‘Talk to me,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’
‘I can’t. I don’t want to lie to you.’
‘Why do you feel you’d have to lie to me?’ But he’d been silent, then, and nothing she could say would make him change his attitude. She’d heard what his mates at Gipsy Hill sometimes said about being married to a member of the press: rather you than me. But she could tell there was more to it than that, and it scared her. This was going to eat away at him.
It had been the next morning when he’d tried to say a few funny things, but kept coming up short. It had been the next night when he just seemed lost again. She missed that act he put on, and was horrified that there was something big enough to make it fall away from him. She didn’t want to keep asking, but she knew she would persist, because it was all she could do.
She could feel it in herself too. It seemed that Quill was trying to be honest, but she’d meanwhile managed to bury something inside her. The way they stared at each other as if they were angry and scared by each other, by what was missing between them. It felt now that the Quill she knew might go missing forever.
Sefton stumbled out into the mortuary car park, the other three beside him. The rain lashed down on them. ‘The noises in there,’ remarked Costain.
‘That was what it was like at the psychiatric hospital,’ said Ross.
‘Boiled alive,’ Quill whispered. And that made Sefton feel it again, the horror of those bare skeletons. He saw the others reacting as well. They’d had their sense of distance taken away. It felt as if they were all rookies again. ‘If that’s what she does every time. . think of all those kids.’ He remained absolutely still for a moment, as if he had lost everything, every hope. They’d been running on empty, and they’d known they were. It had been Quill who’d kept them going. Now that he was like this. . they seemed to be carrying on only because they had no other hope. At least now they had a few days’ grace. The next West Ham fixture was an away game against Liverpool. Which meant that even if a player did score a hat-trick against them, it might take a while for him to next come to London. If the Losley case had been big in the media before, now it was huge, the sheer impossibility of the killing of Linus McGuire slamming it to the top of every website, every news bulletin. And the bullshit they were coming out with — about hurled grenades, mines planted in the road. Sefton wondered how far Losley would have to go before the media just caved in and started saying she could walk through walls and destroy cars with her body. Finch had given a couple of interviews that had started to suggest Quill was at fault, that the death of his player was down to dangerous driving, but Lofthouse, without prompting from the investigation team, had got the mayor of London to call the chairman at home, and that had put an end to that. It had been Ross’ idea to visit the mortuary and look at the skeletons again, though none of them had any thought as to what the Sight might reveal about them. Again it turned out that they’d been pinning their hopes on nothing.
Now she looked up from where she was checking the emails on her phone. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘It is what she does every time.’
They stood outside the Losley house that Costain and Sefton had visited in Wembley, under a vast polyurethane tent that had been put up to obscure the site, the rain pooling in its canopy. Forensics workers had uncovered a pit in what had been the garden. The sides of the pit revealed strata of bones, including small skulls. It was like an archaeological dig of a battle that had only involved children. Working to a pattern as they did so, the forensics teams had found a similar collection of skeletons at all of Losley’s houses, almost simultaneously.
‘That would have taken. . centuries,’ said Costain, ‘she’s that old. She’s been doing this all that time and. . nobody’s noticed.’
‘Sod starting with 1900, I’ll pull all the parameters off my searches, start them at the year dot,’ said Ross. Now she sounded to Sefton to be deliberately trying to energize the rest of them. ‘I haven’t found anything odd in the list of bills from the councils yet, apart from for all the houses we know about, but I will. We’ll have loads of nuclear DNA by now. Those kids in the cauldron were taken during the last year-’
‘And we’d find three new ones,’ said Quill, ‘if we could locate her new house.’
‘So bells will start ringing on the NDNAD, and we’ve put out the word for open cases featuring missing kids.’
‘No,’ he sighed, as if Ross was a fool. ‘She’s fixing this. We’d have heard something straight away. Three from the same family? Who can lose three kids and not report it?’
‘Jimmy,’ said Ross, raising her voice, and that was the first time Sefton had heard her use Quill’s name, ‘we’ll have her.’
Quill seemed to be on the verge of bellowing something, as he stared at the bones, but when he actually spoke his voice was again just an urgent whisper. ‘How?’
Sefton decided that now was the time for him to speak up. He’d been sitting on what he’d been working on, expecting that any moment a lead would come up through traditional police work. Talking about what he’d been doing seemed. . obscene in comparison to what they’d just witnessed, but he couldn’t see another way forward. He didn’t know if what he was going to offer was just a distraction, but even that might do some good right now. So he made himself speak. ‘While we’re waiting for more evidence,’ he said, ‘maybe we can. . work the background?’
He didn’t feel any more confident as he showed them, back at the Portakabin, what he’d found. He felt that he was risking something again, showing them the part of all this that, for some reason, felt most personal. But this was all for those kids. Everything they did now had to be for them. The Ops Board had only changed in that it now had that photofit picture under the heading for Losley’s lord, and a much bigger piece of card ready for a list of her victims.
‘Jack,’ he said, showing them a picture on a London folklore website. ‘That thing I met, its full name is Jack in the Green. Sort of like a big tree.’
‘Those are legs sticking out,’ said Ross, studying the photo. ‘You’re not saying it was a bloke in a costume?’
‘’Course not, not what I ran into, but it can be. People dressed like this still lead May Day parades. They have since the sixties, a revival of what used to go on in London every year, centuries back. He’s something the old trade guilds put together, as a big showpiece. They went from house to house, all of them in different sorts of costume — dames, princes — to collect a kind of tip, their only extra for the year. Happened a lot around Soho, so he’s still in the right place. They used to stop at the end of the circuit and all dance around Jack, as if he was a kind of mobile maypole.’
‘And someone got sacrificed at the end of it?’ said Quill. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
Sefton paused. ‘Everybody says stuff like that. . that this must go back to before the Romans, but. . you don’t often find any evidence. I looked up those ships of yours as well,’ he looked to Ross, ‘HMS London and HMS Victoria. The first,’ he found the photo of what looked like a computer simulation of the ship on the bottom of the river and read from the text, ‘escorted King Charles II back from Holland at the Restoration, then it blew up in 1665, and sank in the Thames Estuary.’ He went to the next image. ‘The second, on the other hand, was the most powerful ironclad afloat, specially named after the Queen on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee. . but it sank in a collision with another British ship, in the Mediterranean even, in 1893.’
‘So these are ships haunting the Thames?’ suggested Quill. He sounded impatient, but he was at least waiting for Sefton to get to the point.
‘It’s more complicated than that.’ Sefton looked hopefully around at their bemused faces. ‘I think I’ve got a good example we can look at. And it runs on a timetable.’