‘But of the four of us in that attic, only I touched that soil,’ said Quill. ‘This must involve some sort of area effect, like a hand grenade going off.’
‘Whatever, that’s how she thinks we got the Sight, why we’re seeing all this shit. So what is it?’
Nobody had any answers to that one. ‘We need to use these new eyes of ours,’ said Ross, ‘and check out the evidence again.’
‘Well,’ said Quill, ‘there’s one piece for which we can do that immediately.’
They stood at the fence at the back of Gipsy Hill police station. Sefton could now see the mound of soil shining from here. ‘If we touched that,’ said Quill, ‘would it give us more of the Sight, or would it maybe switch it off?’
‘Neither,’ said Sefton, to himself. He looked up when he realized the others were wondering why he sounded so certain. ‘She left it there. It’s not precious any more, so it must be kind of. . used up.’ Quill popped inside the fence to take a quick look. It took a few moments for it to dawn on Sefton that he wasn’t worried, standing here, that the uniforms might get a look at him. The possibility that any remnants of the Toshack organization might learn his identity was nowhere near as threatening as what he now knew lay under reality itself. ‘It’s better in the day,’ he said, ‘don’t you reckon?’
Costain glanced across to London. ‘Yeah, maybe.’
Quill returned to tell them that this mound of soil, when seen with the Sight, looked like a pale reflection of the pile they’d seen inside the house, before Quill had pissed on it. ‘And, yeah, I touched it, but no joy to be had.’
‘I don’t think it’s a symbol of anything,’ said Ross, ‘not like we thought. These things are invisible to most people. When that soil got pissed on, suspect wasn’t psychologically traumatized, but she got so worried she actually legged it! No, this is practical. A system we don’t know much about, but still a system. I think, for some reason, she needs the West Ham soil. She told us she needs to keep it clean, and I don’t think that’s a psychological tic on her part, either. I think she needs to bring it with her when she’s killing, to put it in that heap, in that pattern, otherwise she just wouldn’t do that.’
‘“I have more soil,” that’s what she said,’ recalled Costain, ‘as if it was valuable to her. As if it’s her stash. Maybe that’s why she’s got so many houses.’
‘Like with a heroin-distribution network,’ said Ross, ‘you don’t keep all the eggs in the same basket.’
‘We know Toshack tried to find her at her main home first, on his own. Then he went round all her other houses, her safe houses. He went up into every loft, maybe because he was checking to see if she’d left some soil there, which would mean she still used the place.’
‘While he was getting the rest of us to make as much noise as possible downstairs,’ said Sefton, suddenly sounding shocked again.
‘The fucker was using us as bait! He was trying to make her come out and grab us! We were to be his sacrifices, like he said in that note!’
‘He tried to do that again when the raid went down,’ said Quill, ‘calling her a sow and all.’
‘Why West Ham soil?’ said Ross. ‘Just ’cos she’s a fan?’
Nobody had an answer to that either. Quill called the nicks in all the areas where the other Losley houses were located. They’d already been sealed off by Goodfellow, but now he asked to hear from them about what had been found in their lofts.
‘Get them to piss on it, too,’ suggested Costain.
Quill declined that recommendation. He swiftly heard that largely empty tubs had been found in all the houses, with just a layer of local soil left at the bottom. ‘Right you are: she hauled in her stash.’
Quill felt the new energy of his team, and liked it. But now they needed to do something positive with it rapidly. They needed an aim to work towards, or all this new hope was going to fall apart again. They went back into the Portakabin. There had been a lot of emails forwarded to them concerning possible Losley sightings by members of the public but, given that she could make herself invisible, Quill had the team give them only a quick once-over, and they found nothing that caught their eyes. He got copies of the Goodfellow files emailed over, but he was deeply familiar with their contents, and there was nothing that leaped out at him now that he had this new way of seeing. ‘She said she met Toshack at the football. .’ he reminded them.
Ross found on the PC the list of season-ticket holders in seats close to Losley that West Ham had sent over to Quill. ‘I was going to get to this today,’ she said. She ran her finger down the list of names. Then stopped at a particular one. The seat next to Losley’s was occupied by one Robert Toshack.
‘Get in,’ said Quill triumphantly.
He found the disc with the CCTV tape on it and played it again. That familiar corner of the building, and that flower bed. One moment there was nothing there, and then there was Losley, who’d literally appeared out of thin air. Quill again found himself startled, fearful even at the sight of a moving image of her. ‘It works through video as well as still photos,’ he said, with a cough to conceal his reaction. On screen, Losley took a small bag from her pocket, and poured the contents out on the ground, tracing a spiral with her hand, the other turning in the air. A pile of soil far too large to be contained in the bag was deposited there, arranged in the familiar pattern, shining with power.
‘Maybe it’s like wi-fi,’ said Ross, ‘she can only operate so far from a base station.’
‘Why do it out there?’ said Sefton. ‘Why not just arrive in the interview room itself?’
Quill clapped his hands together in realization. ‘Because she needs to put soil on soil! To put her earth on top of what was there before. Like with those containers in her houses.’
They watched as Losley walked directly towards Gipsy Hill police station and straight through the wall, moving her hands before her as if she was performing an intricate dance. ‘Those gestures, all the time,’ observed Sefton. ‘That’s not habit, that’s meaningful. That’s how she does what she does, using words and gestures as weapons.’
Quill liked how much he was speaking up now. And now he had a sudden idea himself. He called up the nick, then headed over there to pick up a much less controversial CCTV camera recording. He played that back in front of his team, and they all saw the next part of the action: Losley in the interview room, sending Toshack flying up to the roof; Quill looking on awkwardly, his expression and body language saying he was trying to look in all directions at once; the expression on the brief’s face also saying that he didn’t quite know what he was looking at.
‘It’s as if we scratched the lottery card of reality,’ he said, ‘and this is what was bloody underneath. Not a big win, really.’
‘The eighteen per cent!’ said Ross suddenly.
‘What?’ said Quill.
‘The eighteen per cent of the other cases, the hat-trick scorers over the years who we thought probably died of natural causes. .’ Ross went to the computer and busied herself for half an hour, then gathered them round a display on the screen. ‘They’re almost all from teams outside London. So sometimes she’d get them when they came back to town, sometimes she’d forget or give up, sometimes they never came back at all. But she never followed them home!’
‘That means she’s got an operational range,’ said Sefton. ‘Soil in her pockets will only take her so far. Only London provides power. And she only has power inside London.’
‘Fuck,’ said Ross, ‘that’s why Toshack didn’t send her after me. I was up north.’ She added a note to that effect to the board, under Losley’s name.
They mulled that over for a few moments.
‘I’ll see if she’s caught on camera anywhere else inside the nick,’ said Quill. ‘Though I don’t know if we’ll learn anything more from it. Meanwhile. .’ he turned to the others and realized that, with two UCs and an analyst, he had no sensible way of picking who should do the legwork. ‘Toss a coin for who calls up West Ham again. See if they have a list of people who they sold their soil to. Then tell them to stop.’