‘So,’ said Sefton, oh so gently, as if he was talking to a lunatic, ‘you think that now you have to be good.’
‘It’s my only chance, yeah? And it’s so bloody hard to think of every single thing, all the time-’
Sefton was shaking his head. ‘Can I say something?’
‘More of your theories,’ said Costain, ‘’cos that worked so well! Sorry!’
‘There’s no God, so there’s no Heaven-’
‘How do you know?’
‘-and this “Hell” might well be like that, might well have the ghost or the memory or whatever these things are of this informer of yours in it, but it is just the place where the big boss of whatever we’ve found-’
‘How do you know?!’
‘If you’d listen! I’ve found out-’
And suddenly Costain was up out of his seat, and had thrown himself at him.
Ross leaped up just as Quill did. She managed to grab Sefton so that a punch that would have taken Costain’s head off went wide. They hauled the pair apart. They fell on the floor as one mass.
Bar staff were running over, shouting. Among all the confusion, as they were being hauled to their feet, Quill’s phone beeped. As he stumbled out onto the street, looking angry as he did so, as he made himself do it — he looked at the screen. ‘The DNA database results are in,’ he said, his voice incredulous. ‘They found nothing.’
SIXTEEN
‘A vicar, a rabbi and an imam walk into a Portakabin,’ said Quill. He was looking up at just that. Sefton and Costain looked over in surprise too.
Ross raised her head from her endless scrolling through computerized bills records from various London boroughs. They’d all got back to that, letting their eyes cover page after page to see if they noticed one of Losley’s edits in the records of a borough where she wasn’t known to have lived. The same effect, frustratingly, didn’t hold for the DNA records. There were no matches with the DNA from any of the child skeletons, or from the skull on the newel post, in the files for any still-open cases. That is to say, none of these victims was listed as a missing child. Having heard that staggering verdict, they’d expected the files to have been edited, and had got copies sent over, but they showed no sign of tampering. It wasn’t that Losley had altered the records of who these children were; it was that the world seemed to have forgotten them. There came with the results a great mass of descriptions, details of hair colour and teeth and ethnic origin (increasingly diverse as the strata approached modern times) and how, on several occasions, there seemed to be groups of three siblings taken together. The West Ham away game against Liverpool had finished in a nil- nil draw. The next home game would be on Wednesday. Costain and Sefton were doing their best to avoid each other, and Sefton hadn’t raised the matter of looking into the background materials again, though Ross saw him poring through pages on the internet.
Quill had been in conference with Lofthouse a great deal, trying to find some resource or clue in the evidence coming out of any of the searched houses, Toshack’s included, but so far there had been nothing. They had so many alerts for missing children in place it wasn’t true, and also a public that was keen to cooperate to the point of being terrorized. Consequently, playgrounds were empty and school runs were packed. The unit had asked to be sent reports of Losley, and now had way too many of them to sort through, from places as far afield as Inverness and Guernsey. An elderly woman in Aldershot had even been forced to leave her house after persistent attacks on her by youths identifying her as Losley. Ross had decided on some filters for sorting these reports, notably instantly chucking away all those from outside London. Still, working through them was another thing each of them could be doing when whatever else they did was proving fruitless and they felt they had to be doing something.
And behind it all was the spectre of that smiling man, Losley’s lord — the shape in the dark whose existence, every now and then, suggested to Ross, on the edge of sleep, that all they were doing was futile.
The Ops Board had only a couple of new things added to it: an explanation of ‘remembered’ by Sefton, and the phone number from which the darkness had texted them. It comprised a string of numbers which appeared in no searches, and which Quill had scribbled at the bottom left of the board. Ross had pinned up a sheet to cover the board a few minutes ago, and it was a bad sign that her workmates hadn’t mentioned that.
‘Detective Inspector Quill,’ she said now, ‘these are my guests.’
Yesterday morning she’d realized what might bring together Costain’s needs and Sefton’s needs, and had arranged it without bothering to ask the increasingly distant Quill if it was a good idea. She got to her feet. ‘This is the Met chaplain, the Reverend Toby Franklin,’ who looked as if he’d come straight from being kicked around on the rugger pitch, ‘Rabbi Peter Shulman,’ who looked as if he’d walked into the wrong room, ‘and Dr Firdos Irfan, who’s an imam,’ and who also looked to be regretting this already. ‘These last two gentlemen work in the prison service in London.’
‘What’s this about?’ said Sefton, standing up. Costain was looking kind of thankful and awkward at the same time. He’d clearly got it straight away.
Quill eyed her questioningly, then nodded. ‘Let’s call it showing initiative.’
‘I was expecting to meet someone with a spiritual crisis. .’ began Franklin.
‘You might well call it that,’ said Quill. ‘A dirty great spiritual crisis. Tea, Reverend?’
The three clerics started to look concerned as they realized that this was about an operation. Sefton kept his distance as he watched Costain fussing over them. He felt almost betrayed, though Ross kept looking at him encouragingly. It seemed that his colleagues hadn’t heard a word he’d said. If these three men had any power, then the churches and mosques and synagogues of London would be aglow with it. This counted as a wholesale adoption of what the other two probably saw as Costain’s agenda, and if this had been a regular squad. . well, he supposed he could have complained to somebody. Not that he ever would have.
Sefton had spent every waking moment since the bookshop incident researching the world in which they now found themselves. He’d come up with a lot of theories, only he was sure now that this lot wouldn’t want to hear them. Not after he’d led the group into danger. Not after they’d pulled him off Costain — who’d come at him, not the other bloody way round, but who’d nearly got what was coming to him. Only, because of the situation they were in, there couldn’t be any talk of disciplinary action. It was as if they were all waiting, instead, for some regular police-work-shaped clue to come along, rather than bothering to deal with his stuff. When he’d spoken to Ross about this stuff being for the lost and downtrodden. . well, maybe he’d got it more right than he’d imagined. For he was the specialist here, slight as his expertise was. These three priests simply didn’t know what the world they’d found themselves in was like. Getting them in here was like getting a bloody psychic into a normal investigation. He pushed the anger down inside, folded his arms across his chest.