Coldfall Wood Page 12

  “It really is quite beautiful, isn’t it?” Viridius offered, just happy to feel the sun on his skin. He didn’t look to see if she agreed with him. There were different kinds of beauty and there was no denying that Sir Christopher Wren, Sir Charles Barry, and John Nash had built an incredible city. Even the new additions, the Shard and the Gherkin were things of beauty in their own right, their intrusion brutal against the skyline. If there had to be a last view, this wasn’t such a bad one, he thought to himself. He could feel himself failing fast. He knew the sensations that accompanied death far too intimately, although every time he suffered them they came as a fresh surprise. “Do you mind?” he reached into his pocket for the tobacco tin and that special cigarette. Despite the rising sun it was cold enough that he was glad of the coat.

  “Knock yourself out,” Ellie said. “Look, I didn’t come here to hear you say thanks. I’m trying to understand what happened back at your house. You were dead—”

  He cut her short, “Merely sleeping, though it is more akin to hibernation than forty winks.”

  “But that thing, that branch … how? Julie pulled it out of your mouth. Who did that to you?”

  “No one,” Viridius said, knowing he could never explain it. Instead, he offered her the cigarette. She took it from him, and put it to her lips as he took the lighter from his pocket to light it. He almost felt sorry for her, for what he was about to do to her, but reminded himself that the other one—he couldn’t remember than man’s name—was already marked. He had seen the Horned God, but more importantly, the Horned God had seen him. “There is more to this life than you can possibly hope to understand, dear lady,” he said as she inhaled her first breath of him. “Few can. Fewer still would want to.”

  “Is this where you ruin everything by telling me about stag kings and dimgates again? We were doing so well.” The cigarette tip flared redly as she sucked in another lungful of his essential being. Soon enough her perceptions would start to shift; like a junkie getting high.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, dear. This is where I apologize for ruining your life.”

  “That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” she said, smiling as she watched a couple of starlings bicker over a tasty morsel. She inhaled another breath of him.

  All that remained was to wake the magic within her; then he could go and put an end to his pain.

  “Tell me,” Viridius said, as though the thought had just occurred to him, “of all the things that you do for this city, what do you consider to be the most important?”

  The cigarette tip flared red again as more of his leaves smoldered to ash, their smoke filling her lungs. When she exhaled, the smoke drifted up in front of her face. “We keep the peace,” she started to say; then stopped herself. “But that’s just an aspect of what we do. The most important thing? We help those who can’t help themselves. Like yesterday, just before we found you, we were on the High Street where a young man had been stabbed to death because he’d fallen in love with the wrong girl. A few minutes later we found out that the girl had been killed as well. Someone needs to remember them. Someone needs to stand up and be a speaker for the dead. That’s what we do. We stop the world from simply forgetting the victims.”

  Viridius smiled, “The Speaker for the Dead,” he said, breathing the last of his life into the words. “How very true. And just what this world needs now.”

  Ellie didn’t notice the slight shift in emphasis as he named her; indeed, she didn’t notice him slump in his chair as the life left him. “I like to think so,” she agreed. “It’s important someone is there for the victims in all of this. We’re in such a rush for justice and retribution, but when it doesn’t come easily there are always so many more victims to fight for that some inevitably get forgotten. That isn’t right. We shouldn’t just forget. Not someone’s life. Not something so important.”

  “You are more right than you could ever know,” Viridius said, thinking of all the injustices that had been forgotten, the lives and sacrifices paved over and built upon to fashion the skyline before him now. “Someone must speak for the ghosts of London. I think you are the perfect choice for the role.” Viridius held out a hand. She helped him rise unsteadily, and together they walked right up to the waist-high wall that enclosed the rooftop terrace, and looked out over the edge, all the way down the dizzying drop to the Thames below.

  She snuffed the last of the cigarette out on the stone wall and flicked it over the side.

  “Well, we really should get you back down to your room, you’ll catch your death out here, and I need to go home and get some sleep before the rat race begins all over again.”

  She turned her back on the city, and in the process saw the old man’s body still slumped in the pew where he’d died a few minutes earlier.

  “I am so very, very sorry,” the old man’s ghost told her.

  “I don’t…”

  “I am out of time, but at least I can leave this place knowing that it is defended.”

  Viridius walked away from her, and long before he reached the pew his body faded into the rising sunlight and was no more.

  The potted plants were in full bloom.

  20

  Sykes and her partner, Melissa Banks, drove to the Kirmanis despite the fact it was less than five minutes’ walk from the station.

  They couldn’t get to the house on Fisher Row. The crowds were already gathering. There must have been 150 people outside the Kirmanis’ red-brick terrace. The curtains were drawn so no one could see in or out. There was a local television broadcast truck blocking half the street. They were in the process of setting up the camera unit for a report to feed the beast that was the twenty-four-hour rolling news cycle. Even when there was nothing to say they were more than prepared to fill the silence saying it. “This isn’t good,” Mel said. She had a gift for stating the obvious. Sara leaned closer to the wheel to flick the switch so the siren announced their arrival. The crowd parted reluctantly, giving them room to drive slowly down the white line in the middle of the road.

  They could hear the vile racist chants without rolling down their windows.

  Sara opened the door.

  The hatred amplified a hundredfold.

  She closed her eyes—counted to three to steady herself—then clambered out of the car to face the mob. The worst of it was that they looked so utterly normal but for the hate in their eyes. They could have been bank tellers, shop clerks, baristas, and sheet metal workers. All walks of life were there, and that was anything but comforting. “Okay, folks. I’m going to ask you nicely to go home. There’s nothing to see here. These people have done nothing wrong.”

  “Scum!” someone shouted.

  “Bastards!” came the answer, followed by the inevitable, “Fucking Pakis!”

  Mel climbed out of the car.

  “Look, this is a bad situation, but what you need to realize is that you’re making it worse. We are looking for Jamshid Kirmani. He’s not in there. His parents are. His baby sister is. I get it, you’re angry, but not at them. This isn’t helping things. Please, I’m going to ask you again, don’t give this lot,” she gestured dismissively toward the camera, “an excuse to plaster your faces all over the six o’clock news. Be smarter than that. Trust us. We all want justice for Ollie and Aisha.”

  “Like fuck you do,” someone shouted from the back of the crowd. The voice was strident, full of bitterness and pent-up frustration. “Ollie and Aisha were our kids, they grew up here; we all knew them,” the crowd parted so Sara could see the speaker. It was an elderly woman, in her seventies if she was a day, with blue fingers in fingerless mittens and nylon pop socks rolled down around the varicose veins of her ankles. She wore soft-soled slippers on her feet. She was the last person in the world Sara would have expected to swear with such vitriol, but that was the Rothery. “That worthless piece of shit killed my grandson. So, don’t expect me to just sit down in front of my television and wait for my turn to die. That piece of scum,” she pointed a tremb
ling—accusing—finger at the Kirmanis’ front door, “better hope you find him before we do.” Her promise was greeted by applause and shouts of agreement from the crowd.

  “Look, I get it,” Sara said, trying to be heard over the noise. “I really do. And my heart goes out to you, but all you are doing is terrorizing a family in there. Please. Go home.” She was aware of the camera on her and didn’t want to give them their sound bite, either.

  They moved away, grudgingly. Mutters of discontent followed them down the garden path.

  They didn’t need to knock on the door; it opened a crack before they reached it. Sara could make out the gold links of the security chain that wouldn’t have kept them safe from an irate toddler. “Mrs. Kirmani?” The chain rattled against the hasp and fell free and the door opened wider to a roar of anger from the other side of the hedge.

  “Come in,” the voice was timid against the backdrop of anger.

  Sara and Mel disappeared inside. The woman locked the door quickly behind them, sliding the security chain back into place as though it were the ultimate defense against a pitchfork-wielding mob. “Go through to the lounge, please.”

  The rest of the Kirmani clan had gathered in the small room. There were no free seats so they stood in the middle of the off-white carpet looking at the ring of faces. “Is it really true?” a girl of maybe fifteen asked. She had long raven-black hair and eyes to match. “What they’re saying about Jam? Did he really kill Ollie and Aye?” She used both names with familiarity, and obviously knew both victims.

  Sara nodded. “I’m afraid so. The assault was captured on video by a couple of girls in their class.”

  “My foolish boy,” the woman who’d let them into the house moaned and seemed to sink into herself; slumping against the doorframe. She needed it to keep her from falling. “What have you done?” The question went out to the one person who wasn’t there to answer for himself.

  “I know this is hard,” Sara said, “but I need you to think. Is there anywhere Jamshid might have gone? Friends or family who would hide him? You can see what it’s like out there. It’s important we find him before anyone else does. If there’s anything you can think of, a place we can start looking, now is the time to tell us.”

  “He’s got cousins in Watford and Bedford, but he hasn’t seen them since he was ten or eleven.”

  “His best friend went to Uni up in Newcastle,” the girl suggested.

  “Are they’re still in regular contact?” Mel asked.

  The girl shrugged. “Facebook, Twitter, that kind of thing. They don’t send love letters—”

  “Neysa!”

  “It’s okay,” Sara said, before it could turn into something. “Do you remember his name?”

  “Marcus French. He’s doing Business Studies.”

  “That’s great, thank you.” Before she could ask anything else the huge bay window shattered in a spray of glass. There were screams as a chunk of brick hit the side of an elderly woman’s face, opening a deep gash as she fell out of her seat. The others were up on their feet, screaming and yelling as chaos broke out inside the room. A bitter chorus of hate spilled in through the broken window. The net curtain flapped in the breeze. Shards of glass ground underfoot as people ran to help the fallen woman.

  Sara radioed the attack in, calling for backup to the Rothery hoping to stave off what felt like the inevitable escalation. “Stay here,” she told her partner, and went back outside to yell at the crowd, one voice against the mob. “Enough! There are children in there. That brick just hit an old lady in the head. I hope you’re proud of yourselves.” She leveled a finger at Ollie Underwood’s grandmother. “You need to stop this now.”

  “No, I don’t,” the old woman said. “They’re scum. Their kid deserves everything that’s coming to him.”

  Before she could argue, someone at the back of the crowd called out, “They’ve found a body in the woods! Look.”

  “It’s that kid,” someone else said, looking down at their own phone. “The footballer who went missing last night.”

  “Musa,” someone gave him a name.

  Her radio cracked to life, the call from the dispatcher directing officers to respond to an incident up at Coldfall Wood. Sara was already looking at the too-vivid photograph of Musa Dajani’s broken body that scrolled by under the hashtags #justice4ollie, #strikebackLondon, #aishainourhearts. The missing boy had been stripped naked and strung up from the iron letters that spelled out the forest’s name. His young body, stretched thin by the crucifixion pose—wrists bound by vines to the first and last O—had taken a battering before he’d died. It was a pitiful sight.

  Sara felt sick to her core, and so much worse as the old woman leaned in to get a good look at the picture, a vindictive smile cracking across her weather-worn face.

  “It’s a start,” the old woman said. “But it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t bring Ollie back. My grandson is still dead.”

  “And now someone else’s grandson is, too,” Sara snapped, unable to stop herself. “You did this. This boy is dead because of you. He’s the only innocent person in this whole fucking mess. So you tell me, who’s the scum here?” She had to stop herself from saying more, but the anger was there for all to hear, including the mics on the cameras. She turned her back on the old woman, shaking her head in disgust, and walked back down the short garden path.

  A second brick sailed over her head, missing her by a couple of inches. It powdered against the wall, leaving a red stain against the side of the Kirmanis’ house.

  Sara Sykes spun around on her heel, glaring at the crowd as she growled, “Which moron threw that?”

  The camera had caught it all, and the camera never lied.

  21

  Julie found Joshua Raines sitting by himself in a café on the South Bank, watching a tugboat wrestle with a deep-sea vessel. He had changed. He was a shadow of the man Julie had helped trap Seth Lockwood. Lockwood might have been in a prison where one year passed like a hundred, but Josh was the one aging that way. There was an empty espresso cup on the table beside him. A coffee-colored scum of espresso thickened around the white rim. A garishly illustrated paperback book picked up from the market stall beneath the bridge, lay open beside the cup, its spine cracked so that it lay flat on the wooden surface.

  Josh had his eyes closed, lost in thought.

  Julie Gennaro dragged back the second chair and joined him.

  “Julie,” Josh said, without opening his eyes.

  “Josh,” Julie said, all very polite. Their relationship had never been exactly normal, given how they’d first met. If ever a first impression was going to define a relationship, it was that one with Josh seeming to step out of a tear in the world, right in front of Julie’s squad car. Julie caught the waitress’s eye and pointed at the empty espresso cup, signaling two. He settled back into the uncomfortable chair. “You’re a hard man to find.”

  “Not really, I only go to three of four places these days, and none of them are exactly far from home.” Home, though, wasn’t the house on the Rothery he’d shared with his mum and grandfather; it was the secret flat he’d inherited from Boone Raines along with the mystery of Eleanor’s disappearance. He’d cleaned out the walls of crazy, taking down the newspaper cuttings and the old headshots and dismantled the crisscross of red threads, so the only reminder of Glass Town that remained was the map scorched into the floorboards, along with those three little words. Everything else was gone, if not forgotten. “Not to be rude, but what do you want?”

  Julie said, “World peace.”

  “Better get used to disappointment, mate.”

  “Indeed. Sadly, this isn’t a social visit.”

  “What am I supposed to have done?”

  “You remember when the old man said there would be consequences to banishing Seth?”

  “It’s not a day I’m likely to forget.”

  “Well, looks like it’s time to pay up. The way the old man explained it, it’s a two-way do
or, we opened a gateway to some sort of Hell when we banished Lockwood. He went in through the door, but something else came out while we were busy congratulating ourselves. One for one, that’s how Damiola said it.” That had Josh’s attention. He could see the fear ripple across the surface of Josh’s eyes. Josh knew those words; he lived with them underfoot every day.

  Julie was thinking about Myrna Shepherd, or the thing that had clothed itself in her glossy cinematic likeness. Julie knew it was Shepherd, because it was always Shepherd. He saw the actress’s face every single night in the darkest hours, when he woke sweating in a tangle of sheets. He couldn’t escape the memory of her devouring Taff. He didn’t know what memories haunted Josh. It was enough to know that they had a shared vision of Hell that began and ended with Glass Town.

  “It can’t be happening again,” Josh shook his head. “It’s over. We won.”

  “We did. At a price.”

  “I can’t do it again,” he reached instinctively for the empty espresso cup and stared into it before setting it aside uselessly. “Please don’t ask me to get involved. I don’t think I can.”

  “I saw the old man this morning. What we did, it’s affecting others now. Kids. They’re going to die if we don’t do something. I know you, Josh. You’re not going to sit there looking at the river sipping your coffee while kids are dying. Not when you know it’s your fault.”

  “Fuck you, Julie. I didn’t ask for any of this. Look at me. What do you see?” Before he could answer Josh had his own answer. “I’ll tell you what you see, a broken man. I had to sit with her while she died, Julie. I was right there, trying to be strong for Eleanor, trying to see the beauty in one final sunrise. And now you’re telling me we fucked up. That we opened some door and freed something worse than Seth? Eleanor’s dead. Boone’s dead. My mum. Dead. You see a pattern here? Seth took everyone I’ve ever cared about from me. He left me with nothing. Now you’re trying to tell me that wasn’t enough?”