Harry nodded appreciatively, and took another box down from the shelf.
Quill waited for a moment to see if Harry’s dad was going to react to anything, then, when he didn’t, wandered over to the others, glancing back to see the ghost looking at him angrily. ‘He’s a bit one-note,’ he remarked quietly. ‘I was hoping, ’cos he was his dad, he’d want to help Harry a bit and so he’d whizz about like a genie and find what we’re looking for. But he’s all about delivering the abuse.’ He sighed. ‘I can be a bit of a bastard, you may have noticed.’
Quill felt the energy draining from his team as it became clear they weren’t going to find anything new. He said a fond goodbye to Harry, glowered at his dad, and forced on himself another burst of enthusiasm. He drove them out to the Toshack house, so they could keep talking in the car, and, apart from a couple of near misses, found that nothing of the Sight jumped out to stop him from driving safely. Maybe, he said, the wonders were still concealed in the place itself. But the house, emptied for purposes of evidence, was completely normal. Even that regularly locked office the UCs had had such high hopes of turned out to be utterly mundane. As night came on, they returned to the Hill and the Portakabin, and managed, slumped together, to watch CCTV footage from the nick that merely showed Losley, as expected, impossibly approaching and walking through the wall of the interview room. All that they’d recently added to the board was a list of notes in the Concepts section, beneath a new heading about ‘Soil’.
‘I think we’ve worked off a bit of that original shock,’ said Quill, ‘so you’ll be ready for what comes next.’ They all looked up at him at once, those defeated faces again expectant. ‘We know where she’s going to be. She might have only one bolt-hole left to run to. And we know she’s got a limited fuel supply. She’s a big monster, but so’s the Met. Normal police methods have got us a long way, so let’s use them to see how much of her is merely front. Go home and get some kip, because tomorrow we’re going to nick her.’
‘You look terrible,’ said Lofthouse. ‘Will a drop of gin help with that?’
Quill waved that suggestion aside, settling heavily into the comfort of the chair facing her desk. ‘It’s only ten o’clock at night, so a bit early for me.’ He noticed that she wasn’t wearing her charm bracelet, and then felt a little uncomfortable about noticing it.
‘Bit of a blip in the media coverage last night. They went away again through lack of fresh material, thank God. What’s this about a broken window and a hoo-hah at the crime scene?’
Quill didn’t want to lie to her. ‘Just. . one of those things,’ he replied.
‘Have you got everything you need for tomorrow?’
‘Yeah, I think so. Ta for getting that sorted so fast.’
‘A lot of it involved persuading Brian Finch, the Stoke City chairman, that his players might have anything to fear from a mad old woman — even one who poisons people.’
Quill suddenly thought of something. Did the bemusement they’d all felt at the super putting this incredibly weird team together mean she knew something extra about this situation he’d found himself in? ‘Does. . the word “protocol” mean anything to you, ma’am?’
‘Are you saying that operational protocol is getting in the way of-?’
Quill shook his head, dismissing it. ‘Thanks for all you’ve done, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope it pays off tomorrow.’
THIRTEEN
Quill drove himself home to his semi in Enfield. A journey which seemed to take a day. He had to keep the radio turned way up to keep himself awake. Every now and then, outside the car, some weird sight shouted into his eyeballs. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he responded.
The lounge floor was covered in bizarre novelties. The kitchen floor was messy and the house smelt of. . must be some problem with the plumbing. But the Sight told him nothing disturbing about any of the rooms he looked in, thank God. Outside, his street had looked normal too. He heard music from upstairs, so Sarah was home.
He looked round the door of her office, trying to project sobriety before he remembered that he was actually sober. She didn’t look up from her computer, therefore he knew she was angry with him. He watched the back of her head, the defensive hunch of her shoulders. He’d been thinking about this all the way home. He wanted to tell her everything, but she just wouldn’t believe him. They weren’t. . close enough, he felt, for him to tell her something impossible and for her just to accept it. Maybe they had been close enough once. The more he’d thought about it, the more he’d found there was now this. . hole in the middle of their relationship. It was as if it had taken him witnessing the impossible to make him realize that. But he had no idea what the vacuum between them was, or how to start fixing it. Sorting stuff like that out was something he wasn’t naturally equipped for. He and Sarah had always just got on with it, and neither of them liked the deep and meaningful. Which was awkward now that life had got deep and meaningful.
‘Love,’ he began, ‘listen, I’ve been thinking about us moving out of the city, Reading or somewhere, me commuting in-’
‘Have you?’ She was thinking that his suggestion was way beside the point.
‘Yeah, look, I’ve been trying to call you. That was me in the middle of the night-’
She looked round at him. ‘Yeah, I guessed that because it was your number on the phone. Me being a brilliant detective.’
‘You’ve seen the case we’re working, how big it is-’
‘And it’s just you, is it? There aren’t other shifts who could take over from you?’ She had worked up to full-on anger now. And she was so beautiful. And he wanted to cry. They’d always fought a lot. And, until very recently, he’d thought that was good somehow. Again, he didn’t know why that had changed, and it felt like the reason had fallen down the hole.
They continued the row into the early hours. It exhausted them. They were silent for a while, but the row erupted again in fits and starts, and then died. They made a really late supper together. She tried to tell him about how the delivery firm for the local paper she worked for had started to throw bundles of copies away rather than bothering to distribute them. How that made her wonder why she herself was bothering. Her newspaper, she said, like everything else, was going the way of the dinosaur, but it didn’t mean they should just run away out of London. ‘We’ve got a life here, haven’t we, Quill?’ Quill couldn’t answer.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said to her in bed, near dawn, when he woke from a terrible nightmare and realized that loads of it had been true. But he said it so quietly that he almost wondered if he was talking to himself.
In the anonymous safe house that had become his home, Costain lay awake listening to the traffic outside. He’d fallen asleep, but woken and dozed again in fits and starts. He didn’t want to sleep, because sleep felt like death. He kept thinking back to that house, and what he’d seen beneath him. That man, just a man in a suit, smiling up at him. But what was fixed in his mind was different to what the others had described. It was something particular. Something personal.
He could try to do the right thing as much as he could — the right thing as others described it — and it lost him his freedom, it cut his bloody balls off, but okay. What he couldn’t do was make up for the endgame he’d prepared as insurance, his escape route from both the Met and the Toshack mob. It was too risky to go and unearth it right now and, even if he did, just having arranged it counted as a strike against him. Only, every day he kept it would weigh more and more heavily at. . at the moment of his death, he guessed. The others had seen speculation. They were being fed to a void. He’d seen a prediction: something already prepared for him.
At 4 a.m. he got up and shaved, then he drove out to Gipsy Hill, looking calmly at the horrors of the night that appeared to him. They were nothing now, compared to what was in his head.