Quill looked out over Hell’s London. There it was: not just this outer borough beneath him, but, at an angle to the horizon, the real London. He was looking down on it. London in summer, a blissful aerial view that made Quill feel an agony of wanting and loss. He could see it in several different ways, he realized. There was the physical city, there was a sort of contour map of rushing energies, and there was … as if it had been built there, a great wheel, the structure of which was threaded through everything, that cut across everything. The wheel was made of ideas made by people, or imposed on them. It had gone wrong, he saw: it was moving the wrong way. Right now, there was nothing he could do about that, so eventually he looked elsewhere.

He could see Jason Forrest’s limited point of view, the history of the historical Jack the Ripper, the warring viewpoints of the occult community. He could see whatever concepts he wanted to see. He found himself automatically thinking about Sarah, and then suddenly he was looking at her, and he knew where she was on the map as he pulled his attention away from her.

Oh, oh, that was too painful. If he stayed here he was going to have to do it again. Again and again. What could he look at that was more practical, that could give him a despairing hint of his duty again? He looked again at the back of his hand, at the phone number he’d written there and memorized through repetition.

He looked back to the real London to find all the places Russell Vincent might be.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

TWENTY-SEVEN

EARLIER ON THE EVENING THAT QUILL RETURNED TO LIFE

Costain drove the van into the car park of St Gertrude’s Church in the part of Enfield known as World’s End and parked. He composed himself for a moment. Then he got out.

The facade of the church was bathed in spotlights on this still not very cold night. They threw deep shadows across the porch. As he approached the building, Costain saw a figure standing there, then stepping out to meet him. It was a young woman in clerical dress, a worried look on her face.

‘Reverend Pierce?’

‘You must be Sergeant Costain. Okay, let’s not waste any time.’ She sounded like an Oxbridge graduate, calm and professional. She was somehow more modern than Costain had expected her to be.

‘I was surprised when I read you did this.’