‘Right,’ said Sefton. ‘I don’t think, when everything’s working as it’s meant to, that you’re supposed to be able to see this goo. Like with blood in a human body.’

‘So, applying that to the Ripper case,’ said Ross, ‘I think it’s possible that it means that our supernatural assailant got wounded in the struggle with either the first or both of the victims.’

Quill nodded. ‘What the hell,’ he asked, looking to Sefton again, ‘was that enormous river of the stuff?’

‘Maybe the source of all this power? I have no idea what it is, or where it is, or even if there … is a where…’

Quill saw the sleeplessness around Sefton’s eyes, the burden on his shoulders. He’d never killed anyone himself. He’d known a couple of coppers in firearms units who had; it had never left them. He wished he could help Sefton with that burden. He hoped that maybe there was something in his philosophy, in the fact that he was the one who looked more deeply into the occult stuff, that could help him, but Quill suspected there couldn’t be. ‘Did you see the gold stuff threaded through it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Ross, and held up a page in her notebook. ‘It looked like what was on the walls of Losley’s house, on her pile of soil—’

‘On what we thought was a sort of hyperlink in that book in her lock-up,’ said Costain.

Sefton went back to the concepts section of the board. ‘If the silver goo is the power source, the fuel…’ He wrote two headings in the concepts column. ‘Then maybe the gold thread is the software, the instructions.’

‘So that could be what we touched when we touched the soil?’

‘Maybe. And perhaps if we’d looked at that soil at a microscopic level once we had the Sight, we’d have seen silver goo in it too. The software and the power source.’

‘Perhaps. But that still doesn’t tell us why it was just us four, does it?’

There was silence for a moment. Quill supposed the others felt like he did about that central question of their existence. They all needed to know, at heart, if they’d been chosen for some grand quest or had been the victims of an accident. He wondered again if Lofthouse knew at least that much.

‘John, the Rat King,’ said Sefton, starting a new topic, ‘seemed to me to be … not actually a real human being – he said so himself – something like that bouncer, but with … consciousness, ideas of his own, a character, not limited like they were in the bouncer – more like Brutus.’

‘He went away downstairs,’ said Ross. ‘The bearded gatekeeper seemed calm enough to evacuate that way, so I think we can assume any lower floors just detached themselves and weren’t destroyed in the explosion.’