The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell Read Free Book Online Page B

of the car park outside the chippy and breathed in the smell of frying.The old woman in a hijab they always saw around here trod slowly past, selling the Big Issue. Sefton bought one.
    ‘How are your team getting on now?’
    ‘I can’t talk about the case.’
    ‘Which is why I’m asking about the people.’
    ‘I think there’s something up with Ross.’
    ‘Really?’Joe followed the people Sefton talked about as if they were characters on TV, never having met them, and Sefton almost laughed at the interest in his voice.
    ‘Ever since she got into the Docklands documents, she’s kind of suddenly gone back to how she was: all curled up against the world.Maybe it’s that she’s found something terrible and doesn’t want the rest of us to have to deal.Maybe she’s waiting until she’s got all the details.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘I don’t know.I don’t even know if she and Costain are rubbing each other up the wrong way or…’
    ‘Just rubbing each other?’
    ‘I hope it’s that.It’s weird when I get a feeling about a person now.I’m trying to let myself be aware of the Sight all the time, to listen to something whispering in my ear, but, doing that, you start to wonder what’s the Sight and what’s just you.If I’m not careful I’m going to start being like one of those toddlers that notices a bit of gum on the pavement and hasn’t seen that before, so he squats down and keeps looking at it until his mum goes, “Erm, no – big wide world, more important.”The others want me to keep looking into the London occult shit, to be that specialist, and, you know, I like that responsibility, but they don’t really get that that kind of leads you away from being a police officer.Crime stories: all about getting everything back to normal.This stuff: there is no normal.’
    ‘Crime stories say the centre can hold; in reality, it’s going to fall apart any minute.Maybe all this chaos lately is something to do with the sort of thing you lot investigate.’
    ‘Yeah, we’re all wondering about that: that maybe the shittiness of life right now is all down to the Smiler and how he’s “moved the goalposts” and changed London.That’d be a comforting thought, eh?’
    ‘Only for you is that comforting.’Joe, having finished his own, took one of Sefton’s chips.‘I think the riots and protests would have happened anyway.The protestors are the only people left who give a shit.You just expect a sort of … self-serving hypocrisy from politicians now.You’d be amazed what the guys in my office said about Spatley.Nobody was like, “He deserved it,” but…’ He let the sentence fall away with a shrug.
    Sefton let his gaze drift along the street full of people.‘Bloody general public.Even with London falling apart in the world they can see, all they talk about is the royal baby and The X Factor and all that shit—’
    ‘You like The X Factor. ’
    ‘—while my lot are involved with … the secret of eternal life, making space out of nothing, extra “boroughs” that don’t seem to be in this universe.You know what’d be really good?’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘You remember when I caught that “ghost bus” and went … somewhere else, somewhere away from this world, and talked to … whatever that being was, that called himself Brutus and dressed like a Roman?’
    ‘You really told your workmates about this?’
    ‘I really did, but even when I did it sounded like something I’d dreamed or made up.Anyway, just having met some sort of … big London being … that the others hadn’t, I felt like I’d started to get a handle on this stuff.But as time goes on I’m starting to feel more and more that I did dream him.It’s not as if he gave me much in the way of solid advice, a path I could follow.He didn’t leave me with anything certain, with any mission in life.And without that certainty, there’s this … gap. There’s all sorts of stuff I want to ask him about.I’ve made an actual list,