Quill seemed to consider for a moment, then, just before he was gone out of her eyeline he nodded, which was a relief.

She headed for the stairs, and the man beside them met her gaze. He made a gesture so quick she couldn’t follow it, a grab of nothing, and she felt the air flatten against her face … as she mentally recited the couple of lines of nonsense syllables that Sefton had taught them from the scroll he’d found in the Docklands ruins. She’d been repeating them to herself ever since so it was second nature.

He nodded her through.

Without looking back, she was aware of Quill doing the same and being allowed to follow.

She walked quickly down the stairs. At the bottom was another set of doors exactly like the ones that led into the bar on the floor above. Ross marched right in as if she belonged.

*   *   *

In the milling group waiting beside the stairs, Sefton had managed to strike up conversations with a few people, by just rudely butting in. It seemed to be the sort of interaction they were used to. He was being the classic undercover – not asking questions, but instead, annoyingly, moving the conversation away from the subject, making people focus on it again, while listening to what was said in the background. It turned out that what was most on the minds of these people was what was going to change about this venue. They mentioned a number of other pubs they might try, and Sefton made a mental note of them. Then there was the issue of whether or not the Ripper murders were going to be pinned on ‘their lot’. These people were unsure if there was anyone aware enough of ‘their lot’ to be doing any such pinning. There was a little bit of a paranoid streak to them; they seemed pretty certain that soon enough bad things would happen. He caught whispers from people who’d look in his direction, and when he noticed and returned the gaze, look away: too many outsiders, too many changes. He heard someone refer to the Ripper as ‘proper London’, but there were urgent denunciations of that until the person who’d said it had to admit that they didn’t know anything about what was going on now, that they’d been talking about the Ripper as part of London history.

The people who were doing the talking here, all in all, seemed to need to gossip about everything surrounding the Ripper murders but appeared not to have any idea how or why they were being committed. They were as scared and puzzled as any other slice of the general public. Like the general public, they were in general much more concerned about their own patch. But there were also those here who weren’t talking. Sefton saw a couple of sighing expressions, a couple of looks that suggested that what might be the Sighted members of this community had seen what Quill’s team had seen when they’d watched the news on television. Those were the ones who didn’t gossip so easily.