‘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.
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.
Or just buy a pre-jacked SIM. They cost about the same as a packet of crisps.
As Bullet Eyes makes his phone calls and takes his IMS’s, I get an instant copy of it on my screen. I’ve also got a program running that converts speech to text, so I don’t have to worry about any audio leakage or spook-y ear-pieces. The conversations are so boring it’s unreal. Two grams of this. One wrap of that. Twenty pills of zip-a-dee-doo-dah. Crack, Special K, Bubble, cheese and crackers, blah blah blah. Drugs are so dull.
Occasionally he takes a different kind of call, and a car comes and picks up one of the girls. Before she gets in the car, Bullet Eyes slips a little something into her tiny girl hand to make the night ahead more bearable. All bleeding heart; I’m surprised he doesn’t give her a rose as well.
Those girls think they’re so big and grown up, with their micro-clothes and their trowel make-up, but they’re just broken children getting serial-raped in slow motion; their brains so groomed and loomed that they don’t even know what’s being done to them is wrong. Except when they’re alone and can’t find any drugs to numb themselves, of course.
If I wasn’t so full of snow, and black, and pain I’d probably feel something for them.
I wish I did.
But then I couldn’t do what I do. So I don’t.
This goes on for fifteen minutes before he gets a call on a different phone. I look at my screen and see that the caller’s ID is withheld. Double withheld, as even I can’t trace it.
Of course it is. That’s why I’m here.
The email that Lily-Rose received painted her soul red. It contained the names of the boys who had raped her, and the name of the girl who had filmed it on her camera phone and then distributed it around the estate. Around the school. Around the dark corners of the Interweb. It told her who was there when she was assaulted, and where everybody lived.
It gave her a list of other victims who had also been abused by the same people, cross-referencing with times and places.
Then it listed an address of a youth centre situated next to the Docklands Light Railway, along with a set of directions and a time.
Underneath was written:
Lily-Rose
I understand if you want to hide away forever, but it’s your body, and you shouldn’t have to turn your gaze from it. A life with a black hole at the centre of it allows nothing out, and everything in. It is a vessel for pain
Set yourself free.
As she makes her way off the estate, there’s a hard wire inside her, tingling with electricity. It is keeping her upright and stopping her screaming at shadows. Inside her pockets her hands are clamped so tight that if she’d had any nails left they would have pierced her skin.
When she finally reaches the Youth Centre she is drenched in sweat, and there is a buzzing in her head like a time-shifted scream. The scream she hasn’t let out yet. And then she sees, spray painted across the front of the building
TUESDAY
She takes a deep breath, crosses the road, and walks inside.
The phone call to Bullet Eyes is from his boss, and it’s to do with what’s happening on the estate. There’s quite a lot of colourful language being used. The girls pick up on the tone of his voice and disappear into the kebab shop. Honestly, they’re as stupid as they look, seeking safety in a drug shop. On the plus side it means they’re out of the way. On the down side it means I can’t blow it up now.
I take the taser out of my bag and grab the bottle of acid. I’m halfway across the road, walking my staggery tramp-walk before he sees me. He’s distracted by what he’s hearing on the phone and doesn’t look at me properly. Just sees some street plant on his patch. He doesn’t give me his full attention. Oh dear.
‘Hey. Fuck off, yeah?’ he shouts at me. ‘Go and find some other street to shit on.’
He’s so full of empathy for the homeless he should work for Shelter. I take the lid off the bottle and keep coming. When I’m four metres away I shoot him with the taser. He goes completely rigid. 100 thousand volts of electricity running through your body will do that. I run forward and catch him before he crumples. Not because I give a toss about him. I just don’t want the phone to get broken. I fire a flare high into the kebab shop so it doesn’t lodge in the pointless brain of one of the skin-girls, not that you’d notice a difference, and put his phone to my ear. Mr Boss-man is still talking.
‘Remus? Are you still there, bro? What the fuck’s going on?’
I hold the phone away from my ear so he can hear the flare go off in the drug shop along with the girls’ satisfying oral accompaniment, and then bring it back.
‘I’m afraid Remus has had a bit of a shock.’ I know it’s a crap joke but I just can’t help it. Years of Bank Holiday Bond films on TV have affected my brain.
He’s not out, Remus. But he can’t move. The taser fires so much juice into the body that it scrambles the neural connectors.
You can still feel, though. I pour the acid onto his crotch. I’m quite impressed that he manages to scream.
‘Who the fuck is this?’
The voice is cold. This isn’t Remus, all cock-front and gangland. This is the real deal.
‘Hello, Mr Man. I’m the one who’s been kicking you in the balls.’
‘
Tuesday
.’ I think the voice is meant to frighten me. It’s about as scary as Scooby Doo.
‘But I’m bored with that, so now I’ve decided to cut out your heart, instead.’
And then I take a picture of Remus screaming on the ground, his crotch a smoking ruin, and tweet it to all his contacts. Tweet. Who the fuck thinks these things up? Then I pocket the phone and walk back towards the tube station. There’s shouting and screaming going on behind me but it might as well be birdsong.
While DS Stone is talking to the lab, DI Loss’s phone rings. He answers it and listens to his boss telling him that there’s a full-blown riot happening on the Sparrow Estate, and he’d better get his arse down there, yesterday. They both finish their calls at the same time.
‘Come on. All hell’s broken out on the Sparrow Estate.’
She puts her phone in her pocket and holds her hand up, palm facing him.
‘Hang on a minute, sir. That was the lab.’ There is something in her face that makes him slow down.