‘Do you reckon it’s in there?’ Costain asked.
‘No idea. Can you feel anything?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither. I was thinking she might have … you know … used it.’ She hadn’t wanted to say that out loud. If one had bought the Bridge to insure one’s own safety, her reading indicated that it had to be on one’s person at the moment of death to do so, but if she’d bought it to return someone to life …
‘I thought that too. Didn’t want to say anything.’
They waited there for a while, not knowing what to do. ‘Do you think everyone who dabbles with the power of London goes to Hell?’ asked Ross. She could feel the drug surging through her brain, putting her above worries like that so she could say them out loud.
Costain shrugged. ‘Toshack said all four of us were. But I never believed that. I thought it was just a threat, another way of saying the Smiling Man was going to kill us.’ He was looking kind of hungrily at the door. He saw Ross looking at him, and his expression changed. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘We keep coming to this house,’ she said. ‘We do it in shifts if we have to. We meet this woman, and then we do whatever we have to to get the Bridge of Spikes.’
* * *
Quill went home to find Sarah already in bed, reading. She looked up in surprise at the bag of salt and carrier bag of clinking items he was carrying. ‘Hello, love,’ he said. ‘I feel like experimenting in the bedroom tonight.’
She was horrified when he told her. She talked about getting all of them out of London right now, going to stay in a hotel in Reading or something. But Quill pointed out that, unlike with Losley, there was nothing to indicate that this intruder couldn’t find them wherever they went.
The salt-and-chalk line on the carpet and protective items on the bedpost comforted her only a little. But she got to sleep. It took Quill himself a lot longer, but he finally did.
He woke in the morning to find Sarah looking at him interrogatively. ‘Well?’ she said.
‘I don’t think anything weird happened,’ said Quill. ‘I think the defences might actually have worked.’
* * *
On the way in to Gipsy Hill, while stuck at the traffic lights, Quill put in a call to Forrest’s office, asking if the DCI had time after work tonight to compare notes. He’d emailed his team over breakfast, and none of them had reported incursions into their dreams, but Quill didn’t entirely trust that. He’d been so exhausted and tense last night he suspected he’d have slept through anything. Ross and Costain sounded to have renewed energy. He’d told them the next thing they should do, while continuing to pursue the prostitute Mary Arthur, was start organizing a raid on the Keel occult shop, where they might find some more defences against dream incursion. That was going to need some seriously bogus justification, so getting the main investigation back onside was a priority. Besides, now Quill had a lead to share with them.
He got a call back a few minutes later saying that DCI Forrest would indeed be free and in central London this evening, and that the Opera Rooms was his quiet pub of choice. Quill was pleased to hear that. He could not only do the business he had to do, but he could also become more au fait with a copper whom he felt was much like himself and could try to begin the process of requesting backup for a raid that they’d have to try and squeeze in before a police strike, the purpose of said raid being one that might well escape the DCI.
So Quill entered the Portakabin with some slight hopes. ‘Today is when it all comes together,’ he said, ‘when the elephant in the Portakabin reveals itself.’
‘And shits on us all,’ said Costain, laughing a tad shrilly, Quill thought.
The team spent the day concentrating on Mary Arthur, exploring possible further links, from geographical to financial, between her and the other victims, not excepting Rudlin, on Ross’ insistence. Quill sent Costain back over to the Soviet bar to ask around about prostitutes using the place. This was not, Costain reported back, having been gone a bloody long time, something the bar staff were aware of, even on the sly. So Quill’s prediction for the day failed to come true. But he knew this was the right line, that this was how they’d crack it. He had some hopes that they might have freed themselves from the problem of being got at when they slept as well, though Sefton looked incredulous at the idea that his defences had worked.
At six that evening, thinking that a bit of bonding with a superior officer might well take him over the limit, Quill headed for the railway station. He fell asleep, as he always did on trains. He realized with a start that he was doing so, but he had some of Sefton’s protective objects on him. Finding them with his hand, he let it happen, and he started to dream.
* * *
He was backstage at a Rolling Stones concert, and he was talking to Mick Jagger, who turned out just to want to talk about money, while Quill was all about the music. ‘Nowadays,’ said Mick, ‘the world is just as bad as it was in the seventies, but we’ve had all our illusions scraped off, and it seems people are willing to put up with that without, you know, revolution.’
Quill said something, he wasn’t sure what. This is a normal dream, a wary part of him kept saying.
A nondescript figure was standing behind him. He had a hand on Quill’s shoulders. Quill ignored him for a moment, then realized, with a start, that he was looking into the back of Quill’s head. ‘No, don’t move,’ said the figure calmly, like a doctor. Quill stayed put, with his back to him, but suddenly he had a gun in his hand, because a part of him was yelling that he really needed to have a gun right now.
Quill knew what this was. He spun round and tried to grab the figure, but he couldn’t register any details of it. His hands went straight through it. Quill stumbled forwards into the figure, which was trying desperately to get out of his way, but now Quill had found that the figure was actually a hole, and in trying to grab it he was falling.
Quill lost his footing completely and fell into the void.
SEVENTEEN
FOUR THOUSAND YEARS AGO
Quill fell into the dreams of a mind much older and much bigger than his own. He screamed as he fell, but made himself stop when he saw how huge what he was falling into was. He wasn’t sure he wanted this mind to notice him. The woman who was dreaming dreamed the same things, over and over. Quill had no idea of time, but he was inside her dreams long enough to understand everything. The sadness of it fell over him like a shadow.
* * *
The word ‘kennet’ meant three things to the people of the hawthorn bushes: a long low mound of soil with rock slabs cut by the ancients in a grove at its door; the entrance of a woman, from which came children; and something that was evil. That was why it was a swear word, something shouted by soldiers over beer in the round house.
In the woman’s dreams, which were now his own, Quill found himself standing inside a kennet that she thought of as her home. He no longer had the gun he’d imagined into his hand to protect himself. He was here on the night when everything had changed, a terrible night. She kept dreaming about this night, over and over. Quill could feel that something dreadful was going to happen.
The air was dry as if he was in a library. The floor was impacted mud. The only illumination was moonlight, entering at one end of the kennet. The walls were made of piled rock slabs, covered in painted patterns, swirls and grids. Quill looked closely at them and saw handprints and fingerprints, thousands of years old, and wondered at them. This is what that terrible night had been like, the memories of the dream said to him, grabbing him and shouting it desperately in his ear like a needy drunk. The swirls had been drawn by those who’d brought her body here, many decades ago, when her flesh had died. They had drunk the rotten beer, and the swirls and grids were what they had seen. The fingerprints were her own, pressed to the wall when her flesh was dead, to mark her passing, before they carried her into the chamber where she slept.