Quill looked at the card and his eyes widened. He looked up at Vincent. ‘Tell me,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘Mr Vincent, have you ever experienced anything impossible?’

Sarah’s face was suddenly a picture.

Vincent seemed to falter. Here, Quill was sure now, was someone who knew exactly what he was talking about. ‘I … I don’t know what that is, and I don’t have time to get into it. Sarah, James, good evening.’ He moved swiftly off into the crowd.

Sarah looked aghast. ‘What the fuck, Quill?’

Quill took the business card from her hand and held it up beside the one he’d been given. To his eyes and his eyes alone, they were both spattered with freezing droplets of silver.

Chapter Ten

TEN

‘How did Sefton end up with “severe bruises on his arms”?’ asked Lofthouse.

Quill didn’t quite feel able to share all the details of Sefton’s experiment. ‘He failed to see a man about a bus,’ he said. The two of them were walking down a corridor in the Treasury, all polished wood and the smell of a carpet that was cleaned daily. Quill had asked her to come along to give him as much political clout as possible in what looked likely to be a difficult day. What they’d seen on the way in – protestors gathering in Parliament Square – had put them all on edge. This time the youths in the masks had been carrying an enormous puppet of the Toff character, held up by sticks. It held a bloody razor, doubtless made of felt. To Quill it felt as if this new Ripper was being elevated to the status of minor local god, a god that demanded sacrifice. Perhaps literally.

There was something else that was weird, too. As soon as they’d stepped into the precincts of the Houses of Parliament, he had felt a sudden lack of something, as if he’d walked into a recording studio and the ambient sound of the world had cut off. It had taken him a few paces to realize what was going on, then he’d walked back and stepped back and forth, oblivious to the glances he was getting, until he’d found a specific line where it happened. ‘It feels … safe in here,’ he’d told Lofthouse, who had raised an eyebrow at his performance. ‘Like past this line the power of London doesn’t work.’

‘That has to be deliberate.’