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quickly.
    The PC nodded and obliged by holding up both arms and flagging down the approaching London Bus – he followed the detective to the centre of the road who then repeated the process for the traffic going the other direction.
    “That’s all for now, constable – thank you for your help,” said Detective Z, and began to weave his way through the crowd in pursuit of the blue anorak.

Chapter 6
    THE VERTICAL ABYSS
     
    High in the spiral vortices of the gyre three men were seated around a mirrored table; they were drinking shots of green absinthe from ice thimbles. Today the London weather had delivered a thick band of low cloud that shrouded the city far below them. From the eerie they usually enjoyed a clear view of the western skyscape that was on this occasion denied to the human ants far below - however the raptors were in turn unable to watch the activities of their prey in real time and instead had to rely on the concave power of the table’s mirrored surface that caught and delivered the flash and glint of the spectral energies that they sought to capture, enslave or extinguish at whim.
    Eddie Brocade, Simon Magus and another, set aside their glasses and studied the mirror – it was cloudy. Brocade sighed and took a Faberge snuffbox from his pocket and after taking a generous pinch passed it anticlockwise around the table. Before the cloud had interrupted their view they had been watching a flock of starlings – tens of thousands of the tiny denizens of the western skies had flocked together at dusk and were inscribing a pattern, many patterns – pivoting around an invisible and seemingly fluid point, gathering and then banking and plunging again and again until the trio of watchers were quite dizzy, but it was here that their collective interest lay, because the birds were in the grip of the gyre – a field of energies that formed and marked a point of ingress - a portal to the Mauve Zone.
    After a while it had become obvious that the axis around which the flock were inscribing elliptical circuits was the spire of a church; a ruined chapel on a scrap of waste ground in one of those abandoned and hidden corners of west London that inexplicably exist – overgrown and neglected for decades, seemingly invisible to councils and developers alike.
    Brocade spoke.
    “I’m guessing the police are too dumb to reach any of our people who were at last nights working.”
    He turned to the man on his right and in doing so showed his handsome profile – his good looks only slightly marred by the flicker of a tick that afflicted his right eyelid.
    “What do you think, Sergei?”
    This was not his companions real name but was a standing joke between them that stemmed from the eponymously named Sergei being no Einstein – but perhaps being an Eisenstien : Sergei Eisenstien being the director of many classics of the Russian cinema such as ‘Ivan the Terrible’ and ‘Battleship Potemkin’; and this man, having once directed a couple of pornographic films back in his home city of St Petersburg, wishing to make his mark as a serious film-maker. This was a convolution too far for anyone and everyone except Brocade, who delighted in this circuitous nickname.
    ‘Sergei’ was slow to answer. He had watched many episodes of ‘the Sweeney’ and believed that he knew the capabilities and mind-set of the Metropolitan Police Force as well as any man. He set aside the snuffbox and quickly licked his thin lips, a lizard tongue darting out in a nanosecond – a freeze frame would have shown it to be forked at the tip, having undergone some surgical modification several years earlier.
    “Who knows? – especially if we got a squealer in the pigpen. Check it out, Brocade; you are supposed to be the enforcer around here.”
    At this point the so-far-silent Simon Magus stood up and reached for his cane, constructed of some dark hardwood with a brass dragon’s head for a grip. He swung round and brought the stick down across