It had something of Losley’s attractions to it as well, a terrible jollity but with blood infused in its bricks. It was a bit like those ships or the bus, then. This whole building had a bit of ghost about it. That way it suited how he felt right now. Part of him was aware that, maybe even now, and more and more certainly as Monday evening approached, more children would be in Losley’s hands. And also that, for some reason, nobody would miss them. And that seemed to be his own fault, no matter what he told himself. The match would see a hat-trick, because that smiling bastard would make it happen, and the hole inside him, he was sure of it, would widen by a notch as if held open with forceps. He was overlooking something terrible.
‘Jolly,’ commented Ross, appearing beside him, and looking around.
Sefton and Costain soon joined them. They, too, were eyeing the white middle-aged crowd trooping past. ‘Plain clothes, is it?’ said Sefton.
‘You’re sounding a lot more sarky these days,’ observed Quill, and then regretted it as Sefton clammed up and looked away. This outing was designed, at Ross’ suggestion, to keep Sefton’s agenda of background research going, but in what they hoped would be a less dangerous way. But Quill wasn’t sure the DC had quite understood that, in that he still looked as if he’d thrown his rattle out of the pram. Getting him and Costain together on the same page was going to take some doing.
‘We’re here on your say-so, you know,’ he said.
Sefton looked back, blankly. ‘Yeah. Sorry.’
The interior of the hall was also stained red, but thankfully there was no trace of shambling monarchs. Instead, clouds of them floated loftily overhead, mixing with each other like coloured oil in water. You might call that art rather than a haunting, since they were hardly to be counted as people. Far below their empty gaze, long rows of tables were covered in occult paraphernalia and lifestyle accoutrements, ranging from crystals to racks of colourful dresses. It was like something from after the apocalypse, this bring-and-buy sale held in the palace that nobody quite knew the meaning of any more. Quill passed a woman with a bowl and a chalice on her table, who was offering, her sign said, ‘Whole Spirit Therapy’, and who was, his new senses told him, completely harmless.
She smiled at him, and he felt he should say something. ‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a witch.’
Quill couldn’t help it. ‘No you’re not,’ he said, and moved on.
The stage at one end of the hall was occupied by large paintings of dolphins and eclipses, the man trading them presumably having paid a bit more for his pitch. Over the odour of royalty, half jeweller’s shop, half butcher’s shop, there was that splendid metropolitan smell that Quill had always associated with the civic spaces of London: some sort of polish, obviously, but now it also contained the same force that had made the marble and brass shine with use. It was the smell of people. In a good way. Sensing anything about the masses in a good way was a bit new for a copper. But Quill supposed that, right now, he was willing to take comfort from anything that didn’t equate a mass of people with the horrors of the football stadium, and afterwards.
He’d ordered the others to enter, observe and report back to him in an hour with any points of interest. Given their experience in the bookshop, he’d added that they were to leg it immediately away from anything seeming remotely dodgy. They were looking for raw evidence, but especially anything that could be used as a weapon against Losley. At first, it seemed to Quill that this was going to be a repeat of the clerics’ visit. But then he spotted a little shadow of meaning on one table, a little flash of something being put into a box on another. There wasn’t much of it. . but it was here. He clicked the button on his phone to send a text that said, We’re on.
Ross let a false smile appear occasionally on her face as she walked through the rows of tables, listening to the chatter of the people tending the stalls and their customers. Her team were grasping at straws, also running out of time. At least the chief’s text indicated there was more here than there had been with the visit of the clerics. As she passed, nobody was talking about anything weird: tea, the weather, aches and pains, the way the world was going these days. . this lot certainly weren’t the youngest demographic. Business was bad. Table prices had gone up. Someone was wondering whether or not to start accepting credit cards, only then they’d just go and bloody replace them with something else. Ross found herself distantly enjoying listening to them. They seemed to be an everyday sort of people. There was a restful nostalgia about them, for something she’d never really experienced.
And she was feeling so tired. It was tempting to think of herself sitting one day behind a table like one of these, taking refuge in being part of a community like this, where nobody would look twice at her eyes, her bent nose. It was like she often wished she had a favourite record or movie, in the way other people did, rather than just favouring something that was on the radio or the television when she happened to be paying attention. Other people seemed to have things to belong to or things to be. Other people said they were enthusiasts, fans of, supporters of. But no, she chided herself, That can’t come true until you’ve finished this. And then, whatever happens, you have to find a way to deal with not getting revenge for Dad. She couldn’t imagine herself going back to being a normal analyst, even if they somehow got rid of the Sight. What she was hoping for, she now understood, was a happy ending. Which right now felt so impossible that it was almost like inviting death.
Every now and then she saw a flash of something interesting, but she didn’t react, didn’t let them see she’d noticed it. She stopped when she realized she was now feeling a couple of larger presences in the distance, one on each side of the hall. Following orders, she’d didn’t head towards them, or even look, just kept on down the middle.
But then she felt something else right in front of her. At this end of the hall, along on the wall furthest from the stage, there sat a young woman: one in a row of three traders, the others uninteresting. A hand of tarot cards were spread out, face down, on a black cloth in front of her. The cards looked heavy and meaningful in her delicate hand. She looked up at Ross and it was obvious she was seeing her as just another potential punter. ‘Shall I read your fortune, my darling?’
Ross considered her orders for a moment, then she went to sit down.
Costain felt as if he hadn’t really slept, only he supposed his head must have dropped for a couple of hours. He was in a world of rules now, when he really just wanted to cut loose and swagger again, and be the star of this picture and, God, maybe get a toot from somewhere. Only, yeah. . that would be bad. He felt awkward around Sefton.
‘What is it between you two?’ Ross had asked the previous night, after the DC had left. Costain had shaken his head. ‘I read his Goodfellow reports,’ she continued. ‘He always said good things about you. It was reading between the lines there, and your own stuff, that made me think you were a shit.’
Costain had been genuinely surprised. Then had found himself laughing. ‘What do you think now?’
She’d shrugged. ‘You’re our shit.’
Sefton hadn’t been undermining him. That unfairness had been in his dreams that night. He had bigger things on his conscience list: things he couldn’t deal with right now, because it’d be unsafe to do so. But every time he started to think of what words to use to Sefton, he found himself getting angry again. He still wanted to hate him. That entire house of pain was still there in his head, even though now it had no foundations. And that felt, somehow, even more annoying. And now he was standing beside him at the tea stall in the middle of the hall. When Sefton nodded to him, he let himself behave as if they were mates.