There was silver on him, and in the car. He would have to clean it all. He had been forbidden to give himself up. The deal outlined by the ghost that had been sent to meet him was very detailed, but it hadn’t, curiously, made any mention of how Quill was going to die, only that Gaiman would lure him into it. Gaiman got the feeling that the details had been improvised, a reaction to events.

He looked up and saw that the man who had offered him the deal, who had stood beside that ghostly visitor, was now nearby, in the middle of the road. He was well dressed, powerfully built, with a receding hairline and cold grey eyes. Whenever Gaiman had seen him he’d had a broad smile on his face; that was also the case now.

‘I did what you wanted,’ Gaiman said. He was shocked somehow to find his tone was still reasonable, that he sounded questioning, merely amazed at himself.

The man inclined his head, still smiling. Yup, I guess you did!

‘Everything I’ve read tells me you keep your side of a bargain. That you don’t, in fact, twist deals to your advantage like the Satans of literature. I want you to tell me again that, in return for Quill’s life, the people I named have now been freed from Hell.’

The man nodded. Perhaps, if he ever spoke, his voice would destroy all who heard it.

‘I told Quill’s team that if they caught the Ripper, they could start turning things around. There was nothing in your contract to say I couldn’t offer them hope.’

The man shrugged. His smile remained untroubled.

Gaiman took a last look around the artificial stillness of the bridge. Once more he made himself feel the full weight of what he had done. Then he got into his car and drove off. After a moment, the lights of London started to move again behind him.

Chapter Twenty-One

TWENTY-ONE

Costain drove the others back from the pathologist’s lab to Gipsy Hill. Sefton kept trying to find something on the radio other than bad news.

‘… actually one of the detectives working on a related inquiry, with no other apparent links to the other victims…’

‘That it’s come to this, that a Metropolitan Police detective inspector can be stabbed to death by what certainly appears to be the very suspect he’s pursuing, because he was the leader of a team of only four officers, working out of a Portakabin, with almost no resources. No, I am not using his death for political ends, whatever that means; I’m saying that with better funding he would have had backup, he would have had team members around him…’