“No.”

“Sensible. You can’t see the future, there’s no such thing. It’s all bets. You’ll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn’t mean either of them’s wrong.”

“Might be,” Dane said.

“They might,” Moore said. “But it’s all degrees of might. You want your prognosticators to argue. You never told us what you dreamed, Billy. Something coming up? Everyone can feel something coming up. Since the kraken disappeared. And no one disagrees.” He brought together his hands in a reverse explosion. “And that’s wrong.

“This is a recording we made of a consultation with the Londonmancers,” he said.

“What’s…?” Billy said.

“Well you may ask,” said Dane.

“Voices of the city,” Moore said.

“They wish.”

“Dane, please. Oldest oracles in the M25.”

“Sorry,” Dane said. “But Fitch has been off for years. Just tells you what you want to hear. People just go for tradition…”

“Some of the others are sharper,” said someone else.

“You’re forgetting,” the Teuthex said. “It was the Londonmancers called it first. Fitch may be past it, true. People go out of tradition, true.”

“Sentiment,” Dane said.

“Maybe,” Moore said. “But this time it was him called it. He’s been begging people to pay attention.” He pressed Play.

“-best if you ask,” said a curt digital voice.

“That’s Saira,” Moore said.

“-what you’re here for.”

“Something’s coming up, underneath everything.” It was the Teuthex. “We’re looking for a path between possible-”

“Not this time.” An old man’s voice. He muttered in and out of sense. He sounded urgent, in a confused way. “Have faith, but you have to do something, understand? You’re right, it’s coming, and you have to… It’s all ending.”

“Have faith in what?” the Teuthex said. “In London?”

The old man Fitch maundered about back streets and hidden histories, described pentacles in the banalities of town planning. “Time was I’d have said that,” he abruptly said.

“I don’t understand…”

“No one does. I know what you think. What did they tell you? Did anyone tell you what’s coming? Did they? No. They all know something is. None of them saw any way past it, did they? Something,” Fitch said, and his voice sounded like the voice of dust, “is coming. London’s been telling you. Something happened and there’s no running the numbers. No argument this time. No getting away from it.”

“What is it?”

“The world’s closing in. Something rises. And an end. If any augur augurs you otherwise, sack ’em.” Billy heard despair. “Because they’re lying, or they’re wrong.”

“We need to be looking,” Dane said. “We need to be out there finding God. The Tattoo runs things. He won’t let anyone else have something that powerful.”

“What about the man you said was his enemy?” Billy said. “Might it be him who took it?”

“Grisamentum,” Dane said. “No. He weren’t a villain and he weren’t a man of gods. And he died.”

“Don’t people think you took it?” said Billy. Everyone stared at him.

“Everyone knows we wouldn’t,” the Teuthex said. “It’s not ours. It’s no one’s.” They were, Billy understood, the last people who would take it, that asymptote of their faith.

“What is it you want to do?” Dane said. “You say we need to understand the situation, but we have to hunt. We can deliver it from evil.”

“Enough,” the Teuthex said, silencing everyone else. “Does it not occur to you that this is a test? You really think God… needs rescuing?” He held himself like the head of a church, for the first time. “Do you know your catechism? What’s the most powerful piece on the board?”

At last Dane muttered, “Kraken’s the most powerful piece on the board.”

“Why?”

“… The movement that looks like not moving.”

“Act like you understand what that means.”

Moore stood and walked out. Billy waited. Dane walked out. The congregation left, one by one.

Chapter Twenty

FSRC HEADQUARTERS, ONE MIDDLE-SIZED ROOM CONTAINING cheap armchairs and Ikea office furniture. Collingswood rarely used a desk and had never claimed one of the various of them for herself, working instead with a laptop in a deep chair.

“What’s up with grumpy twat?” Collingswood said.

“By which we mean whom, today?” Baron said.

“Vardy. He’s been even quieter and grumpier than usual since this squid business.”

“You think? Seems pretty standard surly to me.”

“Nah.” Collingswood leaned in toward her screen. “What’s he even doing, anyway?”

“Getting to grips with the squid cult.”

“Right. Having a kip, then.”

Collingswood had seen Vardy’s methods. He crossed London, interrogating informants. He did a great deal of online trawling. Sometimes he would pursue a frenetic and focused following of a trail from book to book, reading a paragraph in one, dropping it and grabbing another from the sliding scree of them on his desk, or jumping up and finding one on the shelves that faced him, reading it as he returned so that by the time he sat down again he was already done with it. It was as if he had found a single compelling story smuggled in bits into countless books. There was also his channelling. He would sit, his fingers arching in front of his mouth, his eyes closed. He might rock. He would slip into that reverie and stay in it for minutes, maybe an hour.

“What do you think’s behind all the pangolin bones?” Baron might ask him, of some emerged oddball sect, or, “Any clue what that priestess meant by ‘stick-blood’?” or, “Where do we think they might sacrifice that boy?”

“Not sure,” Vardy would say. “Couple of ideas. I’ll have a think.” And his colleagues would be quieter, and Collingswood, if she were in the room, would make what a twat motions, or pretend to intend to spill her drink on him or something.

He would stay like that a long time, at last snap open his eyes and say something like, “It’s not to do with the armour. Pangolins are bipedal. That’s what this is about. That’s why they kidnapped that dancer…” Or: “Greenford. Of course. The changing rooms of some disused swimming pool. Quick, we haven’t got long.”

“He can’t move for squid stuff,” Baron said. “Last time I looked he had the notes on Archie’s preservation and a bunch of articles on squid metabolism. And some leaflets for that Beagle trip.”

Collingswood raised her eyebrows. “I can’t get any sniff about that business in Putney,” she said. “Too much going on. The fucking squid’s got everyone on edge. The number of cranks calling in you would not believe.”

“How are you doing with it all?”

She made a rude noise. “Fuck off, guv,” she said. She did not tell him about her new recurring nightmare, of being thrown from a car, hurtling toward a brick wall.

“It’s definitely for us though, this Putney thing?”

“If I had to put dosh down,” said Collingswood. “Bruises like that.” A body had been listlessly humping the stony shoreline with the slap-slap of the water. He was a journalist with a special interest in labour, who appeared to have been crushed. The murder had been passed to FSRC when a pathologist had pointed out that the four huge bludgeoning wounds on the man’s chest looked a bit like a single punch from an impossibly large fist.

Baron glanced at his screen. “Email from Harris.”

“Am I right then?” Collingswood said. She had mooted the possibility that the body they had found in the basement-“Leave aside the doesn’t-fit-in-the-fucking-jar thing for a minute, boss”-was nothing to do with the squid case. Was, in fact, some many-years-old arcane gangland hit that Billy had stumbled onto at that moment of heightened sensitivities. “He’s got something,” she had said. “A bit of nous. Maybe all stressed he sniffed something.”

“Hah,” said Baron, and sat back. “Alright then. You’re going to like this, Kath. You’re right.”

“What?” She sat up fast enough to spill her coffee. “Bollocks. Really, guv?”