Free The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell Page A

were standing in a backstreet behind the station, flanked by fenced-off brownfield sites, but there were no vehicles or workers, and they could smell the scent of undisturbed mud baking in the summer heat, suggesting that nothing was actually being built.Costain associated that smell with his childhood because nothing really changed.There were school gates over there, and the map he was looking at on his phone showed a sports centre down the road.House prices would have been shooting up before this latest recession, nice people coming in … and then it had all fallen backwards, as it always did.He glanced over and saw Ross was looking at her phone too.
    ‘Jewish cemetery round the corner,’ she said under her breath.
    ‘One thing we should be thinking about,’ said Costain, also in a whisper, struck by a sudden thought, ‘is, if the murders are about Jack the Ripper being remembered, why aren’t they happening right here?Everything we’ve seen like this before – from Berkeley Square to when Losley got powered up – it all stayed put where it was.Or where it was most associated with, like your ships.’
    ‘Yeah.’Ross took out one of her enormous rough books and wrote it down.
    Costain found himself taking pleasure in that.‘Ever since we found those files in Docklands—’
    She suddenly looked straight at him, as if he’d caught her out, then looked away again, as if she’d revealed too much of herself. Interesting. ‘What?’she said, finding something else to write.
    He drew closer to her and she closed the book, as if to stop him seeing inside it.‘The Continuing Projects Team were obsessed with architecture,’ he said.‘Maybe our two victims were just in the wrong place, kind of like deadly feng shui.’
    Ross nodded, but she didn’t look convinced.Her face wasn’t giving anything away.
    ‘Perhaps you’d like to share with the class?’Fennix had stopped and, having realized that Ross and Costain weren’t going to shut up, had decided to mock them for it.That had got a laugh too.
    Get many tips, do you? Costain flashed the man his most generous grin.‘We’re just fascinated with this stuff, mate.Tell us more.We were just saying there’s a Jewish graveyard round the corner—’
    ‘Ah, yes.’The actor nodded solemnly.‘We’ll be visiting the site of the original eerie message implicating our Judaic friends, found over a piece of a victim’s soiled clothing, later.Was there a Jewish conspiracy involved?Is that conspiracy still afoot in London today, behind two modern murders?Was Jack’s original message a protest about the capitalist excesses of his own times, which resonates in the modern day?Or is it the other way round?’He quickly looked at his tour party, as if to gauge their sensibilities and/or ethnicities.‘Is it a conspiracy to blame these terrorist acts on the Jews?Are they to be the fall guys for the New World Order yet again?Were these prostitutes – I mean, these proper young ladies –’ he paused for the delayed laugh again – ‘slaughtered according to secret religious ceremonies as per the request of the secret rulers of the world, the Illuminati?Perhaps we shall see.Perhaps.But let us begin at our starting point, the bloody scene before us.Imagine it!’With a sweep of his cape, he walked over to a wall.He pointed to the kerb beside it.‘How much scrubbing did it take to remove every trace of such a scrubber?’Perhaps knowing that the line wouldn’t translate, he moved swiftly on.‘She’d been the wife of a printer’s machinist.’Costain didn’t know what that was, and suspected, given the ease with which the phrase had come out, neither did this bloke; it was just one of those things that got written down and repeated.It sounded as if Fennix had added his modern conspiracy rhetoric to an older script at the last minute.It was hardly convincing.But the crowd seemed to be lapping it up.He continued, ‘But she was too fond of the bottle, and their marriage