London Falling (31 page)

‘So this is why a lot of the news about Losley makes no sense.’

‘You believe me?’

‘I think . . . I’ll reserve judgement. Maybe this is . . . a sort of a metaphor for something, but I saw you when you met “Jack” that time, and you weren’t faking that. The least I can do is listen.’

Sefton grabbed him by the back of his head and kissed him. ‘Okay,’ he said after, ‘maybe that’s not the least I can do.’

On match day, Ross woke to her alarm, aware that she’d had terrible dreams, but not remembering them. She went in to work with her iPod playing loudly in the car. Not using the radio, because then she’d hear about Losley. She didn’t want to hear about Losley until she walked into the Portakabin, and then it was all about Losley. Because at that point she could
do
something.

Do something about Losley? It seemed even more deferred now. That discontinuity was sinking deeper and deeper into her, so she felt that it would one day reach her heart and kill her. What did getting Losley matter, if her dad was in Hell? Continual torment. No passing of time. No ending. She had felt it distantly. She had heard Costain describe it. She could imagine it. And imagine it she did, till she stopped herself. She thought instead of the kids they were trying to save. Then she felt guilty. And so that cycle went round and round.

The newspapers were full of anticipation, a pile of them sitting on the table. That Losley face was everywhere, today looking like a badge in the top right-hand corner of the
Star
. The
Sun
had put a green filter over the photo.

‘It’s as if she’s become a cartoon character,’ said Quill. ‘Except people are also terrified of her. Families are taking their kids out of school and moving off to the country—’

‘The rich ones,’ said Costain.

‘—but the public deal with it by making her into . . . I don’t know, Mr Magoo with murder too. She’s bloody
everywhere
.’ He must have seen the look on Ross’ face, because he led her over to where Sefton had placed his holdall on one of the tables.

‘If we find her today,’ said Sefton, stepping forward, ‘we’re as ready as we can be.’

‘If this was an episode of
CSI
, we could use that single photo of her to find her in databases, crowd scenes, bloody . . .’ Quill waved a hand to finish his sentence. He looked as if he’d had a few last night.

‘I think that feeling,’ said Ross, ‘of not being able to control things is why people started doing stuff like Losley does, way back when. That’s why it’s
town
stuff. Everyone going back and forth in the city, doing deals, getting one up on each other, when maybe you were used to how it was in the country, just working your land and stuff, same thing happening every year . . . The city makes you want it
now
, makes you want it
easier
. But the bureaucracy of the city also grinds against that, makes you look for a way to get round it.’

‘Dark satanic mills,’ said Sefton. ‘But the city
changes
all the time. And the users we’ve met dress
old
. It’s as if, long ago, a few people worked out some ways to use this stuff, which worked back in the day, and they’ve been passing those methods on. Maybe this lot are bottom of the food chain. They’re just . . . living in the ruins, playing out the same old games.’

‘They’re like junkies,’ said Costain. ‘They’re not really using it. It’s using them.’

‘Maybe they’re still getting used to their new freedom, if someone was previously policing them. I wonder who that was? The bigger dogs? I think Losley’s the only one of those we’ve had a scent of.’

‘It’s a pity,’ said Ross, ‘that we can’t tell the public about the forgetting, however she manages that.’

‘Thankfully,’ said Quill, who had been reflexively checking his emails again, ‘coppers have less imagination than the general public. We’ve got something here.’

Late last night, Terry and Julie Franks, who lived in Brockley, had been arrested on suspicion of murder. Mr Franks’ brother, puzzled, amazed and then outraged when he’d continually asked about his nephew and niece, and been rebutted with increasing vehemence, had finally gone to his local nick. ‘’Cos the Franks,’ said Quill, ‘have insisted they don’t have any children!’

‘She wouldn’t want to keep them for long,’ said Costain, ‘so she’s taken them ready for tonight.’

‘I’d say she won’t kill them until she knows she needs to,’ said Ross. ‘She must know that taking them, even with this forgetting bit, is the most dangerous thing she does. Most of the long boiling process must therefore happen post-mortem. No hat-trick, she hangs on to the kids for next time.’

Quill got on the phone and started yelling. ‘No, tomorrow’s not good enough. I want them put in a fucking van and brought over here for interview right now. You read the papers, don’t you? Yeah, bit of a hurry on here!’

Sefton was pinning a map of London to the wall. He stuck a red pin in Willesden. Ross realized he was indicating where Losley’s houses were, and she looked up the other addresses to add further pins. Sefton finally added a speculative white pin at the Franks’ address in Brockley. ‘Look at how far away that is,’ he said.

‘Indicative of a new base,’ said Costain. ‘Fucking A.’

Ross brought up the council bill records for Brockley, and started spooling through them, though that was going to take her hours.

Quill suddenly shouted incoherently. ‘Patterns!’ he continued. ‘Patterns with the victims! This is what I’ve been missing! Frigging
map
!’

Ross swiftly brought up a list of where every victim with a pile of the soil in their garden had lived. They grabbed yellow-headed pins and, between them, covered the map.

Then they stepped back.

And inclined their heads and squinted, as if they were looking at a particularly difficult piece of modern art.

‘It’s sort of like a . . . jumping horse,’ said Sefton. ‘Maybe?’

‘There’s a kind of concentration around . . .’ began Quill.

‘Storks on the roof,’ said Ross.

‘Eh?’

‘Is there a genuine correlation between number of children born in Dutch houses and the number of storks that come to nest on the roof, supposedly bringing babies?’ said Ross. ‘The maths says, “God, yes”; it screams out at you. But that’s because bigger houses equals richer families, equals more incentive to breed. At least, that was the case back when rich people did breed more. Here all it means is that, yes, this pattern isn’t completely random, there is a concentration here, but that’s only because those are upmarket areas where footballers and gang bosses might live. Money is a hidden power too. And everything’s within reasonable reach of Losley’s known addresses. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation.’

Quill slumped, and Ross thought she could see something terrible appear in his face. That wasn’t what he’d been missing. And whatever that was, it was getting harder for him all the time.

‘Pity,’ said Costain. ‘I’ve always wanted to be working on a case where the dots on a map formed a pattern.’

Ross called the Brockley nick, and got photos of the suspects’ house sent over. ‘Look there,’ she said, for there was that glowing soil shape in their garden.

The match was due to kick off at 8 p.m. And, of course, it was going to be broadcast live on Sky and Radio Five. Purely for the sport, of course. As the hours ticked away, and all four of them continued looking through the council records for the boroughs around and including Brockley, and started pulling out the many sighting reports of Losley from around that area, Ross found that she was developing stomach cramps. It hadn’t even occurred to her to eat, and she wondered if any of the others were managing to do so. It took until bloody nineteen-thirty for a van to arrive outside the Portakabin, bringing with it the two suspects, Mr and Mrs Franks. Their brief had arrived also, Janice Secombe from Mountjoy’s, stepping carefully out of her car and raising an eyebrow at the stretch of mud between her and the cabin itself.

‘Ross,’ said Quill, picking up the tape recorder he’d borrowed from Gipsy Hill that morning, ‘you’re with me in interview room one. By which I mean the far corner here. You two, keep checking those records and loom menacingly in the background.’

Quill knew Secombe from many such encounters. She was obviously loving this bizarre lack of the usual form, knowing how it’d play before a jury. But Quill was pretty sure these two weren’t destined for a trial. He set the tapes running with all due procedure, then he studied the suspects sitting across the table from Ross and himself.

For a moment, in his mind’s eye, he saw blood bursting from their faces.

This was going to be such a long shot. Despite the briefing notes they’d prepared on a few things they could have a go at, there were whole areas which, especially with a brief present, could not be touched on. Not without having these two immediately set loose with one hell of a story to tell the press, one which would snare the team and stop them from having the freedom to do what they had to.

‘My clients,’ began Secombe, ‘are the victims in a missing persons case—’

‘No we’re bloody not!’ said Terry Franks.

‘—who have suffered severe trauma—’

‘We haven’t!’

‘They . . . agree with me, however, that there is no justification therefore for treating them like criminals. And I personally fail to see what they might have to do with the case you’re obviously pursuing here.’

That aspect must be freaking her out. They’d hidden the Ops Board before this lot had arrived, but Secombe knew which of them was working on what. Terry and Julie Franks looked as if they hadn’t slept recently. They were both in their late twenties, him with a number-two haircut that was growing out a bit, earring, white jacket, T-shirt with something pretty on it. If his mobile rang, it’d be something r&b. She was in a grey top that looked as if she’d worn it for three days. Layers in the hair, but no makeup today. She hadn’t been bothered. She wasn’t trying to put on a front, and hadn’t even done the tiny modest stuff that she would have done to attempt to indicate she deliberately wasn’t trying to put on a front.

Innocent
,
both of them
. He wouldn’t normally have let that supposition mean anything, because you always worked the facts in front of your accumulated experience, and he had in the past met many seemingly innocent fuckers who’d done some terrible shit. But in this case he knew it to be genuine, and – had he a heart to break – it would have done so. They were saying something to him about himself, but in ways he couldn’t understand.

‘All right,’ said Terry angrily, ‘what’s going on?’

‘They keep saying we’ve got kids,’ interrupted his wife, still trying to be reasonable while he was already worked up. There was half a laugh in her voice. ‘It’s bureaucracy gone mad! As if we wouldn’t know. But I’m glad we can sort it out now. It’s some sort of error in the paperwork.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Franks,’ said Quill, ‘but it isn’t.’

Terry immediately started to speak, but the brief cut across him. She said, ‘We’re still trying to establish the facts in this case, aren’t we?’

Ross put copies on the desk of what the brief and the Franks pair had already seen: birth certificates for Charlie, aged five, Hayley, six, and Joel, seven.

‘We keep saying there must be a mistake,’ Terry continued. ‘Just the same name . . . maybe they used to live at our address.’

Ross, with no expression at all, put the photos on the table. They’d been taken both from what had been found during a search of the Franks’ house and from the albums of the children’s uncle and other relatives. They showed Terry and Julie with three happy, messy, gurning children at a theme park, by the sea side, on the deck of a cross-Channel ferry, wearing stupid hats.

The couple stared at the photos, as dumbfounded by them now as they must have been when first they saw them. ‘That’s just it – why would someone go to all that bother,’ Terry protested, ‘to Photoshop these? We are obviously being set up for something!’

‘If you don’t have any children,’ said Quill, ‘why is your house full of toys? Why, on several occasions during the last year, did you hire your niece as a babysitter?’

‘First Craig, and now you lot!’ The man was getting shrill, as if he could fight reality back to what was normal. ‘We get so worked up, we can’t hardly hear what people are saying, because they keep going on and on! You think we might just let these kids you think we have wander off, and forget about them? Forget about them after they went missing? Our own kids? Do you really think anyone would do that? Is that how far you think we’ve sunk?’

‘Everyone is looking at us funny,’ said Julie, more carefully, ‘and there’s something they’re not saying. It’s like they think we’re . . . paedophiles. And we’re not! We’re terrified of people like that.’

‘Why?’ said Ross.

The couple were suddenly silent.

‘Why would a couple without children be terrified of paedophiles?’

The silence continued, while their mouths worked as if they were trying to find something to say.

Julie finally raised her hands. ‘I have . . . been thinking about this,’ she said. ‘We’re not . . . Whatever you may think of us, we’re not stupid.’

‘I didn’t say you were,’ said Quill gently.

‘I remember buying the . . . I suppose you’d call them toys. Over, well, years. I remember buying this . . . junior tennis set from the pound shop. Just this pair of yellow plastic rackets and a soft ball. Perfect, I thought. Only now . . . now I can see that seems weird, because we don’t use it, do we?’

‘It’s not a crime,’ muttered Terry, ‘whatever this is, it’s not a crime.’

‘And I have to . . . to try really hard to think about that. It’s like if I don’t think about it, it goes away again. Like my brain doesn’t want to think about it, because maybe there’s something . . . terrible. Please . . . Please tell us. Are we . . . living wrong? Is there something . . .
wrong
with us?’

‘Mrs Franks—’ began the brief.

‘There can’t be something wrong with
both
of us!’ explained Terry. ‘Everyone thinks we’re lying—’