They all took turns to touch the book. Right up close to it, and only then, there was a kind of. . nausea. Not sickness, but-
‘It scares me,’ said Sefton, ‘just on its own. It feels like. . the edge of a rooftop. My eyes keep trying to work out where the threat is.’
‘Booby-trapped,’ said Costain. ‘Like that tile.’
‘There’s something. . familiar about it,’ persisted Ross.
‘You mean you saw it when you were a kid?’ asked Quill.
‘Not saw it, but I think it must just have been around sometimes. . in his pocket.’
‘My day for doing this,’ said Quill. He grabbed the book by its spine and threw it off the shelf and onto a nearby desk, as if it was hot. They all leaped back, but nothing happened. Then he took a step towards it, and nodded when Ross asked if he was okay. They all leaned over the desk. The book was The West Ham United Football Book, No. 2, by Dennis Irving, with a foreword by Geoff Hurst.
‘Why is that evil?’ asked Costain.
Ross pointed at the top edge of the book. There were some pages of a different colour sticking up at the back of the text. ‘There’s something else in there.’
‘We need protection,’ said Sefton. ‘What is there we could use for protection?’ He fumbled for his special notebook, and started leafing through the pages. Ross noticed that they were covered with notes added later, so that it looked as if it was starting to become a bit of a grimoire itself.
‘Salt,’ he said finally. ‘That’s the best I can do. The Met chaplain said that was always regarded as a protection against evil. “Always” is good for me. And my mum always threw some over her shoulder, to get in the eye of the devil.’ The twist in the floor was still revolving, making a breeze that, when combined with the cold air coming in under the lock-up door, fluttered everything that wasn’t boxed up. Sefton gingerly jumped back into the middle of it, and returned a few minutes later with some salt from the Gipsy Hill canteen. ‘We’re going to be looking at manufacturers’ addresses a lot, yeah?’ he said, pointing at the container.
‘Packaged in London?’ said Costain. ‘Is that going to be enough?’
‘That means it’s got a bit of London-ness about it,’ said Sefton. ‘And what else have we got?’ He poured some of the salt in a circle around the book, to no effect that Ross could sense. Then he poured some over it. Ross then felt maybe a slight diminution of the power of the thing. Sefton put on his evidence gloves, and gently opened the book, sprinkling salt over every page. ‘It is exactly what it says it is: no marks made on the pages. I’m going to turn to the back.’ He threw a larger amount of salt onto the last page as soon as he got there, and stepped back. When nothing happened, he opened the book again. Inside it were two flattened-out pages of very old paper, brown, cracked at the edges, brittle like leaves. ‘Don’t even breathe on them,’ he said.
Ross could feel the threat crackling from the first page, which looked to be handwritten in some form of old English. She could still make out a few words underneath the salt, but it was the diagram that made her stop and stifle her reaction. It was a drawing of some oddly calm-looking medieval peasant hanging by a noose from the ceiling. There was a wound on his head, and a wound in his side, which was oozing huge drops of blood. A similarly calm man in a robe stood back, a sword in his hand, the other hand in the air, fingers splayed in an unusual gesture. To the left of the hanged man there stood a horned, dog-legged devil with a forked tail, his tongue curled ornamentally. He was spilling coins from a sack, obviously intended as a reward to the man in the robe. Sefton pointed to the page of text facing the loose sheets, where the picture of some long-haired footballer holding a cup had been stained brown.
‘This has been concealed in here for a very long time,’ Ross declared.
She closed her eyes. So this was it, the idea that had killed her father. She could imagine Toshack finding this book in some antique shop. Had it been left there specially for him to find? Maybe. Or maybe this temptation was waiting around to snare just anyone, but Toshack had been ready to receive what was hidden in its pages: a guide on how to sacrifice a man and gain power in return. She could imagine him glancing, curious, at these strange ancient sheets, then starting to read them in detail. The ancient words they contained would have spoken to him, got into his head, whispered to him — as she felt them whispering now. Here’s how you reverse the fortunes of the firm, my son. All it’ll take is the sacrifice of your own brother. That sacrifice of her father had got Toshack his meeting with the smiling man. And the smiling man had then given him Mora Losley. And all Toshack’s riches had flowed from that.
Someone put a hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes and saw that it was Costain. ‘The fucker,’ he said, and she knew that he’d understood what she must be feeling, having finally seen the cause of her misery all this time.
Sefton turned over the page and scattered the salt again. Something golden and fearful bloomed out of the book. It was a name, scribbled in a hand that looked much more modern than anything else here, written right across the diagrams and words of the second page, as if none of that remained important now. It said ‘Mora Losley’.
‘That’s Toshack’s handwriting,’ said Ross, for she could see it now. Him taking this book along to the match that the smiling man had told him to attend; Losley sitting in the seat beside him; the conversation they would have held in whispers, her telling him to take out his pen and write down her name.
‘There’s some power to the paper itself,’ observed Sefton. ‘She must have got him to write it there in order to use that. And now it’s like. .’ He dared to move his finger closer to it, then pulled it away, suddenly more careful now. ‘I can feel it tugging at me. It feels like. . being on the perimeter of those rotating boxes we used to get ourselves here. I think this is. . sort of like a hyperlink on a website. You touch it and go somewhere else.’
‘Losley wouldn’t be up for him summoning her,’ said Costain. ‘He’d have to go to her.’
Before any of them could stop him, Quill slammed his finger down on the golden words. Then, with a yell that shocked Ross, he withdrew it. He made as if to stick the finger in his mouth, but Sefton grabbed his hand to prevent him. ‘Stop doing things like that!’ The finger was badly burned. Ross looked back at the sheet of paper. The name on it was swiftly fading, as the power dissipated. Then it was just ink.
Quill was shaking his hand in the air, furious with himself. ‘Of course that didn’t bloody work. He came back here before we nicked him, so he would have tried that if it would! And I didn’t see a burn on his fingers, because he knew better than to. . knock on a locked door, or something! Fuck!’
Costain was again checking the monitor. When he looked up from it, it was obvious that nothing had changed. Except that his own expression had hardened, and he looked to have made a decision. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we’re going to have to move as soon as this bug shows the cat’s been picked up. If it is. So’ — he handed the monitor to Ross — ‘there’s something I can’t put off doing any longer.’
And, before anyone could stop him, he stepped over to the spinning boxes and vanished.
TWENTY-EIGHT
At 6 p.m., with twenty-six hours to go until the start of the match, Costain marched towards the office unit of a plastic-sheeting company on an industrial estate in High Barnet. He’d kept his phone switched off. He didn’t want the others to know where he was or what he was doing. Not yet. The manager of the company was trying to keep up with him. ‘It’s now been a few weeks, and nobody’s been in touch. But you needn’t worry. We didn’t disturb anything. We don’t even know what you left in there. Please could you. . could you pass that information on, higher up the. . organization?’