I think a little bit about Suzanne, and I think a little bit about my daughter, and I think a little bit about the man who lives in the flat at Hyde Park, and about what he did, and then I stop thinking for a little bit. I don’t think about the people coming down the escalator to kill me. What’s the point? They’re going to be dead soon. Not as dead as my daughter, cos they’re not real human beings, but definitely stopped-clock, run-down dead. After a time I start thinking again, and press a few buttons on my computer.
Time to get to it.
‘Jesus fucking Christ!’
All the LED smart-signs that line the walls adjacent to the escalators have switched on. Every one of them is showing the same identical thing. It is footage of Tuesday, on a loop. Tuesday running towards the screen, her oversize goggles giving her that insectile, alien quality. Tuesday on the tube, walking through the gang boys as if she’s spring cleaning. Tuesday outside Candy’s. Over and over again, the image of the boy being shot in the eye with the crossbow pistol plays out on the screen. The gang members walking down to the Piccadilly Line are mesmerized. So much so that, when the escalator comes screeching to life, they are caught unawares, and fall over.
Cursing and swearing, they scramble to their feet and point their guns at the open space below them. Although the escalator is working there are no lights. The low illumination comes from the electronic posters on the walls, flashing the name ‘Tuesday’ in carnival-red lettering, and the stuttering emergency lights high in the ceiling. The foyer below is a gloomy pool of unknown menace, and the tunnels leading off from them toward the platforms are black holes.
‘This is seriously fucking me up, man,’ says one of the gangboys. They arrive at the bottom and step onto the tiled floor. The overhead lights come on with a metallic snap.
‘Shit!’
Although the lights have come on there is nothing to see. The crew point their weapons everywhere but there’s no one to hit. No one there. The place is still empty.
Two of them take the Eastbound platform and the other two take the Westbound. However freaky the situation is they take heart from the fact that it’s just one teenage girl, and they are hardened bad boy criminals. That plus the fact that they’ve got some serious guns.
I have no compunction in taking out these boys. They have come to kill me. Look at them, walking down the empty platform holding their guns out in front of them, but turned sideways like they’re all Mr. Black. Like they’re some gang-banger SWAT posse. Stupid, stupid gun bunnies. Don’t they know you can’t aim if you hold a gun like that? That there’s a reason the sighting bar is on the top? I mean, I’m not an expert or anything, but even I know that. Mind you, if they hit me then I’m dead. I’m not stupid, or so blasé that I think I’m indestructible.
If they see me and shoot at me, it’s game over.
Not that there’s anything to aim at anyway. I’m not on the platform. They’re looking around, stealth-walking just like in the films, pointing their toys at any shadow their tiny gang minds think is moving.
But they can’t see me.
Of course they can’t see me; I’m not on the platform.
I’m not on the platform, boys.
I’m under it.
‘How can you get an email down here?’
DI Loss and DS Stone have been getting an education. They have walked through underground London. They have been amazed at the beautiful stone arches in the Victorian sewers. They have seen bats, and rats, and blind foxes with milk-coloured eyes. On the underground canal section they had quietly walked past a narrowboat that seemed to be being used as a bordello. The deck of the boat had been festooned with Chinese lanterns, and Billie Holiday’s cracked voice was seeping out of the windows, singing about love and pain. The moment was so bizarre and broken-heartedly beautiful, that Loss would have taken up smoking again right there and then, if someone had offered him a cigarette.
‘I don’t know. I guess because we’re near Leicester Square we’re picking up its Wi-Fi.’
‘OK. But it’s quite weird, getting it down here.’
‘Not as weird as having post delivered twice a day,’ says Stone. She looks at her phone, and reads the email. ‘It’s from Professor Mummer. She says that following the break-in, they’ve done a complete inventory of the artefacts stored in the basement. It seems some other stuff was taken.’
‘Like what?’
‘You’re not going to like it.’
‘What?’ Loss stops and glares at her. ‘What?’
‘Where’s Borneo?’
The traditional poison used with the big game dart gun that I borrowed, i.e. nicked, from the British Museum is curare. Well, they should have better security, shouldn’t they? But I’m not fucking about here; I’ve gone straight for the sting from the Iraqi red scorpion. Once the poison hits the bloodstream you’ve got about three seconds, then you’re dead.
Thank you, the basement of the Natural History Museum.
Well, there’s more than one museum in this city built by tunnel-mad Victorians.
As the first drone walks over the grate above me, I shoot a dart into the underside of his chin, in the soft area beside the jaw-bone. I walk on to where I can hear the next one before the first puppet has even fallen to the ground.
‘Jed! What the fuck’s happened, man?’
Jed’s dead. That’s what the fuck has happened. As his partner runs over me to see what’s wrong with his mate, I stab him in the shin through the grate with the poisoned tip of my knife. He lets out one surprised little yelp, a bit like a small dog, and then he falls over for good. Puppet strings cut. Really, if these people weren’t sent to kill me I’d feel sorry for them. I can hear their friends coming from the other platform, running to find out what is causing all the noise. I move on and climb the steps that lead up to the air-conditioning shaft behind the wall. It’s like some old stately home down here, with service tunnels behind every wall so the public don’t have to see how the machine functions. I have a good view of them through the access door grille as they look at the bodies of their scummy little buddies.
The two gang boys skid to a stop when they see the bodies in front of them. The one at the back takes out his mobile and punches the speed button.
‘Constantine! She’s down here, man, and she’s zeroed Jed and Lem. What? I don’t
know
how she did it. Shit, she’s a freaking ghost! Look.’ The boy swipes on the camera app and shows his boss the area in front of him. ‘See. There’s no one here! No!’ In front of him his partner drops to the ground as if he’s been rabbit-punched in the head. His body spasms once, then is still.
‘Did you get that? He just died in front of me, man. No bullet or nothing! I’m getting out of here!’ And then he feels a small prick in his neck, and the world goes numb. The phone drops from his hand.
Three seconds later he’s dead.
The phone in Constantine’s hand shows the boy falling to the ground, then the sender screaming, ‘He died in front of me!’, and then the image vanishes as the phone drops and, by chance, lands pointing at the boy who was holding it. It shows an image of his head, a bubble of blood in his mouth, and a slug of red oozing from his nose. The eyes are staring past anything a living person can see.
‘Fucking hell,’ mutters one of the gang boys next to him. Suddenly the phone is picked up and turned round. Constantine stares into the face of a girl with short choppy hair, bleached white. She smiles at him.
‘Hello, boys. Stay right where you are. I’ll be with you in a minute.’ She stares at them for a moment longer, and then ends the call, turning the screen black.
‘You’ll need to get out of the ventilation shaft in about three minutes.’ DS Stone’s phone has just rung, nearly making her jump out of her skin, and the girl known as Tuesday looks out at her, smiling serenely.
As Stone and DI Loss look at the image on her phone, she can’t believe that this young girl has caused so much mayhem in her city. Has killed all those people. She is just a girl. Her black eye-liner has run a little, giving her a slightly frazzled look, but other than that she could be one of any counter-culture emo Gothy types you can see around the city.
‘Tuesday. You need to come in, Tuesday. You need to let us come and get you and take you in.’
The girl on the phone goes on smiling at them, showing two rows of slightly gapped, but perfectly maintained teeth. Loss wonders how she has managed it; whether there might be dental records somewhere, with her real name attached.
‘Sorry Detective Sergeant Stone, but you’re not in charge here. The gang boys are in charge. The rape-drones and the bodysnatchers, they’re the ones who are calling the shots. I’m just reacting to them.’
‘You can’t believe that,’ says Loss, staring at her. He feels as though he is living in the future. The image is crystal clear.
Tuesday shifts her gaze to look at him. ‘Hello, Inspector. You know, I really loved your daughter. When I first came into the Refuge she didn’t look at me as if I was shit. As if I’d just fucked myself up out of spite. She looked at me as if she was my mum. A proper mum, that is. Not the one who raised me. I’m really, really sorry she is dead.’
‘How did you do it? How did you steal her DNA profile?
Why
did you steal it?’ He clenches his fists by his side in the dark.
The girl stares back at him for a moment, not smiling now. And then she seems to relax. ‘Tick-tock, detectives,’ she says, holding up a thin wrist and shaking it, as if to show them an invisible watch. ‘Well, the “how” is easy. Really, everyone tries to look for complicated systems, when everything is simply not that hard. Everyone who worked at the hospital had to have his or her DNA added to the database, yeah? They had some high-security cases going through there, so I think it was just standard procedure. So was taking DNA samples of the runaways. Talk about a police state! How can it even be legal? Anyway, I was in for a late scan when Suzanne was giving her DNA sample, and they took mine at the same time: a saliva swab and a fingerprint on a square of glass. Well, there was some sort of doctory thing, some emergency next door, and everyone had to rush out. And I was left alone for a couple of minutes.’ Tuesday pauses and winks at the detectives. ‘So I swapped them. Hers for mine. Simple.’ The girl stops looking at Loss for a second, and gazes at the past. Then she snaps back, causing a spasm of electricity to surge through him. ‘I was 14-years-old. I didn’t want anyone to find me. I
specifically
didn’t want anyone to find me. So I swapped them.’ The girl who calls herself Tuesday glares defiantly out of the screen at them.
‘And then, when they took my baby and killed your daughter, it became a sort of talisman for me. As I staggered about in the dark, it was one of the things that kept me alive. Knowing my daughter was taken and killed. I was going mad, and being part of Suzanne kept me sane.’ The girl pauses for a moment, and then smiles brightly. ‘Well, fairly sane.’
‘But why? Why did they kill your daughter? Why did they kill Suzanne? And what do you mean in the note, about the police being involved?’
Tuesday holds his gaze for a moment, her eyes unblinking. ‘Have you ever wondered, detective, how come I haven’t been caught? How come, with algorithms being used to hunt for terrorists, and metadata being sieved by pattern-recognition software, that I haven’t been stopped before now? I mean, you’ve seen my wall, yeah?’ An image of the wall with all the names and QR codes stencilled to it skims across Loss’s brain. He nods.
‘Well If all that was working as it should, even someone as clever as me should have been put down long ago.’
‘Someone’s been fucking with the data,’ whispers Stone. Tuesday looks at her and grins.
‘Bingo! Time’s up, I’m afraid, detectives. I really hope you’re near the shaft exit.’
Stone looks down the tunnel ahead at the entrance to the shaft. From there they will need to climb up the internal ladder for a minute or so to reach the ticket office. ‘Why? What’s so bloody important about getting out of the shaft?’
Tuesday glances at her tablet. ‘I see Professor Mummer has sent you another email, DS Stone. I’d open it if I were you. It looks as though she’s found something she wants to tell you about.’ And then Tuesday gives them a little finger wave with the hand that isn’t holding the phone, and severs the connection.
Stone presses some buttons and opens up her email and quickly scans the contents. ‘Oh God.’
Loss is still numb from the information Tuesday has and has not given him.
‘We’ve got to get out of here. Right now,’
Loss picks up on the urgency in her tone. And the fear. ‘What is it? What has she stolen?’
‘Professor Mummer says that they’ve found a crate in the lower basement that has absolutely no right being in the Museum.’
Loss thinks of the crate in Tuesday’s strange home, with the skull and crossbones embossed on it. He feels a block of dread whiting out his brain. ‘Go on then, tell me. It’s a bomb, isn’t it?’
The phone in Stone’s hand gives a merry ‘ping’: an Instagram. ‘No, sir. The crate contains a yellow rose and a bromide gas grenade. Professor Mummer says that if the crate had been full it would have contained twenty grenades.’ Stone turns the phone around to show a picture of a small room, somewhere underground: an open crate showing the grenades nestling on a bed of straw. The photo is tagged ‘Tuesday’.
‘Like this one in the photo Tuesday has just sent through.’
It’s surprising what useful information you can pick up from books people throw away. Bromide gas was used in the trenches to temporarily blind and disorientate the soldiers. It was dropped onto the battlefield in canisters fired from mortars. So, blind and disorientated is just about what the boys and girls coming up the tunnels will be. After all this time the likelihood of the gas sealed inside their metal sheaves still being full-strength is quite small, but it’s going to give them a world of pain. The effects are really quite nasty. As well as temporary blindness, there’s vomiting, internal blisters to the throat and lungs. I’ve put two canisters in the entrance to each of the tunnels, and one in the lower hallway, just for fun. In fact, just so my little friends get the full effect I’ve turned on all the lights and put some hardcore psycho-dub over the Tannoy system. After all, I’ve got a reputation to uphold.