Paul Cornell - The Severed Streets

The media were, of course, even with the little they knew, going apeshit about the killings. The Independent was calling this second murder ‘the final failure of authority’ and the Sun had gone with ‘Day of the Mob’. The Herald was still very much implying that the Toff protestors must somehow be to blame, and that the CCTV footage from the car attack had somehow been tampered with. Quill wondered how many news stories over the years had been influenced by stuff from what was now his area of expertise, and how much impossibility, before the blinkers had been taken off, he’d seen euphemized or made ‘sense’ of. That paper, and a couple of others, had long since wandered away from facts into what Sarah called ‘opinion leads’ — meaning, so far as Quill could see, fiction — which the Herald usually used to cover half the front page with furious wordage that led up to a big headline. ‘People don’t buy newspapers for the news now,’ she’d said. ‘They buy a voice that agrees with them. The Herald knows that best of all and is angling itself towards a future when all the papers will be like that.’ Quill hoped that by that point some kind soul might have put him out of his misery. The Herald regarded the Coalition government, incredibly, as far too middle of the road and wishy-washy, and it wanted a crackdown on, well, everything, as far as he could tell. Every now and then, someone on the news would opine that the paper might soon declare its support for some other, currently minor, party further to the right. That would, people said, be a game-changer. Quill wasn’t sure and didn’t care very much at the moment. To him it was all bloody people doing what bloody people did.

‘At the end of all this,’ he said, ‘when I retire, maybe you can write the book.’

‘By then we’ll be living in a land where what you lot deal with is accepted, will we? I don’t know if I’m looking forward to that. I keep thinking that we should send Jessica to school somewhere outside London when she’s old enough.’

‘But-’

‘I mean boarding school. You have to stay here to fight this stuff.’

‘But-’

‘And we can talk about this sometime in the next five years.’ She picked up her iPad. ‘I’m just checking on the headlines. Not contributing to them. At all. Just looking. Shit.’

Quill didn’t like how her expression had changed. ‘What?’

She held up the front page of the Herald site so he could see the headline. This time it was short and to the point:

YOURS TRULY, JACK THE RIPPER

Quill grabbed the tablet off her. ‘How the fuck did they get that?’

‘Well, this is the Herald, the cleanest newspaper in Britain, as they proudly state. So they’ll just have been looking through the window of that house with a long lens. Or had an anonymous photo emailed to them. Or something equally ethical. Dear God, I could have beaten the Herald to what’s turned out to be an exclusive for them. By about a minute. It’s an exquisite form of torture.’ She gave him a deliberately manic grin, threw back her tea and banged the mug down on the table. ‘Have a nice day at work, dear.’

* * *

Quill knew exactly what he was going to see when he entered Lofthouse’s office at Gipsy Hill. Sure enough, there it was: the Herald on her desk.

‘In case I hadn’t heard,’ he said.

She gave him a wry look and daintily dropped the newspaper into the wastebasket. ‘Tell me.’

Quill paused for a moment, returning her calm expression. He wished he could ask her to tell him what she knew. But he had learned from their first few regular meetings that it wouldn’t get him anywhere. He was still getting used to being able to talk to her about impossible things. ‘We found traces of the silver liquid that you can’t see on the exterior wall at what would have been the exit point of the assailant. There were a few drops of it in the garden, but no major deposits, and nothing had been disturbed, suggesting, once again, an airborne escape route.’

‘You’ve talked to the wife?’

Quill recounted his interview with Jennifer Staunce. She had had a terrible expression on her face, not just the grief and horror Quill had seen so many times before, but a dubious and suspicious look that he was starting to recognize: she was shocked that her home, her security, had been violated, but her rational mind still couldn’t see how it could be so. ‘Geoff … had just turned down the sound on the television,’ she’d said. ‘He turned it down, and so we could hear the noise from those … Toffs they call them, outside, chanting from the street. So strange to have them here. Disturbing. He was about to make a phone call. To his brother. He’s in property, in Northampton. They talk about this time every week. That’s what he said he was going to do. He’s a creature of habit: nap every afternoon, he always likes the same things for his dinner. So I went into the kitchen to make some coffee. The percolator is quite loud, I didn’t hear … I didn’t even hear him scream or anything like that, I just heard … some odd noises, sounds of movement. So I went back in and … there he was. Being … hauled around. Already … already obviously … by something I couldn’t see. I didn’t get to see who was doing it. Geoff … must have been in the way. All I could think of was … they’ve got in. They’re in here.’

‘They?’ Quill had asked.

‘Those protestors. After what happened to Michael Spatley, I’d been thinking that Geoff wasn’t safe on the streets. But in here…! I’ve been a copper’s wife for thirty years, Mr Quill. I thought we were past him being in the line of fire. High office never suited him; he’s had nightmares with every promotion in the last couple of years. I’m rambling. Sorry. I ran, I’m sorry — I just thought of what he’d want me to do, and I was such a coward!’ She’d stopped and visibly steadied herself. She’d known what Quill needed from her. ‘They … say there was … a message? Something about Jewish people?’

Quill had nodded. ‘Is there anyone of Jewish ancestry in your or Mr Staunce’s family, ma’am?’

‘Not that I know of. We have some Jewish friends. Or I think we must do. It’s not something you ask, is it?’

‘Thinking back, was there any sign of an intruder?’

‘No. They must have … I don’t know. I didn’t take more than two steps towards the … Geoff … the … I could see … I ran straight out of the room, not to the door, because I was thinking, If they’re in here, if they’re in here, I’m next, and I have to tell someone. So I ran into the downstairs toilet, because that’s got a bolt on it, and I slammed it, and thank God I still had my phone on me, and I called Ben at the office. And that’s where they found me.’

Lofthouse nodded in appreciation now. ‘Good for her.’

‘Very good, in the circumstances. The first unit on the scene broke a window to get in rather than try to batter down a front door that was still deadlocked and secure. If she’d gone to the body, if she’d got a single splash of blood on her, she might have already been arrested.’

‘And she might still be, despite, once again, the lack of weapon at the scene.’

‘She also doesn’t seem a likely fit for daubing messages about the Jewish friends she might or might not have. There was CCTV in front of the building. My lot got a look at the recordings, and we saw the same glowing figure leaving the scene. But nothing new.’

‘What about the wording of the message?’

‘It’s spelled differently to the original version and has better grammar, but the records of the time give three different versions of what that message actually said. So it might be that our Jack continues to write exactly the same thing he always did. Or perhaps he writes it in whatever the current vernacular is.’