Sefton felt the great weight of what was down there, the enormous anger, clear now. It still wasn’t free. He looked to Ross. She was obviously feeling it too. One of them had to go down there. Him, because of his greater experience of dealing with supernatural beings? Or her, because if what was down here was connected to the Ripper and did somehow share the same fingerprints, then it had shown itself unwilling to hurt women?

Ross’ phone rang.

She answered it, hands fumbling with it, and as she listened to whoever was on the other end of the line, Sefton saw the expression on her face become one of absolute horror.

*   *   *

Russell Vincent stood up from his desk and stretched. He wandered to the window of his upper-floor apartment in a tower block of one of his many subsidiaries in Wapping and looked out to see, in so many directions, London burning. Great palls of smoke were drifting across the summer night. Concentrations of fire. It was like looking at a volcanic landscape. It was all down to him.

He had worked nearly three-quarters of the way down his little list, cutting every trail that could lead back to him and going on to attack his list of enemies, slicing through employee and celebrity and politician alike. It was fortunate, actually, now he knew what the Ripper wouldn’t do, that he hadn’t used any of his female staffers to act as his proxies in occult London. He had done his research, confident that the night of the strike was coming, finding out where every one of his targets was going to be, checking in on their dreams. No reasonable evidence could point to him. Okay, someone might well say, one day, what a coincidence that all these people had grudges against Russell Vincent. But how could he have been responsible? What had happened was impossible! The social landscape of Britain was about to change, anyway, and would make such speculations in public much harder to make.

He was genuinely sorry he’d had to kill Challoner. The man hadn’t even considered being disloyal, and it pleased Vincent to kill only when he had to, to show noblesse oblige to his employees. But Challoner was weak and might crack under questioning, and so, ever since Quill had found that business card with his phone number on it, Challoner had been on Vincent’s death list for tonight.