Quill stood in the director’s lounge at the Boleyn Ground, Upton Park, looking at the assembled directors and chairpersons and hangers-on, including Brian Finch from visiting Stoke City, and Peter Brockway, chairman of West Ham itself. From a great window behind them, he heard and now felt the gathering force of a Premiership football crowd assembling. On the table lay the morning papers. The headline of the Metro read: Mora: Score a Hat-Trick and Die. ‘They’re already on first-name terms,’ he observed, picking it up. ‘I know what you’re thinking: why couldn’t she be like most Londoners and support Man U?’
‘So, let me get this straight,’ said Brockway. ‘She kills criminals, coppers, kids and footballers who score hat-tricks. She uses poison. . or a bloody cauldron. Is there anything you’ve ruled out?’
Quill thought for a moment. ‘Not a lot,’ he said. ‘But we do know her behaviour pattern indicates she’ll very much want to be here. And we think she might try to access the pitch. Which is why we’ve had uniforms watching it since the early hours, and why we’ve now cancelled all leave and got more bodies in the ground than in Highgate Cemetery.’
Brockway didn’t look particularly satisfied. ‘May I remind you, we had to ask you to bring in sniffer dogs. I should think she won’t get further than the turnstile. Still, me and Brian have come to a gentleman’s agreement.’
‘I’ve told my players that if any of them puts two in, they’re to hang back and not go for a third. That’s all you’re getting. It’s against the FA code of practice, as it is. And it’s giving in to terrorism.’
Quill managed a smile. He took the bottle of water from his pocket, drained it in one swallow, and handed it to a PA for a refill. ‘Got any more of that coffee?’
‘You’ll be going all through the match,’ remarked Finch.
‘I hope,’ said Quill, ‘I won’t have to.’
Ross, with Sefton beside her, watched the hordes pouring in through the home supporters’ entrance, just inside the tower-like gates on Green Street. They stood with their backs to a wire fence, watching the warm bodies pass them, in their claret and blue. ‘Dad was always Arsenal,’ she said, feeling the need to say something. It was hard not to push herself back into the fence. The sheer. . weight that this mass of people brought with them, now that she was seeing them with the Sight. . it was sort of like an expectation, a shape that demanded a response from you. It felt terrible, like the raging of a mob, the sort of thing that could push you towards the kind of cynicism that coppers felt about the general public all the time. But when you looked at any of these individual faces, they were just people looking all the different ways people looked. There were also uniforms everywhere, a density of them she’d never seen before.
The plan was to defend the pitch if there wasn’t a hat-trick, to grab Losley if she tried to get more soil, to take her down by sheer numbers. If she was invisible when she did that, there would be one of them watching the match at all times, and they’d send in the army of uniforms at any sign of pitch disturbance, and the stewards had also been told to pile in. If there somehow was a hat-trick, and thank God that was very unlikely now, that defensive pattern would be altered to form an army around a much smaller target. The four of them with the Sight would be watching every aspect of the audience in the stadium, hoping to pick out Losley.
Ross felt pleased at the size of the organization. It was a warm feeling of being in the Met mainstream. At the end of all this, though — and it felt like a risk to even hope there was an end in sight — she was still going to have to deal with having been denied her revenge. But she had at least found a new depth to the world. And she would have helped rid it of something terrible.
‘Well, duh,’ said Sefton, ‘I’m surprised your uncle got away with being an Irons fan in Bermondsey. I kept wanting to say something about how odd that was, when I was acting as one of his lads, but, you know. . guns.’
‘Listen to you,’ she said, ‘sounding more camp.’ Then she remembered she didn’t know him at all well enough to say stuff like that. ‘Sorry.’
‘No,’ he managed a smile, ‘depends who I’m with, yeah? I definitely stand straight among this lot. Not like the way police do, not like I’m in a club, just. .’ He indicated his own stance, which just looked normal to her.
‘You’ve thought about this a lot.’
‘Done it more than thought about it.’ He inclined his head towards the crowd. ‘One o’clock.’
It was a man who was trying to laugh along with his mates, but on his shoulders he carried a dead child, the boy’s legs beating against his chest with every step, his hands clasping his hair tightly at the scalp.
‘Fuck,’ whispered Ross. Just a moment of random chat, and then it had all come crashing back.
They’d seen a few such things among the crowd, but not everything leaped out at them this way. The variety of things the Sight showed them included some quite subtle effects — stuff that your eye could miss. Or maybe they were just starting to process it as they would through normal vision. As a test, they’d popped into the club shop and asked to buy some soil. It wasn’t on sale now, they’d been told, because of health and safety. ‘True, that,’ Sefton had remarked. But they’d glimpsed a few sacks of it behind the counter, and it didn’t seem to have any power associated with it.
‘If it did have power in itself,’ Ross had then said, ‘this stadium would be like a giant searchlight. It has to be something specific about the soil and her.’
Costain had meanwhile been patrolling the concrete caverns of the stadium, and now he headed up the steps to the Bobby Moore Stand. He looked out over the enormous crowd that had now filled the stadium, just as the tannoy announced that the minute’s silence for Losley’s victims was about to begin. The huge sound of so many people swiftly quietened, became an almost unnatural emptiness of distant coughs and shuffles. People looked at the ground or closed their eyes, appearing pious to show they could be, not knowing — because nobody knew — who those child victims had been. There was something defiant in the completeness of it. This lot were determined that Losley wasn’t part of them. It wasn’t that he could feel that same emotion inside them as individuals, not quite. He could almost. . see it. But it didn’t feel great. It felt like a vacuum, a need to feel. The whistle blew for the end of the silence, and a vast roar rose all around him, another empty assertion of togetherness.
Costain had grown up as an Arsenal fan, and his dad had often expressed a hatred of West Ham. These days he could just about name the squad, and he watched it on TV if it was on, but he’d still been kind of dreading this moment. The crowd all started to sing, all at the same moment, as the club song came on the tannoy: I’m forever blowing bubbles. . They had one attitude, one purpose. They were one thing. And Costain, standing among them, felt his undercover hackles rise as never before. Here he was, an away fan, secretly one of the great enemy, possessed of the Sight. It was like being in the mouth of some giant animal. He could feel the vast potential hatred for yet another facet of what he was, though it was deeply buried inside him. It hit him like thousands of tiny blows, beating against his skin. He was the enemy: the other. Well, it was what he was used to. He now did what he always did. He took a deep breath and joined in with the song.
The Sight didn’t like that. He could feel something huge and unknown, something beyond what these thousands of small people knew, reacting to it. Or maybe that was just the feeling of gears slipping inside his head, as he pushed against the tide.
The song came to an end, and there was an enormous, explosive cheer. Costain walked to the end of a row, to look over to where Losley’s season-ticket seat had previously been. They’d taken it out, and every seat beside it or behind it, including Toshack’s and all those to the distance of one seat away. As if even where she’d sat was infectious. Now a steward stood to one side of the gap, in case anyone. . well, who could guess? He wondered how pleased those other seven season-ticket holders had felt to be relocated. The authorities must have made a decision as to how far to take that dislocation. It suggested a sort of rough instinct about the kind of thing the Sight revealed, that everyone had an inner knowledge about evil that didn’t reflect science at all. Nobody in that meeting of directors would have said ‘Leave it, it can’t do any harm, it’s just a seat’. That viewpoint could only reassert itself a few seats further out. They knew, but also they didn’t.