Costain threw himself at her and sent her rolling into the table before she could dash her brains out. The table flew towards the woman. He was desperately holding Ross down.
‘Let go!’ she yelled. ‘I have to-!’ And then normal awareness rushed back into her head. ‘The suspect!’ she shouted. ‘Stop her!’
Costain eased off just enough to see that Quill and Sefton had already pushed the table aside-
To reveal that the woman had gone, like a dove out of a conjuring trick, taking her equipment with her, leaving only a spray of blood across the white cloth. There came cries and shouts from all around, as people who did and didn’t know the truth of it gasped.
EIGHTEEN
They sat on the steps outside, the Houses of Parliament looming behind them, the office lights coming on in the afternoon twilight. Big Ben began to strike four, and Quill could swear he heard the echoes reverberating through this new London he was learning about. They sounded to the depths and resonated back off the sky. They rang through people and memory. ‘The woman at that table turns out to have paid them in cash and provided a false address. Bloody sketchy description you got of that bloke who left the. . bomb or whatever it was.’
‘I reckon he disguised himself,’ said Costain, ‘like Losley did.’
He looked to Ross. He’d have expected her to have got her laptop out by now, but she was just staring into the distance. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘so that woman told Ross that we’re going to have to be like Sherlock Holmes to win: hardly a revelation. She also said that five is better than four, whatever that means. We’ve also discovered that there used to be some form of law enforcement among this community, but that’s gone now. And we’ve found that stuff associated with London, made in London, about London — that stuff seems to have power in London. I got these things too.’ He took the vanes from his pocket and, meeting Sefton’s gaze, handed them over to him.
‘And there’s going to be a death close to us,’ muttered Sefton, accepting them. He’d retreated into his shell again.
Quill closed his eyes for a moment, as that statement put a weight in his stomach weirdly beyond what he’d expect to feel at a threat. He felt he should know what it was about, and was feeling vulnerable that he didn’t. ‘Yeah, but. . later for that. Lisa, what aren’t you telling us?’
She composed herself for a moment. ‘My dad,’ she said, ‘he was Toshack’s “good sacrifice”. He was sent to Hell, and Toshack got Losley’s services in return.’
They were all silent. Quill looked at Sefton, who was silently disapproving of their terminology again.
‘Which makes me realize something,’ she said, making him look back. ‘Everybody thought my dad committed suicide. Including the coroner. So this stuff can close cases that should have remained open. We’ve only instructed the databases to look through open cases, so how about we look at closed ones, too?’ Quill made to put a hand on her shoulder, but her expression deterred him.
That evening, Quill oversaw the rewriting of the Ops Board. ‘Speaking in tongues’ and the three items Ross had consulted through the fortune-teller were added to the Concepts list, as were ‘London items’, ‘old law’, ‘five over four’, ‘tile bomb’, ‘vanes’ and ‘someone close’. ‘Remembered’ had been expanded to include Sefton’s ideas about the memories of the masses and the dead. Photofits for new suspects Fortune-Teller, Windy and Bomber had been put up, unconnected to Losley so far.
‘We’re going to end up with a whole other board just for speculation,’ he observed.
But then, with shaking hands, Ross took down the speculative card under Toshack, picked up a piece of card marked ‘Alf Toshack’, and attached it to Rob’s picture by a victim thread. Then she stood looking at it for a few minutes, as if she could rip up time and have him at her mercy by sheer fury.
West Ham were playing at home on Wednesday evening. It took until Monday afternoon for the list of closed cases of missing or murdered children, enormous as it was, to be sent to the Portakabin. It wasn’t just a computer file, since Quill had asked for the search parameters to go back to the very start of when records were kept. A van arrived, with two archive clerks from Hendon carrying boxes of papers. The computer file included a lot of cases where the perpetrators were currently serving jail time. Ross, who until then had been obsessively trawling the list of bills again, started there, getting the others to begin on the physical files.
‘One thing I’m after,’ she said, ‘is Caucasian, red-headed, parents of three siblings. The parents of those kids in the cauldron. With the older files, you’re looking to match up the descriptors we’ve got of the older victims longer ago, particularly the siblings taken in threes. The cases are now closed, so the authorities at the time will have come to a solid conclusion as to what happened to them. We’re looking to prise that open, and see Losley.’
Quill didn’t suggest that it was a meagre hope. He made them stop every hour for a cuppa, and they worked on into the night. Until-
‘Got one,’ said Ross. Quill and the others went quickly over to see. ‘Tereza Horackova was her name, a redhead — look at that photo. She was serving time in Holloway prison for multiple murder of children, before committing suicide a couple of years ago.’ She went on to the internet. ‘She was convicted of killing her own children,’ she continued, her voice starting to crack. ‘Three of them, and the ages fit, but she always insisted she didn’t have kids.’ She looked up the DNA swab details and emailed them to Dr Deb before his office closed for the night. ‘I’ve got her home address.’
Quill didn’t want to argue with that look on her face. Instead he went to get his coat.
The house in Acton was now occupied by a Bangladeshi family who spoke little English and were reluctant to let them inside. They managed to find a translator from the local nick, and that way eventually got granted access. They did only a cursory search, but Quill had got what he needed from the garden, where there were the faintly glowing remains of soil pushed to the side of where a patio had been installed.
‘She kept rigorously to her story,’ said Ross, ‘insisting that she had no children. She couldn’t explain the many signs suggesting the opposite, up to and including the slide and playhouse in her garden. Losley came here all those years ago, she took those children, and she made that woman forget them. That’s how she manages to steal kids and nobody notices.’
‘Bloody excellent,’ said Quill. ‘Coppers are bound to remember cases like that. We’ll find a few more.’
‘It’s just a pity,’ said Costain, ‘that this is close enough to Losley’s Willesden house for her to have operated from there, so we don’t have a sniff of another base.’
Quill put out the call to every nick in London: they were after current or recent cases where parents of missing children claimed not to have any kids. Especially anything that had just come in. Ross had found them something vital with that obsessive determination of hers. It put hope back into him. But, as Quill walked out of the gate of the semi, he was struck by something: a sudden fear that made him look back. He paused, his eyes searching the garden, finding nothing. It was. . just that feeling of missing something. Again, that echo resonating inside him. Sooner or later he’d figure out what it meant. Maybe all this was just telling him that as a person he was built on nothing. Well, he knew that, and he’d keep going anyway. He headed back to the car and ordered the others to go and get some sleep.