‘Yeah, I sensed you were different’, Ross went on. ‘It’s like there’s. . there’s something about your voice.’
The woman nodded sagely. ‘I said you was clever. You always sound out how a seer talks, my darling. Not all in whispers that won’t break the surface, but with the proper London. Proper London isn’t your darkie talk, like the kids do now. It’s not your estuary English. . Gawd, that grates on my ears. It’s from before.’
Not that much before, reckoned Ross. This movie Victoriana wasn’t that old, nowhere near as old as London; it was just a gesture in that direction. Maybe that was something to do with degrees of power. This woman didn’t sound anything like the insane mixture of tongues Losley had used. Oh, speaking in tongues, was that a thing, too? ‘You seem to know so much about these things.’
‘I know what my mum used, and her mum before her, and her mum before that, hetceterhah.’
‘Don’t you ever want to change it? Make it more modern?’
The other woman shook her head quickly, her eyes widening. ‘You don’t want change. Change is the enemy of memory, like my mum always said.’
‘Could. . could I learn it?’
‘Maybe. It’s about the way you talk, the way you move. The past is the thing, and that’s what the people in the know do, we follow the past.’
Ross felt the truth of it in the woman’s eyes. Here was someone who had the past always looming over her, wearing a parent’s clothes. This lack of a present or a future was suddenly startling, and genuinely sad. She made herself focus on the job again. ‘You must have had a really hard life.’ That phrase, said right, at the right moment, always opened a few doors.
The woman paused, searching her face, clearly wondering how much she could trust her. Wanting to talk, though. Come on, come on. ‘Well, that’s where you find the power, isn’t it? Like my mum said, between the game and the gutter. Most of it works without you knowing what it means, or how it does it. You can sometimes work it out, just a bit, or sometimes it’s just obvious, just being how things should be. You try and work one of those out with your school head on, you’ll be up all night pondering the complexities of life. That’s how the City Line is memory, it’s one of those: you can kind of see how it works, but you can’t think about it. All this stuff is just enough to get by. You don’t get no riches out of it, not really. You start thinking you want that, you start asking for more, it quickly gets to be more than you can handle. More than the likes of me can, anyway.’
Ross decided to take a risk. ‘You’ve obviously made. . sacrifices.’
The woman was silent for a moment, a real, hurt part of her rebelling, her eyes only just keeping faith with Ross, just the promise of money and being listened to keeping her on the hook. ‘What do you mean by that, now?’
‘I’ve. . read some old books. .’
The woman thought for a further moment. Then she raised her left hand from below the table and put it down in front of her. All three middle fingers were missing, and there was scarring up and down the wrist, old wound on old wound, not in an angry, self-harming way, but something more like the endless search of the junkie for a suitable vein. ‘Of my own flesh and blood.’
‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Ross. ‘So you can’t get. . remembered?’
‘What? You’ve read a bit, I see, but not enough. How would I make a big enough splash to get folk to remember me?’
‘Well, Mora Losley seems to be. .’ Ross stopped as she felt the words bounce off some sort of tripwire in the air. She felt the confidence leave her face.
And now the woman was looking at her as if she was the scum of the earth, the promise broken, another betrayal in a whole life of them. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, so you’re a fucking rozzer.’
‘I’m not,’ said Ross quickly, letting the truth that she wasn’t actually a police officer be a kind of lie. ‘If you really can see, you can see I’m not.’
‘Judas words. As good as.’ She was getting to her feet. She was about to march away, or maybe start yelling. And here was someone who might be able to find Losley for them directly! By answering just the one question! Ross had to keep her here. She remembered what the woman had said about doing what seemed appropriate. Copper gut assumption again: there was one thing that all the stories seemed to insist on.
‘I paid you,’ she said. ‘We have a bargain. You can’t break it.’
The woman stopped. She now looked ferocious and, for a moment, Ross thought she was actually going to strike her down with something. But, finally, she sat down again and glared at her. ‘You cunt,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ nodded Ross. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
Quill had systematically checked out all of the people of interest in the centre of the hall, recording their appearance in his special notebook. There was something particular to them, they were the ones in the old clothes: an ancient waistcoat here, a battered greatcoat there. The fashions of everyone else, while occasionally baroque, didn’t incline so much towards the distant past. When he made his way back through the fair, a few of them were no longer about, a couple had left their stalls completely unattended, having taken away with them any items whose presence had been obvious to the Sight. So this lot could detect the law, and not necessarily through extra-sensory means. They’d had that look about them, too, like the ones you hauled in from the pub for an identity parade, and took a quick shufti in the files while they were present. What all those folk also had had in common — and this shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise — was that the objects of power he’d glimpsed had all been either of a particularly London character (a chipped coronation mug, a bunch of London Pride flowers) or could have been if only he’d known what he was looking at (a branch, a bracelet of thorns). So much for the silver handcuffs, although he supposed that, since it was blessed by the Met chaplain, they did have in their possession some very London holy water. Pity that Chamsa wasn’t local, too. He went to the ticket seller at the door, and was introduced to the organizer, a thin man with a ponytail, in sandals and a business suit. Quill followed him into an office, for a more formal introduction involving his warrant card.
‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘Oh, now, is this about Mora Losley? What that woman does has nothing to do with these peaceful practices going back to the time of-’
‘Yes, sir, I’m sure. This is just a routine check, nothing to worry about. I’d like to be able to say that the. . what would you call it, the occult community?’
‘The New Age community!’
‘That you’ve been offering us brilliant support and a nice cup of tea. So, if I could just take a quick look at your list of who’s at what table. .’
The list showed two big tables, on either side of the hall, each rented to a major dealer. Quill wondered therefore if maybe what he was feeling there was quantity rather than quality, as it were. He gave the list back to the organizer, thanked him for his helpfulness, told him his silence would be appreciated, and headed off to have a quick butcher’s at one of the tables identified.
This was indeed where the professionals were based: real swords, glassware, fabrics, paintings in frames, unicorns and dragons. It made Quill sigh a bit: they were among this terrifying weight of people and history, and yet here were vague guesses at it being regurgitated as tourist tat. Oh, so no change there, then. There was nothing specific about most of it, nothing particularly. . London. The table was staffed by young men and women in T-shirts bearing the dealer’s logo, with an older man, a bit of a pot belly on him, in charge. Nothing odd anywhere, and certainly not among the merchandise. So where was the huge sense of unease about this table coming from? It seemed to be located further behind. . Quill saw that, at the rear of the displays, there was a stack of the boxes this stuff had been transported in. Unnoticed by the staff, someone was rooting through them, not looking as if he had any particular purpose, but more like a tramp searching for food. He was a big lad with broad shoulders on him, wearing a tattered military coat, a garment that looked as if it was from the Boer War. Woollen gloves, so no fingerprints. He had that special sense of meaning about him. The Sight knew him, and he made Quill afraid. But Quill had been up close with Losley, and had also been in the presence of whatever that smiling man was, and he didn’t rate this bloke as being in that league. He took a step closer, leaving only a couple of punters between himself and the man who was obviously keeping himself unseen by the traders seated in front of him.