‘And find that fag …’
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.
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.
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.’
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.