Tuesday Falling
Tuesday Falling
S. Williams
‘An awe-inspiring main character…I recommend it hugely!’ SHARON BOLTON‘I could not put it down. Totally loved it. Excellent writing, brilliant story’ ANGELA MARSONSA relentless thriller that will grip you by the throat and refuse to let go! Perfect for fans of SILENT SCREAM by Angela Marsons, and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.You’ve never met anyone like Tuesday. She has suffered extreme cruelty at the hands of men, and so has taken it upon herself to seek vengeance. She wants to protect and help others like her, to ease their suffering. A force to be reckoned with, she lives beneath the streets of London in the hidden network of forgotten tunnels that honeycomb the city – and this is her preferred hunting ground.When Tuesday is connected to a series of brutal attacks on gang members, DI Loss takes on the investigation. A burned-out detective still suffering the devastating effects of the unsolved murder of his daughter three years earlier, the case starts to hit close to home. Because soon Loss will discover that Tuesday could hold the key to uncovering the truth about what happened to his daughter…
S. WILLIAMS
Tuesday Falling
Copyright (#ulink_735d3dfd-bed7-5bf4-9df6-002eb5cc27a0)
Killer Reads
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GH
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Copyright © S. Williams 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
S. Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780008132743
Version 2015-02-26
Dedication (#ulink_cb8778e0-530a-5dde-bbf2-83f6507ab30e)
For Josephine, completely
Contents
Cover (#u2d332135-9298-5d1a-b6d4-bff2dff5bd7c)
Title Page (#u7d6e1f91-3774-5f31-8cff-a64a8fddfdea)
Copyright (#ua35b1faf-d061-588b-98e4-e056f54f726a)
Dedication (#ubfd86a01-de3f-52fd-90da-2d3ea0e2879a)
Chapter 1 (#u4a26cb60-c6c7-5aba-9b19-0e1480543c04)
Chapter 2 (#ua5d5f4e4-ffcb-569a-b516-4851f032ccb3)
Chapter 3 (#u6fcc218c-a123-501c-99a6-2279c5decfde)
Chapter 4 (#u2b63e6cf-39dd-53ba-9c5d-347ce2f33a88)
Chapter 5 (#u3778f0d4-1124-5a3d-8797-df6422ec2f11)
Chapter 6 (#u82227656-e7fa-5a2d-9ed2-d3de34980ac1)
Chapter 7 (#u3f7a1273-6237-52db-b7be-7312a4c1b1d8)
Chapter 8 (#u1aac1b77-c5b7-595a-9654-5cabef53b9b4)
Chapter 9 (#u1f49b682-a452-55a5-97f6-c1d359366463)
Chapter 10 (#u799e4b64-1b1b-5532-8562-297ca812d60c)
Chapter 11 (#u363b36be-6756-5456-b28a-643b0f1fb317)
Chapter 12 (#u98b2efbc-2ca0-52fa-83f6-4afda9ba71b4)
Chapter 13 (#u664f0725-a529-5100-ac71-8f87fe94a347)
Chapter 14 (#ucd81b1e5-e850-57ea-a7a3-bdea2ce04721)
Chapter 15 (#u59428a62-6f2f-5141-a605-a5390c45f842)
Chapter 16 (#uea938982-cb32-5c33-9eb7-1521e4e4dff7)
Chapter 17 (#ufadaed19-b4ad-5d3e-b571-97e5674161fb)
Chapter 18 (#ud495a692-797b-55b0-a44b-ee390a284658)
Chapter 19 (#u149d12fc-c9ee-5a36-aad0-9b7e229bc783)
Chapter 20 (#u616efa54-b7d4-5e3a-89b6-f7f56fa1592c)
Chapter 21 (#ud2fa821c-5113-5e98-878b-e6dc91993eab)
Chapter 22 (#uf3a01932-a67e-5703-9cdc-5cb36d3fcae7)
Chapter 23 (#ud7a87821-5cdb-55ad-8b65-7f89225005de)
Chapter 24 (#u8ea1df10-d379-5cda-8844-d5fee6149bfe)
Chapter 25 (#uf411d659-e79c-5711-bcf1-0ee017a33a75)
Chapter 26 (#u02c56357-2dea-505b-863f-ec2a14a898c0)
Chapter 27 (#uc6dd49e9-9d07-52fe-b63a-88a74efc7797)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 65 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 66 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 67 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 68 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 69 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 70 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 71 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 72 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 73 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 74 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 75 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 76 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 77 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 78 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 79 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 80 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 81 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 82 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 83 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 84 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 85 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 86 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 87 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 88 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 89 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 90 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 91 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 92 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 93 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 94 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 95 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 96 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 97 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 98 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 99 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 100 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 101 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 102 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 103 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 104 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 105 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 106 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 107 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 108 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Sometimes, I like to just sit on the tube, travelling from station to station. The station, then the tunnel, then the station. Over and over.
The white. The black.
I never look directly at anyone; I always look at them in the windows. See them reflected in the dark of the machine.
Sometimes, when the noise in my head threatens to make me snowbound, I just travel the tube, tuning everything out. Leaning my head against the connecting door. Feeling the vibration. Feeling the ghosts move through me. Waiting for it all to stop.
1 (#ulink_d41308d5-ee1f-5b98-8232-6759f1f9e58d)
The boys pile onto the tube, all drop-crotch trousers, and Jafaican whine. Their eyes are hard and shiny from too much speed laced with too little mephedrone. Their clothes scream outsider whilst looking desperate to fit in. They want to be seen separate, but together. Little boys in grown-up bodies, confused and broken by a society they can’t keep up with, and so try to laugh at instead. It’s pathetic really. If they weren’t so dangerous I might try to take them home and mother them.
But me, a mother? I don’t think so. The last time I was a mother I was fourteen, and it worked out just fine for about fifteen minutes.
There are six of them, these boys. The youngest is maybe thirteen, and the oldest about sixteen. If you added up their IQs the total wouldn’t even equal my shoe size, and yet they think they’re so clever.
I love messing with boys like them. They see me sat in the corner of the carriage, a little Gothette. A tiny emo. They look at my army satchel and they think, ‘poetry book’. They don’t think, Columbine.
Actually, I’m giving them too much credit. They don’t think at all. They function on crowd-brain. Follow the leader. Seek out the weak.
The weak. That’s me. Five foot fuck-all and all dressed in black, like I’ve got nothing better to do with my time than watch The Matrix, and make pretty pictures on my arm with a blade. A pretty girl, pretty fucked-up.
Ripe for the plucking.
Come on then, boys.
Pluck me.
2 (#ulink_1661cb6e-a360-5a91-8b54-129a6e315d65)
‘Who is she?’ DI Loss is looking at the CCTV from the tube train. Even though it’s a recording, not a live link, the tension in the room is a physical presence. The air seems razor-thin, and there is a whine at the back of the DI’s thoughts like a broken light-filament. The image on the screen is in black and white and the pixilation is terrible. There’s grey-out everywhere, and all the faces are smudgy, as if they’ve been partially rubbed out.
It doesn’t, however, disguise the blood.
‘Dunno, sir. We’re checking the cameras from the entrance now.’
His DS is not looking at what her boss is looking at. She’s already seen it and is still, several minutes later, having to swallow the copious amounts of saliva her body is producing. It’s either that or throw up on her lap-top.
On-screen there’s blood everywhere. All over the bodies of the young men lying motionless on the floor of the tube carriage. Splashed on the seats and the windows and in long splatter streaks on the tube walls. Even though the image is black and white and the pixilation is terrible the inspector can tell it’s blood. And he knows it’s not the girl’s blood because he just watched her walk out of the tube without a scratch on her. The DI sighs deeply and reaches for his e-cigarette.
‘Roll it again,’ he says.
The screen goes blank for a moment, and then the carriage is back to a time before the carnage. No blood. No bodies. Just a small teenage girl in the corner and six junked-up predators piling in through the sliding door. They mess about for a bit, hitting each other and mouthing off in silent comedy violence, and then they spot the girl. Even with the white-out. Even with the pixels more spaced out than a SkunkMonk, DI Loss can see that the boys think it’s Christmas. Two of them low-five each other, and the pack begin to move down the carriage towards the girl, unstoppable in their gang-power. Completely in control of their environment. Top of the food chain.
Loss stares at the screen. Stares at the animal hunger visible on their smudged-out faces.
‘I wouldn’t count on it, boys’ he whispers.
3 (#ulink_9ee317f0-29f6-5317-b5db-3c56f6b309b6)
Well whoopy-doo, here they come.
The one in the hoodie spots me first. What am I talking about – they’re all in hoodies. Of course they are. They all want to look the same, as if they’re American gangstas. Don’t they realize it’s all shit? That those people they idolize have the life expectancy of a sparrow? Honestly, if you think it through, what I’m about to do is a mercy. These brothers aren’t really living, they’re simply decomposing in slow motion.
Time to speed up the film.
What I meant to say was, the one at the front in the slightly more hoodie-ish hoodie than the other Marys, spots me first. I’m thinking he’s what passes for the brains of this crew. He can almost walk upright, for a start. He low-fives his drone-clone and starts edging towards me, all the others following as if they’re connected by puppet wire.
Did I tell you I love these guys? All tough stances and thousand-yard stares when they’re in a group. I reckon if I met one of these boys by themselves outside a church on Sunday and gave him a leaflet he’d say thank you very much.
I don’t want you to think I’m part of the God-squad, by the way. Fuck that. I’d rather have my teeth pulled out than get down on my knees in front of a priesty-prick.
No, what I’m saying is without his crew, his structure, he’s nothing but some brain-dead mother’s son with the processing power of a leaking punch-bag.
Doesn’t excuse him, of course.
I observe their approach through the reflection in the carriage window. When they’re a couple of feet away they come to a smug stop, almost in time with each other. Well done, boys.
Here we go. Mega-hoodie grins at me and speaks, his voice dagger-friendly.
‘Hey, Weirdo, how about you come with us, yeah. Do some stuff?’
It’s brilliant. Mega-hoodie is like the Shakespeare of the gang. He’s the Romeo. He’s managed to reduce thousands of years of linguistic evolution to the verbal equivalent of showing me his cock and saying ‘How about it?’.
Really, I’ve got to leave him till last, if I can. He’s just so much fun! I pull my knees up to my chest and carry on staring out of the window. Into the dark tunnel flashing by at a million miles an hour.
They all start to smile and jitter up. They think they’ve scored a hot one here. They think I’m scared and ready to pop.
‘Hey, Emo! I’m talking to you. Nothing to look at out there, girl. Plenty to look at in here, though.’ He starts to laugh, one elbow banging into his mate while he stuffs his right hand down the front of his pre-ripped Diesel combat trousers.
Two things here:
One. There’s plenty to look at because we’re in a tunnel with the lights of the carriage bright and sparkly. That makes the window a mirror. I can see everything they’re doing.
Two. Mr Ape has just stuffed his right hand down his trousers to have a good old jiggle in front of his mates, and so I’m guessing he’s right-handed, and has just about made it impossible for him to attack me.
I mean, you couldn’t make it up, could you? Intimidate the stranger in front of you by handicapping yourself! It’s like being threatened by the Teletubbies.
I can’t be fucked anymore. I turn back round to face them, pull the knife out of my bag, and stab Trouser-boy in the throat.
4 (#ulink_189e26d1-4132-55c3-9bc6-74a0168d4953)
The DI watches the girl on the tube do her thing. Even in the washed-out colour he can tell she’s smiling. Even with the time-stutter visuals and the horror film lighting that starts halfway through, when she pulls the emergency cord, he can tell she’s happy. There is a beauty and fluidity to her movements as she walks back down the carriage that sings of her satisfaction with her work. It is like witnessing a human tsunami as she flows down the carriage. Loss takes a drag from his e-cigarette and continues to watch, the vape obscuring not one grisly moment.
5 (#ulink_8f06c926-5e76-5448-9783-0fb22119b467)
It’s not hard to stab someone in the throat. You just pull the knife out of your army satchel and shove it in his neck, cutting into his carotid artery, just a few centimetres to the side of his trachea. Of course it’s not hard; he was going to rape you, and then watch as you were cluster-fucked by his clones. Completely self-defence.
No, the hard thing is not freezing up and stopping there, staring at the boy dying in front of you as he spasms around on the floor. That’s where most people go wrong. You have to stab him in the throat, then immediately pull out the knife, turning his body with your scuffed oxblood DM so that none of the blood hits you. Marks you. Then you’ve got to not freeze as the blood pumps out of Dying-boy in great gushes of red, spraying over his mates and the walls as his body spins away from you.
But you’re not looking as the body falls. No you’re not. You’re already slashing the eyes of drone number two as you run along the length of the bench-seating to the other end of the carriage. Between the blood fountain and the screaming you’ve gained yourself three or four seconds of shock before the adrenalin kicks in and they come for you as a pack. Of course, if they do that, you’re fucked. Beyond fucked. But by the time they’ve got it together you’ve already got your back pressed against the wall and big loony smile on your face.
It’s important which wall you’re pressed against. The tube train is travelling at 56 mph and when the emergency cord is pulled, which is what is about to happen, the momentum placed on the standing body of a drugged-up rape-junkie will be enough to make him face-dive the floor. It would also be enough to make a little Gothette sail through the air and crumple herself against a window, so it’s important that she is against the wall that will immediately arrest her momentum, and they are at the end that will give them the furthest to travel, thereby – one can only hope – breaking every bone in their rape-mongering bodies.
Smile. Pull. The scream of the brakes barely registers in my head, cos it’s full of snow and ice, but the boys in front of me are looking a little bit not so fucking clever now.
Oh, and rather helpfully, once the cord is pulled, the overhead lights go out, leaving the carriage lit by the stutter of the emergency fluorescent trace bulbs in the walls and floor.
Have a nice day, boys. I open up the satchel and pull out two curved scythes. I stand up and walk towards them.
Swish swash.
It doesn’t take long. It never takes long. If it takes long you’re in trouble. If it takes long you’re dead. The carriage is silent. I walk back up the train and put the scythes away. I won’t use them again but I don’t want to leave them for the police, either.
I mean, I don’t want it to be too easy, do I? Where’s the fun in that? There is, however, something I do want to leave for the police, and I take it out of my vintage American army shirt pocket and place it on Trouser-boy. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t object.
Then I look up at the camera so the boys and girls in blue get a good shot of me.
Then I leave.
Job done.
6 (#ulink_8752f194-ee56-5120-ac7e-706fefb146d5)
The DS taps at her keyboard and the scene backs up a few frames, and then freezes at the place where the girl is smiling up at the camera. Loss can feel a pressure building in his stomach and quietly belches; his hand in front of his mouth. The room fills with the smell of bacon fat. It makes him feel nauseous. More nauseous.
‘The cameras outside the station?’ he asks, reaching inside his jacket for some antacid tablets. His DS indicates the split-screen on her laptop, showing the CCTV views of the entrance to Embankment tube station, where all the passengers had to disembark after the emergency cord was pulled on the train.
‘Nothing, sir. According to the cameras she never left the station. She walked through those boys as if she was some sort of ghost ninja and then …’, she makes a throwing away gesture with her hands, ‘puff, disappeared.’
The DI continues looking at the girl on the screen. She couldn’t be more than seventeen. ‘And how many of those fine young men did she kill?’
‘Amazingly, only one. The leader.’ The DS taps a few keys. ‘One Jason Dunne from Sparrow Close, Crossquays.’
‘Lovely.’ Sparrow Close was well known to DI Loss. If one took a sink estate, an estate so deprived of government investment, but so rich in monies from drugs and stolen goods, and then dumped a load of stone-cold bastards in it, you’d have Sparrow Close.
‘Although none of the others will walk again,’ continues his DS. ‘She sliced their Achilles tendons and cut through the hamstrings behind the knee.’
The DS stops looking at her laptop and turns to face him. ‘Actually, she did more than that but I don’t want to think about it.’
Loss doesn’t blame her. All the blood in front of him on the screen is starting to make him light-headed. Even though on the monitor it’s not in colour, it’s in colour in his head, and it’s turned up to full-tilt. ‘And what was it she put on his body?’ he asks
She turns back to her laptop and starts tapping, her fingers hammering at the keys, and the screen is filled with a close-up of the body of Jason Dunne. Lying on his jeans, stuck onto them with blood, is a piece of white card, like a business card. Typed in Ariel font is one word: Tuesday. The DI sighs heavily.
‘And is it?’
‘Is it what, sir?’
‘Tuesday.’
Stone smiles tightly, staring at the image on the screen.
‘No, sir. It’s Friday.’
7 (#ulink_c8a90205-e5cf-5d94-b3bc-b99f9cf3ee20)
It‘s all over the news, screaming out on every media platform going.
One murdered and five crippled for life!
Jason Dunne, 16, and five other teenagers, all excluded pupils of Sparrow Secondary School, were brutally attacked in a Tube train late last night. Mr Dunne died at the scene. At present the police are asking for witnesses of the crime to come forward, and say they will shortly be giving a statement. They are particularly keen to speak to a young woman whom they believe to be at the centre of the incident.
When Lily sees the report she feels faint; she thinks she’s the young woman the police want to question. After a moment reality slams back in, and she breathes a shaky sigh of relief.
Of course it isn’t. It can’t possibly be her.
She was in all night.
Just as she’d been instructed.
Lily kills the image on her laptop and climbs out of bed. Without the noise of the news report filling the room, the rain can be heard plainly, tip-tapping at the window, behind the curtains. Lily is dressed in her favourite M&S brushed-cotton blue PJs. She has to roll the top of the pyjama bottoms over a few times to stop them falling off her. Lily has lost weight fast, and now weighs just under five and a half stone. Her bones hold up her skin in the same way a hanger does a hand-me-down dress. They look like they’ve borrowed a smaller girl’s body. Putting on her dressing-gown, she goes slowly to her bedroom door and presses her head against the wood, listening for sounds that shouldn’t be there. All she can hear is the noise of the radio in the kitchen, and her mother systematically beating breakfast into submission.
No sounds of doors being smashed. And people stumbling in.
No reek of drugs, and booze, and hate.
No jackal laughter. No violence and ripping and body greed.
Well, there wouldn’t be, would there?
Lily pulls back the bolt on the lock that she had fitted three weeks ago and walks through the flat into the kitchen. She doesn’t walk much these days, and she is slightly unsteady on her painfully thin legs. Her mother is standing over the cooker, a look of complete incomprehension on her face. Lily smiles. It feels good. Lily doesn’t smile much anymore.
Before it all, her mother rarely cooked for her; too busy working three jobs just to make sure there was food in the fridge and credit on her phone. Lily had repaid her by working hard at school and trying not to get in too much trouble. On Lily’s estate that wasn’t easy, but she had tried really hard. Now her mother doesn’t leave Lily alone in the flat. Lily no longer goes to school and rarely leaves her room. There is no longer any need for the cooker.
You don’t eat when you want your body to die.
Lily’s mum looks up from the cooker and stares at her daughter. Lily sees her own eyes in her mother’s face. Bruised from too much crying. Dry from too little tears.
‘Have you heard?’
Lily nods and stares back at her. Outside, the rain speaks a language all of its own as it lashes at the window. Lily’s mum looks at the radio; the quiet, measured radio-voice is talking about the attack on the six boys on the tube train. Lily’s mum nods her head sharply. Just once.
‘Bastards deserved everything they got.’
Lily smiles again. Hearing her mother swear, however mildly, makes her feel grounded. Not like she is walking through a cotton-wool dream world in her head where nothing matters and everything’s all right.
Lily goes over and gives her mum a hug, but only gently so that she doesn’t feel how sharply her bones are pushing at her thin skin. Lily knows her mum blames herself for what happened to her. When she was at work.
‘I tell you what, Mum. You mix me a Complan while I check my messages, and then we’ll swear at the radio together.’
It isn’t much, but it’s the best she can do. Interaction is a skill that has become lost to her. Weaving words to make a shield used to be part of her structure. Now words are a maze that confounds her. Lily leaves her mum crying in the kitchen, staring after her as she walks back to her bedroom. The last time she saw her daughter eating was two days ago, and that was a carrot sliced so thinly it looked as if it had been shaved.
8 (#ulink_1f889d21-1b94-5adc-bb54-61269c5967c5)
There are over forty abandoned tube stations in London, some of them only a short distance from the ones that are still used, but only a few of them fit my needs.
They need to have more than one way in or out, for a start. It’s no use making a crib with no escape tunnel. When I first started living underground I holed up in an old tunnel just off Green Park: near enough to the platform to feel safe, but far enough away so as not to attract attention. There are hundreds of these tunnels in the system. Some of them are for storage, or work stations. Some connect to lines that are now redundant. Some, well some I haven’t got a scooby what they’re for. I thought the one I was bundled up in was perfect. The walls and ceiling were made up of all these little white porcelain bricks as if someone had used toy bricks to make a full-size thing. Like I felt all the time. It had an old camp bed in there and a lamp and stuff.
Compared to where I’d been living before I thought it was the Ritz.
Never occurred to me that it might still be used. I thought it was a remainder from the War or something.
Third night in and I get woken up by a workman, skimming a few hours off a ghost-shift. I don’t know who was more freaked: him or me. Anyhow, there was no back door to the tunnel, so I ended up having to bite him just to get past. Living as I was then, he must have thought I was an animal.
That was then, this is now.
After I leave the boys on the train, I walk through a service tunnel to Charing Cross, taking off my wig and stuffing it in my satchel, and putting on a baseball cap. I reverse my army shirt so it shows green rather than black, then wait until a train pulls into the station. I have a skeleton key for the emergency tail-door, which is always still in the tunnel when the train stops, so all I have to do is slip out of my alcove, climb on board, and bump it one stop to Leicester Square. Change to the Piccadilly line and ride it up to Holborn.
Little-known fact about Holborn Station is that it’s a replacement station. There’s another station almost opposite it, on the other side of Oxford Street, that closed in 1933; the British Museum Station.
You can probably guess, can’t you?
I get off the train with the other passengers, keeping my hat low and my satchel slung round my back like a haversack, its leather straps over my head but under my arms. I follow the crowd so far, then ghost through a maintenance door and slip along the running tunnel that takes me to the abandoned station. I light the way with the halogen torch I take from my satchel, and then shade through the winding chambers and connecting corridors that bring me to the air-raid shelter that was used in the Second World War.
Home sweet home.
9 (#ulink_155df397-65a9-50e5-92e9-e4412f6e38f2)
Lily turns on her computer, directs the arrow to the Google icon, and clicks. As she waits for the machine to connect to the Internet she goes to her window and snitches back the curtain, looking through snakes of rain crawling down the pane at the estate outside.
Lily lives on the first floor of a three-floor block. On each of the floors there are ten flats, all identical to hers. Across the battle-ground below her that passes as a play area is a block of flats that exactly mirrors hers. To her left and right are precisely the same again: four blocks of identi-flats; lives wrapped in concrete.
Everybody knows each other to look at, but not to confide in: living in a war zone. There are at least a dozen languages spoken on Lily’s estate, but only two that are understood by everybody: fear and power. Below her Lily can see teenagers on children’s bikes. Peddling from block to block with drugs, phones, iPads, whatever. Above the blocks, in the distance, she can make out the neon lights and shiny bank-towers of Canary Wharf: an untouchable future from another world.
Behind her the computer makes a quiet, muted noise, indicating it’s connected to the Interweb, and Lily turns away from the window, and sits down gingerly. One month on and the bruising has gone, but the stitches still hurt. She opens up the Facebook page specially created for her, and is unsurprised to find it completely empty. There is no photo tag, no likes or dislikes, no friends.
Of course, no friends.
Lily types, ARE YOU THERE?
A computer pause; the cursor flashing like fingers tapping on a desk, then:
YES.
The reply font is electric blue.
Lily is unconsciously biting her lip, causing petals of blood to flower as she stares at the screen. There is so much she wants to ask, but knows she can’t. That isn’t how it works.
She types, HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS?
Pause
YES. WHERE WERE YOU?
Pause
AT HOME WITH MY MUM ALL NIGHT WATCHING TV
Pause
GOOD. ARE WE DONE?
Lily turns to look at the raindrops sliding down her window, then back at the words on the screen. They are so simple. Are we done? So simple, but impossible for her to fathom. Lily sucks at the cut on her lip and uses her sleeve to drag the tears away from her eyes.
ARE WE DONE, LILY-ROSE?
Pause
YES. WE’RE DONE. THANK YOU.
OK. FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS, AND THEN HAVE A NICE LIFE. YOUR BODY IS YOURS. MEND IT.
Lily is given directions for her to manipulate her laptop settings, allowing her computer to be accessed remotely. Once done, she watches the ghost hands systematically remove all traces of their correspondence from her laptop. All references of the Pro-Anna forum where they first made contact. All the conversations they have had in the cyber-basements of the Interworld. Omecle. Whisper. All of them. The Facebook account specially set up for their meetings ceases to exist. Everything. Every connection between Lily-Rose and the person remotely-controlling her keyboard. The last thing written on the screen before the computer shuts itself down is:
GOODBYE, LILY-ROSE
Lily-Rose sits in front of her blank laptop, its dead screen, and the future-girl stickers with which she’d personalized it in another life, and wonders what is going to happen next. She feels as if there is a door between her and the rest of the world, and the handle has been removed. Even though she has never met the person on the other end of her computer there was a connection: a way of understanding the pain and self-loathing inside. Lily-Rose does not know whether she will ever be able to take the advice and stop being frightened. Whether she’ll be able to take control of her life enough to live it. She wraps her arms around herself and stares past the curtain of rain at the grey world outside, seeing nothing. There is a knock on her bedroom door. She turns round to see her mum standing in the doorway to her bedroom, a mug of Complan in her hand, and her face set in an expression Lily-Rose is unable to read.
‘Mum? Are you all right?’
Lily-Rose sees past her to a tired-looking man in a zero-style suit and a weary-looking woman in an even worse one staring back at her.
‘It’s the police,’ her mother says, her voice tight-leashed. ‘They want to ask us some questions.’
10 (#ulink_fc9f4cde-c052-5f68-ac94-d91cd276e824)
It’s not hard to hack a computer. Anyone who says differently is a liar. It’s like lock-picking, or face-reading: all you need is the right teacher, and the correct motivation. All these films showing nerdy kids sitting around watching Star Trek, and Quantum Geek, and hacking into NASA or whatever, it’s just bollocks. Just another way to bully the weirdies. Box them in. Make them this. Make them that. Make them sit alone in the dark.
Mind you, I like sitting alone in the dark. It means nobody else is there.
Most of the tube stations have Wi-Fi now, including Holborn, so all I had to do to get a signal was set up a booster along the running tunnel between there and the British Museum Station. It’s not hard. There are so many redundant cables and junction boxes down here that finding a power source was easy, and disguising it unnecessary. The walls look like something out of Alien, all rubber-coated armoured cable and danger signs. No one can tell what belongs to what, down here. That’s why they never remove anything. Pull the wrong thing out and a train stops moving. Or all the lights go out. Something awful might happen, so leave it alone; that’s the thought process.
Works for me.
I’ve made my crib in the part of the station that was used as an air-raid shelter, the deepest part of the structure. It’s still got the ‘Dig for Britain’ posters on the walls. I’ve got fairy lights hanging from the ceiling, a camp bed, a laptop with remote speakers, and a rail for my clothes. There’s still a working toilet in the main part of the station, although I have to fill it with water from a stand-pipe in the running tunnel. Really, It’s more home-y than home ever was.
I’ve got other cribs in other stations for other things, scattered all across London … I don’t like to have all my eggs in one basket in case one of them breaks.
There’s three ways out of this crib, so I feel OK. Any less and I start getting jittery. I set the alarms, tune the laptop to the World Service, and lie down in my cot. I stare at the fairy lights sparkling above me, their little twinklings reflected in the millions of tiny dust particles that are no doubt poisoning my lungs. The computer is all news speak. Fucked-up country this. Fucked up climate that. All happening in a world I’m so separate from, it might as well be made up. I tune out and just lie here, looking at the tiny porcelain tiles that make up the ceiling. Honestly, it must have taken them years to fit all those bricks in. Why did they do it? Why did they make the bricks so small? And where did they make them? I can’t think of an answer so I stop thinking about it, and just lie here, breathing in and out.
Like I’m alive.
That’s about it really.
Lights out. Night-night.
11 (#ulink_cce17280-d657-5cc4-97b6-6bc3c2d640f2)
Even from the doorway where he and DS Stone are standing, DI Loss can tell the girl has been messed over good and proper. She’s got that gaunt look of someone who’s lost weight suddenly: skin too tight and eyes too big. Like a cancer victim, or someone who’s undergone extreme circumstances. War. Famine. Or, he thinks sadly, someone who’s been repeatedly raped and beaten and no longer sees her body as an ally.
They are shown into the living room. It is a rectangular box identical in structure to thousands of other rectangular boxes the DI has been shown into over the years. The mother has tried to personalize it with pictures and paint, furniture and rugs, but to Loss’s mind it’s still a rabbit hutch on a sink estate that might as well be a prison.
The mother is staring hard at them, her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Protecting her. Pouring strength into her. Neither of them wants him here. Or his DS. He can tell that from their faces. He can see that from their posture. Have to be blind not to. What he can’t tell is why. It could be that, after the attack, the police were brutish and unsympathetic. They often are where rape is concerned. In some police circles, rape is just another word for ‘changed her mind’. Not in all. Much better than it used to be, but some. It could be that, mother and daughter have simply had enough, and want to shut themselves away and heal, or try to heal, and they, the police, are just a reminder of past horrors. It could be all these things and more besides. Loss had noticed a strange expression on the daughter’s face when she’d first caught sight of him. Almost guilt. And that furtive look at her laptop? The DI doesn’t know what to make of it, so decides to make nothing of it and get on with why he is here. He leans forward in his chair.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you this morning, Mrs Lorne, Lily, but I’ve got some information possibly relating to your, er …’ He is at a loss what to say. Sitting here in this tidy small flat with its touches of humanity, even using the word ‘rape’ seems to invite an evil that doesn’t belong in this place. He can see the mother’s hand whiten as she squeezes the daughter’s shoulder.
‘We heard it on the radio, Inspector …?’ The mother wants his name again. Even though he’s told her. Wants to keep control. He doesn’t blame her.
‘Loss.’
‘Inspector Loss, all I can say is those animals got everything they deserve.’ The mother’s face is flushed high with anger, and the daughter is staring at her hands. Loss notices she has bitten her nails down to such an extent that the skin has been chewed and the end of each finger is raw and bloody.
‘I’m sorry to have to ask, Mrs Lorne, but because of the nature of the attack on the young men …’
‘Animals!’ Mrs Lorne interjects vehemently. ‘They raped my daughter, beat her up, and then raped her again. Everything that happened to those vermin, it wasn’t enough.’
‘And because it was those specific young men,’ Loss continues, lowering his voice, ‘well, I’m afraid I have to ask.’
The seconds tick by, and mother and daughter just stare at him. Finally Mrs Lorne understands what he is saying. Asking. She looks at him with loathing and says, ‘We were in all night. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’
‘The CCTV shows a young woman at the scene of the crime …’ Loss stops speaking as Mrs Lorne makes a cutting motion with her hand.
‘Enough. We were here all night. People called round. Unlike those animals who attacked my daughter, we have witnesses apart from ourselves.’ Mrs Lorne curls her lip in disgust. For a second Loss thinks she’s going to spit on her own floor. ‘They just back each other up. Cover each other’s tracks and sneer at us as if we’re nothing.’ Loss can see that Mrs Lorne is only just holding her rage in check. ‘Not that we’d need witnesses if those bastards had been locked up. The last month I’ve not been able to leave the flat without one of them hanging around, laughing into their phones. Even when I go to the shop downstairs I have to get a neighbour to sit in or else Lily starts screaming, or worse,’ Both Mrs Lorne and Lily-Rose seem to be falling apart in front of him, and Loss has a deep sense of self-loathing within himself. All these people want to do is heal, and here he is twisting a screwdriver into the wound, opening it up for inspection. Making things worse. So he twists it again.
‘Does the word “Tuesday” have any special meaning to either of you?’
‘Get out.’ The mother is striding to the door, barging past the DS. ‘I’d like you to leave now. My daughter needs to rest.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Loss stands up and follows her to the front door. As he passes Lily-Rose he has an urge to touch her shoulder, seeing his own daughter in her, but resists. ‘Even with the incident on the tube we’ll continue trying to corroborate your statement. The officers who were assigned to your case have handed over transcripts of all the interviews. It might be that given the new, ah, circumstances they have something more to add.’
Lily-Rose looks up at him, staring. And then she smiles, and it’s like the last rays of the sun before it sinks into the sea.
‘They’ll have difficulty raping anyone else from a wheelchair, yeah?’ And then she turns away from him and stares at the floor, leaving him cold and empty.
Outside on the concrete walkway in front of the closed flat, the detectives look out at the rain-soaked estate. Although the rain is coming down in sheets, they can still see the boys on their bikes with their rucksacks full of consumables. Commerce doesn’t stop because of the weather. Loss takes his e-cigarette out of his pocket, taps it a few times to charge the atomizer, and pulls a breath of nicotine down into his lungs. The DS sniffs, places her hands on the walkway balustrade, and looks down at the concrete playground beneath them.
‘Definite reaction when you said ‘Tuesday’, sir.’
12 (#ulink_2e07ec87-989e-5ae4-a07d-41a3b9f08230)
After I’ve finished wiping everything from Lily-Rose’s computer I pull the hard-drive out of mine and put it and the console in my satchel for throwing in the sewer later. It’s not so much that I’m worried about getting caught, I couldn’t give a fuck about that, it’s more that I don’t want my clients to have to deal with any shit. No hard-drive, no record.
New client, new laptop.
I keep the speakers, though.
Clients. That’s what I call them. Girls and boys who have no one else to turn to when everything gets fucked up and they end up in the nowhere world of self harm and suicide …
Anyway, I won’t be getting any more clients, will I?
Before I get rid of the hardware I have a Red Bull and write down the names of the boys from the train on my wall. Later on, once I’ve hacked the CCTV footage from the underground, I’ll attach a QR code next to their names. I’ve already pre-linked the code to the site where they’ve put up video footage of Lily-Rose. If anybody tries to watch ‘the Lily-Rose rape show’ they’ll find themselves watching ‘the tube train gang boys getting completely outclassed and fucked up show’ instead.
I grab the hardware and my MagLite and enter the stairwell. The stairs aren’t in as good nick as the main areas, so I have to do a little scrambling. I go up a couple of levels to where there’s a tunnel that connects to the sewer system. The walls are made up of the same Victorian brickwork as in some of the stations. Really, what is it about Victorians and tiny bricks? The whole of the sewer network is full of them too. I know a lot of the sewers and the early Tube tunnels were built at the same time, but were all the bricks being made by midgets, or something? Was it some sort of work-house orphanage scheme?
I dump the laptop in the slow-moving effluence. There’s a kind of walkway by the side of the channel and I go along there for about half a mile and then dump the hard-drive. You’ve got to be quite alert in the sewers. There’s a lot of noise around, and workmen are often down here, doing something work-y …
I read in one of the free newspapers that litter the stations that London is going to get a new super-sewer tunnel, and that a lot of the old tunnels that stitch lower London together will be demolished. Good luck with that. There’s so much secret stuff down here that anyone trying to do a full recce will blow their mind. In my wanderings I’ve found hash farms, secret garages full of stolen super cars, and factories for making crystal meth. Half of the London underworld keeps its stuff underground. Once I even found a tank. A tank!
After I’ve got rid of the computer stuff I go back to the British Museum Station, and begin slowly checking all my alarms, working my way up to the ‘loot-chute’: a tunnel dug in the Second World War between the tube station and the basement of the British Museum. The thinking was that if the Nazis started bombing the crap out of London, then the most valuable artefacts could be brought down here and kept safe. The ones, that is, that the government hadn’t already hidden in mines in Wales, or sold off to the Americans as a bribe. It’s amazing what you can learn from documents people forget they even have. There’s a tunnel under MI6 as well. That’s the old MI6, not the swanky new one. It’s like the Death Star, under the new one; I stay well away from there.
Anyway, I put an ABUS disc-cylinder padlock on the connecting door between the tunnel and the station to make sure no one who found the entrance accidentally would get very far, and a trip alarm to let me know if they did. Not that I think anyone ever would, but it would give me time to run.
I undo the padlock and make my way up to the door that leads to the basement of the museum. I say basement, but there’re hundreds of rooms. The place has been going since 1753; that’s a lot of stuff, with more added year after year. I’m willing to bet that most of the stuff they’ve got they don’t even know they’ve got anymore. Old artefacts from around the world. Maps and clothing. Instruments and weapons.
They’ve got weapons from all over the empire, and beyond.
Like these Burmese hand-scythes, for instance.
13 (#ulink_cbcba7d2-388e-5d0f-b290-2e39b72312a0)
DI Loss stares at the whiteboard covering the back wall of his office, and wishes he still smoked. In the two weeks since the attack on the tube by the unknown girl, he has been slowly placing tiny bits of information on the board. Filling it up with snippets of facts and conjecture that he hopes will add up to some defining whole. There is a grainy still from the CCTV showing the girl staring out at him, a look that has begun to haunt odd moments of his day. Underneath the picture, using a bold black marker-pen, he has written:
HOW DID SHE LEAVE THE STATION?
DISGUISE?
The names of all six of the boys she attacked – defended herself against – a small voice inside him says, and their addresses, underneath he has written:
SPARROW ESTATE
DRUGS?
SEXUAL ASSAULT?
There is a picture of Lily-Rose, taken at the hospital, less than an hour after her mother found her. Loss can’t look at it without a little piece of his heart being sliced away and swallowed by despair. The bits of body that should be inside, but were outside. The swelling. The blood. The sheer brutal animalism that it must have taken to do that to another human being. It makes him think of his daughter, but he can’t think of his daughter because it will make him cry, and he’ll never be able to stop. Underneath he has written:
REVENGE?
LAPTOP? INTERNET RECORDS?
ALIBI?
That Lily-Rose is hiding something he has no doubt, but he can’t for the life of him work out what it is. They’d checked out her internet history, but, apart from some pro-anorexia sites and extreme self-help forums, found nothing unusual.
Apart, that is, from the lack of social networking. Girls her age normally had a Facebook account, or Google+. Something. Lily-Rose had nothing. Her presence in the Interzone barely skimmed the surface. There is something odd about it, but Loss can’t quite get to grips with what it is.
At the top of the board, in bold stark letters, he has written:
TUESDAY MEANS WHAT?
And at the bottom of the board, next to the picture of the white card stuck to the dead boy’s jeans, the card with ‘Tuesday’ scrawled on it, he has written:
WHAT DOES SHE WANT TO TELL US?
In the middle of the board is a still of the strange knives she used to cripple the youths. Loss has sent the image out to all the weapons dealers in the city, but so far has had no luck in identifying them. Underneath the still he has written
ANTIQUES?
As Loss is staring at the board, trying to make sense of the disparate pieces of information, his laptop chimes an alert: denoting a message. He looks at it, his mind still on the words and images on the whiteboard, and then suddenly his attention is fully on the incoming mailbox; there is no sender address, just two words in the subject line, along with an emoticon of a smiling face.
GUESS WHO?
DI Loss feels the hairs rise on his arm, as his skin contracts. There is no text when he opens up the email, just an MPEG attachment: a photo, or a video. He feels the tension in his body notch up as he stares at the screen, then presses the buttons that will access the file. He looks at it for a moment, eyes soaking up the image in front of him, and then he says one word:
‘Fuck.’
14 (#ulink_c2fada12-39c3-5e0d-a166-2f10f235d56d)
The boys fall out of the back door of the club and into the alley, the skanked-up bass music spilling out with them and bouncing off the walls. It’s completely beyond them to just walk out. They have to shove each other, and swagger and attempt to live up to some image in their video-drone heads. It’s pathetic. Who are they posing for? Certainly not me. They haven’t seen me yet. I’m sat by the bins, and they’d have to look beyond their own little-boy world to notice me.
Like that’s ever going to happen.
They take out glass pipes and little rocks of crystal meth wrapped in cellophane, and fire up. I hate watching people take drugs. It’s like watching someone stab themselves repeatedly in slow motion. If they weren’t such horrible bastards I’d feel sorry for them. But they are, so I don’t. I stand up and switch on the camera I’ve placed on the metal step of the fire escape next to the bins. Why the bottom of the fire escape is surrounded by bins is beyond me. What would happen if there was a fire? The boys are leaning against the club wall, laughing and sucking down their drugs. Each time they inhale, their faces are lit up, floating in the dark caves of their hoodies.
They look so cool; I’m surprised none of them are wearing sunglasses.
The alley is a dead end, with the opening to the main street at the front of the club, past the drug-boys, and me and the bins at the back, smack against the office wall. I take out a soft-pack of cigarettes from the top pocket of my Chinese army shirt. I can’t stand here all night waiting for one of them to notice me. I shake the pack, spilling a single smoke into my fingers.
‘Hey, boys! Got a light?’
All three of them stop what they’re doing and look up, squinting through the smoke to where I am.
Now they’ve noticed me.
15 (#ulink_37df4625-012e-50be-8b1a-e8f1e59e57be)
Loss stares at the images unfolding on the screen. Without taking his eyes off the laptop, he reaches over and buzzes Stone to come in. The footage has no sound. It has been filmed on an expensive camera with night vision. The colours are various shades of green. When one of the boys lights the girl’s cigarette, it looks as if he’s using a roman candle. Some sort of thermal imaging, he thinks, reaching into his pocket for his e-cigarette. In the corner of the screen is a frame counter, chronicling the seconds as they tick by; cutting time into slices of violence and pain. There’s a knock on the door and Stone comes into the room.
‘Sir?’ she says.
Loss can’t drag his eyes away from the screen. He beckons the DS over. Raising her eyebrows, she comes around the desk and stands next to him. After a moment she registers what she is looking at on the computer.
‘Fuck.’
16 (#ulink_9f29e402-9a0b-5242-93be-7cf2ba3070fe)
I walk up to the boys, letting them drink me in. I’ve got on a pair of black pilot trousers over black leggings, ripped at the knees, and my green Chinese red army shirt with the collar torn off. I can see them watching me come towards them, slightly addled by their drugs, but not so far gone that I’m freaking them out. One of them pulls back his hood and stares at me. His skin is speed-tight, with crack-burns around his nostrils. And he’s got cold eyes; eyes like weighing scales. He’s not judging me; he’s just trying to work out the odds. He’s a z-channel hurt-merchant with no future past this alley, but he’s trying to work out the chances of doing me. He cups his hands and sparks up his Zippo. Of course it’s a Zippo. With them it’s always a fucking Zippo. I lean in and light my cigarette.
‘Cheers,’ I say, and walk back towards the fire escape. Towards my satchel. Well, I’ve got to give them a chance to do the right thing, haven’t I?
I can feel their eyes on my back, working out the risk. Little Goth-girl like me, long night ahead, no witnesses. Really, for them, it’s a no-brainer. There’s a pause as the rusted cogs in what passes for their brains kicks in, then:
‘Hey, Nirvana, where d’you think you’re going? Why don’t you come back here and have a little fun, yeah?’
Nirvana. Jesus, they can’t even get their sub-cultures right.
I smile and reach into my bag.
Fun. Why not?
17 (#ulink_4a31730f-e075-5319-9405-2fc1656e034a)
DI Loss and DS Stone watch as the girl walks towards the camera. Even in the strange green light of the thermal imaging they can tell it’s her: the girl from the tube. She’s not wearing the same clothes, but the hair is the same, and the face, and the smile. The detectives know that something awful is going to happen next, but they can’t look away. The timer continues to count the scene. The smallest numbers, the hundredths of a second, are just a blur. The girl stops in front of the camera, looks right at them, and throws the cigarette to her left. Even though Loss knows that the image isn’t live, he can’t help feeling that she is looking directly at him.
The boys behind her grin at each other and begin to walk forward: leopards approaching a deer. The one with the hood down is saying something to her. Loss can guess what it is. Stay with us. Play a while. Don’t make any long-term plans. The girl bends down out of shot, and then straightens. The detectives can see that there’s something in her hand, but she’s too close to the camera for them to identify what it is. She turns round to face the boys slinking toward her, and Loss whispers:
‘Here we go.’
18 (#ulink_04f72f0a-a0a8-55f6-b5d9-916315fffbe4)
I shoot Mr Hood-down through the right eye. His right, not mine. There’s no sound because I’m using a crossbow pistol. The bolt leaves the mechanism at a million miles an hour then buries itself in Hood-down’s brain. Or what passed as his brain.
Night-night, on the ground. Sleepy-time now.
I turn away while his friends are still trying to work out what the fuck is going on, and put the weapon back in my bag.
‘Danny? Hey Danny! What the fuck are you doing, man?’
Danny’s not doing a whole lot right now, except maybe twitching a bit. I take out the flare gun and shoot the other two in the face.
19 (#ulink_4585d1a2-7787-52d8-94f9-e38a539e6e12)
When the flare gun detonates its charge, the entire screen goes white, then black; the super-sensitive setting on the camera overloading.
‘What the hell was that?’ DS Stone asks. DI Loss doesn’t answer her, nor does he take his eyes off the screen. Swirls of green light, and black and white heat flowers are blooming all over the screen, then dying and fading in front of him. When the image returns, the two boys are on the floor, clawing at their faces, white hot blobs thrashing left and right on the screen as the super-heated metal filaments embedded in their skin sputter and die. The girl is walking away from the camera towards the three figures on the ground. Loss instinctively clenches his jaw, expecting to see some new slice of violence, but instead the girl steps over them as though they’re litter and walks to the club wall.
‘What the hell is she doing?’ breathes Stone. Loss shakes his head, his eyes never leaving the screen. The girl is shaking something in her right hand, the image blurring. She stops by the door to the club. The detectives watch her as she starts to graffiti the wall with spray paint. After the first two letters, Loss grabs the phone on his desk and dials the crime-processing division, requesting all information on a triple assault involving a flare gun in the past two weeks. He hangs up when he has the information he wants. On the screen in front of him the girl has finished writing on the wall. In letters three feet high she has sprayed:
TUESDAY
in Gothic bold print.
‘Bloody hell, sir.’ Stone is shaken by the brutality of the last few minutes. On screen, the girl walks back to the camera, looks directly through the lens, then reaches forward and turns it off. The screen goes blank, and both detectives stare at it, as if expecting something else to happen. Something to make it make sense. And then Loss taps some buttons and makes it start all over again in a pop-up window in the top right-hand corner of the monitor. The rest of the screen is taken up as he utilizes the information given to him on the phone.
‘Candy’s. It’s a pop-up drug club, last in residence,’ he says, his fingers working the keyboard, ‘just off London Bridge. St. Clements Court. Incident reported at 12.45 this morning; one dead, two blinded, probably permanently. No witnesses.’
He runs his fingers through his hair, trying to scrape his brain into top gear. Any gear.
‘I want you find any CCTV that shows the entrance to this alley. Interview the FOS officers, find out if anybody saw this girl, saw anything, and fingerprint the fire escape, just in case.’
He stops the scene on his laptop and swipes his fingers over the touchpad, re-winding a few seconds. The girl in front of him pulls the cigarette out of her mouth and throws it away. He rewinds again, pausing it just as she is pulling the cigarette out of her mouth. He can’t tell in the weird green light, but he’s pretty sure she’s smiling.
‘And find that fag …’
20 (#ulink_167c28ba-5ba9-5e09-8f46-c717a513421e)
It was all over the news. Again.
The youths, all of whom are known by the police to be associated with the Sparrow Estate drug gangs, were found mutilated in the early hours of this morning in an alley near London Bridge. The police will not confirm that one of the youths, a Mr Simon Garth, was found dead at the scene …
Lily-Rose sips her tea and nibbles a Ryvita, tuning out the voice on the radio. Since the murder of one of the boys who raped and brutalized her, she has gained a shadow of weight to her frame. She does not think of what happened to the boy as murder. She thinks of it as redemption. Redemption for her, for her mother, and for many other girls on the estate. After the attack, the whole block went into lockdown. All the drug boys on their bikes disappeared, their handlers holding onto their gear until the trouble had settled. Lock-ups remained locked. There were no tattooed men sitting outside pubs, smoking countless contraband cigarettes and talking on cloned mobiles, their muzzled status dogs at their feet. Lily-Rose even saw a young mother pushing her child on a swing in the playground courtyard.
Lily-Rose smiles and sips her tea. Of course, the mother was young. Round here, any woman over thirty was more likely to be a grandmother than a mother. Seeing Lily-Rose smile is like seeing a flower growing in a smashed-out window. She knows that the person who attacked the boys outside Candy’s is the same person who attacked the youths who raped her. And she doesn’t have to be signed up to any of the social networks to know what is going on. It’s all over the Interweb, all over the street. She only has to look out of her window.
Down in the war zone between the concrete blocks that make up her estate is a new tag: a whitewashed wall with a name graffitied across it in paint the colour of dried blood.
TUESDAY
No one on the estate knows whether it refers to an event in the past that sparked off the spree of retribution, which occurred on a Tuesday, or whether it refers to an event yet to happen, on a future Tuesday. Everyone is holding their breath, waiting for more details.
A date. A target. A name.
Lily-Rose smiles and frosts the glass with her breath, obscuring the world outside. On the misted pane she draws three little Xs with her finger, making a small squeaking sound.
Then Lily-Rose goes back to bed.
21 (#ulink_627ecf81-98b6-5f6c-b233-0f05e2ff84db)
Well I think I’ve probably got everybody’s attention now.
After my little bit of business at London Bridge I pack my gear away. Stuff my wig in my bag, reverse my shirt, and ghost through the underground. I use my pre-loaded Oyster card, topped up with cash. I used to clone it, but now, with the new high-resolution cameras focused on the turnstiles, you’re more likely to be spotted.
I head down the escalator for the city branch of the Northern line. I love going down the escalators: the little push of pressure you get from below; the sub-rumble of machinery beneath your feet; and the feeling of above-ground time slipping away. This late at night it’s beginning to close down. The only people about are the drunks and the hustlers, each of them trying to get to somewhere that doesn’t exist. I love the feel of the underground when it’s almost empty: it’s like sneaking inside a machine. Gusts of warm air come at you unexpectedly, and if you put your hand to the walls you can feel a quiet throbbing. For such a massive structure to be so empty, it’s as if all the people have been stolen.
Which of course they have. They just don’t know it.
Sometimes my brain slows down and ticks gently, nothing going in, nothing going out. Just ticking. The Mayor is talking about opening some stations twenty-four hours. Non-stop progress to nowhere. Skeleton crews on a shadow train.
I make sure that the cameras spot me in London Bridge, and then again at Bank. But after that, I’m a ghost in the machine.
I’ve got stuff to do.
I hobo from Bank to Oxford Circus on the Central line. The train is one of the old ones, pre S-class, so I can crank down the window at the end of the carriage, filling my head with noise. From the connecting tunnel off the platform, I go through the maintenance door that joins the network to one of the tunnels under Oxford Street. Under the big stores.
I’m sure you must’ve wondered, when you’ve been in these massive department stores there, with their floors and floors of stuff. Where does it all come from? I mean, this is central London, not some robot dormitory town with mega aircraft hangars of retail space. All these shops, with thousands of people buying shit every day, where does it all get stored?
You’ve probably guessed, haven’t you?
All these stores, with their five or six floors of stuff, also have three or four floors below street level: a mirror store underground. For every object on display there are at least two or three stored in one of the basements. And coming off the basements are dozens of tunnels. And this isn’t just in one store. This is all the stores. It’s a wonder Oxford Street hasn’t collapsed in on itself. There’s practically nothing left under there. It’s like an ants’ nest.
I first heard about these tunnels when I was still living above, on the street. One of the people I hung out with was signed up to a shadow agency; a rip-off shop for immigrants and street rats, and was trying to get me to join. It was coming up to Christmas, and he had got some work in the basements of whatever the shop was called – Miss Selfish, Marks and Render, CockShop, who cares? – cataloguing the clothes and hanging them on racks
‘You wouldn’t believe it!’ he said to me in the café one night. ‘They’ve got racks a mile long! They’ve got whole tunnels full of racks!’
And it’s not just clothes. It’s hardware, too. They have to have air conditioning down there, so that stuff doesn’t rot or rust.
He’s dead now, the person who told me this stuff. I didn’t kill him. He shoved a bullet up his nose in the shape of cheap brown skag.
Never mind. Lie down.
The only lock on the maintenance door is the one I put there, but I check the traps just in case. I’ve got a camera set to detect any movement made by something bigger than a rat, and a pulse ‘disorientator’, which emits a 400-lumen strobe of light that’ll make your eyes bleed, should I need a quick getaway with no follow. I’ve got low-tack adhesive sprayed on both sides of the door with a layer of calcium-dust that’ll show a hand print if someone has touched it, and I’ve got a scary bio-hazard sign proclaiming ‘contaminated waste’, because sometimes a sign is all you need for a security guard who gets paid fuck-all on a zero-hour contract.
Once I’m in the tunnels I head for the one that contains the stuff I need. The tunnels are lit by low-watt festoon lighting and there are large pools of darkness between each light. Unlike the underground, these tunnels are red brick instead of white tiles, but they’re still teeny-tiny. Seriously, if I weren’t who I am, this thing with the tiny bricks would begin to seriously creep me out.
Finally, I come to the tunnel I want, and begin packing up the stuff I need.
22 (#ulink_164ba348-e37a-5659-b0ac-fb04c9e8aa56)
DI Loss hasn’t had a lot of sleep. His suit is crumpled, and worn continuously for so many hours it has begun to smell of the cigarette brand he used to smoke. His hair is greasy and his skin has a lived-in look as though it needs to be cleaned. Possibly just replaced. Rain is slithering down his window as if it wants to be somewhere else. DI Loss doesn’t blame it. He’d be somewhere else if he could. The overhead fluorescent light in his office is making his eyes hurt, and that whine in his brain from too little sleep is making it hard for him to concentrate.
He misses his computer; it has been taken away to be analysed. The computer has pictures of his daughter on it. Their absence is a physical pain; he has so few pictures of her. He has no pictures of his wife.
Loss leans back in his chair and sighs heavily. DS Stone, sitting opposite, wonders if her boss will make it through the day.
‘OK,’ Loss stares at the window, but not out of it. ‘Tell me what we do know.’
‘Well, the good news is that Candy’s has been under surveillance by the Drugs Unit for some time; first in Docklands, and then later at London Bridge, and we have clear video footage of the entrance to St Clements Court right through the night in question.’
Loss is staring at the rain leaking past his office. He wishes he could close his eyes, but every time he does he thinks he’s going to fall over.
‘And the bad news?’
‘At 12.45 on Sunday morning, the officers on duty in the van witnessed two youths staggering out of St Clements Court, clutching their faces. The officers ran to assist, and upon discovering what appeared to be foul play, reported the incident and called for back-up.’
Loss looks at his DS and raises his eyebrows.
‘Foul play? You’re going with “foul play”?’
‘Absolutely.’
He feels unutterably weary. He misses smoking and sleeping and sunshine, but most of all, he misses his daughter. He waves his hand in the general direction of his DS, urging her to continue.
‘Still waiting for the bad news,’ he says.
‘Once another unit had arrived, the officers carried out a search. They found one youth, dead, who had been shot through the eye at close range with an antique crossbow bolt, and a large piece of graffiti, still wet, proclaiming one word: ‘Tuesday’. There were no other persons found in the alley, which is a dead end. The only exit was under all-night video surveillance. The officers took photos of the deceased, and the graffiti.’
Stone spins her laptop round for him to see. It’s the report from the surveillance officers, including pictures of the dead boy. Images of the video sent to his computer slices through his vision.
‘The club door?’ he asks.
‘Could only be opened from the inside. Apparently there was some form of knocking code.’
‘Very Scarface. Any other doors? Windows? An office, perhaps?’
‘Nothing. And the fire escape only went up two floors, once again ending in a door that could only be opened from the inside.’
Loss rubs his hands over his eyes, wondering how much worse he can possibly feel. ‘And I suppose our boys were on the ball enough to check the bins?’
‘And girls. Just full of paper from the offices, and bottles and cans from the club. It’s all in the report, sir. The Drugs Unit were staking out that club front all night, and as far as the video shows, the only people who went into the alley were our three crack friends, and only two came out. The girl, who we clearly saw on the video sent to your computer, seems to be a spirit who can walk through walls.’
Loss contemplates the incident board. He is pretty certain that very soon it’s going to need to be much, much bigger.
‘However, there’s one other bit of news,’ Stone adds.
‘Yes?’
‘The back-room boys and girls taking apart your computer, were able to use the video to determine where we might find the cigarette butt our ghost-girl threw away. This was reported to the forensics team who were nit-combing the alley, and the said butt has been recovered and sent off for DNA analysis. With any luck in the next day or so our girl will have a name.’
The phone rings, its single loud trill making DI Loss’s ears hurt. He knows that he is becoming unwrapped, and badly needs some sleep. He looks intently at the DS as she speaks to the person on the phone. He can tell she is excited about something. She frantically taps notes into her iPad, thanks the caller and hangs up.
‘Let me guess. That was our MurderGoth, asking where we want her to appear next?’ he says, trying for grim humour and missing by a country mile.
‘No,’ she says. ‘That was Mr Brooks, of Brooks Military Antiquities, saying he can tell us all about the scythes that were used in the tube train assault, and who he sold them to.’
23 (#ulink_b55b5c19-e5c6-5dc4-b72e-79ba85ffeba4)
It’s not the hardware, it’s the operating system
I avoid the systems most people use. They’re always updating, always prying. It’s like sticking a tiny plaster over a great big cut: loads of crap just keeps oozing out. And the more they try to fix it, the longer it takes to run, and the more they know about you. I always go free source. You’re still on the grid, but at least you’ve got a bit more control.
When I was living on the street there was this boy called Diston, but everybody called him Deadman. He was rib-puncture thin with stinking dreads and had a unique approach when it came to panhandling for money. He used to go up to a person and ask them if they could give him some cash for his coffin. He would stare at them, hair down in front of his eyes, like some fucking zombie, and ask them for money. The poor sods used to be so freaked out they’d hand over whole wads of cash just to make him stop staring at them.
The thing is Diston truly believed he was dead. He was just trying to raise enough cash so he could lie down and go to sleep forever. He had borderline personality disorder, or at least that’s what he told us.
Me, I always thought he was a fucking liar. Anyhow, one of Diston’s things, one of the things that sparked up his plugs, was computers. He used to say he could leave his soul scattered across the Interweb. Diston knew all about computers.
How to build them. How to link them up through the ether.
And, most importantly for me, how to program them.
We used to sit in the underpass by Tottenham Court Road, surrounded by hobos, blinded by anti-freeze-strength white sui-cider, and sludge-blooded, old-school clock junkies, one needle away from being compost. Diston had this Asus tablet that ran open-source: completely adaptable. Fuck knows where he charged it up. I know he used to steal the Wi-Fi codes from local offices. He said it was easy. I never knew how easy until he taught me.
Really, just changing your password every week isn’t enough. You need to change your keypad too. Once Diston was into a computer, he had programs that could tell how frequently a key was pressed and then work out the passwords that allowed access to whatever the system was linked to. He blacked out whole swathes of information for fun, and then gently wiped his electronic feet, and left.
And then there was the Internet. Once he was in the Interzone he was away. A spider ghost in the World Wide Web. The way he described it, when people cruised the Web, they thought they were in their own little virtual bubble, their own private cyber car. That, he said, was bollocks. It was more like they were in a taxi, a black cab. You’d type in your web address and click, and then get in the cyber taxi and it would take you to your destination.
Recording all your information on the way.
Who ordered the cab.
Who got in the cab.
Where it picked you up. Where it dropped you off.
Diston used to tell stories, his face mad and rippled in the flames from a tramp fire. Stories of governments and corporations. Of cyber-tracking and data surveillance. He used to tell ghost stories too. About people who built clone cabs, cabs that navigate the Interzone without detection. About people who became the taxi driver rather than the passenger.
He was a scary boy, Diston. I didn’t trust him, and I didn’t like him, but he knew what he was talking about when it came to computers. He taught me all about C codes, and UNIX, and open-source hacking. He taught me how to spirit-slide behind legit apps and about mirror protocols, and mimic programs. Really, it’s quite simple once you’re into the groove, so to speak. It’s like anything else; it’s just a matter of application.
It’s not fucking art, is it?
Anyhow, that was then, when I wasn’t what I am now.
Branching off the main tunnels are little alcoves, cul de tunnels. They’re twelve metres long and kitted out with polymer racking systems to allow maximum storage. There are big, square, silver condensers bolted to the alcove roof with concertinaed tubing snaking away to remove the moisture and prevent corrosion.
I walk in, open up my satchel, and grab a couple of high-end laptops with solid-state delivery, and a bunch of mid-level phones. Most smart phones these days have a GPS chip soldered directly onto the board so the phone can be tracked, but you can still find units that only have it as an add-on, but are still ok for Wi-Fi hot-spotting. I also pick up some external drives and some Bluetooth headsets.
All the stuff down here in the tunnels isn’t registered yet, cos half the staff are on the steal. It doesn’t actually get on any books until it goes front-of-house. Perfect for me. I take a couple of prestige pieces to sell and then shadow-walk my way out of there, through the system and back to my crib.
For a while I toyed with buying stuff off the Silk Road before it got shut down. And then off BMR. I kept one laptop solely for subbing through the Dark Web: the web hidden under the Web, used by criminals and hackers, and art-terrorists and, for that matter, real terrorists. The BMR is a kind of eBay for Dark-webbers. I thought I could get my hardware there. Maybe some guns.
Well I could have, but the whole system was so full of spooks from all the covert security agencies that it was like scuba-diving through police sea, so I sacked it.
When I get back to my crib I do the rounds, making sure everything’s safe and secure, and then I hook up my new gear to my speakers and cue up the World Service. It’s late and there’s a programme on about the formation of matter. I tune out my head, and wash myself down, and do my business.
Then I drink down a protein shake and go night night.
Nothing to see here.
24 (#ulink_844edfe3-dfe1-5a04-bd47-3dcba1f78704)
Brooks Military Antiquities is the kind of shop in the kind of alley that demands dark skies and even darker conspiracies. From the moment they come out of the tube station at Leicester Square and walk down St Martin’s Lane, DI Loss is filling up with foreboding. The sky is a seething mass of grey, and black, and blue, and as low as if London had a ceiling over it. His phone vibrates in his pocket: a text. He pulls out the phone and opens it up.
‘Jesus!’
‘What, sir?’
‘The footage of Lily-Rose’s rape, which kept on being posted on all those revenge-porn sites that we failed to shut down cos they never show faces and are not controlled in this country, and God knows what else … it’s been replaced with footage of the mayhem on the tube.’
‘Good.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t mean good as in it was good what happened to those boys. I just mean good as in I’m glad the Lily-Rose images aren’t there anymore. Just because no one was identifiable, well, it’s still going to be understood by all those kids on the estate, isn’t it? And now they’re seeing those boys who did it.’
‘Allegedly.’
‘Whatever. Now they’re going to see them get fucked over. So “good”.’
Loss replaces his phone, feeling as if control is not so much slipping away from him, as running full-pelt. The air of the capital is hot and humid, and the bombardment of smells coming from all the street vendors makes him both nauseous and light-headed. The noise is incredible: tourists armed to the teeth with electronic gadgetry, clicking, and whirring, and flashing, all shouting at each other. The locals no better; many speaking a language he can’t understand, either because he’s too old and can’t decode the intonation, or they aren’t speaking in English. Almost half have strange contraptions in their ears and are shouting at the air in front of them. Amazingly, his DS seems to be enjoying herself. She even stopped and bought them each an ice-cream from a vendor working out of a rickshaw with a cooler-box attached to the back.
As they stroll down the lane towards the Coliseum Theatre, a deep throb of thunder pulses across the sky, as if it’s being fracked. Loss is having difficulty walking. He isn’t sure whether it’s because he is so tired, or because the pavement has begun to melt in the heat. The entire city is becoming surreal to him as though he’s a few seconds out of sync. A permanent shudder in reality. Stone stops suddenly, and grabs his arm.
‘What?’ he asks. Stone smiles at him and points. Loss looks at what she’s pointing at.
‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
Between the theatre and a music shop is an alley, no more than fifty centimetres wide. Spanning the gap, attached to both sides of the narrow street, is a lamp, making an arched entrance-way.
‘Brydges Place, sir. I believe this is us.’
The day is now so dark that the lamp marking the entrance sputters into life. As they walk single-file under it and into the alley, Loss briefly wonders if he has gone back in time. Steam seeps out of the walls in front of him through cracks in the mortar, and he feels as if the walls are barely staying upright that, at any moment, they might close up and crush him. He is dizzy with hunger, sleep deprivation, and claustrophobia. If it weren’t for the narrowness of the lane he might very well fall down.
After ten metres the alley opens up into a tiny courtyard, and Loss feels the constriction in his chest ease slightly, although his sense of displacement increases. The courtyard has a scattering of tables and chairs; an outside extension of the Marquis of Granby pub. In one corner sits a ragged dust-coated scarecrow of a figure, playing a violin, with an upturned bowler hat at his feet. Loss doesn’t recognize the tune, but it sounds vaguely eastern European. The only other occupant is a pavement artist, chalking a winged figure falling from the skies. From his perspective Loss can’t make out much of the picture, but he suspects that it’s Icarus, who flew too close to the sun. From where he is standing Loss can only see the back of the artist and he can’t tell if they are male or female.
‘Over here, sir.’ Stone nods her head at a dark blue door to their left. Above it is a painting of two antique duelling pistols, and a brass plaque next to it:
K Brooks
Military Antiques and Ephemera
By appointment only
Next to the plaque is a brass bell-pull. The DS gives it a firm tug. After a moment a cultured voice enquires after their business. Once the DS has given the required information there is a click as the door is remotely unlocked, and then they walk inside.
‘Hello? I’m up here!’ The same cultured voice rings out from above them, and urges them up a steep staircase. The stairs are old and the bare wooden treads are not flat, making them difficult to climb. The narrowness of the staircase, coupled with its seemingly random twists and turns increases Loss’s claustrophobia. By the time they reach the glass-walled garret at the top of the building Loss is so out of breath he thinks his heart is going to explode. His vision is just colours with no pattern or meaning to them. He feels himself falling.
‘Oh my poor chap!’ A tall scruffy man, his appearance at total odds with his voice, is quickly at his side, a firm hand on his elbow. He studies the DI, concern printed on his tight-skinned face. ‘Do sit down.’ He ushers Loss into an over-stuffed armchair.
After a few moments his vision settles and he is able to take in his surroundings. He blinks several times and wonders if perhaps he is drunk. Pointing directly at him is a cannon. Next to the cannon is a pirate brandishing a flint pistol at his DS. It’s only after some moments that DI Loss realizes it is a waxwork model.
Following his gaze, the scruffy man beams brightly. ‘I got him from Madame Tussaud’s. I think he’s supposed to be Calico Jack.’ The gaunt man is standing by the armchair holding a glass of iced water. He hands it to Loss, who drinks it down gratefully, and gazes around the room.
The walls are covered with weaponry of all kinds; from pistols to blow-pipes. There are esoteric potted plants everywhere, and the dry smell of them, mixed with the shadows they create from the enormous amount of light streaming into the room through the glass roof and walls, gives the feeling of a tropical forest. Loss wouldn’t be surprised if a Pigmy reached up and grabbed the blowpipe off the wall. The room is divided by glass exhibit tables. Loss stands up and peers into the one nearest him. The proprietor comes to stand beside him and looks into the case. Resting on red felt, and neatly labelled, are two wicked looking axes, about thirty centimetres long.
‘Those are Egyptian quarter axes, popular around 1500 BC,’ the man beside him says. ‘The first ones were made out of bronze, of course, but they were so useful in combat that they lasted right up to the Iron Age. I’m Kavenagh Brooks, by the way,’ he grabs Loss’s hand and gives it a single, dry pump. ‘I understand you’ve been looking for information concerning these.’
From out of another case the antiquarian produces a slim box and places it on the display glass in front of the detectives. When he opens it Loss feels a slick of saliva flood his mouth. Inside are two scythes, identical to the ones he’d last seen separating flesh from bone on a tube train, not very far from here. Beside him his DS gives a sharp intake of breath. Loss sways slightly.
‘Steady on, old chap.’ Mr Brooks places a concerned hand on the DI’s arm.
‘Where did you get them?’
‘These are one of two sets I brought back with me from Burma. Actually, it’s quite remarkable to find one pair in such good condition, let alone two.’
Loss can’t take his eyes off the knives, at the wicked curve of them, and the way they seem to sliver the light into flat silver snakes.
‘And who did you sell the other set to?’
Mr Brooks strokes the knives gently, as if he is putting them to sleep.
‘Why, the British Museum.’
25 (#ulink_3bb7c78e-04ef-5e26-846f-c3cb5678e70c)
Lily-Rose is getting dressed. Her clothes are too big for her now, and when she wears them, the impact of her recent experiences comes into sharp relief. She is a ghost inside her own skin. She puts on a pair of scuzzy old jeans, and uses a dressing gown cord threaded through the belt loops to keep them up. She doesn’t need a bra beneath her ripped black Joy Division tee shirt – since she stopped eating her breasts have almost completely disappeared. This is one of the reasons she still eats so little. She does not want her breasts to return. She does not want to be a sexual being. Over the tee shirt she wears a Russian army jacket with the collar cut off, and on her feet, a pair of Doc Martins. She does not look at herself in the mirror. She has broken all the mirrors.
When the police returned Lily-Rose’s computer she did not touch it. She was not sure if, when she started it up, knowing that everything on it had been examined, she would feel violated again. She wasn’t worried about them finding anything incriminating; the girl she met in the Pollyanna chat room was obviously very good at covering her tracks. But just the fact that strangers had electronically thumbed through her hard-drive. Her photos. Her texts. Her life.
Herself.
She wasn’t sure she could cope with it all.
In the end, she decided she couldn’t and, instead, used her iPad to re-connect to the Interzone. She created a new email address, which she gave to no one. Of course she didn’t. There was no one to give it to. Since her assault she has systematically shut down all her contacts with the school and the estate. It wasn’t hard. Most of her friends have abandoned her, seeing her as broken: damaged goods. Or worse, blaming her for bringing down trouble onto the estate. Her rape was in some way a difficulty that reflected badly on them. An inconvenience; rocking the boat, and allowing the corpse of fear to surface.
She collected all the information on the web concerning the girl the media were now calling Tuesday. She re-entered the anorexia/self-harm forums, the scar-bars she haunted after she was raped, searching for her.
This morning she received an email. It had no IP address and seemed to originate from nowhere. She opens it up and reads it.
The words make her break out in a shivering sweat but she reads it to the end.
Once Lily-Rose has finished dressing, covering her hands with a pair of fingerless grey mittens and wrapping a black keffiyeh round her throat, she leaves the house for the first time since her attack, and heads into town.
26 (#ulink_b9a38883-ae3f-5a34-b1c7-fd5a482dfe44)
When Loss and Stone leave Mr Brooks’ premises, the sky is a ribbon of boiling black above them, and the busker and street painter have disappeared. Seeing the scythes at close quarters has brought home to the detectives just how much pain and fear must have been in the carriage on the night they were used.
‘I need to sit down.’ Loss lowers himself into a chair at one of the tables opposite the door from which he has just emerged. Stone walks through into the Marquis of Granby, and returns a few minutes later with two Cokes. Loss can feel the moisture in the air, as though the rain has already arrived and is just waiting for somebody to notice. There are glass beads of condensation on the outside of the glass. He takes a sip of the Coke. It is not real Coke, but some glucose-rich variant from a soda-stream.
‘So whoever she is, she probably nicked them from the British Museum – unless she had access to similar weapons elsewhere.’ Stone sits down next to him and sips her drink. Flashes of lightning cross the narrow strip of sky above them. ‘But what I don’t get is why? Why use such a bizarre weapon, one that’s going to be quickly identified? And why leave a calling card, look at the camera, and then go to such extremes as to disappear by walking through walls. It just doesn’t make sense.’
Loss can’t disagree. The whole case is making him feel stupid. He can’t seem to be able to grasp a bigger picture. He knows there must be one. He feels it deep inside him. He just doesn’t know what it could be. He drinks his Coke, examining the pavement in front of him. It takes him a few minutes to register what he is staring at.
‘Fuck!’
The rain starts to fall in large drops on the chalk picture the street artist has left. Although the picture is much the same as when they went into the antique shop, it differs in two main respects. The first is that the central character, the one Loss had assumed was Icarus, is now a tumbling, black-trousered Gothette in an army shirt. She is quite clearly the girl from the CCTV and the video sent to his computer. The second is that the drawing now has a title written beneath it, beginning to blur and run in the rain:
TUESDAY FALLING
‘Take a picture of that before it washes away, for God’s sake!’
Stone gets out her phone, but, before she can utilize the camera facility, it rings.
‘It’s the lab, sir,’ she clocks the ID window, and pushes the button to accept the call, and puts the phone to her ear.
While his DS deals with the call, Loss pulls out his own phone and takes a snap of the chalk drawing on the pavement. All the colours have merged into each other and the image is distorted and surreal; a pictorial representation of how he feels. His phone rings.
And that’s when DI Loss’s world blows apart.
27 (#ulink_7b7c64c6-f50d-5f52-9908-6bf597775dd3)
Now they know that I’m not just some random fruit shoot, I have to be a bit more inventive. Not too inventive, cos I’m still dealing with empty-headed morons, but a little bit.
I’m not talking about the police here; I’m still playing Children’s’ Hour with them. It’s still Follow the Leader in that camp, and they haven’t got a clue what’s going on.
Of course, when I say the police, I mean DI Loss. I couldn’t give a fuck about the rest of them.
Poor DI Loss, all at sea and not a boat in sight.
No, I’m talking about the Sparrow Estate boys and girls. The rape merchants and the pain posses.
Really, they think they’re living in some film. They think they’re gangstas, or hooked-up players. They think they’re part of some crew and the world they live in is run by them, for them.
It’s almost unbelievable how people can be so stupid.
They all have smartphones they don’t understand, which is a joke in itself. Smartphones for stupid people. They all think it’s like chatting in their own cribs. All I had to do was send them a phishing email with a hack attachment piggy-backed onto a free game app, and I have a real-time screen on my tablet of all their texts, all their phone calls, emails, everything. They’re children, really. They don’t trust each other, but they trust a machine.
Heartless, raping robot children, obviously, but children.
Although technically, of course, I’m the child.
Anyhow, since my little run-ins with them, their phones have been on fire, trying to find out who I am. What I want. To begin with, once they knew it wasn’t just some psycho gig, they thought I must be some bit of fluff they’d fucked up in the past. Thought I was out for revenge.
They think that way. Like it’s all about them. Well, I’ll give them something, I suppose. In a way they’re right. Just not the way they think they are.
So they started to talk to each other on their little future-machines about all their victims, all the people they’d jumped in the past.
So many it makes you cry. All so casual. All so part of their everyday DNA.
And the way they think. Once they’ve fucked someone, they think that person has lost the right to refuse to have sex. Not that it is sex. Rape becomes just an assertion of property. Of power.
I’ve set up a program on my tablet that logs and stores all their messages, and relays them out to the people they’ve destroyed. It took me about zero seconds to write it. About the same to find the electronic addresses of the people they’d fucked over. Most of them were already on their hand-helds: trophies. Now all the victims know who it was stamped on their lives, and what they think about it. They knew some of it before of course, but now I’ve connected up all the dots. Opened the curtains and smashed out the window. I’d send it to the police but it wouldn’t be as much fun. It wouldn’t create the panic and movement that this is going to create.
And I need movement.
I need all the little worker ants to have boiling water spilt on them so I can watch them run.
I need to know where they’re running to.
That’s why I’ve decided to give them another little push.
The kebab house looks the same as any other kebab house; all faulty neon and unbelievably bad food pictures. You can tell by its popularity that it is a front for drugs. There are five under-age groom-girls outside, wearing belts that are pretending to be skirts, and a boy, maybe nineteen, standing a few feet away from them, with cold bullet eyes, like he’s a gunslinger, or a spook, or a hard-nosed mutha.
What he is, is he’s just a prick that someone else pulls, and he’s probably got about half an hour left to enjoy his life.
I’ve been watching them from a doorway next to the tube station. I’ve got a litre bottle of cider next to me filled with hydrochloric acid, and I’ve covered myself with a sleeping bag I pulled out of a skip. I’m wearing a Korean army greatcoat cos they’re the only ones that will fit me, and I’ve got on a fake-fur trapper’s hat.
Frankly, I look how I used to look three years ago, when I’d only just AWOL’d out of the hospital and was back living on the street. When it all got going and everything broke in my head.
But I smell a lot better.
So here I am, in my brilliant tramp disguise, which only works because no one likes to look too closely at a tramp in case they do something tramp-y to you, watching the boy outside of the kebab/drug shop who is looking at the street like it belongs to him.
He doesn’t look at me, though. Me, he looks right through as if I’m litter.
Every few minutes Bullet Eyes takes, then makes, a phone call, and a teenager on a pedal bike comes up and goes in the meat shop. After a little time they come out, get on their bike and ride off. They never have a kebab with them, though. I don’t blame them.
I’ve got my tablet resting on my lap, hidden by the sleeping bag, and I’ve got it connected to the Interzone with a cascade IP router so I can’t be traced. I used to use TOR before it got rebooted. TOR stands for The Onion Router, a way of transferring data that has so many layers of relays as to make it untraceable. Really, I don’t know why they bother. If someone doesn’t want anyone to know where they’ve been on the interlanes there are a million programs out there that will help them. Shutting one down is like trying to jail a planet.
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S. Williams
‘An awe-inspiring main character…I recommend it hugely!’ SHARON BOLTON‘I could not put it down. Totally loved it. Excellent writing, brilliant story’ ANGELA MARSONSA relentless thriller that will grip you by the throat and refuse to let go! Perfect for fans of SILENT SCREAM by Angela Marsons, and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.You’ve never met anyone like Tuesday. She has suffered extreme cruelty at the hands of men, and so has taken it upon herself to seek vengeance. She wants to protect and help others like her, to ease their suffering. A force to be reckoned with, she lives beneath the streets of London in the hidden network of forgotten tunnels that honeycomb the city – and this is her preferred hunting ground.When Tuesday is connected to a series of brutal attacks on gang members, DI Loss takes on the investigation. A burned-out detective still suffering the devastating effects of the unsolved murder of his daughter three years earlier, the case starts to hit close to home. Because soon Loss will discover that Tuesday could hold the key to uncovering the truth about what happened to his daughter…
S. WILLIAMS
Tuesday Falling
Copyright (#ulink_735d3dfd-bed7-5bf4-9df6-002eb5cc27a0)
Killer Reads
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GH
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Copyright © S. Williams 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
S. Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780008132743
Version 2015-02-26
Dedication (#ulink_cb8778e0-530a-5dde-bbf2-83f6507ab30e)
For Josephine, completely
Contents
Cover (#u2d332135-9298-5d1a-b6d4-bff2dff5bd7c)
Title Page (#u7d6e1f91-3774-5f31-8cff-a64a8fddfdea)
Copyright (#ua35b1faf-d061-588b-98e4-e056f54f726a)
Dedication (#ubfd86a01-de3f-52fd-90da-2d3ea0e2879a)
Chapter 1 (#u4a26cb60-c6c7-5aba-9b19-0e1480543c04)
Chapter 2 (#ua5d5f4e4-ffcb-569a-b516-4851f032ccb3)
Chapter 3 (#u6fcc218c-a123-501c-99a6-2279c5decfde)
Chapter 4 (#u2b63e6cf-39dd-53ba-9c5d-347ce2f33a88)
Chapter 5 (#u3778f0d4-1124-5a3d-8797-df6422ec2f11)
Chapter 6 (#u82227656-e7fa-5a2d-9ed2-d3de34980ac1)
Chapter 7 (#u3f7a1273-6237-52db-b7be-7312a4c1b1d8)
Chapter 8 (#u1aac1b77-c5b7-595a-9654-5cabef53b9b4)
Chapter 9 (#u1f49b682-a452-55a5-97f6-c1d359366463)
Chapter 10 (#u799e4b64-1b1b-5532-8562-297ca812d60c)
Chapter 11 (#u363b36be-6756-5456-b28a-643b0f1fb317)
Chapter 12 (#u98b2efbc-2ca0-52fa-83f6-4afda9ba71b4)
Chapter 13 (#u664f0725-a529-5100-ac71-8f87fe94a347)
Chapter 14 (#ucd81b1e5-e850-57ea-a7a3-bdea2ce04721)
Chapter 15 (#u59428a62-6f2f-5141-a605-a5390c45f842)
Chapter 16 (#uea938982-cb32-5c33-9eb7-1521e4e4dff7)
Chapter 17 (#ufadaed19-b4ad-5d3e-b571-97e5674161fb)
Chapter 18 (#ud495a692-797b-55b0-a44b-ee390a284658)
Chapter 19 (#u149d12fc-c9ee-5a36-aad0-9b7e229bc783)
Chapter 20 (#u616efa54-b7d4-5e3a-89b6-f7f56fa1592c)
Chapter 21 (#ud2fa821c-5113-5e98-878b-e6dc91993eab)
Chapter 22 (#uf3a01932-a67e-5703-9cdc-5cb36d3fcae7)
Chapter 23 (#ud7a87821-5cdb-55ad-8b65-7f89225005de)
Chapter 24 (#u8ea1df10-d379-5cda-8844-d5fee6149bfe)
Chapter 25 (#uf411d659-e79c-5711-bcf1-0ee017a33a75)
Chapter 26 (#u02c56357-2dea-505b-863f-ec2a14a898c0)
Chapter 27 (#uc6dd49e9-9d07-52fe-b63a-88a74efc7797)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 65 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 66 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 67 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 68 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 69 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 70 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 71 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 72 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 73 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 74 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 75 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 76 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 77 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 78 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 79 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 80 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 81 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 82 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 83 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 84 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 85 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 86 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 87 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 88 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 89 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 90 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 91 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 92 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 93 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 94 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 95 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 96 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 97 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 98 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 99 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 100 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 101 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 102 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 103 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 104 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 105 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 106 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 107 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 108 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Sometimes, I like to just sit on the tube, travelling from station to station. The station, then the tunnel, then the station. Over and over.
The white. The black.
I never look directly at anyone; I always look at them in the windows. See them reflected in the dark of the machine.
Sometimes, when the noise in my head threatens to make me snowbound, I just travel the tube, tuning everything out. Leaning my head against the connecting door. Feeling the vibration. Feeling the ghosts move through me. Waiting for it all to stop.
1 (#ulink_d41308d5-ee1f-5b98-8232-6759f1f9e58d)
The boys pile onto the tube, all drop-crotch trousers, and Jafaican whine. Their eyes are hard and shiny from too much speed laced with too little mephedrone. Their clothes scream outsider whilst looking desperate to fit in. They want to be seen separate, but together. Little boys in grown-up bodies, confused and broken by a society they can’t keep up with, and so try to laugh at instead. It’s pathetic really. If they weren’t so dangerous I might try to take them home and mother them.
But me, a mother? I don’t think so. The last time I was a mother I was fourteen, and it worked out just fine for about fifteen minutes.
There are six of them, these boys. The youngest is maybe thirteen, and the oldest about sixteen. If you added up their IQs the total wouldn’t even equal my shoe size, and yet they think they’re so clever.
I love messing with boys like them. They see me sat in the corner of the carriage, a little Gothette. A tiny emo. They look at my army satchel and they think, ‘poetry book’. They don’t think, Columbine.
Actually, I’m giving them too much credit. They don’t think at all. They function on crowd-brain. Follow the leader. Seek out the weak.
The weak. That’s me. Five foot fuck-all and all dressed in black, like I’ve got nothing better to do with my time than watch The Matrix, and make pretty pictures on my arm with a blade. A pretty girl, pretty fucked-up.
Ripe for the plucking.
Come on then, boys.
Pluck me.
2 (#ulink_1661cb6e-a360-5a91-8b54-129a6e315d65)
‘Who is she?’ DI Loss is looking at the CCTV from the tube train. Even though it’s a recording, not a live link, the tension in the room is a physical presence. The air seems razor-thin, and there is a whine at the back of the DI’s thoughts like a broken light-filament. The image on the screen is in black and white and the pixilation is terrible. There’s grey-out everywhere, and all the faces are smudgy, as if they’ve been partially rubbed out.
It doesn’t, however, disguise the blood.
‘Dunno, sir. We’re checking the cameras from the entrance now.’
His DS is not looking at what her boss is looking at. She’s already seen it and is still, several minutes later, having to swallow the copious amounts of saliva her body is producing. It’s either that or throw up on her lap-top.
On-screen there’s blood everywhere. All over the bodies of the young men lying motionless on the floor of the tube carriage. Splashed on the seats and the windows and in long splatter streaks on the tube walls. Even though the image is black and white and the pixilation is terrible the inspector can tell it’s blood. And he knows it’s not the girl’s blood because he just watched her walk out of the tube without a scratch on her. The DI sighs deeply and reaches for his e-cigarette.
‘Roll it again,’ he says.
The screen goes blank for a moment, and then the carriage is back to a time before the carnage. No blood. No bodies. Just a small teenage girl in the corner and six junked-up predators piling in through the sliding door. They mess about for a bit, hitting each other and mouthing off in silent comedy violence, and then they spot the girl. Even with the white-out. Even with the pixels more spaced out than a SkunkMonk, DI Loss can see that the boys think it’s Christmas. Two of them low-five each other, and the pack begin to move down the carriage towards the girl, unstoppable in their gang-power. Completely in control of their environment. Top of the food chain.
Loss stares at the screen. Stares at the animal hunger visible on their smudged-out faces.
‘I wouldn’t count on it, boys’ he whispers.
3 (#ulink_9ee317f0-29f6-5317-b5db-3c56f6b309b6)
Well whoopy-doo, here they come.
The one in the hoodie spots me first. What am I talking about – they’re all in hoodies. Of course they are. They all want to look the same, as if they’re American gangstas. Don’t they realize it’s all shit? That those people they idolize have the life expectancy of a sparrow? Honestly, if you think it through, what I’m about to do is a mercy. These brothers aren’t really living, they’re simply decomposing in slow motion.
Time to speed up the film.
What I meant to say was, the one at the front in the slightly more hoodie-ish hoodie than the other Marys, spots me first. I’m thinking he’s what passes for the brains of this crew. He can almost walk upright, for a start. He low-fives his drone-clone and starts edging towards me, all the others following as if they’re connected by puppet wire.
Did I tell you I love these guys? All tough stances and thousand-yard stares when they’re in a group. I reckon if I met one of these boys by themselves outside a church on Sunday and gave him a leaflet he’d say thank you very much.
I don’t want you to think I’m part of the God-squad, by the way. Fuck that. I’d rather have my teeth pulled out than get down on my knees in front of a priesty-prick.
No, what I’m saying is without his crew, his structure, he’s nothing but some brain-dead mother’s son with the processing power of a leaking punch-bag.
Doesn’t excuse him, of course.
I observe their approach through the reflection in the carriage window. When they’re a couple of feet away they come to a smug stop, almost in time with each other. Well done, boys.
Here we go. Mega-hoodie grins at me and speaks, his voice dagger-friendly.
‘Hey, Weirdo, how about you come with us, yeah. Do some stuff?’
It’s brilliant. Mega-hoodie is like the Shakespeare of the gang. He’s the Romeo. He’s managed to reduce thousands of years of linguistic evolution to the verbal equivalent of showing me his cock and saying ‘How about it?’.
Really, I’ve got to leave him till last, if I can. He’s just so much fun! I pull my knees up to my chest and carry on staring out of the window. Into the dark tunnel flashing by at a million miles an hour.
They all start to smile and jitter up. They think they’ve scored a hot one here. They think I’m scared and ready to pop.
‘Hey, Emo! I’m talking to you. Nothing to look at out there, girl. Plenty to look at in here, though.’ He starts to laugh, one elbow banging into his mate while he stuffs his right hand down the front of his pre-ripped Diesel combat trousers.
Two things here:
One. There’s plenty to look at because we’re in a tunnel with the lights of the carriage bright and sparkly. That makes the window a mirror. I can see everything they’re doing.
Two. Mr Ape has just stuffed his right hand down his trousers to have a good old jiggle in front of his mates, and so I’m guessing he’s right-handed, and has just about made it impossible for him to attack me.
I mean, you couldn’t make it up, could you? Intimidate the stranger in front of you by handicapping yourself! It’s like being threatened by the Teletubbies.
I can’t be fucked anymore. I turn back round to face them, pull the knife out of my bag, and stab Trouser-boy in the throat.
4 (#ulink_189e26d1-4132-55c3-9bc6-74a0168d4953)
The DI watches the girl on the tube do her thing. Even in the washed-out colour he can tell she’s smiling. Even with the time-stutter visuals and the horror film lighting that starts halfway through, when she pulls the emergency cord, he can tell she’s happy. There is a beauty and fluidity to her movements as she walks back down the carriage that sings of her satisfaction with her work. It is like witnessing a human tsunami as she flows down the carriage. Loss takes a drag from his e-cigarette and continues to watch, the vape obscuring not one grisly moment.
5 (#ulink_8f06c926-5e76-5448-9783-0fb22119b467)
It’s not hard to stab someone in the throat. You just pull the knife out of your army satchel and shove it in his neck, cutting into his carotid artery, just a few centimetres to the side of his trachea. Of course it’s not hard; he was going to rape you, and then watch as you were cluster-fucked by his clones. Completely self-defence.
No, the hard thing is not freezing up and stopping there, staring at the boy dying in front of you as he spasms around on the floor. That’s where most people go wrong. You have to stab him in the throat, then immediately pull out the knife, turning his body with your scuffed oxblood DM so that none of the blood hits you. Marks you. Then you’ve got to not freeze as the blood pumps out of Dying-boy in great gushes of red, spraying over his mates and the walls as his body spins away from you.
But you’re not looking as the body falls. No you’re not. You’re already slashing the eyes of drone number two as you run along the length of the bench-seating to the other end of the carriage. Between the blood fountain and the screaming you’ve gained yourself three or four seconds of shock before the adrenalin kicks in and they come for you as a pack. Of course, if they do that, you’re fucked. Beyond fucked. But by the time they’ve got it together you’ve already got your back pressed against the wall and big loony smile on your face.
It’s important which wall you’re pressed against. The tube train is travelling at 56 mph and when the emergency cord is pulled, which is what is about to happen, the momentum placed on the standing body of a drugged-up rape-junkie will be enough to make him face-dive the floor. It would also be enough to make a little Gothette sail through the air and crumple herself against a window, so it’s important that she is against the wall that will immediately arrest her momentum, and they are at the end that will give them the furthest to travel, thereby – one can only hope – breaking every bone in their rape-mongering bodies.
Smile. Pull. The scream of the brakes barely registers in my head, cos it’s full of snow and ice, but the boys in front of me are looking a little bit not so fucking clever now.
Oh, and rather helpfully, once the cord is pulled, the overhead lights go out, leaving the carriage lit by the stutter of the emergency fluorescent trace bulbs in the walls and floor.
Have a nice day, boys. I open up the satchel and pull out two curved scythes. I stand up and walk towards them.
Swish swash.
It doesn’t take long. It never takes long. If it takes long you’re in trouble. If it takes long you’re dead. The carriage is silent. I walk back up the train and put the scythes away. I won’t use them again but I don’t want to leave them for the police, either.
I mean, I don’t want it to be too easy, do I? Where’s the fun in that? There is, however, something I do want to leave for the police, and I take it out of my vintage American army shirt pocket and place it on Trouser-boy. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t object.
Then I look up at the camera so the boys and girls in blue get a good shot of me.
Then I leave.
Job done.
6 (#ulink_8752f194-ee56-5120-ac7e-706fefb146d5)
The DS taps at her keyboard and the scene backs up a few frames, and then freezes at the place where the girl is smiling up at the camera. Loss can feel a pressure building in his stomach and quietly belches; his hand in front of his mouth. The room fills with the smell of bacon fat. It makes him feel nauseous. More nauseous.
‘The cameras outside the station?’ he asks, reaching inside his jacket for some antacid tablets. His DS indicates the split-screen on her laptop, showing the CCTV views of the entrance to Embankment tube station, where all the passengers had to disembark after the emergency cord was pulled on the train.
‘Nothing, sir. According to the cameras she never left the station. She walked through those boys as if she was some sort of ghost ninja and then …’, she makes a throwing away gesture with her hands, ‘puff, disappeared.’
The DI continues looking at the girl on the screen. She couldn’t be more than seventeen. ‘And how many of those fine young men did she kill?’
‘Amazingly, only one. The leader.’ The DS taps a few keys. ‘One Jason Dunne from Sparrow Close, Crossquays.’
‘Lovely.’ Sparrow Close was well known to DI Loss. If one took a sink estate, an estate so deprived of government investment, but so rich in monies from drugs and stolen goods, and then dumped a load of stone-cold bastards in it, you’d have Sparrow Close.
‘Although none of the others will walk again,’ continues his DS. ‘She sliced their Achilles tendons and cut through the hamstrings behind the knee.’
The DS stops looking at her laptop and turns to face him. ‘Actually, she did more than that but I don’t want to think about it.’
Loss doesn’t blame her. All the blood in front of him on the screen is starting to make him light-headed. Even though on the monitor it’s not in colour, it’s in colour in his head, and it’s turned up to full-tilt. ‘And what was it she put on his body?’ he asks
She turns back to her laptop and starts tapping, her fingers hammering at the keys, and the screen is filled with a close-up of the body of Jason Dunne. Lying on his jeans, stuck onto them with blood, is a piece of white card, like a business card. Typed in Ariel font is one word: Tuesday. The DI sighs heavily.
‘And is it?’
‘Is it what, sir?’
‘Tuesday.’
Stone smiles tightly, staring at the image on the screen.
‘No, sir. It’s Friday.’
7 (#ulink_c8a90205-e5cf-5d94-b3bc-b99f9cf3ee20)
It‘s all over the news, screaming out on every media platform going.
One murdered and five crippled for life!
Jason Dunne, 16, and five other teenagers, all excluded pupils of Sparrow Secondary School, were brutally attacked in a Tube train late last night. Mr Dunne died at the scene. At present the police are asking for witnesses of the crime to come forward, and say they will shortly be giving a statement. They are particularly keen to speak to a young woman whom they believe to be at the centre of the incident.
When Lily sees the report she feels faint; she thinks she’s the young woman the police want to question. After a moment reality slams back in, and she breathes a shaky sigh of relief.
Of course it isn’t. It can’t possibly be her.
She was in all night.
Just as she’d been instructed.
Lily kills the image on her laptop and climbs out of bed. Without the noise of the news report filling the room, the rain can be heard plainly, tip-tapping at the window, behind the curtains. Lily is dressed in her favourite M&S brushed-cotton blue PJs. She has to roll the top of the pyjama bottoms over a few times to stop them falling off her. Lily has lost weight fast, and now weighs just under five and a half stone. Her bones hold up her skin in the same way a hanger does a hand-me-down dress. They look like they’ve borrowed a smaller girl’s body. Putting on her dressing-gown, she goes slowly to her bedroom door and presses her head against the wood, listening for sounds that shouldn’t be there. All she can hear is the noise of the radio in the kitchen, and her mother systematically beating breakfast into submission.
No sounds of doors being smashed. And people stumbling in.
No reek of drugs, and booze, and hate.
No jackal laughter. No violence and ripping and body greed.
Well, there wouldn’t be, would there?
Lily pulls back the bolt on the lock that she had fitted three weeks ago and walks through the flat into the kitchen. She doesn’t walk much these days, and she is slightly unsteady on her painfully thin legs. Her mother is standing over the cooker, a look of complete incomprehension on her face. Lily smiles. It feels good. Lily doesn’t smile much anymore.
Before it all, her mother rarely cooked for her; too busy working three jobs just to make sure there was food in the fridge and credit on her phone. Lily had repaid her by working hard at school and trying not to get in too much trouble. On Lily’s estate that wasn’t easy, but she had tried really hard. Now her mother doesn’t leave Lily alone in the flat. Lily no longer goes to school and rarely leaves her room. There is no longer any need for the cooker.
You don’t eat when you want your body to die.
Lily’s mum looks up from the cooker and stares at her daughter. Lily sees her own eyes in her mother’s face. Bruised from too much crying. Dry from too little tears.
‘Have you heard?’
Lily nods and stares back at her. Outside, the rain speaks a language all of its own as it lashes at the window. Lily’s mum looks at the radio; the quiet, measured radio-voice is talking about the attack on the six boys on the tube train. Lily’s mum nods her head sharply. Just once.
‘Bastards deserved everything they got.’
Lily smiles again. Hearing her mother swear, however mildly, makes her feel grounded. Not like she is walking through a cotton-wool dream world in her head where nothing matters and everything’s all right.
Lily goes over and gives her mum a hug, but only gently so that she doesn’t feel how sharply her bones are pushing at her thin skin. Lily knows her mum blames herself for what happened to her. When she was at work.
‘I tell you what, Mum. You mix me a Complan while I check my messages, and then we’ll swear at the radio together.’
It isn’t much, but it’s the best she can do. Interaction is a skill that has become lost to her. Weaving words to make a shield used to be part of her structure. Now words are a maze that confounds her. Lily leaves her mum crying in the kitchen, staring after her as she walks back to her bedroom. The last time she saw her daughter eating was two days ago, and that was a carrot sliced so thinly it looked as if it had been shaved.
8 (#ulink_1f889d21-1b94-5adc-bb54-61269c5967c5)
There are over forty abandoned tube stations in London, some of them only a short distance from the ones that are still used, but only a few of them fit my needs.
They need to have more than one way in or out, for a start. It’s no use making a crib with no escape tunnel. When I first started living underground I holed up in an old tunnel just off Green Park: near enough to the platform to feel safe, but far enough away so as not to attract attention. There are hundreds of these tunnels in the system. Some of them are for storage, or work stations. Some connect to lines that are now redundant. Some, well some I haven’t got a scooby what they’re for. I thought the one I was bundled up in was perfect. The walls and ceiling were made up of all these little white porcelain bricks as if someone had used toy bricks to make a full-size thing. Like I felt all the time. It had an old camp bed in there and a lamp and stuff.
Compared to where I’d been living before I thought it was the Ritz.
Never occurred to me that it might still be used. I thought it was a remainder from the War or something.
Third night in and I get woken up by a workman, skimming a few hours off a ghost-shift. I don’t know who was more freaked: him or me. Anyhow, there was no back door to the tunnel, so I ended up having to bite him just to get past. Living as I was then, he must have thought I was an animal.
That was then, this is now.
After I leave the boys on the train, I walk through a service tunnel to Charing Cross, taking off my wig and stuffing it in my satchel, and putting on a baseball cap. I reverse my army shirt so it shows green rather than black, then wait until a train pulls into the station. I have a skeleton key for the emergency tail-door, which is always still in the tunnel when the train stops, so all I have to do is slip out of my alcove, climb on board, and bump it one stop to Leicester Square. Change to the Piccadilly line and ride it up to Holborn.
Little-known fact about Holborn Station is that it’s a replacement station. There’s another station almost opposite it, on the other side of Oxford Street, that closed in 1933; the British Museum Station.
You can probably guess, can’t you?
I get off the train with the other passengers, keeping my hat low and my satchel slung round my back like a haversack, its leather straps over my head but under my arms. I follow the crowd so far, then ghost through a maintenance door and slip along the running tunnel that takes me to the abandoned station. I light the way with the halogen torch I take from my satchel, and then shade through the winding chambers and connecting corridors that bring me to the air-raid shelter that was used in the Second World War.
Home sweet home.
9 (#ulink_155df397-65a9-50e5-92e9-e4412f6e38f2)
Lily turns on her computer, directs the arrow to the Google icon, and clicks. As she waits for the machine to connect to the Internet she goes to her window and snitches back the curtain, looking through snakes of rain crawling down the pane at the estate outside.
Lily lives on the first floor of a three-floor block. On each of the floors there are ten flats, all identical to hers. Across the battle-ground below her that passes as a play area is a block of flats that exactly mirrors hers. To her left and right are precisely the same again: four blocks of identi-flats; lives wrapped in concrete.
Everybody knows each other to look at, but not to confide in: living in a war zone. There are at least a dozen languages spoken on Lily’s estate, but only two that are understood by everybody: fear and power. Below her Lily can see teenagers on children’s bikes. Peddling from block to block with drugs, phones, iPads, whatever. Above the blocks, in the distance, she can make out the neon lights and shiny bank-towers of Canary Wharf: an untouchable future from another world.
Behind her the computer makes a quiet, muted noise, indicating it’s connected to the Interweb, and Lily turns away from the window, and sits down gingerly. One month on and the bruising has gone, but the stitches still hurt. She opens up the Facebook page specially created for her, and is unsurprised to find it completely empty. There is no photo tag, no likes or dislikes, no friends.
Of course, no friends.
Lily types, ARE YOU THERE?
A computer pause; the cursor flashing like fingers tapping on a desk, then:
YES.
The reply font is electric blue.
Lily is unconsciously biting her lip, causing petals of blood to flower as she stares at the screen. There is so much she wants to ask, but knows she can’t. That isn’t how it works.
She types, HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS?
Pause
YES. WHERE WERE YOU?
Pause
AT HOME WITH MY MUM ALL NIGHT WATCHING TV
Pause
GOOD. ARE WE DONE?
Lily turns to look at the raindrops sliding down her window, then back at the words on the screen. They are so simple. Are we done? So simple, but impossible for her to fathom. Lily sucks at the cut on her lip and uses her sleeve to drag the tears away from her eyes.
ARE WE DONE, LILY-ROSE?
Pause
YES. WE’RE DONE. THANK YOU.
OK. FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS, AND THEN HAVE A NICE LIFE. YOUR BODY IS YOURS. MEND IT.
Lily is given directions for her to manipulate her laptop settings, allowing her computer to be accessed remotely. Once done, she watches the ghost hands systematically remove all traces of their correspondence from her laptop. All references of the Pro-Anna forum where they first made contact. All the conversations they have had in the cyber-basements of the Interworld. Omecle. Whisper. All of them. The Facebook account specially set up for their meetings ceases to exist. Everything. Every connection between Lily-Rose and the person remotely-controlling her keyboard. The last thing written on the screen before the computer shuts itself down is:
GOODBYE, LILY-ROSE
Lily-Rose sits in front of her blank laptop, its dead screen, and the future-girl stickers with which she’d personalized it in another life, and wonders what is going to happen next. She feels as if there is a door between her and the rest of the world, and the handle has been removed. Even though she has never met the person on the other end of her computer there was a connection: a way of understanding the pain and self-loathing inside. Lily-Rose does not know whether she will ever be able to take the advice and stop being frightened. Whether she’ll be able to take control of her life enough to live it. She wraps her arms around herself and stares past the curtain of rain at the grey world outside, seeing nothing. There is a knock on her bedroom door. She turns round to see her mum standing in the doorway to her bedroom, a mug of Complan in her hand, and her face set in an expression Lily-Rose is unable to read.
‘Mum? Are you all right?’
Lily-Rose sees past her to a tired-looking man in a zero-style suit and a weary-looking woman in an even worse one staring back at her.
‘It’s the police,’ her mother says, her voice tight-leashed. ‘They want to ask us some questions.’
10 (#ulink_fc9f4cde-c052-5f68-ac94-d91cd276e824)
It’s not hard to hack a computer. Anyone who says differently is a liar. It’s like lock-picking, or face-reading: all you need is the right teacher, and the correct motivation. All these films showing nerdy kids sitting around watching Star Trek, and Quantum Geek, and hacking into NASA or whatever, it’s just bollocks. Just another way to bully the weirdies. Box them in. Make them this. Make them that. Make them sit alone in the dark.
Mind you, I like sitting alone in the dark. It means nobody else is there.
Most of the tube stations have Wi-Fi now, including Holborn, so all I had to do to get a signal was set up a booster along the running tunnel between there and the British Museum Station. It’s not hard. There are so many redundant cables and junction boxes down here that finding a power source was easy, and disguising it unnecessary. The walls look like something out of Alien, all rubber-coated armoured cable and danger signs. No one can tell what belongs to what, down here. That’s why they never remove anything. Pull the wrong thing out and a train stops moving. Or all the lights go out. Something awful might happen, so leave it alone; that’s the thought process.
Works for me.
I’ve made my crib in the part of the station that was used as an air-raid shelter, the deepest part of the structure. It’s still got the ‘Dig for Britain’ posters on the walls. I’ve got fairy lights hanging from the ceiling, a camp bed, a laptop with remote speakers, and a rail for my clothes. There’s still a working toilet in the main part of the station, although I have to fill it with water from a stand-pipe in the running tunnel. Really, It’s more home-y than home ever was.
I’ve got other cribs in other stations for other things, scattered all across London … I don’t like to have all my eggs in one basket in case one of them breaks.
There’s three ways out of this crib, so I feel OK. Any less and I start getting jittery. I set the alarms, tune the laptop to the World Service, and lie down in my cot. I stare at the fairy lights sparkling above me, their little twinklings reflected in the millions of tiny dust particles that are no doubt poisoning my lungs. The computer is all news speak. Fucked-up country this. Fucked up climate that. All happening in a world I’m so separate from, it might as well be made up. I tune out and just lie here, looking at the tiny porcelain tiles that make up the ceiling. Honestly, it must have taken them years to fit all those bricks in. Why did they do it? Why did they make the bricks so small? And where did they make them? I can’t think of an answer so I stop thinking about it, and just lie here, breathing in and out.
Like I’m alive.
That’s about it really.
Lights out. Night-night.
11 (#ulink_cce17280-d657-5cc4-97b6-6bc3c2d640f2)
Even from the doorway where he and DS Stone are standing, DI Loss can tell the girl has been messed over good and proper. She’s got that gaunt look of someone who’s lost weight suddenly: skin too tight and eyes too big. Like a cancer victim, or someone who’s undergone extreme circumstances. War. Famine. Or, he thinks sadly, someone who’s been repeatedly raped and beaten and no longer sees her body as an ally.
They are shown into the living room. It is a rectangular box identical in structure to thousands of other rectangular boxes the DI has been shown into over the years. The mother has tried to personalize it with pictures and paint, furniture and rugs, but to Loss’s mind it’s still a rabbit hutch on a sink estate that might as well be a prison.
The mother is staring hard at them, her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Protecting her. Pouring strength into her. Neither of them wants him here. Or his DS. He can tell that from their faces. He can see that from their posture. Have to be blind not to. What he can’t tell is why. It could be that, after the attack, the police were brutish and unsympathetic. They often are where rape is concerned. In some police circles, rape is just another word for ‘changed her mind’. Not in all. Much better than it used to be, but some. It could be that, mother and daughter have simply had enough, and want to shut themselves away and heal, or try to heal, and they, the police, are just a reminder of past horrors. It could be all these things and more besides. Loss had noticed a strange expression on the daughter’s face when she’d first caught sight of him. Almost guilt. And that furtive look at her laptop? The DI doesn’t know what to make of it, so decides to make nothing of it and get on with why he is here. He leans forward in his chair.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you this morning, Mrs Lorne, Lily, but I’ve got some information possibly relating to your, er …’ He is at a loss what to say. Sitting here in this tidy small flat with its touches of humanity, even using the word ‘rape’ seems to invite an evil that doesn’t belong in this place. He can see the mother’s hand whiten as she squeezes the daughter’s shoulder.
‘We heard it on the radio, Inspector …?’ The mother wants his name again. Even though he’s told her. Wants to keep control. He doesn’t blame her.
‘Loss.’
‘Inspector Loss, all I can say is those animals got everything they deserve.’ The mother’s face is flushed high with anger, and the daughter is staring at her hands. Loss notices she has bitten her nails down to such an extent that the skin has been chewed and the end of each finger is raw and bloody.
‘I’m sorry to have to ask, Mrs Lorne, but because of the nature of the attack on the young men …’
‘Animals!’ Mrs Lorne interjects vehemently. ‘They raped my daughter, beat her up, and then raped her again. Everything that happened to those vermin, it wasn’t enough.’
‘And because it was those specific young men,’ Loss continues, lowering his voice, ‘well, I’m afraid I have to ask.’
The seconds tick by, and mother and daughter just stare at him. Finally Mrs Lorne understands what he is saying. Asking. She looks at him with loathing and says, ‘We were in all night. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’
‘The CCTV shows a young woman at the scene of the crime …’ Loss stops speaking as Mrs Lorne makes a cutting motion with her hand.
‘Enough. We were here all night. People called round. Unlike those animals who attacked my daughter, we have witnesses apart from ourselves.’ Mrs Lorne curls her lip in disgust. For a second Loss thinks she’s going to spit on her own floor. ‘They just back each other up. Cover each other’s tracks and sneer at us as if we’re nothing.’ Loss can see that Mrs Lorne is only just holding her rage in check. ‘Not that we’d need witnesses if those bastards had been locked up. The last month I’ve not been able to leave the flat without one of them hanging around, laughing into their phones. Even when I go to the shop downstairs I have to get a neighbour to sit in or else Lily starts screaming, or worse,’ Both Mrs Lorne and Lily-Rose seem to be falling apart in front of him, and Loss has a deep sense of self-loathing within himself. All these people want to do is heal, and here he is twisting a screwdriver into the wound, opening it up for inspection. Making things worse. So he twists it again.
‘Does the word “Tuesday” have any special meaning to either of you?’
‘Get out.’ The mother is striding to the door, barging past the DS. ‘I’d like you to leave now. My daughter needs to rest.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Loss stands up and follows her to the front door. As he passes Lily-Rose he has an urge to touch her shoulder, seeing his own daughter in her, but resists. ‘Even with the incident on the tube we’ll continue trying to corroborate your statement. The officers who were assigned to your case have handed over transcripts of all the interviews. It might be that given the new, ah, circumstances they have something more to add.’
Lily-Rose looks up at him, staring. And then she smiles, and it’s like the last rays of the sun before it sinks into the sea.
‘They’ll have difficulty raping anyone else from a wheelchair, yeah?’ And then she turns away from him and stares at the floor, leaving him cold and empty.
Outside on the concrete walkway in front of the closed flat, the detectives look out at the rain-soaked estate. Although the rain is coming down in sheets, they can still see the boys on their bikes with their rucksacks full of consumables. Commerce doesn’t stop because of the weather. Loss takes his e-cigarette out of his pocket, taps it a few times to charge the atomizer, and pulls a breath of nicotine down into his lungs. The DS sniffs, places her hands on the walkway balustrade, and looks down at the concrete playground beneath them.
‘Definite reaction when you said ‘Tuesday’, sir.’
12 (#ulink_2e07ec87-989e-5ae4-a07d-41a3b9f08230)
After I’ve finished wiping everything from Lily-Rose’s computer I pull the hard-drive out of mine and put it and the console in my satchel for throwing in the sewer later. It’s not so much that I’m worried about getting caught, I couldn’t give a fuck about that, it’s more that I don’t want my clients to have to deal with any shit. No hard-drive, no record.
New client, new laptop.
I keep the speakers, though.
Clients. That’s what I call them. Girls and boys who have no one else to turn to when everything gets fucked up and they end up in the nowhere world of self harm and suicide …
Anyway, I won’t be getting any more clients, will I?
Before I get rid of the hardware I have a Red Bull and write down the names of the boys from the train on my wall. Later on, once I’ve hacked the CCTV footage from the underground, I’ll attach a QR code next to their names. I’ve already pre-linked the code to the site where they’ve put up video footage of Lily-Rose. If anybody tries to watch ‘the Lily-Rose rape show’ they’ll find themselves watching ‘the tube train gang boys getting completely outclassed and fucked up show’ instead.
I grab the hardware and my MagLite and enter the stairwell. The stairs aren’t in as good nick as the main areas, so I have to do a little scrambling. I go up a couple of levels to where there’s a tunnel that connects to the sewer system. The walls are made up of the same Victorian brickwork as in some of the stations. Really, what is it about Victorians and tiny bricks? The whole of the sewer network is full of them too. I know a lot of the sewers and the early Tube tunnels were built at the same time, but were all the bricks being made by midgets, or something? Was it some sort of work-house orphanage scheme?
I dump the laptop in the slow-moving effluence. There’s a kind of walkway by the side of the channel and I go along there for about half a mile and then dump the hard-drive. You’ve got to be quite alert in the sewers. There’s a lot of noise around, and workmen are often down here, doing something work-y …
I read in one of the free newspapers that litter the stations that London is going to get a new super-sewer tunnel, and that a lot of the old tunnels that stitch lower London together will be demolished. Good luck with that. There’s so much secret stuff down here that anyone trying to do a full recce will blow their mind. In my wanderings I’ve found hash farms, secret garages full of stolen super cars, and factories for making crystal meth. Half of the London underworld keeps its stuff underground. Once I even found a tank. A tank!
After I’ve got rid of the computer stuff I go back to the British Museum Station, and begin slowly checking all my alarms, working my way up to the ‘loot-chute’: a tunnel dug in the Second World War between the tube station and the basement of the British Museum. The thinking was that if the Nazis started bombing the crap out of London, then the most valuable artefacts could be brought down here and kept safe. The ones, that is, that the government hadn’t already hidden in mines in Wales, or sold off to the Americans as a bribe. It’s amazing what you can learn from documents people forget they even have. There’s a tunnel under MI6 as well. That’s the old MI6, not the swanky new one. It’s like the Death Star, under the new one; I stay well away from there.
Anyway, I put an ABUS disc-cylinder padlock on the connecting door between the tunnel and the station to make sure no one who found the entrance accidentally would get very far, and a trip alarm to let me know if they did. Not that I think anyone ever would, but it would give me time to run.
I undo the padlock and make my way up to the door that leads to the basement of the museum. I say basement, but there’re hundreds of rooms. The place has been going since 1753; that’s a lot of stuff, with more added year after year. I’m willing to bet that most of the stuff they’ve got they don’t even know they’ve got anymore. Old artefacts from around the world. Maps and clothing. Instruments and weapons.
They’ve got weapons from all over the empire, and beyond.
Like these Burmese hand-scythes, for instance.
13 (#ulink_cbcba7d2-388e-5d0f-b290-2e39b72312a0)
DI Loss stares at the whiteboard covering the back wall of his office, and wishes he still smoked. In the two weeks since the attack on the tube by the unknown girl, he has been slowly placing tiny bits of information on the board. Filling it up with snippets of facts and conjecture that he hopes will add up to some defining whole. There is a grainy still from the CCTV showing the girl staring out at him, a look that has begun to haunt odd moments of his day. Underneath the picture, using a bold black marker-pen, he has written:
HOW DID SHE LEAVE THE STATION?
DISGUISE?
The names of all six of the boys she attacked – defended herself against – a small voice inside him says, and their addresses, underneath he has written:
SPARROW ESTATE
DRUGS?
SEXUAL ASSAULT?
There is a picture of Lily-Rose, taken at the hospital, less than an hour after her mother found her. Loss can’t look at it without a little piece of his heart being sliced away and swallowed by despair. The bits of body that should be inside, but were outside. The swelling. The blood. The sheer brutal animalism that it must have taken to do that to another human being. It makes him think of his daughter, but he can’t think of his daughter because it will make him cry, and he’ll never be able to stop. Underneath he has written:
REVENGE?
LAPTOP? INTERNET RECORDS?
ALIBI?
That Lily-Rose is hiding something he has no doubt, but he can’t for the life of him work out what it is. They’d checked out her internet history, but, apart from some pro-anorexia sites and extreme self-help forums, found nothing unusual.
Apart, that is, from the lack of social networking. Girls her age normally had a Facebook account, or Google+. Something. Lily-Rose had nothing. Her presence in the Interzone barely skimmed the surface. There is something odd about it, but Loss can’t quite get to grips with what it is.
At the top of the board, in bold stark letters, he has written:
TUESDAY MEANS WHAT?
And at the bottom of the board, next to the picture of the white card stuck to the dead boy’s jeans, the card with ‘Tuesday’ scrawled on it, he has written:
WHAT DOES SHE WANT TO TELL US?
In the middle of the board is a still of the strange knives she used to cripple the youths. Loss has sent the image out to all the weapons dealers in the city, but so far has had no luck in identifying them. Underneath the still he has written
ANTIQUES?
As Loss is staring at the board, trying to make sense of the disparate pieces of information, his laptop chimes an alert: denoting a message. He looks at it, his mind still on the words and images on the whiteboard, and then suddenly his attention is fully on the incoming mailbox; there is no sender address, just two words in the subject line, along with an emoticon of a smiling face.
GUESS WHO?
DI Loss feels the hairs rise on his arm, as his skin contracts. There is no text when he opens up the email, just an MPEG attachment: a photo, or a video. He feels the tension in his body notch up as he stares at the screen, then presses the buttons that will access the file. He looks at it for a moment, eyes soaking up the image in front of him, and then he says one word:
‘Fuck.’
14 (#ulink_c2fada12-39c3-5e0d-a166-2f10f235d56d)
The boys fall out of the back door of the club and into the alley, the skanked-up bass music spilling out with them and bouncing off the walls. It’s completely beyond them to just walk out. They have to shove each other, and swagger and attempt to live up to some image in their video-drone heads. It’s pathetic. Who are they posing for? Certainly not me. They haven’t seen me yet. I’m sat by the bins, and they’d have to look beyond their own little-boy world to notice me.
Like that’s ever going to happen.
They take out glass pipes and little rocks of crystal meth wrapped in cellophane, and fire up. I hate watching people take drugs. It’s like watching someone stab themselves repeatedly in slow motion. If they weren’t such horrible bastards I’d feel sorry for them. But they are, so I don’t. I stand up and switch on the camera I’ve placed on the metal step of the fire escape next to the bins. Why the bottom of the fire escape is surrounded by bins is beyond me. What would happen if there was a fire? The boys are leaning against the club wall, laughing and sucking down their drugs. Each time they inhale, their faces are lit up, floating in the dark caves of their hoodies.
They look so cool; I’m surprised none of them are wearing sunglasses.
The alley is a dead end, with the opening to the main street at the front of the club, past the drug-boys, and me and the bins at the back, smack against the office wall. I take out a soft-pack of cigarettes from the top pocket of my Chinese army shirt. I can’t stand here all night waiting for one of them to notice me. I shake the pack, spilling a single smoke into my fingers.
‘Hey, boys! Got a light?’
All three of them stop what they’re doing and look up, squinting through the smoke to where I am.
Now they’ve noticed me.
15 (#ulink_37df4625-012e-50be-8b1a-e8f1e59e57be)
Loss stares at the images unfolding on the screen. Without taking his eyes off the laptop, he reaches over and buzzes Stone to come in. The footage has no sound. It has been filmed on an expensive camera with night vision. The colours are various shades of green. When one of the boys lights the girl’s cigarette, it looks as if he’s using a roman candle. Some sort of thermal imaging, he thinks, reaching into his pocket for his e-cigarette. In the corner of the screen is a frame counter, chronicling the seconds as they tick by; cutting time into slices of violence and pain. There’s a knock on the door and Stone comes into the room.
‘Sir?’ she says.
Loss can’t drag his eyes away from the screen. He beckons the DS over. Raising her eyebrows, she comes around the desk and stands next to him. After a moment she registers what she is looking at on the computer.
‘Fuck.’
16 (#ulink_9f29e402-9a0b-5242-93be-7cf2ba3070fe)
I walk up to the boys, letting them drink me in. I’ve got on a pair of black pilot trousers over black leggings, ripped at the knees, and my green Chinese red army shirt with the collar torn off. I can see them watching me come towards them, slightly addled by their drugs, but not so far gone that I’m freaking them out. One of them pulls back his hood and stares at me. His skin is speed-tight, with crack-burns around his nostrils. And he’s got cold eyes; eyes like weighing scales. He’s not judging me; he’s just trying to work out the odds. He’s a z-channel hurt-merchant with no future past this alley, but he’s trying to work out the chances of doing me. He cups his hands and sparks up his Zippo. Of course it’s a Zippo. With them it’s always a fucking Zippo. I lean in and light my cigarette.
‘Cheers,’ I say, and walk back towards the fire escape. Towards my satchel. Well, I’ve got to give them a chance to do the right thing, haven’t I?
I can feel their eyes on my back, working out the risk. Little Goth-girl like me, long night ahead, no witnesses. Really, for them, it’s a no-brainer. There’s a pause as the rusted cogs in what passes for their brains kicks in, then:
‘Hey, Nirvana, where d’you think you’re going? Why don’t you come back here and have a little fun, yeah?’
Nirvana. Jesus, they can’t even get their sub-cultures right.
I smile and reach into my bag.
Fun. Why not?
17 (#ulink_4a31730f-e075-5319-9405-2fc1656e034a)
DI Loss and DS Stone watch as the girl walks towards the camera. Even in the strange green light of the thermal imaging they can tell it’s her: the girl from the tube. She’s not wearing the same clothes, but the hair is the same, and the face, and the smile. The detectives know that something awful is going to happen next, but they can’t look away. The timer continues to count the scene. The smallest numbers, the hundredths of a second, are just a blur. The girl stops in front of the camera, looks right at them, and throws the cigarette to her left. Even though Loss knows that the image isn’t live, he can’t help feeling that she is looking directly at him.
The boys behind her grin at each other and begin to walk forward: leopards approaching a deer. The one with the hood down is saying something to her. Loss can guess what it is. Stay with us. Play a while. Don’t make any long-term plans. The girl bends down out of shot, and then straightens. The detectives can see that there’s something in her hand, but she’s too close to the camera for them to identify what it is. She turns round to face the boys slinking toward her, and Loss whispers:
‘Here we go.’
18 (#ulink_04f72f0a-a0a8-55f6-b5d9-916315fffbe4)
I shoot Mr Hood-down through the right eye. His right, not mine. There’s no sound because I’m using a crossbow pistol. The bolt leaves the mechanism at a million miles an hour then buries itself in Hood-down’s brain. Or what passed as his brain.
Night-night, on the ground. Sleepy-time now.
I turn away while his friends are still trying to work out what the fuck is going on, and put the weapon back in my bag.
‘Danny? Hey Danny! What the fuck are you doing, man?’
Danny’s not doing a whole lot right now, except maybe twitching a bit. I take out the flare gun and shoot the other two in the face.
19 (#ulink_4585d1a2-7787-52d8-94f9-e38a539e6e12)
When the flare gun detonates its charge, the entire screen goes white, then black; the super-sensitive setting on the camera overloading.
‘What the hell was that?’ DS Stone asks. DI Loss doesn’t answer her, nor does he take his eyes off the screen. Swirls of green light, and black and white heat flowers are blooming all over the screen, then dying and fading in front of him. When the image returns, the two boys are on the floor, clawing at their faces, white hot blobs thrashing left and right on the screen as the super-heated metal filaments embedded in their skin sputter and die. The girl is walking away from the camera towards the three figures on the ground. Loss instinctively clenches his jaw, expecting to see some new slice of violence, but instead the girl steps over them as though they’re litter and walks to the club wall.
‘What the hell is she doing?’ breathes Stone. Loss shakes his head, his eyes never leaving the screen. The girl is shaking something in her right hand, the image blurring. She stops by the door to the club. The detectives watch her as she starts to graffiti the wall with spray paint. After the first two letters, Loss grabs the phone on his desk and dials the crime-processing division, requesting all information on a triple assault involving a flare gun in the past two weeks. He hangs up when he has the information he wants. On the screen in front of him the girl has finished writing on the wall. In letters three feet high she has sprayed:
TUESDAY
in Gothic bold print.
‘Bloody hell, sir.’ Stone is shaken by the brutality of the last few minutes. On screen, the girl walks back to the camera, looks directly through the lens, then reaches forward and turns it off. The screen goes blank, and both detectives stare at it, as if expecting something else to happen. Something to make it make sense. And then Loss taps some buttons and makes it start all over again in a pop-up window in the top right-hand corner of the monitor. The rest of the screen is taken up as he utilizes the information given to him on the phone.
‘Candy’s. It’s a pop-up drug club, last in residence,’ he says, his fingers working the keyboard, ‘just off London Bridge. St. Clements Court. Incident reported at 12.45 this morning; one dead, two blinded, probably permanently. No witnesses.’
He runs his fingers through his hair, trying to scrape his brain into top gear. Any gear.
‘I want you find any CCTV that shows the entrance to this alley. Interview the FOS officers, find out if anybody saw this girl, saw anything, and fingerprint the fire escape, just in case.’
He stops the scene on his laptop and swipes his fingers over the touchpad, re-winding a few seconds. The girl in front of him pulls the cigarette out of her mouth and throws it away. He rewinds again, pausing it just as she is pulling the cigarette out of her mouth. He can’t tell in the weird green light, but he’s pretty sure she’s smiling.
‘And find that fag …’
20 (#ulink_167c28ba-5ba9-5e09-8f46-c717a513421e)
It was all over the news. Again.
The youths, all of whom are known by the police to be associated with the Sparrow Estate drug gangs, were found mutilated in the early hours of this morning in an alley near London Bridge. The police will not confirm that one of the youths, a Mr Simon Garth, was found dead at the scene …
Lily-Rose sips her tea and nibbles a Ryvita, tuning out the voice on the radio. Since the murder of one of the boys who raped and brutalized her, she has gained a shadow of weight to her frame. She does not think of what happened to the boy as murder. She thinks of it as redemption. Redemption for her, for her mother, and for many other girls on the estate. After the attack, the whole block went into lockdown. All the drug boys on their bikes disappeared, their handlers holding onto their gear until the trouble had settled. Lock-ups remained locked. There were no tattooed men sitting outside pubs, smoking countless contraband cigarettes and talking on cloned mobiles, their muzzled status dogs at their feet. Lily-Rose even saw a young mother pushing her child on a swing in the playground courtyard.
Lily-Rose smiles and sips her tea. Of course, the mother was young. Round here, any woman over thirty was more likely to be a grandmother than a mother. Seeing Lily-Rose smile is like seeing a flower growing in a smashed-out window. She knows that the person who attacked the boys outside Candy’s is the same person who attacked the youths who raped her. And she doesn’t have to be signed up to any of the social networks to know what is going on. It’s all over the Interweb, all over the street. She only has to look out of her window.
Down in the war zone between the concrete blocks that make up her estate is a new tag: a whitewashed wall with a name graffitied across it in paint the colour of dried blood.
TUESDAY
No one on the estate knows whether it refers to an event in the past that sparked off the spree of retribution, which occurred on a Tuesday, or whether it refers to an event yet to happen, on a future Tuesday. Everyone is holding their breath, waiting for more details.
A date. A target. A name.
Lily-Rose smiles and frosts the glass with her breath, obscuring the world outside. On the misted pane she draws three little Xs with her finger, making a small squeaking sound.
Then Lily-Rose goes back to bed.
21 (#ulink_627ecf81-98b6-5f6c-b233-0f05e2ff84db)
Well I think I’ve probably got everybody’s attention now.
After my little bit of business at London Bridge I pack my gear away. Stuff my wig in my bag, reverse my shirt, and ghost through the underground. I use my pre-loaded Oyster card, topped up with cash. I used to clone it, but now, with the new high-resolution cameras focused on the turnstiles, you’re more likely to be spotted.
I head down the escalator for the city branch of the Northern line. I love going down the escalators: the little push of pressure you get from below; the sub-rumble of machinery beneath your feet; and the feeling of above-ground time slipping away. This late at night it’s beginning to close down. The only people about are the drunks and the hustlers, each of them trying to get to somewhere that doesn’t exist. I love the feel of the underground when it’s almost empty: it’s like sneaking inside a machine. Gusts of warm air come at you unexpectedly, and if you put your hand to the walls you can feel a quiet throbbing. For such a massive structure to be so empty, it’s as if all the people have been stolen.
Which of course they have. They just don’t know it.
Sometimes my brain slows down and ticks gently, nothing going in, nothing going out. Just ticking. The Mayor is talking about opening some stations twenty-four hours. Non-stop progress to nowhere. Skeleton crews on a shadow train.
I make sure that the cameras spot me in London Bridge, and then again at Bank. But after that, I’m a ghost in the machine.
I’ve got stuff to do.
I hobo from Bank to Oxford Circus on the Central line. The train is one of the old ones, pre S-class, so I can crank down the window at the end of the carriage, filling my head with noise. From the connecting tunnel off the platform, I go through the maintenance door that joins the network to one of the tunnels under Oxford Street. Under the big stores.
I’m sure you must’ve wondered, when you’ve been in these massive department stores there, with their floors and floors of stuff. Where does it all come from? I mean, this is central London, not some robot dormitory town with mega aircraft hangars of retail space. All these shops, with thousands of people buying shit every day, where does it all get stored?
You’ve probably guessed, haven’t you?
All these stores, with their five or six floors of stuff, also have three or four floors below street level: a mirror store underground. For every object on display there are at least two or three stored in one of the basements. And coming off the basements are dozens of tunnels. And this isn’t just in one store. This is all the stores. It’s a wonder Oxford Street hasn’t collapsed in on itself. There’s practically nothing left under there. It’s like an ants’ nest.
I first heard about these tunnels when I was still living above, on the street. One of the people I hung out with was signed up to a shadow agency; a rip-off shop for immigrants and street rats, and was trying to get me to join. It was coming up to Christmas, and he had got some work in the basements of whatever the shop was called – Miss Selfish, Marks and Render, CockShop, who cares? – cataloguing the clothes and hanging them on racks
‘You wouldn’t believe it!’ he said to me in the café one night. ‘They’ve got racks a mile long! They’ve got whole tunnels full of racks!’
And it’s not just clothes. It’s hardware, too. They have to have air conditioning down there, so that stuff doesn’t rot or rust.
He’s dead now, the person who told me this stuff. I didn’t kill him. He shoved a bullet up his nose in the shape of cheap brown skag.
Never mind. Lie down.
The only lock on the maintenance door is the one I put there, but I check the traps just in case. I’ve got a camera set to detect any movement made by something bigger than a rat, and a pulse ‘disorientator’, which emits a 400-lumen strobe of light that’ll make your eyes bleed, should I need a quick getaway with no follow. I’ve got low-tack adhesive sprayed on both sides of the door with a layer of calcium-dust that’ll show a hand print if someone has touched it, and I’ve got a scary bio-hazard sign proclaiming ‘contaminated waste’, because sometimes a sign is all you need for a security guard who gets paid fuck-all on a zero-hour contract.
Once I’m in the tunnels I head for the one that contains the stuff I need. The tunnels are lit by low-watt festoon lighting and there are large pools of darkness between each light. Unlike the underground, these tunnels are red brick instead of white tiles, but they’re still teeny-tiny. Seriously, if I weren’t who I am, this thing with the tiny bricks would begin to seriously creep me out.
Finally, I come to the tunnel I want, and begin packing up the stuff I need.
22 (#ulink_164ba348-e37a-5659-b0ac-fb04c9e8aa56)
DI Loss hasn’t had a lot of sleep. His suit is crumpled, and worn continuously for so many hours it has begun to smell of the cigarette brand he used to smoke. His hair is greasy and his skin has a lived-in look as though it needs to be cleaned. Possibly just replaced. Rain is slithering down his window as if it wants to be somewhere else. DI Loss doesn’t blame it. He’d be somewhere else if he could. The overhead fluorescent light in his office is making his eyes hurt, and that whine in his brain from too little sleep is making it hard for him to concentrate.
He misses his computer; it has been taken away to be analysed. The computer has pictures of his daughter on it. Their absence is a physical pain; he has so few pictures of her. He has no pictures of his wife.
Loss leans back in his chair and sighs heavily. DS Stone, sitting opposite, wonders if her boss will make it through the day.
‘OK,’ Loss stares at the window, but not out of it. ‘Tell me what we do know.’
‘Well, the good news is that Candy’s has been under surveillance by the Drugs Unit for some time; first in Docklands, and then later at London Bridge, and we have clear video footage of the entrance to St Clements Court right through the night in question.’
Loss is staring at the rain leaking past his office. He wishes he could close his eyes, but every time he does he thinks he’s going to fall over.
‘And the bad news?’
‘At 12.45 on Sunday morning, the officers on duty in the van witnessed two youths staggering out of St Clements Court, clutching their faces. The officers ran to assist, and upon discovering what appeared to be foul play, reported the incident and called for back-up.’
Loss looks at his DS and raises his eyebrows.
‘Foul play? You’re going with “foul play”?’
‘Absolutely.’
He feels unutterably weary. He misses smoking and sleeping and sunshine, but most of all, he misses his daughter. He waves his hand in the general direction of his DS, urging her to continue.
‘Still waiting for the bad news,’ he says.
‘Once another unit had arrived, the officers carried out a search. They found one youth, dead, who had been shot through the eye at close range with an antique crossbow bolt, and a large piece of graffiti, still wet, proclaiming one word: ‘Tuesday’. There were no other persons found in the alley, which is a dead end. The only exit was under all-night video surveillance. The officers took photos of the deceased, and the graffiti.’
Stone spins her laptop round for him to see. It’s the report from the surveillance officers, including pictures of the dead boy. Images of the video sent to his computer slices through his vision.
‘The club door?’ he asks.
‘Could only be opened from the inside. Apparently there was some form of knocking code.’
‘Very Scarface. Any other doors? Windows? An office, perhaps?’
‘Nothing. And the fire escape only went up two floors, once again ending in a door that could only be opened from the inside.’
Loss rubs his hands over his eyes, wondering how much worse he can possibly feel. ‘And I suppose our boys were on the ball enough to check the bins?’
‘And girls. Just full of paper from the offices, and bottles and cans from the club. It’s all in the report, sir. The Drugs Unit were staking out that club front all night, and as far as the video shows, the only people who went into the alley were our three crack friends, and only two came out. The girl, who we clearly saw on the video sent to your computer, seems to be a spirit who can walk through walls.’
Loss contemplates the incident board. He is pretty certain that very soon it’s going to need to be much, much bigger.
‘However, there’s one other bit of news,’ Stone adds.
‘Yes?’
‘The back-room boys and girls taking apart your computer, were able to use the video to determine where we might find the cigarette butt our ghost-girl threw away. This was reported to the forensics team who were nit-combing the alley, and the said butt has been recovered and sent off for DNA analysis. With any luck in the next day or so our girl will have a name.’
The phone rings, its single loud trill making DI Loss’s ears hurt. He knows that he is becoming unwrapped, and badly needs some sleep. He looks intently at the DS as she speaks to the person on the phone. He can tell she is excited about something. She frantically taps notes into her iPad, thanks the caller and hangs up.
‘Let me guess. That was our MurderGoth, asking where we want her to appear next?’ he says, trying for grim humour and missing by a country mile.
‘No,’ she says. ‘That was Mr Brooks, of Brooks Military Antiquities, saying he can tell us all about the scythes that were used in the tube train assault, and who he sold them to.’
23 (#ulink_b55b5c19-e5c6-5dc4-b72e-79ba85ffeba4)
It’s not the hardware, it’s the operating system
I avoid the systems most people use. They’re always updating, always prying. It’s like sticking a tiny plaster over a great big cut: loads of crap just keeps oozing out. And the more they try to fix it, the longer it takes to run, and the more they know about you. I always go free source. You’re still on the grid, but at least you’ve got a bit more control.
When I was living on the street there was this boy called Diston, but everybody called him Deadman. He was rib-puncture thin with stinking dreads and had a unique approach when it came to panhandling for money. He used to go up to a person and ask them if they could give him some cash for his coffin. He would stare at them, hair down in front of his eyes, like some fucking zombie, and ask them for money. The poor sods used to be so freaked out they’d hand over whole wads of cash just to make him stop staring at them.
The thing is Diston truly believed he was dead. He was just trying to raise enough cash so he could lie down and go to sleep forever. He had borderline personality disorder, or at least that’s what he told us.
Me, I always thought he was a fucking liar. Anyhow, one of Diston’s things, one of the things that sparked up his plugs, was computers. He used to say he could leave his soul scattered across the Interweb. Diston knew all about computers.
How to build them. How to link them up through the ether.
And, most importantly for me, how to program them.
We used to sit in the underpass by Tottenham Court Road, surrounded by hobos, blinded by anti-freeze-strength white sui-cider, and sludge-blooded, old-school clock junkies, one needle away from being compost. Diston had this Asus tablet that ran open-source: completely adaptable. Fuck knows where he charged it up. I know he used to steal the Wi-Fi codes from local offices. He said it was easy. I never knew how easy until he taught me.
Really, just changing your password every week isn’t enough. You need to change your keypad too. Once Diston was into a computer, he had programs that could tell how frequently a key was pressed and then work out the passwords that allowed access to whatever the system was linked to. He blacked out whole swathes of information for fun, and then gently wiped his electronic feet, and left.
And then there was the Internet. Once he was in the Interzone he was away. A spider ghost in the World Wide Web. The way he described it, when people cruised the Web, they thought they were in their own little virtual bubble, their own private cyber car. That, he said, was bollocks. It was more like they were in a taxi, a black cab. You’d type in your web address and click, and then get in the cyber taxi and it would take you to your destination.
Recording all your information on the way.
Who ordered the cab.
Who got in the cab.
Where it picked you up. Where it dropped you off.
Diston used to tell stories, his face mad and rippled in the flames from a tramp fire. Stories of governments and corporations. Of cyber-tracking and data surveillance. He used to tell ghost stories too. About people who built clone cabs, cabs that navigate the Interzone without detection. About people who became the taxi driver rather than the passenger.
He was a scary boy, Diston. I didn’t trust him, and I didn’t like him, but he knew what he was talking about when it came to computers. He taught me all about C codes, and UNIX, and open-source hacking. He taught me how to spirit-slide behind legit apps and about mirror protocols, and mimic programs. Really, it’s quite simple once you’re into the groove, so to speak. It’s like anything else; it’s just a matter of application.
It’s not fucking art, is it?
Anyhow, that was then, when I wasn’t what I am now.
Branching off the main tunnels are little alcoves, cul de tunnels. They’re twelve metres long and kitted out with polymer racking systems to allow maximum storage. There are big, square, silver condensers bolted to the alcove roof with concertinaed tubing snaking away to remove the moisture and prevent corrosion.
I walk in, open up my satchel, and grab a couple of high-end laptops with solid-state delivery, and a bunch of mid-level phones. Most smart phones these days have a GPS chip soldered directly onto the board so the phone can be tracked, but you can still find units that only have it as an add-on, but are still ok for Wi-Fi hot-spotting. I also pick up some external drives and some Bluetooth headsets.
All the stuff down here in the tunnels isn’t registered yet, cos half the staff are on the steal. It doesn’t actually get on any books until it goes front-of-house. Perfect for me. I take a couple of prestige pieces to sell and then shadow-walk my way out of there, through the system and back to my crib.
For a while I toyed with buying stuff off the Silk Road before it got shut down. And then off BMR. I kept one laptop solely for subbing through the Dark Web: the web hidden under the Web, used by criminals and hackers, and art-terrorists and, for that matter, real terrorists. The BMR is a kind of eBay for Dark-webbers. I thought I could get my hardware there. Maybe some guns.
Well I could have, but the whole system was so full of spooks from all the covert security agencies that it was like scuba-diving through police sea, so I sacked it.
When I get back to my crib I do the rounds, making sure everything’s safe and secure, and then I hook up my new gear to my speakers and cue up the World Service. It’s late and there’s a programme on about the formation of matter. I tune out my head, and wash myself down, and do my business.
Then I drink down a protein shake and go night night.
Nothing to see here.
24 (#ulink_844edfe3-dfe1-5a04-bd47-3dcba1f78704)
Brooks Military Antiquities is the kind of shop in the kind of alley that demands dark skies and even darker conspiracies. From the moment they come out of the tube station at Leicester Square and walk down St Martin’s Lane, DI Loss is filling up with foreboding. The sky is a seething mass of grey, and black, and blue, and as low as if London had a ceiling over it. His phone vibrates in his pocket: a text. He pulls out the phone and opens it up.
‘Jesus!’
‘What, sir?’
‘The footage of Lily-Rose’s rape, which kept on being posted on all those revenge-porn sites that we failed to shut down cos they never show faces and are not controlled in this country, and God knows what else … it’s been replaced with footage of the mayhem on the tube.’
‘Good.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t mean good as in it was good what happened to those boys. I just mean good as in I’m glad the Lily-Rose images aren’t there anymore. Just because no one was identifiable, well, it’s still going to be understood by all those kids on the estate, isn’t it? And now they’re seeing those boys who did it.’
‘Allegedly.’
‘Whatever. Now they’re going to see them get fucked over. So “good”.’
Loss replaces his phone, feeling as if control is not so much slipping away from him, as running full-pelt. The air of the capital is hot and humid, and the bombardment of smells coming from all the street vendors makes him both nauseous and light-headed. The noise is incredible: tourists armed to the teeth with electronic gadgetry, clicking, and whirring, and flashing, all shouting at each other. The locals no better; many speaking a language he can’t understand, either because he’s too old and can’t decode the intonation, or they aren’t speaking in English. Almost half have strange contraptions in their ears and are shouting at the air in front of them. Amazingly, his DS seems to be enjoying herself. She even stopped and bought them each an ice-cream from a vendor working out of a rickshaw with a cooler-box attached to the back.
As they stroll down the lane towards the Coliseum Theatre, a deep throb of thunder pulses across the sky, as if it’s being fracked. Loss is having difficulty walking. He isn’t sure whether it’s because he is so tired, or because the pavement has begun to melt in the heat. The entire city is becoming surreal to him as though he’s a few seconds out of sync. A permanent shudder in reality. Stone stops suddenly, and grabs his arm.
‘What?’ he asks. Stone smiles at him and points. Loss looks at what she’s pointing at.
‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
Between the theatre and a music shop is an alley, no more than fifty centimetres wide. Spanning the gap, attached to both sides of the narrow street, is a lamp, making an arched entrance-way.
‘Brydges Place, sir. I believe this is us.’
The day is now so dark that the lamp marking the entrance sputters into life. As they walk single-file under it and into the alley, Loss briefly wonders if he has gone back in time. Steam seeps out of the walls in front of him through cracks in the mortar, and he feels as if the walls are barely staying upright that, at any moment, they might close up and crush him. He is dizzy with hunger, sleep deprivation, and claustrophobia. If it weren’t for the narrowness of the lane he might very well fall down.
After ten metres the alley opens up into a tiny courtyard, and Loss feels the constriction in his chest ease slightly, although his sense of displacement increases. The courtyard has a scattering of tables and chairs; an outside extension of the Marquis of Granby pub. In one corner sits a ragged dust-coated scarecrow of a figure, playing a violin, with an upturned bowler hat at his feet. Loss doesn’t recognize the tune, but it sounds vaguely eastern European. The only other occupant is a pavement artist, chalking a winged figure falling from the skies. From his perspective Loss can’t make out much of the picture, but he suspects that it’s Icarus, who flew too close to the sun. From where he is standing Loss can only see the back of the artist and he can’t tell if they are male or female.
‘Over here, sir.’ Stone nods her head at a dark blue door to their left. Above it is a painting of two antique duelling pistols, and a brass plaque next to it:
K Brooks
Military Antiques and Ephemera
By appointment only
Next to the plaque is a brass bell-pull. The DS gives it a firm tug. After a moment a cultured voice enquires after their business. Once the DS has given the required information there is a click as the door is remotely unlocked, and then they walk inside.
‘Hello? I’m up here!’ The same cultured voice rings out from above them, and urges them up a steep staircase. The stairs are old and the bare wooden treads are not flat, making them difficult to climb. The narrowness of the staircase, coupled with its seemingly random twists and turns increases Loss’s claustrophobia. By the time they reach the glass-walled garret at the top of the building Loss is so out of breath he thinks his heart is going to explode. His vision is just colours with no pattern or meaning to them. He feels himself falling.
‘Oh my poor chap!’ A tall scruffy man, his appearance at total odds with his voice, is quickly at his side, a firm hand on his elbow. He studies the DI, concern printed on his tight-skinned face. ‘Do sit down.’ He ushers Loss into an over-stuffed armchair.
After a few moments his vision settles and he is able to take in his surroundings. He blinks several times and wonders if perhaps he is drunk. Pointing directly at him is a cannon. Next to the cannon is a pirate brandishing a flint pistol at his DS. It’s only after some moments that DI Loss realizes it is a waxwork model.
Following his gaze, the scruffy man beams brightly. ‘I got him from Madame Tussaud’s. I think he’s supposed to be Calico Jack.’ The gaunt man is standing by the armchair holding a glass of iced water. He hands it to Loss, who drinks it down gratefully, and gazes around the room.
The walls are covered with weaponry of all kinds; from pistols to blow-pipes. There are esoteric potted plants everywhere, and the dry smell of them, mixed with the shadows they create from the enormous amount of light streaming into the room through the glass roof and walls, gives the feeling of a tropical forest. Loss wouldn’t be surprised if a Pigmy reached up and grabbed the blowpipe off the wall. The room is divided by glass exhibit tables. Loss stands up and peers into the one nearest him. The proprietor comes to stand beside him and looks into the case. Resting on red felt, and neatly labelled, are two wicked looking axes, about thirty centimetres long.
‘Those are Egyptian quarter axes, popular around 1500 BC,’ the man beside him says. ‘The first ones were made out of bronze, of course, but they were so useful in combat that they lasted right up to the Iron Age. I’m Kavenagh Brooks, by the way,’ he grabs Loss’s hand and gives it a single, dry pump. ‘I understand you’ve been looking for information concerning these.’
From out of another case the antiquarian produces a slim box and places it on the display glass in front of the detectives. When he opens it Loss feels a slick of saliva flood his mouth. Inside are two scythes, identical to the ones he’d last seen separating flesh from bone on a tube train, not very far from here. Beside him his DS gives a sharp intake of breath. Loss sways slightly.
‘Steady on, old chap.’ Mr Brooks places a concerned hand on the DI’s arm.
‘Where did you get them?’
‘These are one of two sets I brought back with me from Burma. Actually, it’s quite remarkable to find one pair in such good condition, let alone two.’
Loss can’t take his eyes off the knives, at the wicked curve of them, and the way they seem to sliver the light into flat silver snakes.
‘And who did you sell the other set to?’
Mr Brooks strokes the knives gently, as if he is putting them to sleep.
‘Why, the British Museum.’
25 (#ulink_3bb7c78e-04ef-5e26-846f-c3cb5678e70c)
Lily-Rose is getting dressed. Her clothes are too big for her now, and when she wears them, the impact of her recent experiences comes into sharp relief. She is a ghost inside her own skin. She puts on a pair of scuzzy old jeans, and uses a dressing gown cord threaded through the belt loops to keep them up. She doesn’t need a bra beneath her ripped black Joy Division tee shirt – since she stopped eating her breasts have almost completely disappeared. This is one of the reasons she still eats so little. She does not want her breasts to return. She does not want to be a sexual being. Over the tee shirt she wears a Russian army jacket with the collar cut off, and on her feet, a pair of Doc Martins. She does not look at herself in the mirror. She has broken all the mirrors.
When the police returned Lily-Rose’s computer she did not touch it. She was not sure if, when she started it up, knowing that everything on it had been examined, she would feel violated again. She wasn’t worried about them finding anything incriminating; the girl she met in the Pollyanna chat room was obviously very good at covering her tracks. But just the fact that strangers had electronically thumbed through her hard-drive. Her photos. Her texts. Her life.
Herself.
She wasn’t sure she could cope with it all.
In the end, she decided she couldn’t and, instead, used her iPad to re-connect to the Interzone. She created a new email address, which she gave to no one. Of course she didn’t. There was no one to give it to. Since her assault she has systematically shut down all her contacts with the school and the estate. It wasn’t hard. Most of her friends have abandoned her, seeing her as broken: damaged goods. Or worse, blaming her for bringing down trouble onto the estate. Her rape was in some way a difficulty that reflected badly on them. An inconvenience; rocking the boat, and allowing the corpse of fear to surface.
She collected all the information on the web concerning the girl the media were now calling Tuesday. She re-entered the anorexia/self-harm forums, the scar-bars she haunted after she was raped, searching for her.
This morning she received an email. It had no IP address and seemed to originate from nowhere. She opens it up and reads it.
The words make her break out in a shivering sweat but she reads it to the end.
Once Lily-Rose has finished dressing, covering her hands with a pair of fingerless grey mittens and wrapping a black keffiyeh round her throat, she leaves the house for the first time since her attack, and heads into town.
26 (#ulink_b9a38883-ae3f-5a34-b1c7-fd5a482dfe44)
When Loss and Stone leave Mr Brooks’ premises, the sky is a ribbon of boiling black above them, and the busker and street painter have disappeared. Seeing the scythes at close quarters has brought home to the detectives just how much pain and fear must have been in the carriage on the night they were used.
‘I need to sit down.’ Loss lowers himself into a chair at one of the tables opposite the door from which he has just emerged. Stone walks through into the Marquis of Granby, and returns a few minutes later with two Cokes. Loss can feel the moisture in the air, as though the rain has already arrived and is just waiting for somebody to notice. There are glass beads of condensation on the outside of the glass. He takes a sip of the Coke. It is not real Coke, but some glucose-rich variant from a soda-stream.
‘So whoever she is, she probably nicked them from the British Museum – unless she had access to similar weapons elsewhere.’ Stone sits down next to him and sips her drink. Flashes of lightning cross the narrow strip of sky above them. ‘But what I don’t get is why? Why use such a bizarre weapon, one that’s going to be quickly identified? And why leave a calling card, look at the camera, and then go to such extremes as to disappear by walking through walls. It just doesn’t make sense.’
Loss can’t disagree. The whole case is making him feel stupid. He can’t seem to be able to grasp a bigger picture. He knows there must be one. He feels it deep inside him. He just doesn’t know what it could be. He drinks his Coke, examining the pavement in front of him. It takes him a few minutes to register what he is staring at.
‘Fuck!’
The rain starts to fall in large drops on the chalk picture the street artist has left. Although the picture is much the same as when they went into the antique shop, it differs in two main respects. The first is that the central character, the one Loss had assumed was Icarus, is now a tumbling, black-trousered Gothette in an army shirt. She is quite clearly the girl from the CCTV and the video sent to his computer. The second is that the drawing now has a title written beneath it, beginning to blur and run in the rain:
TUESDAY FALLING
‘Take a picture of that before it washes away, for God’s sake!’
Stone gets out her phone, but, before she can utilize the camera facility, it rings.
‘It’s the lab, sir,’ she clocks the ID window, and pushes the button to accept the call, and puts the phone to her ear.
While his DS deals with the call, Loss pulls out his own phone and takes a snap of the chalk drawing on the pavement. All the colours have merged into each other and the image is distorted and surreal; a pictorial representation of how he feels. His phone rings.
And that’s when DI Loss’s world blows apart.
27 (#ulink_7b7c64c6-f50d-5f52-9908-6bf597775dd3)
Now they know that I’m not just some random fruit shoot, I have to be a bit more inventive. Not too inventive, cos I’m still dealing with empty-headed morons, but a little bit.
I’m not talking about the police here; I’m still playing Children’s’ Hour with them. It’s still Follow the Leader in that camp, and they haven’t got a clue what’s going on.
Of course, when I say the police, I mean DI Loss. I couldn’t give a fuck about the rest of them.
Poor DI Loss, all at sea and not a boat in sight.
No, I’m talking about the Sparrow Estate boys and girls. The rape merchants and the pain posses.
Really, they think they’re living in some film. They think they’re gangstas, or hooked-up players. They think they’re part of some crew and the world they live in is run by them, for them.
It’s almost unbelievable how people can be so stupid.
They all have smartphones they don’t understand, which is a joke in itself. Smartphones for stupid people. They all think it’s like chatting in their own cribs. All I had to do was send them a phishing email with a hack attachment piggy-backed onto a free game app, and I have a real-time screen on my tablet of all their texts, all their phone calls, emails, everything. They’re children, really. They don’t trust each other, but they trust a machine.
Heartless, raping robot children, obviously, but children.
Although technically, of course, I’m the child.
Anyhow, since my little run-ins with them, their phones have been on fire, trying to find out who I am. What I want. To begin with, once they knew it wasn’t just some psycho gig, they thought I must be some bit of fluff they’d fucked up in the past. Thought I was out for revenge.
They think that way. Like it’s all about them. Well, I’ll give them something, I suppose. In a way they’re right. Just not the way they think they are.
So they started to talk to each other on their little future-machines about all their victims, all the people they’d jumped in the past.
So many it makes you cry. All so casual. All so part of their everyday DNA.
And the way they think. Once they’ve fucked someone, they think that person has lost the right to refuse to have sex. Not that it is sex. Rape becomes just an assertion of property. Of power.
I’ve set up a program on my tablet that logs and stores all their messages, and relays them out to the people they’ve destroyed. It took me about zero seconds to write it. About the same to find the electronic addresses of the people they’d fucked over. Most of them were already on their hand-helds: trophies. Now all the victims know who it was stamped on their lives, and what they think about it. They knew some of it before of course, but now I’ve connected up all the dots. Opened the curtains and smashed out the window. I’d send it to the police but it wouldn’t be as much fun. It wouldn’t create the panic and movement that this is going to create.
And I need movement.
I need all the little worker ants to have boiling water spilt on them so I can watch them run.
I need to know where they’re running to.
That’s why I’ve decided to give them another little push.
The kebab house looks the same as any other kebab house; all faulty neon and unbelievably bad food pictures. You can tell by its popularity that it is a front for drugs. There are five under-age groom-girls outside, wearing belts that are pretending to be skirts, and a boy, maybe nineteen, standing a few feet away from them, with cold bullet eyes, like he’s a gunslinger, or a spook, or a hard-nosed mutha.
What he is, is he’s just a prick that someone else pulls, and he’s probably got about half an hour left to enjoy his life.
I’ve been watching them from a doorway next to the tube station. I’ve got a litre bottle of cider next to me filled with hydrochloric acid, and I’ve covered myself with a sleeping bag I pulled out of a skip. I’m wearing a Korean army greatcoat cos they’re the only ones that will fit me, and I’ve got on a fake-fur trapper’s hat.
Frankly, I look how I used to look three years ago, when I’d only just AWOL’d out of the hospital and was back living on the street. When it all got going and everything broke in my head.
But I smell a lot better.
So here I am, in my brilliant tramp disguise, which only works because no one likes to look too closely at a tramp in case they do something tramp-y to you, watching the boy outside of the kebab/drug shop who is looking at the street like it belongs to him.
He doesn’t look at me, though. Me, he looks right through as if I’m litter.
Every few minutes Bullet Eyes takes, then makes, a phone call, and a teenager on a pedal bike comes up and goes in the meat shop. After a little time they come out, get on their bike and ride off. They never have a kebab with them, though. I don’t blame them.
I’ve got my tablet resting on my lap, hidden by the sleeping bag, and I’ve got it connected to the Interzone with a cascade IP router so I can’t be traced. I used to use TOR before it got rebooted. TOR stands for The Onion Router, a way of transferring data that has so many layers of relays as to make it untraceable. Really, I don’t know why they bother. If someone doesn’t want anyone to know where they’ve been on the interlanes there are a million programs out there that will help them. Shutting one down is like trying to jail a planet.
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S. Williams
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Триллеры
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 19.09.2024
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О книге: ‘An awe-inspiring main character…I recommend it hugely!’ SHARON BOLTON‘I could not put it down. Totally loved it. Excellent writing, brilliant story’ ANGELA MARSONSA relentless thriller that will grip you by the throat and refuse to let go! Perfect for fans of SILENT SCREAM by Angela Marsons, and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.You’ve never met anyone like Tuesday. She has suffered extreme cruelty at the hands of men, and so has taken it upon herself to seek vengeance. She wants to protect and help others like her, to ease their suffering. A force to be reckoned with, she lives beneath the streets of London in the hidden network of forgotten tunnels that honeycomb the city – and this is her preferred hunting ground.When Tuesday is connected to a series of brutal attacks on gang members, DI Loss takes on the investigation. A burned-out detective still suffering the devastating effects of the unsolved murder of his daughter three years earlier, the case starts to hit close to home. Because soon Loss will discover that Tuesday could hold the key to uncovering the truth about what happened to his daughter…