Paul Cornell - London Falling

It took them several hours to move into the house properly. First the Armed Response Unit had swept it thoroughly. Then Forensics and Explosives had gone through in turn. Costain hadn’t known what to do with himself in the meantime. When he’d been a UC, scene-of-crime had been more of a before routine for him than an after . More and more police vans arrived outside, a lot of uniforms needed for crowd control as locals and the press started massing. Finally, the house was declared clear, and Quill’s team were allowed in.

They found some West Ham paraphernalia, and a scarf left over a chair in the kitchen. Quill got hold of a magistrate, and put out a new warrant for Losley’s arrest in connection with the Howarth murder. Even assuming that someone else was doing the killing, such as a family member she kept under the same roof, finding her should eventually lead to them. He also gave orders that all the other houses Losley had inhabited were to be searched.

The tiny skull on the newel post turned out to be fixed in place by purple wax. ‘No,’ corrected Sefton, ‘ claret -coloured wax.’ A West Ham serial killer — how huge was this? Costain found himself smiling. He was now part of a successful operation and, for a bonus, not as a UC. The guys back home would have a fucking fit. This justified everything Lofthouse had done. She was right to have put him here, if this was the pay-off. This was the juice.

‘I would hate,’ he said, ‘to be doing PR for that football club tonight.’

‘Obvious she’d have to be West Ham,’ remarked Quill. ‘Just one stop away from Barking.’

They gradually explored every room. Upstairs was worse than down below. The bedroom was just a soiled mattress, the stink of ammonia so strong that none of them could linger there. Every inch of the walls of the upper floor was daubed with patterns, symbols and writing. Costain found player lists of what the internet confirmed were old West Ham squads, and what seemed to be maps of geographical features with labels in Latin. The smile was now constantly fixed to his face: he was a detective again. He saw Sefton glance in his direction, so he made sure to smile wider. Yeah, he’d made it all right, no thanks to posh boy over there. Ross brought up a translation on her phone. ‘The Latin looks like it might be a legal paragraph, a very old one, about the right, or otherwise, of the monarch to enter a private citizen’s dwelling.’

‘And they called her eccentric,’ said Quill.

Nothing they found there suggested to Costain that the place had been inhabited by anyone other than an old lady.

There was a trapdoor leading to a loft. The armed officers and forensics people had closed it again after they’d done a search up there. As Quill reopened it with a hook on a pole, a puff of stale air from inside made everyone cough. Quill insisted on going first, and who was Costain to deny him that? He climbed up the stepladder that the uniforms had brought with them, and cautiously stuck his head through the gap. A moment later, he called for the others to follow. He sounded excited once again.

The loft had been converted into one big room. It had been roughly boarded-out at some stage, and over the boards had been thrown a variety of dirty rugs. They’d been drawn on, too, in sticky black: lines, diagrams and tiny writing. It was even colder up here. The room was filled with West Ham memorabilia: scarves, hats, really old posters that were more like theatre bills, annuals and a copy of a team sing-along album sitting beside an ancient gramophone to play it on. There was one huge central feature: a wooden tub about six feet across. It didn’t have an original purpose in the loft, and it couldn’t have fitted through the trapdoor. It must have been assembled up here.

It contained only a huge pile of soil, the surface shaped into a familiar spiral. The room smelt of it, and it looked fresh and uncontaminated.

‘What’s the betting,’ said Quill, ‘that this soil’s the same type used to form the other spirals?’

‘Jimmy.’ Sefton was holding up a plastic sack gleefully. On it was written: Original West Ham Turf. Take the Irons spirit into your garden! There was a tightly folded roll of other such sacks stashed under a bench.

‘Here’s what Forensics were talking about.’ Ross’ voice sounded different. She was leaning over an iron cauldron.

They all went over to see. In the cauldron lay three small human skeletons, arranged in a rough circle, head to toe. There were still the tiniest fragments of meat on the bones. Smaller bones lay scattered across the bottom of the vessel.

Costain felt himself relax completely. Thanks to Lofthouse’s mad hunch and some good police work, he was once again on the up. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated, ‘serial killer house.’

Ross made sure she kept working, knowing the coppers were more used to this. They had a work culture to support them. She’d been quite surprised that Quill had asked her to come along, but, as he’d said, this operation was bizarre to start with, and ‘she’d pine away if left all alone in that Portakabin’. Which was, she guessed, the result of him noting the desperation she’d been trying to hide. From now on she’d have to get used to being operational, he’d said, too. And that had certainly felt better than the alternative. Until this . If she even stopped to think about what had happened here. . so she wouldn’t. Had Toshack known about the child murders? Maybe, yeah. He’d have been the kind willing to turn a blind eye, all right.

‘As long as it wasn’t on his own doorstep,’ said Costain, catching the expression on her face. She looked away. She didn’t like people being so close to her old world — or making guesses at what she was thinking.

And there was. . the other thing. The thing that, incredibly, this house was making her think about for the first time in years. She could do that if she had to, deliberately not think about stuff. It was. . just a coincidental thing, just an association. Children in a pot: that just made your mind go to a certain place, and that was a place she shouldn’t go. She got out her laptop and carried out a Full Business Objects Search, on the Crime Recording System. She could find only two unsolved missing-children cases for this part of London in the last three years, and both of those turned out to involve older individuals.

‘Has it really gone that far?’ said Quill, when she told him. ‘Bloody three children go missing, and nobody calls it in?’

‘These two modes are really different. Possible poison that leaves no trace. . and kids cooked in a pot. What sort of narrative has she put together for herself that connects those? She kills the former away, and these at home, probably.’ She slapped her hand on the wall, over and over, feeling more alive than she had since Toshack had been killed, and also feeling a little alarmed at the intensity of it. ‘It’s as if we’re seeing the outlying features of something more complicated. As if there are different killers with different MOs. . or something. We’re in this house, but we’re still not seeing. . what’s in the middle.’

‘If anyone finds a ripe, rosy apple,’ said Quill, ‘don’t touch.’

‘You reckon those three are Dopey, Grumpy and Sneezy?’ said Costain, indicating the cauldron.

Ross put it out of her mind again. She understood the context of these copper jokes: it was what people who dealt with horrors did. She’d once been shown round the paramedic control centre in High Barnet, and they’d put cartoons up of their call-outs — what they called their ‘shouts’ — with the highest body count. She wished she had it in herself to join in. For her there was even a little jolt now as she looked at Losley’s photo, even though she did it to reassure herself. This Losley woman was a complete stranger to her. But what had previously been bland had now certainly become sinister. No dead-eyed Myra Hindley, this one, that calm look on her face maybe saying: Ooh yes, if you had any to spare, she might be persuaded to snap up just one or two of your children.