London Falling (22 page)

‘Do you know how I do this?’ she said.

Quill didn’t answer. He was trying hard to move, desperately to put himself between her and the boy. But he was caught in a different sort of time, a slower sort. He was impotent. He was deeply, deeply a fool. His pride had now brought him and an innocent to slaughter. He was almost, horribly so, pleased for himself. To get to the end. He was anticipating the car crash that was about to happen to him, that was already happening to his body.

‘I make sacrifice to my lord of the pleasant face, that is how things work. Three more children went in the pot so I could do this. If you keep attempting to limit me, I will have to make more sacrifices. And therefore many children will die because of you. My lord of the pleasant face told me how this would be tonight. He appeared to me – in so rare a visit. He told me not to return to the football matches.’

Quill tried to say something. He wanted to yell at McGuire to get himself out of it.

But then time was gone again in a flash and McGuire’s body was hitting the roof of the car and hot darkness had burst up from the ground and a scream fell away into the depths. The boy exploded with blood. The liquid splattered onto the window, passing Quill. He had lost control dreamlike ages ago. And he wondered, at the last moment, why he hadn’t been taken too.

Losley vanished through the back of the car, her laugh staying as an echo that fluttered as the metal burst open around it.

The car spun back into complete time, hit the pile of soil that stood in the road, slewed across it, and ploughed into the crash barrier.

Costain got out of the marked car in which he’d been a passenger, Sefton and Ross walking quickly beside him. They showed their warrant cards and were allowed through the cordon. The dual carriageway had been shut down on the northbound side, and cars were backing up on the southbound, to get a look. It had started to sleet, the drops of ice in the air reflecting the bright lights. Ahead of them a spent pile of Losley’s soil shone dully.

‘He won’t move from there, sir,’ said a uniform. ‘He could . . . I mean he’s . . . not hurt, somehow.’

Forensics were already swarming around the car, with an ambulance standing uselessly nearby. The crashed vehicle had compacted, and the remains of McGuire were being picked out of a back-seat deceleration area where he would surely have been killed anyway. The windscreen had collapsed into daisy chains of cellular glass spreading out across the road, reflecting light in all directions, like Christmas. The front seats were crushed, airbags inflated. And impossibly, beside the car sat Quill in the cold and wet, with no expression on his face.

They helped him up. Costain let Quill push him away, starting to stumble away on his own. ‘I felt it hit,’ he said suddenly. ‘I knew I was going to die. But she didn’t let me. Because she wanted me to know about the children.’

FIFTEEN

Dr Piara Singh Deb, DMJ, was a forensic pathologist working out of Lambeth, and he knew about coppers. He knew they reacted only slightly to the dead. That they rarely expressed anger at the perpetrators, whom they seemed to view as a sailor would view sharks. That their dark sense of humour concerning corpses always sought out new depths to plumb. And that, despite being so unlike how they were portrayed on television, they always expected
him
to have coffee and sandwiches handy.

Singh had never before been part of an investigation that had received such media attention. The free tabloid that had been thrust into his hand at the tube station this morning had carried that photo of Mora Losley on its front cover, and so did every other newspaper he saw as he headed for St Pancras Mortuary. Singh supposed that this represented the mother lode for any editor: a serial killer who murdered children, gangsters and footballers. His daughter had asked him earlier about Linus McGuire. The canteen here was full of gossip. For this hour, and probably just this hour, the bulletins were leading with a story on one West Ham supporter who was claiming, dubiously, that Losley had offered to babysit.

Singh found the team from Toto quite surprising. He could see they were tired, and so he expected the usual crudity and impatience, the usual blank reaction to bodies unless he showed them injuries done to testes or breasts. But these four . . . for a start they looked like junkies. As if they’d slept regularly in those suits. Their eyes were red and they stood looking about to fall over at any moment. They’d reacted hugely when he wheeled out the corpses of the three children. That wasn’t odd in itself. Police officers, in Singh’s experience, tended to be ‘lookers-after’, meaning the oldest sibling in their family, or the sort of only child who takes on the responsibilities of its parents. The woman here, though she wasn’t a police officer, had some of that about her, too. More than anyone, they didn’t like harm done to children, because they always felt that something could have been done, and therefore they sought – and he’d heard this feeling expressed in the most extraordinary ways – to blame themselves for it. But this time the reaction was different. They were horrified, yes, but it was as if they’d expected to see something more than what he was actually showing them, and were angrily frustrated at the mere sight of the bodies. One of the two young black men stayed absolutely silent. He looked lost, as if he desperately wanted to help but didn’t know whether anything he could say might prove worthwhile. The other was very proper, addressing Singh by his full title, all please and thank you. But there was something odd about that, as if he’d been ordered to do so, and resented it. The analyst did most of the talking, and she seemed to be the one with the greatest command of the situation, but even she spoke in a clipped monotone. The DI looked completely out of it, seemingly forcing himself to listen, putting a hand to his brow, appearing stressed to the point of distraction. Singh wondered if he was grieving privately, and persisting at work despite that burden.

He had to make himself stop paying such watchful attention to these strange coppers, and more to the work confronting them. He felt a little worried as to how they might react to his conclusions, which were so grim that they’d laid a considerable weight on his own shoulders. The three victims, he announced, were two boys and a girl, aged from four to seven years old. Their teeth featured dental work that looked British to Singh, including a filling that was less than a year old. He hadn’t found any unique skeletal markers, dental implants, diseases that affected the bones – the sort of thing that would help with identification. They were all Caucasians (he pointed out the smooth nasal sills and the u-shaped palates), and the remaining strands of hair indicated that all three were redheads (he’d found enough of it to harvest mitochondrial DNA). He’d pulled teeth from the bodies and found – and it had been a bit of a lottery whether or not he would, considering that there was none left anywhere else – nuclear DNA in the pulp, so he was certain in stating these three children were siblings. If they found a candidate for a mother, he’d be able to make a positive identification from a mouth swab. His office was already checking the DNA against the NDNAD database, and would let them have the results as soon as possible.

‘What were the circumstances of their deaths?’ That was from the analyst.

‘There are traces of flesh, so the skeletons weren’t picked clean, and there are no indications of sharp-force trauma, no knife or tool or tooth marks.’

‘So not cannibalism?’

‘I’d be inclined to say no, despite the media speculation. Were any internal organs found separately? We didn’t receive any.’

The analyst shook her head.

‘Yes, I was afraid that might be the case. And I think I know the reason. The bones show signs of pot polish, meaning they’ve been softened by heat and then collided repeatedly with the walls of the cauldron in which they were found. Look at the pale coloration of the bone, which is a sign of exposure to steady heat. And look at this, too.’ He indicated the small bones of the fingers and toes, some of which had been found in the cauldron alongside the skeletons. ‘There are small fractures on several of these. This is peri-mortem damage. Living bone breaks like this, in splinters or fairly straight lines. And among the small bones we found a lot of shredded and split fingernails. He held one up with tweezers. ‘This is evidence of a struggle, in close conditions, where the victims were so concerned about escape that they were willing to harm themselves. I think it’s possible that these three may have been . . . boiled alive.’

By the way they reacted, he had indeed added to their burden – a burden which he was sure he didn’t fully understand. They clearly knew horrors beyond even what he had just described. He felt for them.

The one young black detective thanked him very properly, the other stayed silent. The analyst merely nodded to him, and then they were on their way. The DI didn’t look back.

Singh found himself wondering if this investigation really should be left in such trembling hands.

Sarah Quill sat at her desk in the newspaper office, thinking about Saturday night.

She had heard about what had happened to Linus McGuire, but she’d had no idea that Quill had also been in that car, until he got home, supported by two uniformed police officers. She’d wanted to yell at him, and felt horribly guilty at such an impulse. How dare he risk . . . himself. Them. And what they were. That had suddenly felt like so little; it should be more. He’d just waved the coppers away, and they went off, and he’d been left there looking lost. Again he looked as if he’d been drinking, without actually having been drinking. Not a word had come to his lips, none of the usual bollocks. He’d finally let her hold him, and they’d stood like that for ages.

‘Talk to me,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

‘I can’t. I don’t want to lie to you.’

‘Why do you feel you’d have to lie to me?’ But he’d been silent, then, and nothing she could say would make him change his attitude. She’d heard what his mates at Gipsy Hill sometimes said about being married to a member of the press:
rather you than me.
But she could tell there was more to it than that, and it scared her. This was going to eat away at him.

It had been the next morning when he’d tried to say a few funny things, but kept coming up short. It had been the next night when he just seemed lost again. She missed that act he put on, and was horrified that there was something big enough to make it fall away from him. She didn’t want to keep asking, but she knew she would persist, because it was all she could do.

She could feel it in herself too. It seemed that Quill was trying to be honest, but she’d meanwhile managed to bury something inside her. The way they stared at each other as if they were angry and scared by each other, by what was missing between them. It felt now that the Quill she knew might go missing forever.

Sefton stumbled out into the mortuary car park, the other three beside him. The rain lashed down on them. ‘The noises in there,’ remarked Costain.

‘That was what it was like at the psychiatric hospital,’ said Ross.

‘Boiled alive,’ Quill whispered. And that made Sefton feel it again, the horror of those bare skeletons. He saw the others reacting as well. They’d had their sense of distance taken away. It felt as if they were all rookies again. ‘If that’s what she does every time . . . think of all those kids.’ He remained absolutely still for a moment, as if he had lost everything, every hope. They’d been running on empty, and they’d known they were. It had been Quill who’d kept them going. Now that he was like this . . . they seemed to be carrying on only because they had no other hope. At least now they had a few days’ grace. The next West Ham fixture was an away game against Liverpool. Which meant that even if a player did score a hat-trick against them, it might take a while for him to next come to London. If the Losley case had been big in the media before, now it was huge, the sheer impossibility of the killing of Linus McGuire slamming it to the top of every website, every news bulletin. And the bullshit they were coming out with – about hurled grenades, mines planted in the road. Sefton wondered how far Losley would have to go before the media just caved in and started saying she could walk through walls and destroy cars with her body. Finch had given a couple of interviews that had started to suggest Quill was at fault, that the death of his player was down to dangerous driving, but Lofthouse, without prompting from the investigation team, had got the mayor of London to call the chairman at home, and that had put an end to that. It had been Ross’ idea to visit the mortuary and look at the skeletons again, though none of them had any thought as to what the Sight might reveal about them. Again it turned out that they’d been pinning their hopes on nothing.

Now she looked up from where she was checking the emails on her phone. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘It
is
what she does every time.’

They stood outside the Losley house that Costain and Sefton had visited in Wembley, under a vast polyurethane tent that had been put up to obscure the site, the rain pooling in its canopy. Forensics workers had uncovered a pit in what had been the garden. The sides of the pit revealed strata of bones, including small skulls. It was like an archaeological dig of a battle that had only involved children. Working to a pattern as they did so, the forensics teams had found a similar collection of skeletons at all of Losley’s houses, almost simultaneously.

‘That would have taken . . . centuries,’ said Costain, ‘she’s that old. She’s been doing this all that time and . . . nobody’s noticed.’

‘Sod starting with 1900, I’ll pull all the parameters off my searches, start them at the year dot,’ said Ross. Now she sounded to Sefton to be deliberately trying to energize the rest of them. ‘I haven’t found anything odd in the list of bills from the councils yet, apart from for all the houses we know about, but I will. We’ll have loads of nuclear DNA by now. Those kids in the cauldron were taken during the last year—’

‘And we’d find three new ones,’ said Quill, ‘if we could locate her new house.’