‘Two blokes came after it the night before. Most of my defences got used up on them. They finally got out, on fire, with me screaming at them. I should have legged it then; I should have taken it with me. I made all these fucking sacrifices, just so some-’ She had to stop, looking away. She wasn’t trying to fool them, Ross was sure. Someone had indeed looked inside their heads and seen what they were after, and they had come and taken it. Two lots of people, somehow, had known and had had a go. What did that mean?
Feeling almost a need to get close to someone with whom she shared such pain, she went to sit next to her. The woman looked puzzled at her, sure there was nothing more Ross could want from her.
‘You’re Anna Lassiter?’
‘How do you know my name? How did you know it was here?’
Ross reasoned that the next time this woman was among her subculture she’d hear about the auction anyway, so she told her about the price she’d paid.
‘Good,’ said Lassiter. ‘Your sacrifice was in vain too.’
Ross ignored that. ‘Tell us about the two blokes and the burglary the day after,’ she said. ‘All the details, from the top.’
‘Why should I? You only want to find it so you can have it for yourselves!’
Ross looked to Costain. He reached into his pocket and produced his police warrant card.
‘Oh, what?’ Anna Lassiter looked between them as if her week had, if that was possible, actually got worse. ‘You have got to be fucking kidding.’
* * *
Ross listened to the woman’s account of the unsuccessful break-in and the successful burglary, asking all the things Lassiter would expect a police interviewer to ask. She let Lassiter believe that the Met in general knew a bit about the hidden world that she was part of, that they wanted to find the Bridge of Spikes as part of an investigation, not for themselves. Thankfully, Lassiter didn’t seem to pay enough attention to the modern media to have heard much about the death of Quill or to connect him to the man she’d seen at the Goat the same night they were there, otherwise she might have realized their real motive. Or what might have been their real motive; Ross still didn’t know who she would have chosen to save. Costain paced as they talked, barking the occasional question. Lassiter started looking perplexed at that, worried that she was looking at a cop and a user, but it didn’t stop her from telling her story.
Lassiter had come home yesterday, having gone out to get some items to replenish her flat’s defences following the break-in attempt, to find the Bridge of Spikes missing, with only small signs of a burglary having taken place. This must have been done, she thought, by someone with the Sight. Ross was surprised to hear that these were the first such attempts. It had been secrecy, rather than anything particularly useful in terms of defences, that had stopped Lassiter being raided before now.
‘It would make sense,’ said Costain, when she had taken him aside, ‘that it’s the same person who made both attempts.’
Lassiter had bought the Bridge at one of the underworld auctions over the phone, through a proxy. She’d used what she called ‘craft’ to conceal her identity on the other end of the phone from what she called ‘checking’, or as Sefton had it, ‘reading your bar code’. She’d trusted the auctioneers with her address, she said bitterly, because nobody had ever successfully paid to see the register before, but she didn’t want anyone else to know she’d got the Bridge. Ross had started to ask if the individual who’d been her proxy was trustworthy, but the woman had laughed bitterly at that, saying he was long dead. Yes, she had been planning to use the Bridge to save herself from death. Why else would she have held onto it?
They took all the details. It wasn’t much to go on. The burglar had left no trace of his or her passing. The raiders hardly much more. Costain and Ross took prints from likely surfaces, and Lassiter angrily let them have hers for comparison.
Before they left, Costain did something Ross admired him for. He called up a locksmith, talked and talked at him about what a good thing locksmiths were, and paid over the phone for him to come and repair the door.
They left Anna Lassiter glaring at them furiously, like the jackals they were.
* * *
Costain and Ross went back to their cars in the bright afternoon sunlight, and Ross felt as if she wanted to die. ‘We’re not going to be able to find whoever stole it,’ she said, aware of how tiny her voice sounded now. ‘We don’t have enough evidence. We don’t have enough contacts in that world.’
‘There are the fingerprints. You never know.’
She had to lean on her car. She didn’t feel like going anywhere or doing anything. She was starting to see the edges of grief, doubled for her, unfolding infinitely around her. ‘Why are you so hopeful?’
‘I’m … not. I suppose…’ He rested on the car beside her. ‘I suppose I just have to keep going. For Jimmy.’
‘Right. Keep going.’ She made herself say it, but she didn’t feel it.
They went back to Costain’s place, took some more meth, fucked. Ross took what pleasure she could from it. She found no happiness. She was thinking about her father and Jimmy in Hell.
Then the phone rang.
TWENTY-TWO
Kev Sefton had stood at the door of the Portakabin watching Costain’s car roar off down the road. He felt, in that moment, too angry to breathe.
What was he supposed to do? Carry on on his own? What could he do?
Nothing. He was meaningless and had now been utterly deserted. Was all this happening to him because he’d taken a life? He’d felt wrong ever since. Was that why Brutus was still rejecting him, why his source and … patron, he supposed, wasn’t allowing him access? He had no idea how Brutus felt about death. Or about anything, really.
He sat down on the floor. He let his head drop back against the wall. He felt desperately that he wanted to fall asleep, but he couldn’t let that happen. He felt a dream welling up in his head, making strange sense of his thoughts, and fought it off. He wouldn’t close his eyes.
He closed his eyes. He was on the verge of sleep. He was on the verge of giving in. ‘Help,’ he said, with no power in his voice.
Something moved over the Portakabin. The light against his eyes changed. He heard a distant sound. Distant music. Dance music. It was like a hand on his face. It was an echo of the joy that he and Brutus had shared in a kiss. Dance music that took him back to happier times.
The music offered him a way forward. A terrible way.
He opened his eyes again. Everything around him was normal. There was a moment when he didn’t believe anything strange had just happened. He was stressed out and grieving and exhausted. But what was he if not someone who did mad things because of something that might be a dream? That was a definition of what he had to be if he was going to go any further into knowing the power of London.
Slowly he got to his feet. He contemplated what was being asked of him. It would be a sacrifice. It seemed to hold the potential to wash him clean of Barry Keel’s blood. It seemed to hold the possibility of doing due honour to Quill. It was something right for him and how he lived. Finally, he had a way forward in his hands. He looked up, then down, because he wasn’t sure where Brutus’ ‘outer borough’ could be said to be. He said thank you, silently.
He went to his holdall, intending to see what defences he could take with him on his journey. As he looked through it, he realized there was something missing — several things. He emptied the bag out onto the floor, and found that a bunch of items he’d kept because of their potential as protective devices: a box of London-made matches with what seemed to be occult symbols in the trademark, some salt from an ancient source actually within the metropolis, a horseshoe used in the Trooping the Colour … they were all gone.
He looked around the Portakabin, wondering what could get in and do that. The same thing, presumably, that had entered their dreams.