He looked up and saw that the man who had offered him the deal, who had stood beside that ghostly visitor, was now nearby, in the middle of the road. He was well dressed, powerfully built, with a receding hairline and cold grey eyes. Whenever Gaiman had seen him he’d had a broad smile on his face; that was also the case now.
‘I did what you wanted,’ Gaiman said. He was shocked somehow to find his tone was still reasonable, that he sounded questioning, merely amazed at himself.
The man inclined his head, still smiling. Yup, I guess you did!
‘Everything I’ve read tells me you keep your side of a bargain. That you don’t, in fact, twist deals to your advantage like the Satans of literature. I want you to tell me again that, in return for Quill’s life, the people I named have now been freed from Hell.’
The man nodded. Perhaps, if he ever spoke, his voice would destroy all who heard it.
‘I told Quill’s team that if they caught the Ripper, they could start turning things around. There was nothing in your contract to say I couldn’t offer them hope.’
The man shrugged. His smile remained untroubled.
Gaiman took a last look around the artificial stillness of the bridge. Once more he made himself feel the full weight of what he had done. Then he got into his car and drove off. After a moment, the lights of London started to move again behind him.
TWENTY-ONE
Costain drove the others back from the pathologist’s lab to Gipsy Hill. Sefton kept trying to find something on the radio other than bad news.
‘… actually one of the detectives working on a related inquiry, with no other apparent links to the other victims…’
‘That it’s come to this, that a Metropolitan Police detective inspector can be stabbed to death by what certainly appears to be the very suspect he’s pursuing, because he was the leader of a team of only four officers, working out of a Portakabin, with almost no resources. No, I am not using his death for political ends, whatever that means; I’m saying that with better funding he would have had backup, he would have had team members around him…’
‘This vote to strike has no weight in law, but what it does is bring this government up short, faces them with the idea that they might actually, amid increasing riots and protests, have to declare that officers who mount wildcat strikes have taken illegal action and have them suspended or even arrested.’
‘One less. That’s it.’
‘These people don’t speak for us or our movement. We do not advocate violence. Many of us who were here at the start are desperately trying to discourage the use of the Toff costumes, which are now widely seen as a sign of violence. There is no leadership structure, we’re not a hierarchical organization, no, so … let me finish … no, we have no power to enforce that…’
‘Britons, Londoners, we implore you — the police won’t protect you, the urban rioters seek to burn your honest businesses, the work of centuries — get out onto the streets and stand up for what is yours. What’s the face behind that mask, the killer of police officers and those who’ve worked hard all their lives to make good? I think we all know the answer, but so few people are prepared to say the words out loud. International financiers are looking to see this city burn, and then step in to plunder what’s left at knock-down prices. Don’t let them. Secure your own streets.’
The riots were actually ramping up now, drawing in other police forces like a fire draws in oxygen. Those forces and the protestors were waiting for the day of the strike, when the Met and all the other police forces would retreat and, presumably, strike the spark of the inferno. The owners of small businesses had now taken on a sort of costume of their own, a towel wrapped round their faces, a cudgel of some kind over their shoulders, and were filmed in lines and marches. Drain the colour from the picture and you could be in the thirties, Sefton thought, looking out of the car window at distant smoke. The banks had now shut their branches in almost half the boroughs. People were talking about not being able to pay in their wages, economists about the possibility of a never-ending recession.
It felt as if now Jimmy had ended, the world was ending with him. Sefton had to do something. But what?
* * *
When they got to the Portakabin, they saw the mirror they’d brought back from Vincent’s standing there, and as one went to grab it. They heaved it through the door and finally left it standing outside on the grass. Whatever Sefton had said about it seemingly being bereft of power, they all still felt better without it in the room.
They looked at each other, standing outside in the sunlight, and Ross felt the weight of how long she’d been awake, the need for more meth to keep her going. They’d kept working through the night to try and find Jimmy, then to go and see his body. On the way here, the Data Protection Act results had come back, forwarded from the main inquiry, concerning the tweets that led to the mob outside the bar and the later ones that had sparked off the crowds of Toffs near Quill. All of the Twitter accounts, and there were several involved, had been set up by anonymous webmail users whose chosen names looked to be deliberately random strings of letters and numbers. The contact details given were plausible-sounding street names, but uniformly fictional; the phone numbers all led to the monotone of unreal connections. Ross had Googled the words but could find no connection between them, except that some of them were actual streets in a random scatter of different towns.
Without saying anything, she marched back into the Portakabin; the other two followed. She went to the Ops Board. ‘Adding the two big questions,’ she said, picking up a marker, feeling numb and roaring at the same time. ‘One: why did the Ripper kill Quill?’ She wrote ‘motive?’ beside a victim line connecting Quill to the Ripper.
‘It must be something we learned recently,’ said Costain, ‘between the last murder and now.’ He paced back and forth. ‘It must be. It must be.’
‘Mary Arthur,’ said Sefton, pointing to the CCTV camera still of her. ‘Jimmy was sure we were onto something with her. She has a possible link to Spatley. Somehow she’s the only survivor of an attack by the Ripper-’
‘Ironic,’ said Ross, ‘her being a prostitute.’ Then she chided herself. The choice that was looming over her was putting her off her game. She was letting Jimmy down. ‘No, fuck “ironic”, significant. Potentially.’
‘She’s the lead we’ve recently been pursuing. Fruitlessly, so far, because that bar is the only place she’s been seen since she vanished.’
‘She might have needed funds, decided to turn a trick again,’ said Sefton.
‘Hoxton nick hasn’t laid eyes on her, despite the description doing the rounds,’ said Costain.
‘It’s the same pattern,’ said Ross, ‘as with Tunstall’s death: we discover something new, someone who can follow up on that is murdered. Now, question two: how did the Ripper locate Quill?’ Ross wrote ‘how?’ beside the same line, and underlined it many times.
‘I want a watch on Twitter,’ said Costain. ‘If anyone tries to start a flash mob of those Toff fuckers anywhere near us, I want some warning. I want to know, okay?’
‘Already on it,’ said Sefton.
There was silence. Quill would normally have said something to further shape the questions they should be asking. Ross listened to the silence, feeling the limits of where the board could take them. She felt the speed of her pulse making the emptiness stretch. It was as if the death of Quill had been just the first enormous blow, and they knew more were coming. The business of the Ops Board, of trying to turn such huge impossible things into simple data, of trying to control the world that way, felt ridiculous now. That they had won against Losley seemed like sheer chance.