It didn’t help that the awful things they could all now see were confined to London. You could get away from it by going on a day trip to Reading. Quill and Sarah had taken Jessica to a theme park in the Midlands a couple of weekends ago, and had had what had felt like the best sleep of their lives. Sarah didn’t share the Sight. She hadn’t been there when Quill had touched that pile of soil in the house of serial killer — and, as it turned out, wicked witch — Mora Losley. In some way that they still didn’t understand, it had been that action that activated this ability in himself and his three nearby colleagues. Sarah only knew what Quill told her, which was just about everything. On the drive back to London from their weekend break, Quill had seen Sarah’s expression, how complicated it was. She was trying to hide the fact that she admired Quill’s need to do his duty … but hated it too.
Quill realized that the radio was playing ‘London Calling’ by the Clash and angrily changed the channel to Classic FM. He didn’t need his situation underlining, thank you very much. He wound down the window and immediately regretted it, but left it open for the cool air on his face. The air brought with it the smell of burning. The smell was of last night’s riots and lootings, of some borough or other going up in smoke. Thanks to an interesting series of interactions between this government and certain classes of the general public, it was shaping up to be one of those summers. He and his team had been told that the Smiling Man had a ‘process’ that he was ‘putting together’, and Quill kept wondering if he was somewhere behind the violence. He could imagine a reality where the coalition in power had done a lot of the same shit, but without a response that included Londoners burning down their own communities. Really, it was down to how the initial outbreaks of violence had been mismanaged and a strained relationship between government and the Met that was leaving him increasingly incredulous.
The news came on the radio, and he made himself listen. Sporadic looting, protests against the cuts and austerity measures. Cars on fire and bottles being thrown at police. ‘The postal ballot on strike action by the Police Federation-’
Quill told the radio to piss off as he changed the channel again. He could understand the frustration felt by his fellow officers, really he could. Every move, every sensible decision that the Met made to get to the cause of the unrest and damp it down seemed to be instantly overturned and criticized by either the mayor’s office or the Home Office. To the ‘lid’, the uniformed police officer on the street, what that meant was that you got spit in your face and then found out that you were going back the next night for more of exactly the same, when it was obvious to you and your mates — spread out and targets for missiles as you were — that the situation wasn’t going to get any better. The other police forces of Britain had their own difficult relations with this government, knew where the Met was coming from and wanted to support their colleagues.
But strike action? His old police dad, Marty, had been on the phone from Essex, making sure Quill wasn’t having any of that. It was against all the traditions of the Met. Against the law, even — coppers didn’t have the right. Besides, Quill’s team’s speciality, standing against the powers of darkness, seemed a bit too urgent to allow for industrial action.
He realized he was passing the cemetery on his right. He always tried not to glance over there, and always failed. Graveyards were usually, in his team’s experience, a bad idea. This one was full of greenish lights that danced between the graves, and there were a couple of swaying figures, one an emaciated husk with glowing eyes who had taken to … yes, there he was again this morning, like every morning.
Quill tiredly raised his hand to return the wave.
* * *
Forty minutes later, Quill got out of his car at Belgravia police station. The sky was getting properly light now. He found Ross standing under one of the big fluorescent car park lights, moths fluttering around it. She had been watching the first batch of last night’s Toff protestors, the ones whom the police presumably had no legal reason to keep, stumbling from the building. They had those Halloween-style costumes of theirs bundled under their arms. A few of them were, even now, giving each other high fives and laughing. But most of them looked grim. Quill looked at their emotion and again felt distant copper annoyance at bloody people. He used to joke that without people his job would be a lot easier. But now he supposed he couldn’t even say that. ‘What have we got?’ he asked.
She looked round at him. Maybe she was his team’s intelligence analyst, a civilian, but what they’d been through together had brought them as close as Quill had ever felt to any fellow officer. He owed her the life of his child. There was something about the paleness of Ross’ left eye compared to her right, about the broken angle of her nose, that made it always look as if she’d just been in a fight. Her hair was cut short to the point where sometimes it looked as if she’d just taken a razor to it. She was biting her bottom lip in that skewed smile of hers, which only appeared once in a blue moon, and which Quill had started to associate with the game, as they say, being afoot. ‘Maybe just the op we’ve been looking for,’ she said.
Quill had caught up with the Spatley case before he’d left the house. The headline on the first edition of the Herald had read, ‘Murdered by the Mob’. Michael Spatley, chief secretary to the Treasury, had been cornered in his car by anti-government protestors, who had forced their way in and eviscerated him. The story had been the lead on the BBC ten o’clock bulletin last night, but Quill had gone to bed thinking, ironically, that he was glad that it wasn’t his problem.
‘Why is it one of ours?’
Ross led him towards the doors of the nick. ‘I have search strings set up in the Crime Reporting Information System, and I check them four times a day. A locked report came through on my page of results late last night, with the heading directing me to the extension of one DCI Jason Forrest. I couldn’t read it, but if it set off my searches it must contain some extreme words, like “impossible”. Around 2 a.m. it showed up on the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System too, so it’s a murder. I checked where this bloke Forrest works, and it’s this nick, which is also the obvious one for a suspect in the Spatley case to be brought back to. I got excited and called you.’
Quill wanted to slap her on the shoulder or fist-bump her or something, but the very urge was against his copper nature. His was a squad created within the budget of a detective superintendent, its objectives hidden from the mainstream of the Metropolitan Police while cut after cut reduced the operational capacity of every other Met department, and the riots and the protests and the outbursts of dissent in the force’s own ranks were pushing the system to breaking point. His team needed a new target nominal — a new operation — before people in senior positions started asking questions about why they existed.
‘And you were awake at 2 a.m. because…?’
Her poker face was immediately back. Quill sighed to see it. After they’d defeated Mora Losley and thus solved the mystery that had loomed over Ross for her whole life, the analyst had opened up for a few weeks, become more talkative, cracked a few jokes, even. It had been wonderful to see. But now the cloud was back. ‘I’m still working through those documents we found in the ruins in Docklands.’