‘Well, yeah, and thank you, but so did those two, that’s not what I was … Listen, do you want to go out for a drink?’

‘Yeah, bloody right now—’

‘No, I mean … I … think … okay this is what I texted you about.’ His gaze was darting all over her face. He looked so shaken. He was determined to get the words out. ‘Would you like to go out for a … drink. For dinner, maybe. With me. Tomorrow. That being Friday.’

Oh.

Oh no. Oh no. Absolutely not.

He was looking so seriously at her. There was something lost about it, something honest, as if he’d been shaken to the core and needed to tell her this. She knew she couldn’t trust how he looked.

But she found that she was smiling. On the verge of a laugh. Against her will. Sort of. She was shaken too. She was still, actually, shaking. This was the worst possible thing that she could do. She was laughing at herself.

But … she could still hold on to her secrets, couldn’t she? What, did she think she’d just tell him all he might want to know, just because they were on a date? She didn’t even know if he did want anything from her, besides the obvious. To think that was to think the worst of him.

Damn it. She wanted to hear what he had to say. She wanted to hear him in private. She wanted to hear him try to get close to her. She wanted to have some closeness in her life, wanted to be able to choose whether or not to hold it off.

She was flattered. He was beautiful. She would stay in control. She would not tell him those things it would be disastrous for him to hear.

She would find out if he was indeed hoping to discover those things.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Okay.’

Chapter Seven

SEVEN

Quill stood at the Ops Board, a marker pen in his hand. He’d slept badly the night before, with terrible dreams about being pierced, penetrated. Not so surprising, considering his closeness to a major explosion. Perhaps he was still in shock. He wondered whether people who did what his lot did could ever get a good kip, whether being in shock was his life now. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what have we discovered?’

‘That silver stuff,’ said Sefton, who looked like Quill felt. He took a pen and added to the concepts list, which had already gained several new entries this morning. ‘That’s the major connection to Operation Fog. It’s not just something that occurs at the Ripper crime scenes, but, I’d speculate, and note that I’m speculating—’

‘Noted,’ said Ross.

‘—that it’s the fuel which powers occult London.’

‘It was in the cracks of the made-up levels of the bar,’ said Costain. ‘Like the surface had fallen off and you could see the real power underneath.’