The media were, of course, even with the little they knew, going apeshit about the killings. The Independent was calling this second murder ‘the final failure of authority’ and the Sun had gone with ‘Day of the Mob’. The Herald was still very much implying that the Toff protestors must somehow be to blame, and that the CCTV footage from the car attack had somehow been tampered with. Quill wondered how many news stories over the years had been influenced by stuff from what was now his area of expertise, and how much impossibility, before the blinkers had been taken off, he’d seen euphemized or made ‘sense’ of. That paper, and a couple of others, had long since wandered away from facts into what Sarah called ‘opinion leads’ – meaning, so far as Quill could see, fiction – which the Herald usually used to cover half the front page with furious wordage that led up to a big headline. ‘People don’t buy newspapers for the news now,’ she’d said. ‘They buy a voice that agrees with them. The Herald knows that best of all and is angling itself towards a future when all the papers will be like that.’ Quill hoped that by that point some kind soul might have put him out of his misery. The Herald regarded the Coalition government, incredibly, as far too middle of the road and wishy-washy, and it wanted a crackdown on, well, everything, as far as he could tell. Every now and then, someone on the news would opine that the paper might soon declare its support for some other, currently minor, party further to the right. That would, people said, be a game-changer. Quill wasn’t sure and didn’t care very much at the moment. To him it was all bloody people doing what bloody people did.

‘At the end of all this,’ he said, ‘when I retire, maybe you can write the book.’

‘By then we’ll be living in a land where what you lot deal with is accepted, will we? I don’t know if I’m looking forward to that. I keep thinking that we should send Jessica to school somewhere outside London when she’s old enough.’

‘But—’

‘I mean boarding school. You have to stay here to fight this stuff.’

‘But—’

‘And we can talk about this sometime in the next five years.’ She picked up her iPad. ‘I’m just checking on the headlines. Not contributing to them. At all. Just looking. Shit.’

Quill didn’t like how her expression had changed. ‘What?’

She held up the front page of the Herald site so he could see the headline. This time it was short and to the point:

YOURS TRULY, JACK THE RIPPER

Quill grabbed the tablet off her. ‘How the fuck did they get that?’