‘“Sodomite”?’ said Costain, as if it had just occurred to him, looking at Sefton.
Sefton looked long and hard at him. ‘You didn’t know?’
Costain shook his head. Sefton kept the look going.
‘I didn’t.’
‘Okay,’ said Sefton finally and looked away.
Quill had known it, actually, but he didn’t think now would be a great time to chime in. He went over to a cupboard and found some blankets, and put them round everyone’s shoulders. He pulled a blanket around himself as well. They all fell silent again.
After a while, Quill realized that he could see something from across the room. See something with the Sight he still possessed. The realization made him tense again, in a horrible way. But no. . no, it was just something inside here, not her walking through the wall. It was something on the Ops Board. He got up, feeling cold inside his stomach, and went to see. It was Losley’s photo, passport-sized. It now showed her as she. . he hesitated to think the word, but no. . as she really was. He made himself examine that face. Good to be able to do that, with the real Mora Losley. She didn’t actually administer poison or have burly nephews. He went to get a file from the table serving as his desk, and he pulled out the season-ticket records. The date of her first registration, 1955, now glowed dully, completely obscuring another date beneath it. It suddenly came to him that there might be a similar type of glowing covering all those missing council tax and utility bills. This was a woman who could edit the world.
He went back to look at the Ops Board. He hated the way it looked now, not just that it had her real face on it. It was lying to him. ‘This is what’s true,’ he said, without really knowing who he was talking to. Maybe to the board itself. He picked up a spool of black thread, and tacked a solid association line between Losley and a photo of Rob Toshack. And then he added a red victim thread as well, because she had also admitted to being his killer. Everything else, all the bullshit that they’d thought might have something to do with this case, he unpinned. He was left with just the prime suspect and those two strands of relationship. He looked up to find that the other three had stood up and joined him, also staring at the board as if it had betrayed them.
‘That’s not all we know,’ ventured Ross.
Quill nodded to her to go ahead.
Her hands shaking, she drew three wobbly stick figures in red on a piece of paper, inside a sketch of a cauldron. She pinned that below Losley, and connected them to her with a red victim thread. She wrote a heading ‘footballers and others’, and attached those to Losley as victims too, ready for the further detail to be filled in.
‘She said that Toshack made a sacrifice.’ Quill attached a victim thread from Toshack to a blank piece of card, and wrote a question mark on it. ‘More kids, like in the cauldron?’
Ross stopped for a moment, taking that onboard. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘he was capable of that.’
Costain stepped forward, too. He was looking the most stricken of any of them, and his whole body was shaking. He took the black thread, wrote ‘cat’ on a piece of paper, and connected Losley to that also. Then he did the same for ‘mistress’, and placed it above her. He looked as if he was doing this on autopilot.
‘“My mistress’ blessed soil”,’ noted Quill, doing his best to sound approving.
‘Who owns West Ham?’ asked Ross.
Quill looked it up. Mostly a bank in Iceland. No women on the list.
‘What about that. . head. . on the stairs?’ said Sefton.
‘We’re listing pets,’ said Quill, ‘so why not furniture?’ He pinned up another heading and threaded the connection. Just seeing the board filling up like this, he realized, was making him feel slightly better. Mora Losley was the missing element that connected all the outlying oddities of their investigation, as Ross had perceived it. Losley had been all the ‘freelancers’ Rob Toshack required to make his firm function. She was the suspect that all those murders stretching way back spoke of.
Costain took a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ he said, then used another black thread to connect Losley to yet another card above her. ‘Lord,’ he wrote on it. And on the card beneath it, he added ‘pleasant face’ as a description.
‘“My lord will have you”,’ said Quill.
‘I reckon that’s what she was trying to do at the house,’ said Costain. ‘To sacrifice us. Give us to her lord. What did you lot see below you, when our bodies were. .?’ He gestured, seeming to have reached the end of his ability to talk about it.
‘Like. . something out of The Sky at Night,’ suggested Quill. ‘My own personal black hole.’ He looked to the others, and they nodded.
‘I saw. . a lot more than that. I think I might have even got a sight of her lord. There was a bloke looking. . happy. And she’d just “given” me to him. And. .’ Costain stopped again. Then he walked quickly for the door, went out and closed it behind him. Through the window, Quill could see his silhouette still standing outside.
‘We need to know,’ said Ross.
‘He knows that. But nobody bloody ask him, clear?’ They both affirmed agreement.
‘Why,’ enquired Ross, ‘was it just him?’
‘I think he’s now asking himself that.’
‘Fuck me,’ said Sefton, ‘who do witches have as their lord? Is that what he’s wondering?’
Quill sighed. ‘I’m way ahead of you two right now, aren’t I? Makes a bloody change.’ He banged his fist on the table, making them both start, and regretted doing it instantly. He felt the terrible chill as much as either of them. ‘But we don’t know, do we? It could just as well be some sort of. . bigger version of one of those things out there.’
‘Right,’ said Sefton, looking almost angry at the idea it could be anything else.
He gave it five minutes, during which he made them another cup of tea, then marched over to the door and opened it, to find Costain leaning against the wall of the Portakabin. ‘In,’ he said firmly.
He turned to all three of them, gathered in front of an Ops Board that was now looking healthier, all with cuppas in their hands. ‘We don’t speculate,’ he said. ‘We don’t do theology. All there is,’ he pointed to the board, ‘is that.’
They all turned back to the board again. ‘Listen-’ he said. And he started to tell them about what had happened in the interview room, and about Harry and everything else.
They all told their stories in turn. Ross about the drive across London, and then, haltingly, about her first meeting with Losley. Sefton saw all that pain concealed behind her poker face, and held himself back from taking her hands in his. He himself — with several meaningful omissions, because he wasn’t going to mention Joe to this lot — talked about his encounter with ‘Jack’, and about the man that had stepped aside from it. Costain seemed to consider what the others had said, and then quickly filled them in on his journey away from London, about how he saw that the effect was limited to the metropolis. They waited for him to say more but, for the moment, that was obviously it.
‘Just London?’ said Sefton. ‘So we can get away from this shit by just getting on the train to Brighton?’ And then he felt immediately guilty at having been the one to say it.
‘I’m amazed you ever came back,’ said Quill to Costain. The man looked suddenly furious at him, and Quill raised his hands, quickly explaining himself. ‘I mean ’cos any of us here would have thought about doing a runner. I’ll bet Ross is thinking right now about going back to her old nick.’
‘Old Nick?’ said Sefton, ‘I wouldn’t use that expression.’
Which made Ross burst out into an enormous, awkward laugh, and then she put a hand over her mouth, her eyes gleaming with tears as if she’d done the most terrible thing. Sefton found himself weirdly pleased, in the midst of how shocked he’d been feeling. He never told jokes; it had just slipped out and made a change in the world.