She was flattered. He was beautiful. She would stay in control. She would not tell him those things it would be disastrous for him to hear.

She would find out if he was indeed hoping to discover those things.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Okay.’

Chapter Seven

SEVEN

Quill stood at the Ops Board, a marker pen in his hand. He’d slept badly the night before, with terrible dreams about being pierced, penetrated. Not so surprising, considering his closeness to a major explosion. Perhaps he was still in shock. He wondered whether people who did what his lot did could ever get a good kip, whether being in shock was his life now. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what have we discovered?’

‘That silver stuff,’ said Sefton, who looked like Quill felt. He took a pen and added to the concepts list, which had already gained several new entries this morning. ‘That’s the major connection to Operation Fog. It’s not just something that occurs at the Ripper crime scenes, but, I’d speculate, and note that I’m speculating—’

‘Noted,’ said Ross.

‘—that it’s the fuel which powers occult London.’

‘It was in the cracks of the made-up levels of the bar,’ said Costain. ‘Like the surface had fallen off and you could see the real power underneath.’

‘Right,’ said Sefton. ‘I don’t think, when everything’s working as it’s meant to, that you’re supposed to be able to see this goo. Like with blood in a human body.’

‘So, applying that to the Ripper case,’ said Ross, ‘I think it’s possible that it means that our supernatural assailant got wounded in the struggle with either the first or both of the victims.’

Quill nodded. ‘What the hell,’ he asked, looking to Sefton again, ‘was that enormous river of the stuff?’

‘Maybe the source of all this power? I have no idea what it is, or where it is, or even if there … is a where…’

Quill saw the sleeplessness around Sefton’s eyes, the burden on his shoulders. He’d never killed anyone himself. He’d known a couple of coppers in firearms units who had; it had never left them. He wished he could help Sefton with that burden. He hoped that maybe there was something in his philosophy, in the fact that he was the one who looked more deeply into the occult stuff, that could help him, but Quill suspected there couldn’t be. ‘Did you see the gold stuff threaded through it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Ross, and held up a page in her notebook. ‘It looked like what was on the walls of Losley’s house, on her pile of soil—’

‘On what we thought was a sort of hyperlink in that book in her lock-up,’ said Costain.