He left the tube station, looking in every direction, half expecting to see the busy shopping street once more filled with Toffs. To his sheer relief, it was not. Nothing followed him out of the entrance. He waited half hidden in the doorway of a newsagent. He hit reply to one of Sefton’s panicked voicemail messages. ‘I’m at Finchley Road,’ he said. ‘I’m going to see what … oh fuck—’

That glow and the weight that came with it was somewhere above him. He looked up, above the level of the shops, and saw a new star appearing in the sky. It was like Tinkerbell dancing its way up out of the metropolis, heading round and round, on a circular course, a corkscrew that was heading right towards him. It took a moment for him to resolve that shape, once again, into the Ripper.

The figure was running in the air. It was jerking the razor in front of it, miming the action of what it still wanted to do to him. It would never give up, he knew. ‘Over here!’ A voice was shouting to him.

A big black car had pulled up at the kerb. From the driver’s seat, Gaiman was urgently beckoning him. ‘Get in! Quick!’

Quill ran for the car.

Chapter Nineteen

NINETEEN

Sarah Quill was waiting. She’d woken up that morning to find that Quill hadn’t come home. This was unusual, but hardly unique. She’d called his phone, expecting to find him having a bacon sandwich at some crime scene or in that Portakabin, which he’d described to her so many times that she could almost see it. She’d left a message on his voicemail, that surprised-sounding identification of himself, with a little hesitation which said, ‘Is this thing on?’ She’d asked him to call and got Jessica to say good morning to Daddy as she got her ready for nursery.

Then she’d gone to work, where there were new computers, and Geoff was showing everyone three choices of new Enfield Leader logos. There’d been a series of phone interviews about the promises made by central government concerning wheelie-bin collections. So many parts of London were burning now that they might as well announce which ones weren’t on fire. At lunch, eating a sandwich at her desk, Sarah called Quill once more, heard the start of the voicemail again, didn’t leave a message. She called the home phone and was relieved to find an answerphone message there but then frowned to hear that it was from the undercover Quill often talked about, Costain. He was asking her to call him back. He sounded worried.