Costain managed a sad smile. ‘We could all easily hop it,’ he said. ‘We could put in for transfers, take any family we have with us. We could leave all this behind. Except. . I think I now have to consider so carefully every. . decision I make. And I think that getting out of it now. . doing anything but my best to help nick her. . would be wrong.’
The tone of his voice was so alien to him, so beaten down, that Sefton almost wanted the bully in him back. Almost.
Quill nodded, giving that statement its due. ‘We all have to decide,’ he said. ‘A highly dangerous suspect has admitted to several murders, and has threatened to carry out more. She’s going to kill any player that scores a hat-trick against West Ham Football Club. Their next match is tomorrow night. We know her MO, and we’ve already worked her background. We have that tiny advantage: we can do proper police work on her. While we were working on that board, it felt as if we were also working to stop her — and that made me feel better. What about you two?’
Sefton nodded. There wasn’t really a choice, as far as he could see. ‘You’re right about going after her, but it benefits us too, doesn’t it? I don’t want to have to stay away from London all my life, and who knows what else is waiting out there? If we can find some way to nick her, maybe then we can force her to take away the Sight from us and all.’
And that got a gratifying reaction too. That hope he’d found had touched a chord in all of them.
Quill looked to Ross, who was deep in thought. ‘She almost certainly didn’t kill my dad,’ she said. ‘Wrong MO. But she’s a serial killer, and only we can have her. And,’ she pointed to her nose, ‘I fucking owe her.’
Quill held up a finger as if to mark this moment. He went over to the pile of paper and card, and took out a long strip of cardboard upon which he wrote something, then pinned it at the top of the board, having finally decided the name of the investigation. Just for once, he didn’t feel he was taking a risk by making it relevant, though the witch from The Wizard of Oz looked positively benign compared to this one.
‘Operation Toto,’ he said.
TWELVE
‘Just nobody ask which of us is missing a brain. Operational objectives.’ Quill began writing them down on the right-hand side of the Ops Board:
1. Ensure the safety of the public.
2. Gather evidence of offences.
3. Find subject Mora Losley.
4. Find means to arrest subject.
5. Arrest subject.
6. Forcibly negotiate removal of the Sight.
7. Bring to trial/destroy.
It took Quill a moment to add that last word, Sefton realized. But they all nodded when they saw it. ‘Yeah,’ he concurred.
Quill shrugged. ‘We don’t want to turn this into some sort of witch hunt.’ Which was the point at which Sefton understood what the man had done. He’d turned their personal nightmare into something approaching business as usual. It wasn’t bloody sustainable, but it at least gave them solid ground to put their feet on. The blankets had been left behind, hanging on the backs of their chairs. It was now starting to get light outside the Portakabin.
‘I’m going to put in requests for bill records from. . sod it, all the thirty-three boroughs, going back. . well, as far as they go, which’ll only be ten years or so, but it’s a start,’ declared Ross, going to the computer. ‘There’ll be a pile of them, but if her alterations, her edits, stand out that clearly, just skimming them will do.’
‘It’ll take weeks of grunt work and potentially lead nowhere,’ said Quill. ‘Excellent: that sounds like police work to me. Anyone got anything else?’
Sefton found one of the new police pocket books he’d been given when he’d suddenly stopped being a UC, and leafed quickly through it. There wasn’t much there that related to anything that was true — not now they knew what the truth was. He put it aside, went to the cupboard and found four plain notepads. ‘Special pocket books,’ he said. ‘Not as issued by the IBO. For our sort of stuff. Like Ross here has always used for her speciality. Maybe one day a court will be prepared to believe us. We can’t put this stuff in the regular pocket books, but we’ll need to remember things.’
‘And now paperwork’, Quill nodded. ‘I’m feeling more at home all the time.’
Sefton felt weird at doing so much speaking up now. His skills had been, up until now, basically hiding, pretending and observing. It must be the observing part of that which was giving him all these ideas. ‘Yeah, well, that’s what this is about: remembering. We have to. . remember better than she does. Starting with. .’ He grabbed a marker pen and a sheaf of paper, and started urgently writing out big headings. ‘Protocol.’ ‘The Sight.’ ‘Privileged.’ ‘Make Sacrifice.’ ‘Remembered.’ He held up those last two. ‘That’s an either/or,’ he explained, his brain moving so fast that he just hoped he was making sense. ‘She asked us if we “made sacrifice” or if we were “remembered”.’ He put them up as headings down the left-hand side of the Ops Board. ‘And. . this is a new area on the board, where the concepts go.’ He stared at it for a moment. He’d just created a new area on an Ops Board. An innovation in policing, just like that. It was only a matter of time before someone stopped him from doing stuff like this.
‘So what does “remembered” actually mean?’ asked Quill. ‘How is that the other choice, instead of just making sacrifice?’
‘Maybe that’s what I felt about the difference between stuff that’s sort of. . grown. . like Jack the green man was, and. . made, like Losley’s stuff is.’
‘So long as we don’t properly know things like that, we’re going to be living on assumptions,’ said Ross, looking up from the computer. ‘We need to get used to that, using working assumptions but bearing in mind that they are just that.’
‘And feelings as well as assumptions,’ said Sefton. ‘Copper instinct. Like when the guv. .’ he hesitated, but then had to say it anyway, ‘. . got his cock out.’
‘If you write that down,’ insisted Quill, ‘do make the context clear. How do we limit what we record? Ghost ships, Harry’s dad, your Jack creature. . it’s like claiming every crime in London is relevant to a murder case.’
‘If we didn’t know what murder was,’ said Ross, ‘they would be.’ She came over and looked at Sefton’s new side of the board with an expert eye. ‘Everything we see with the Sight is part of. . a hidden culture of London. Like an OCN could be divided into chop shops, robberies, toms and drugs, and each of those have their own subculture involving loads of signifiers and definitions that interact with each other. But it’s all still the one thing, and quite often we encounter a small part of it and, given time, pull at that one thread to find a way to nick the whole thing. There are new factors appearing in normal police work all the time: new security behaviours, tech use, drugs. But maybe this special culture is a bit easier because, unlike with organized crime, there might be only two ways for someone to get into this business. .’ She pointed at Sefton’s signs. ‘I mean sacrifice or be remembered. We have some idea what one of those involves: from seeing the kids in the cauldron.’ She now linked those pieces of paper with white thread. ‘We need to find out what this other concept means.’
‘“Protocol”, that’s the word that applied to us,’ said Costain, pointing at the other sign. ‘That’s the important one for us lot. She mentioned it as if it wasn’t something she was used to, either.’
‘Yeah,’ said Quill, ‘I noticed that, too. So that’s someone else’s technical term, not one she’d use normally herself.’
‘It’s called “a Protocol”, and we “had it on us”, as if it’s something physical — that’s what she said — and it “reacted with the soil”.’