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.
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.’
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.
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.’
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?
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.’
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.
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.