing emotion. It slowly raised its left hand, as if balancing itself, willing itself to attack. The skin of the hand, Ross was close enough to see, looked desperately human, wrinkled.
Ross suddenly understood why it might have stopped. Why, like a character in a video game, it was slowly starting to work itself back and forth now, trying to edge around whatever prohibition was stopping it from attacking her, to get to Costain and Sefton. ‘Tony, Kev,’ she said, ‘get behind me.’
They did so. The Ripper stopped trying to jerk forwards.
‘It doesn’t want to attack women,’ said Ross. ‘Not Mary Arthur, and not me.’
The Ripper seemed to vibrate with tension for a moment. Then, with a movement so swift that Ross couldn’t see in which direction it had flown, it was gone.
They sagged together for a moment. They composed themselves. They looked around, making sure it wasn’t going to come back from another direction.
It didn’t. They were safe. For now.
What did they have now? Did they have anything?
‘Thank you for that,’ said Costain. He held Ross. She kissed his cheek, feeling his fear. She felt only professionally satisfied that she might have saved him. She was acutely aware of the missing emotion. She felt the shock entering her and being amped up by the drugs, and she knew there’d be no happiness in the future to balance it, that there was increasingly nowhere left for her, emotionally or, she was starting to feel, physically.
* * *
They went to look at the victim’s body, around which a crowd was now hesitantly gathering. Costain looked through his pockets and found a phone: a brand new cheap one, the sort you could get from a market stall, with no contacts in the memory. ‘Bet he was told to ditch the old one right before tonight,’ he said, ‘so there’d be nothing to associate the corpse with Vincent.’
The concert audience was shying away from those Toffs who had stayed, some of whom had now taken their masks off, to reveal students and a disparate range of mainstream London faces. Some of this lot would be coming forward in a moment to say that a Toff had done this. ‘We need to find out if we can pin the purchase of that ticket on Vincent,’ said Sefton, sounding as if he knew how little a thing that would be.
‘Already put in the request,’ said Ross, looking up from her phone. With shaking hands, she took her rough books and portable Ops Board from her bag. She sat down on the steps and drew some satisfyingly certain lines across the Ops Board, the only control over anything she could have now. ‘It refuses to kill women,’ she said. ‘So Mary Arthur is safe. If only we bloody knew how to find her.’
* * *
They waited until the paramedics had arrived to deal with the remains of Challoner. Ross felt gutted at the idea of putting a body, a crime scene and evidence into the hands of people other than police and associated specialists. The medics looked surprised that coppers were actually here. One looked pleased, the other disgusted.
What could they do? What was left?
They decided to at least go and check out Vincent’s mews flat, just in case he’d been foolish enough to use it again. Costain insisted he could drive and the others just nodded. He drove them through a London where something worrying could be glimpsed down the end of every side street. It was as if their own experience of having the Sight was starting to be translated into the mainstream world. The feeling of impending chaos was worse for them, because they all instinctively wondered what the wider implications might be, how London would react to amplify it, what the Smiling Man would make of it. They tried to keep talking to each other, shouting to each other, even, to stay awake. They took more of the meth. The intensification of the fear of London beat through them now too.
On the radio news, and on the police frequency, they heard reports of police officers putting on uniforms and turning out to help the army. There were rumours that the Police Federation was going to call the strike off early, point proven, themselves horrified at how the riots in the further boroughs had started joining hands, were becoming what the few news commentators actually out there rather than at home reading Twitter were calling a ‘ring of fire’, moving in towards the centre of the cities of London and Westminster. The schools would be closed tomorrow, the news was saying, the post offices and buses and underground too, as the people that ran these things decided that safety now meant staying at home. Ross wondered if she was watching a metropolis swiftly crumbling, a culture flying apart.
The news of Challoner’s murder was fighting the riots for the lead on all the websites, as if the Ripper was leading the charge, the symbol of everything that was happening tonight. The Herald was going big on that version of the story, inevitably. Its editorial was demanding that the army flood the streets with soldiers and impose martial law, because the government was clearly incapable of restoring order.
‘There’s another one,’ said Sefton, who was also looking at his phone. ‘Another Ripper murder.’ Ross went straight to the Herald’s site, because of course that would get it first. The new victim had been identified as a former stringer for various newspapers. Christ, here was another one: a private detective. As soon as Ross had started to read about that killing, Sefton shouted there was another, a financier.
‘It’s because of us,’ said Costain. ‘He’s killing everyone that could lead us to him.’
‘Does that mean we’ve scared him?’ said Sefton. ‘Or has he now got the luxury of tying up all his loose ends?’
Ross got an email and recognized the name. ‘The first of those victims,’ she said, feeling as if they were rats being pursued into a corner, ‘that’s the person the Royal Albert Hall say purchased the ticket for Challoner tonight.’ She slammed the seat with her fist. ‘No wonder the Herald kept pushing the “mob did it” angle about the killings. Vincent used them as cover for every murder. And tonight he’s got that cover just about everywhere.’
* * *
They reached the mews flat and parked outside. It was silent and dark, and through the windows that didn’t have curtains they could see only empty rooms. An estate agent’s board indicated it was for sale. They could hear the distant sounds of chaos moving closer. Costain felt a helpless fury marching back and forth inside him as he looked up at the building. The billionaire had many properties, in London and round the world. He also had an organization which could keep the Met in general — never mind one small unit with a bizarre story — at bay forever. He’d had a good long look at the way Costain’s team did things and had used tonight to make any possibility that they might get him into court recede into the distance at the speed of light. Even the phone number Vincent had given to the Quills didn’t connect now. Mary Arthur might have gone into hiding, never to be heard from again.
Eventually they would sleep.
‘There’s been a Ripper attack in Manchester,’ said Ross, looking up from her phone. Costain went over to see, while Sefton went across to try the door of the building. The story checked out, the MO just the same. As they’d suspected, Vincent could reach them even if they fled London. Their only chance was to hide, to give his vast media network, used to pursuing disgraced celebrities, no clue as to where they were. They might need to live the rest of their lives in fear.