Chapter 65

ABOUT THE FALLEN ONE

It was good to see Tash again. Better than he ever thought it would be. He felt he never wanted to leave her presence now. Always be here with her. Just sitting on her bed, talking. It was enough. More than enough. It was the world.

He and Roy had come over half-an-hour earlier. At the door, Tash nearly threw her arms around his neck. He could tell she wanted to. Roy was happy to look after his granddaughter in the living room while Faultless and Tash had some privacy.

She had wanted to tell him what she’d discovered. But first there were things she had to know.

“What did they do to you?” she asked.

“They tried to barbecue me.”

She flinched. Her sapphire eyes welled up.

“What happened?”

He told her.

She said, “You think it was the old geezer you saw when you arrived? The one outside the shop?”

“That’s right.”

“And he brought you to my dad’s place?”

“That’s what I think.”

“And . . . and he killed Graveney?”

“He had fire.”

“Fire,” she said and touched his face.

“Yes. Fire. He came with fire. From fire. I don’t know. I was fucked. Radio Rental. Probably hallucinating. But that’s what I saw.”

She nodded. He held her hand and kissed her wrist.

“Maybe you shouldn’t do that,” she said but made no effort to pull her hand away.

“Tash, I’d seen him before. The old man.”

“Yeah, outside the shop.” She shuffled closer, so her knee was touching his thigh.

“No,” he said. “Years ago.”

“How many years ago?”

“Nearly thirty five.”

She furrowed her brow. “What?”

“I . . . I dreamt him bringing me here as a baby.”

“A dream. Are you like me? Like Jasmine?”

He shook his head. “What did the letter say?”

“It said, ‘To my children’s children and those who follow,’ and it was written by someone called Richard Troy. He wrote it in 1666. I guess he was one of my ancestors. One of Jasmine’s. He said we are seers.”

“Seers?”

“We can see. Dream. Have visions. Psychics, I suppose. Do you believe someone can be psychic?”

“I’ve heard loads of people claim they were.”

“What about them that help the cops?”

“They don’t help the cops. They say they do. When there’s a murder, they ring up and say stuff like, ‘I think the body’s here or there,’ and ‘I saw so-and-so. ‘Police have just got to follow up on those leads. No choice. A lead is a lead, no matter how shit. When they do, the psychic can say they helped the police—which isn’t a lie, despite being bollocks.”

“You think if I see something I should tell the cops?”

He thought about it.

“You should, I guess.”

“So you think I am psychic?”

He said nothing.

She looked away. “This Richard Troy, he says we go right back to the beginning of time. We . . . my ancestors . . . we were chosen to . . . to hunt this evil. Hunt it wherever it appeared.”

He listened. He looked at her. He thought how beautiful she was. For the first time while gazing at her, Rachel stayed out of his mind. Instead, there was only Tash.

“He says, this Troy, he says London had just burned down. A great fire, he called it.”

“The Great Fire of London. Started by accident in a bakers in Pudding Lane. Not far from London Bridge.”

Tash shook her head. “Not according to Richard. He says they were chasing this . . . this thing, this dark angel, he calls it. The fallen one. He’d got free. He wrote that, ‘Three had been ripped, and the evil sought out two more of my kind.’ It was this fallen one who started the fire. But they trapped it. This Troy fella says they burned the wounds of Christ into its body and locked it up in a coffin weighed down with lead. Tossed it into the Thames. Watched it sink.”

“What’s that got to do with all of this?”

“Charlie, don’t you see? It’s Jack the Ripper, ain’t it.”

“You think Jack the Rippers come back to life?”

“You found that briefcase.”

“Montague Druitt’s come back to life?”

“Neither, Charlie. It’s the fallen one. The dark angel. ‘Three had been ripped, and the evil sought out two more of my kind.’ That’s what Troy said. And in Jonas Troy’s notebooks, he says that the Ripper victims in 1888 in Whitechapel were seers, too.”

Faultless narrowed his eyes. He was trying to link everything. Jack the Ripper. The fallen one. Dark angels. Seers. And the old man with the little tuft of hair on his chin. They were all pieces of information flying about, refusing to join up and make sense.

Tash said, “Jonas Troy says that Jack—that’s what the newspapers started to call him—failed to rip Elizabeth Stride properly. She wasn’t the fifth. There were only four. He was looking for a fifth victim, so he could be freed from a curse. It says in the notebooks that . . . the five wounds of Christ bound this evil figure. Only blood can unbind him, it says. And five deaths will free him.”

Faultless stared into space.

Tash carried on talking. “Jonas says this is how it’s always been—this evil thing hunted by . . . by the seers, and the seers themselves hunted by him in return. They’re caught in a vicious circle. He can’t be killed, though; he can only be contained, it says.”

“Everything can be killed.”

“It . . . it says he can’t.”

Faultless looked her in the eye. She was terrified. Her confusion and dread was obvious in her face.

“So what’s the point if he can’t be killed?”

Tash swallowed. She was pale. She said, “Jonas writes that if this evil he hunts kills five seers and takes . . . takes what he calls ‘the gift’ from them, he will rule the whole world, and it would be hell on earth.”

After a while, Faultless said, “How does he get free in the first place? If this Richard Troy flung him in the river in the 17th century, how did he get out of the coffin to kill in 1888?”

Studying the notes, Tash said, “Blood can unbind him . . . that’s what it says.” She flicked through the pages of one of Troy’s notebooks. “Here . . . here, it says that a woman called Martha Tabram was killed on August 7, 1888—about three weeks before the first Ripper victim, Mary Ann Nichols, was killed. Jonas says here that . . . ” She tailed off and licked her lips, then coughed.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, just scared.”

He stroked her arm. She held his gaze for a few seconds. Then he said, “Tell me about Martha Tabram.”

She looked at the notes again. “J-Jonas says she was found at somewhere called George-yard-buildings in Whitechapel by a laborer. She’d . . . she’d been stabbed—oh my God, Charlie—she’d been stabbed thirty-nine times. Jonas says she was killed to free this evil from the curse. He says this thing, this spirit, can . . . can call to the evil in men’s hearts. He is always calling out to it, says Jonas here. Even while he’s trapped in the curse. He reaches out to anyone who approaches his place of burial, tempting them, urging them to spill blood for him. Blood can unbind him. And then, when he’s free, he comes after the seers.” She looked up at Faultless. “You . . . you think those lads in the lock-up freed this . . . this thing from its curse?”

He shook his head. It was difficult to accept Jonas Troy’s ramblings. Faultless liked evidence. Just because there wasn’t any, you shouldn’t immediately leap to a supernatural conclusion.

“Charlie . . . Charlie, if this is true, and he’s looking for seers to kill, he’s looking for me and Jasmine. He’s going to kill us.”