‘Me too.’
‘Meanwhile, I brought together the money and the resources to set up what you see tonight, what’s going on out there — ’ he gestured towards what was outside the windows, making the ice clink in his whisky glass — ‘and the response to it. I encouraged thuggery on the far right, and made sure the Met and the other police forces were antagonized to the point of going on strike. The Herald’s been prophesying the Summer of Blood for months, and now here it is. You lot gave me the word for that: ostentation. Those I favour to take over will suspend government, step in themselves, order a crackdown, restore order with amazing speed. The army, thanks to what I know about several generals, is partly onside. I should think we’ll eventually return to some form of parliamentary democracy, but on our terms. I will have changed the whole political landscape.’
Quill could hardly believe the scope of this man’s dreams. ‘That’s why you’re doing this, but how? What’s the connection between the scrying glass and Jack the Ripper?’ Quill was pretty sure he already knew the answer.
Vincent nodded eagerly, as if this was the most exciting part. ‘I started to use the glass randomly to sweep important locations where people might be asleep, where I’d pop into a few minds, see what I could find out: the House of Lords; the Police Complaints Commission. In … one of these locations…’ Quill heard him pause, being careful. He was presumably aware of what Quill had seen in his shared dream with the woman in the barrow, but couldn’t know that Quill’s team had later pieced together where he’d been. ‘… I found a sleeping mind whose presence lit up the mirror with its power. I connected my mind to it, and … bam! It was enormous, it rushed into my head, and I went staggering around the mews flat, breaking things, having some sort of fit as I tried to deal with all that power rushing around my brain.’
‘That’s when your PA came in?’
‘Her doing so knocked me out of my trance, broke the connection. There would have been that silver stuff that only you can see all over the place. I felt angry at her, though I was careful not to show it, because right before she’d arrived I’d realized that I could control the power I’d encountered. It was ancient and confused and, above all, asleep, in some way which went beyond all our definitions of sleep. It was terrifying, but also completely vulnerable.’ Quill remembered his vision of the stone being slammed shut, of the once-powerful wise woman now locked away. ‘Later that night I contacted it again. I dominated it, learned how to shape the power that flooded into me, to the point where I could afford to give it limited freedom, like a horse I’d broken. I let it make a body for itself in front of me, an energy form that was spun together out of this golden thread in mid-air, deliberately a body I could see, that others would only see when I wanted them to. I thought then that it was going to be like Caliban out of The Tempest, that I’d send it flying around doing invisible errands. I tried a bit of that, actually, but it wasn’t very satisfying.’
‘But then someone started getting angry at the influence you were exerting over Members of Parliament. Someone started making plans.’
‘And I knew that my servant could help with that, yes.’ Vincent looked almost irritated, as if he was being misunderstood. ‘But, listen, you have to believe me: Spatley really went out of his way to get himself killed. I’d been observing his dreaming mind for months, hoping his plan to come after me would stay in the realm of Lib Dem daydreams. But he started to put real work into it, to make a mental map of what I was up to. I had to do something.’
‘And you didn’t go straight for the fatal option, I’ll give you that. This is where Mary Arthur comes in, isn’t it?’
Vincent smiled, seeming to appreciate Quill’s insight into his cleverness. ‘I took a look at his sexual fantasies and set up a honey trap catering to them — a prostitute who did the full schoolgirl thing, who was, as you say, Mary Arthur. What I didn’t expect was that he’d end up telling her everything he’d found out about me. And that then she’d be sensible enough to go into hiding immediately.’
‘And you can only read people’s sleeping minds when you know where they are. Given that you make use of the same device, I assume that you also need to know where they are to send the Ripper after them?’
‘Exactly!’ Vincent pointed excitedly at Quill. ‘Spatley, in the wake of the honey trap, was going to move against me immediately. So he simply had to die.’
‘Well, obviously!’
‘Through Challoner, my freelancer, I paid Tunstall, the driver, to search Spatley’s office for the business card Spatley had lost on which he’d written down information that could lead to the prostitute or, if Challoner started talking, to me. The card wasn’t very important to Spatley, considering he’d copied the details elsewhere, but very important to me at that stage, when I wasn’t utterly confident of my power and was contemplating my first murder. When the car was halted by the protest, I made the power I’d contacted once more appear in front of me. I took the shape it had made for itself, and then imposed my own meaning on it, changed it, added certain details. Then I sent it off to do its job.’
With, thought Quill, its, or rather, her, own fingerprints intact.
‘My idea then was only to make it look like a Toff protestor. I knew there were people out there who might get glimpses of it, after all, even if the only person I was intending to fully see it was Spatley. The Jack the Ripper bit was because of you lot.’
Quill felt a dull pain on hearing that. ‘Because of us?’
‘When you told Tunstall you believed what he was saying, I wondered how that was possible. When I realized you understood more about the secret side of London than I did, I must admit I got scared. If I was going to get away with what I’d done I would need a cover story. I had to sell you an alternative narrative, a meaning. Hence Jack the Ripper.’
‘Why not just kill us all?’
‘And shut off such a wonderful source of occult information?’ Vincent shook his head. ‘I decided to send your team on a wild goose chase instead, into the morass of Jack the Ripper legends, hoping I’d get you to try to solve all that nonsense. And I saw that the Ripper guise would act as a good cover if I located Mary Arthur, because then I would actually have to murder a prostitute. Reading up on the original Ripper murders, I came across that wonderful message on the wall, about the Jews being to blame, or not to blame, or whatever it’s trying to say. It being so vague creates such a mass of conflicting meanings. An excellent motivator, for example, for my lovely skinhead boys.’ He moved around the room, gesturing in mid-air. ‘When I direct my supernatural servant to go and kill someone, it’s me in the driving seat, willing it to move, controlling the individual movements. But when it’s travelling or doing something mundane I just point it in a particular direction and let it do the work. Exactly like riding a horse. Fiddly stuff, like writing that message, or opening the doors on train carriages — ’ he gave Quill a wink — ‘making those fingers do precise work — wow, that takes concentration.’
Quill realized something which gave him some small satisfaction. ‘And being a former copy boy and subeditor, your version of the message just had to have proper spelling and grammar.’
Vincent looked astonished for a moment. Then he started to laugh. ‘Oh! Oh, I hadn’t realized. But you’re right. That’s tremendous. You have to give me credit for the intelligence of the wider scheme, though. As well as being of practical use, the Ripper icon became just what I needed to lead the Summer of Blood. I’d found the greatest outrage marketing brand of all time. The greatest aspirational cheerleader figure also, free and happy in his work, encouraging people to copy him. The Ripper gets people furious and interested and aroused all at the same time, and it can mean anything.’