She wanted him to be here, and she wanted him to be out there, along with his unit that these coppers here kept complaining about not being part of, but kept saying was too small to achieve anything further. She overheard these conversations; did they really think she wouldn’t?
‘How did she make us forget?’ she had demanded last night. Quill had then told her: everything had finally come flooding out of him. Every detail made her more angry. ‘That happened to you, and you didn’t tell me? Things like that exist, and you didn’t tell me? How could you keep me out in the cold like this? Who am I to you?’ But she believed him very readily, because it was the only option. She got scared at what lay outside, dragged him to the window and made him explain what he could see out there in the night. The journalist part of her kept arranging it into tidy questions, but the person she was went deeper than that. Someone who had thought she was married, and hadn’t thought twice really about the strength and quality of that relationship kept ripping those questions up in sheer fury. How dare he? How dare he not have told her about the danger to her child? He just stood there and took it from her. He wasn’t taking on some sort of noble burden, just accepting the truth of it, rocking slightly on his heels.
She felt the world was against her now. She found it all too easy to see London as Quill described it, as a tentacled monster at the heart of a whirlpool that had snatched away their child. But it was Quill she saw as failing to put a stake into the heart of that monster. It was him whose desperate attacks on the monster had slammed a hole into the ground, who’d caused everything to start whirling around them. He had put an emptiness into the heart of everything, as well as having one inflicted on himself. It was as if something from inside him and his job had spread out into the world and engulfed them.
She stood against a wall, her body propped at an angle it would never normally have assumed, as if she’d been shot, or was a toddler, and she tried in her head to find her way back to a baby called Jessica.
At 10 a.m. Detective Superintendent Rebecca Lofthouse was sitting at a table facing the special committee of the Football Association, which consisted of five white men in their fifties. She took a deep breath. ‘With respect, Mr Chairman,’ she said, ‘what the fuck are you doing?’
The man looked to have faced his fair share of criticism in his time, and he was proud to have done so. But now he was eyeing her with a strange expression, as if he literally didn’t know why he was taking this position. He and his fellow committee members, selected from the high and mighty in the game, had occupied this grand meeting room at Wembley Stadium for three days now, and only this afternoon had she been called in to hear personally the extraordinary news that was about to be given to the press. Now that she’d heard it, she still couldn’t believe it.
‘We are not,’ declared the chairman, sounding flustered and angry, ‘giving in to threats.’ And his glance slid sideways towards an empty seat at the table. Lofthouse glanced at the others, saw they were all looking over there. As if someone else had given the orders, which they didn’t necessarily agree with, and then had. . gone?
She shook her head to clear it. ‘Mora Losley is now threatening the life of every player that scores even one goal against West Ham.’
‘We’re aware of that fact, but-’
‘The Professional Footballers’ Association has threatened to strike, the government has already requested you not to continue, and you were agreeing to the point where everyone was sure-’
‘We live in a free country, and-’
‘All the managers are saying they’ll tell their players not to score against West Ham. These games will be a farce. That’s giving in to threats, making every match about her!’
‘We will not-’
‘And it’s one of my coppers, one of mine now. DI Quill has had his own child taken.’ She remembered that terrible strain on Quill’s face, that utter lack of his usual brave energy. He’d looked so complicated, so knotted, but he’d asked to be allowed to stay on the case and. . well, she had felt she had to let him. He’d justified every bet she’d made, on such a flimsy basis. Who knew what horrors he’d already faced, beyond those she knew about? She found her hand going to her charm bracelet. ‘There is a child in Losley’s hands whom she will undoubtedly kill if a goal is scored!’
‘We’ve considered that, at great length. We feel it’s your job to prevent that. But we can’t give in to every psychopath.’
She kept her voice level. She didn’t want this lot accusing her of being hysterical. ‘I’ll have your arses for this. I’ll fill the pitch with coppers if I have to, and arrest the teams before the match begins.’
‘Now that,’ said the chairman, ‘would be illegal.’ And he was right. She couldn’t make it happen. Lofthouse thought she heard a laugh from somewhere nearby. She turned to look, but there was only that empty chair. When she turned back, she saw that the committee members were all looking over there too. Only they were all bloody smiling.
Ross had listened in disbelief as Quill relayed the news that the matches were going to continue. ‘It’s as if football can somehow soak up death,’ she had said, after he’d finished. ‘As if it’s immortal; that a club or a league or a match will always carry on. They’ll just have a minute’s silence and wear a black armband.’
She’d gone back to her work, aware once more of that clock still ticking, only thirty-three hours to go; aware that the only thing she had to go on — that endless flow of data crossing her screen — probably now had no more secrets to divulge. She looked up from it an hour later, needing to rest her eyes. The air of tension hadn’t ebbed. Sefton was making quick, decisive notes. Quill was pacing before the Ops Board as if something would suddenly leap out at him. Costain had gone to get the cat some more food. Ross watched distantly as he gazed at the animal for a long time, as if pondering something, as if needing something to be fond of and wondering if it could be the cat.
‘I thought you’d stop feeding me,’ said the cat, ‘once it became clear to you how little help I can be.’
‘Yeah, well,’ he said, ‘I thought it was about time someone showed a bit of fucking decency about something.’
‘I do appreciate that.’
‘You don’t have much of an ego on you, do you?’
‘I am, at heart, a dead cat. My mistress has told me, many times, that I am worthless. I am forced to agree.’
‘But it’s not about what you are, is it?’ Costain leaned closer to the cat. ‘It’s about what you could be. Imagine being one of the good guys, one of us, fighting the good fight against Losley.’ Ross thought she heard a certain artificiality in his tone, like something he’d voiced or thought of often.