Nothing’s connected up. It’s just little islands where you live, separated by chunks of city that you mist through. Like they don’t exist. Once you’ve established dry, and warm and safe, nothing else registers.
Except people.
When you’re on the street you learn to read people. Who can fuck you up. Who can cut you down. Who you can scam. Who you have to run from.
I should have run from Suzanne. I ran from where I grew up to this city. I ran from what had happened, ran so hard and so fast that I was just a spirit, just air. No one could ever find me. Not even myself. Not until Suzanne.
Close it down. Shut it off. Bye bye.
Anyhow, I’d choose a destination on my map, and start walking. It was Diston’s tablet, at that time, and I had it connected to a Bluetooth earpiece I kept under my permo-hat. Back then it was hoodies over tramp hats. Anything to keep warm and keep closed. For a while I’d worn headphones, listening to pirate radio. It was good for finding out what was happening in London. Bad for knowing what was going on behind your back.
I mean, who’d beat up a 14-year-old girl-tramp?
Plenty of fucking people, apparently. Gang boys who want to street-mule you. Chav hags out for ethnic cleansing. Dirty police boys on a bit of extra-curricular.
Especially dirty police boys.
Half the fucking city, it felt like.
So I stopped wearing headphones, and moved on to the Bluetooth. A foot in two worlds, a ghost in both. Night after night I’d come up, and shade through the town, going from random A to random B.
That’s when I discovered the honeystreets; when I first started packing up the future.
I was going from Piccadilly Circus to Richmond Mews in the heart of Soho. When I started up Shaftesbury Avenue the theatre crowd were just coming out.
Dance Boy
.
Sing-Girl
. Some fucking thing. I shoegazed up Great Windmill Street, the buildings getting suitably seedy and run down; girls and boys hung back in piss-ridden doorways, their faces ravaged by drugs. The Windmill Theatre is long wound up, but the meat trade goes on. I slip down Archer’s Street then up Rupert Street, past Madam JoJo’s, with its impossibly tall transsexuals outside, smoking cigarette after cigarette; their industrial lip-gloss never losing its oil-slick shine. From there I go along Berwick Street and shim down Tyler’s Court, past the dopers and the street girls washing their dreams away with little bottles of vodka. Small enough to take down in one slug. Just the right size for mouthwash.
I come out of Tyler’s Court with my head down and my hoodie up. You never know if one of the girls’ handlers will be with them, tightening the leash with a wrap of this or a rock of that. Up Wardour Street with the London rain beginning to sift down, dancing with the soot and the dust from a million building sites. At The Ship I turn into Flaxman Court, punk music splashing out of the bar windows and crashing onto the street, my right hand in my hoodie pocket, wrapped round the contact taser.
And that’s where I find out about the honeystreets of London.
According to my street app I should be able to walk through Cleaver’s Passage and end up on Richmond Mews. Except, I ended up at a brick wall. Cleaver’s Passage, it would seem, had been cleaved. I just stand there, gazing at the wall like I’m on drugs. It’s an old wall, not just been thrown up. It’s been there for the duration. To get to where I want to I have to go back round and through St Anne’s. It quite fucking freaked me out. Here was a street in London that existed on my
A to Z
, but didn’t exist in real life.
A ghost street.
A Lie street.
What I later found out was a honeystreet. As in trap.
When I got back to my underground crib I started doing some research. Trawling the Interzone for information about streets that don’t exist. To be honest it was a bit of a head-frack. I’d become so abstracted from the world above that I’d been laying the virtual world on top of it like a skin, thinking it would fit perfectly.
Not just me, of course. Everyone. We all do it. Take things written down as fact. Believe what we see.
That’s when I first started working out how I could fuck him up.
There are honeystreets all over London. Streets the mapmakers put in for a laugh. Or for their loves. Or to prove, if the streets turned up in other maps, that their work had been stolen.
There are so many tiny streets in London. Alleys, walks, passages, sidings, courtyards.
A thousand years of fires, bombs, wars, shanty towns, builders, and rotating town planners, so that half the honeystreets were forgotten, and therefore never removed from the maps. Or removed from some editions, but then turn up, like mine, on ripped-off online maps scrimmed off old editions. On the other hand, there are streets in London that don’t even have a name anymore. At least not officially.
As far as I can tell. Which is not very bloody far.
Honeytrap. You tempt someone in, and they think that one thing’s happening, when in fact something else entirely is going on. But by the time they realize it, they’re locked in.
Shut down.
Switched off.
Loss and Stone stand in front of the university lift doors. They are both immensely pleased there
are
doors after their experience at the British Museum, but are happier still when the doors open and they can step out onto the sixth floor. They walk out together into a corridor that reeks of institutional thinking. It is the worst kind of off-white with large squares of florescent lights that buzz just within human hearing. Loss thinks it’s a supple form of mind torture, and idly wonders if Drake has set up an elaborate experiment.
‘What the hell was that, anyway?’ Loss is referring to the music that was playing in the lift.
‘Fuck knows. “Price tag”? “Anarchy in the UK”? Everything sounds the same on panpipes. Did he say why he wanted to see us again? I thought we were going back to the British Museum.’
‘I don’t know. He didn’t speak to me directly; it was our Commander,’ Loss informs her.
‘Oh?’ She raises an eyebrow. ‘Well we’d better get goose-stepping then, hadn’t we?’
‘Nice to have you back, officially’ Stone says, as they walked down the corridor. ‘How come you’re back, anyway? I thought you were too much of a security risk, what with the DNA thing?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he just wants me where he can see me. Anyhow I’m back on the case, so you’d better stop being rude to me, and start treating me as a professional.’
‘Or maybe he’s just all over the sodding place, and has his head up his arse,’
He sighs. ‘You do know that your total lack of respect for authority is going to get you in massive trouble, don’t you?’ He’s beginning to feel slightly disorientated. Swirls of prison-school green have begun to appear on the walls.
‘Yeah? Well I’m not the one everyone’s favourite Murder-Goth has been writing to, am I?’
They arrive at Stevens’s door, and knock. Loss examines it.
‘Not very original, is it?’.
‘What?’
He nods at the door number.
‘102. So what?’
‘Come in!’ The voice is slightly muffled, but it definitely belongs to Drake.
Loss sighs again. He can’t tell whether Stone is taking the piss out of him or not; whether she gets the painfully modern reference, but is too tired to pursue it. He pushes the door open and they go inside.
The scene is almost exactly the same as their first visit. Tuesday on the video-walls in various poses; CCTV of underground London run silently around her; Drake with the ponytail trying hard to look at everything apart from DS Stone’s breasts. And failing. And focusing on the screen in front of him.
‘Hello again, Mr Drake,’ Stone smiles, while Loss closes the door behind them, and leans against the wall. That way, he reasons, there’s at least one of them he doesn’t have to look at. ‘You asked to see us again, Mr Drake. Do you have new information for us?’ Stone asks.
‘Call me Drake, please,’ he says, not taking his eyes from the screen. He is using a wireless toggle to move the film backwards and forwards. ‘Everyone else does. No Mr, just the one name. Sorry.’
‘Your parents were duck lovers?’ Loss shoots a warning look at his partner but then sees that Drake is smiling.
‘Close. Lovers of English melancholy. There.’ He puts the device down, freezing on a single image. It is from the tube train. Tuesday’s arms are outstretched at her side, chest height, the scythes pointing downwards. Loss can’t look at the scythes without hearing a high-pitched whine in his head. The sound of a razor cutting glass. ‘I tried to reach you at the number you left, but had to talk to some stiff-necked authority geek called, ah, Commander Stonebridge, instead. Is he your boss?’ Drake takes their silence as an affirmation. ‘Thought so. If you like, I can do a complete assassination of his character by doing a speech analysis for you. It would take me about two seconds.’
Loss warms to the young man in front of him. He points at the screen. ‘What are we looking at?’
Drake picks up the toggle again and zooms in on Tuesday’s arm. ‘I’ve been trying to work out where your girl might be hiding. First of all I thought that maybe she’s been living on the street. I mean she’s not living in a flat or something, is she? With the exposure she’s had in the media someone would have come forward. And then all those interviews with the homeless? Am I the only one who found those a bit creepy, by the way? See there.’
All three survey the screen for a while, and then Loss says, ‘It’s an arm.’
‘Yes, but it’s a
clean
arm. Not an arm that’s been living rough and not getting washed properly. Also there are no lesions denoting poor diet or disease. Look at the fingernails.’
‘What fingernails? They couldn’t get any more bitten if you tried.’
‘Well, fair point,’ concedes Drake. ‘But you’d still expect to see some dirt build-up, some detritus if she’d been living commando, as it were. Even if she’d been squatting you’d expect to see more dirt than this. In fact, even if she’d been living in suburbia you’d expect to see more dirt than this. Look at her clothes. I mean, yes they’re old army stuff; faded, and scarred, and whatnot – but they’re not teenage grimy and covered in KFC finger fat, or anything.’ Drake plays the images of Tuesday over and over. He’s right. The clothes are ripped, and scuffed, and generally teenager fucked-up, but they are clean.
‘Are you saying our fine youth are teenage dirtbags who live on fast food?’ Stone is smiling almost affectionately at Drake but he is in his own zone now, fingers flying.
‘And look here.’ He has stills of Tuesday all over the LED wall. Tuesday on the tube. Tuesday outside Candy’s. Tuesday running out of Seething Lane Gardens. Streaming down the wall on the right is image after image of teenagers; many with hoodies, all wearing some form of listening device. ‘No earbuds. She must be the only teenager in London who isn’t wired for sound.’
Loss is surveying the images of Tuesday. Something is bugging him. ‘How come she’s so white?’
Stone stares at him as if he’s an idiot. ‘She’s a Goth,’ she says slowly. ‘She wears Goth make-up. Of course she’s white.’
‘Well done, Inspector. That puzzled me, too.’ Drake zooms in on Tuesday’s face. ‘The hair, of course, is dyed. Here you can see where her real hair is just visible at the join beneath the wig. As there are scarcely any roots showing, I’d say that her hair might be dyed regularly.’
‘Professionally? I mean, like at a hairdresser?’ says DI Loss, then pulls up. ‘Sorry,’ he says. An image of Suzanne slams into him: leaning over the sink in a black sports bra and a pair of ripped 501s, a bottle of peroxide in her nitrile-gloved hand. ‘Sorry.’ He has an urge to sit down. Or perhaps throw up. Stone has taken out her iPad and is tapping notes into it. Drake is still talking, his Oxbridge-modulated voice is a soft tide.
‘With most high-matte foundations, such as a Goth might use, the mixture is similar to that of silicone putty, rather than paint, and so can easily blend where the natural tone of the skin converges with that of the product.’
‘What on earth does that mean?’ says Loss.
‘No tan line. Or rather no anti-tan line,’ Stone explains.
‘Well that’s right, isn’t it? I mean there’s no division line on these images,’ Loss squints at the screens.
Drake gives an exasperated snort. ‘There are two main reasons for someone wearing foundation at her age: to change the colour of the skin, Goths go for white, Chavs for orange, or to hide a skin blemish, such as scars or acne. Your girl isn’t doing either.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I think, Inspector, that she really is pale. All she has on is a slightly coloured moisturizer, to smooth out the skin. I don’t know. It’s as if she only comes out at night, or something. Her pigment is almost similar to an albino’s.’
‘But she’s not? An albino, I mean?’
‘No. Look at her eye pigment. Even in the crap CCTV you can see she’s not albino. It’s a shame she was wearing the goggles in Seething Lane. The quality of the camera that caught her there was outstanding. Anyhow. See the neck? And where the wrists are exposed with her arms outstretched. Anyone who spends even a small time exposed to sunlight gets tanned. Our faces and hands are consistently darker than the rest of our bodies. Not this girl, though. I don’t think this girl has seen sunlight for quite some time.’
DI Loss and Ds Stone look at each other. ‘That’s it then. Confirmed. She’s living underground.’ Loss wipes his hand over his eyes. He thanks Drake, who looks smug, and they leave.
‘For what it’s worth, detectives,’ says Drake as they reach the door. ‘Skin that pale, I’d say when she isn’t wearing a wig or bleaching her hair, she must be a redhead.’
Loss closes the door.
Stone’s phone beeps: a message. She looks at it. ‘Well it’s never boring. I’ll give it that,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘We’re needed back at the office. There’s a message from Five. Apparently she has some more information for us.’
‘I’ll meet you there,’ Loss says. ‘Somewhere I’ve got to go first.’
Lily-Rose and her mother are in a coffee shop on Wilton Road, just outside Victoria Station. They have spent the day in the big department stores on Oxford Street, buying everything they need for their journey: they have brand-new suitcases full of brand-new clothes; they have each had their hair cut and coloured at the salon; they disposed of their old clothes in a charity shop, and now they are unrecognisable, even to themselves.