‘What? What is it?’
‘They’ve analysed the DNA on the filter of the cigarette butt that was picked up in the alley. They ran it through their database and came up with a positive match’
Loss nods impatiently.
‘Yes? Well come on. Don’t keep me in suspense. There’s an all-out war going on that we’ve got to walk into.’
‘According to their records the DNA is a 100 per cent match for a Miss Suzanne Loss.’ She stares at him, bewildered. Loss looks back at her, the colour draining rapidly from his face.
‘Your daughter, sir.’
He sits down as though he’s been unplugged.
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘It can’t be.’ Loss’s gaze turns inward. And backward.
‘I have to put out a call for her, sir.’
Loss realizes his colleague hasn’t been around long enough to know.
‘You don’t understand. It can’t be. My daughter was murdered three years ago.’
‘Sir? Sir, can you hear me?’
DI Loss is sitting in the chair outside the Marquis of Granby, but he is three years away, his mind wrapped in the shadows of his past. He’s standing in the entrance to Bleeding Heart Yard. The police strobes from the patrol cars blocking it from the main road are nightmaring the brick walls, and the rain running down the mortar lines is black.
Uniformed officers are taking measurements on the ground; running tape, and sticking down coloured markers, but Loss barely registers them. All he can focus on is the light-fractured body of his daughter lying; a thrown-away toy. One metre away from her is another body, but the Inspector doesn’t look at it, doesn’t give space in his brain to acknowledge it as he stares at Suzanne. The London rain is lit up in sheets by the strobes. He is hot and cold at the same time and completely indifferent to the scene in front of him. The Victorian yard smells of death, and pain, and broken promises, shattered futures, and failure.
Loss falls to his knees next to his daughter, not feeling his trousers tear or his skin rip open as he slams to the ground. Not feeling the rain slicking his hair, sticking to his skull. The blood running out of her means she is not long dead; the blood is thick and slow-moving, but not yet congealed. It leaves her body in ribbons and rags, and mixes with the blood trickling from his knees. He cannot quite believe that it is his daughter. He feels he is in several places at once: here in front of the body of this girl who was his daughter; sitting at his desk and answering the phone, receiving the call; a rabbit punch of pain that brought him over to this yard. The dead man who has been walking around for the last five minutes, a mapped-out non-future of a non-life without a daughter who had stopped talking to him months ago.
All the things he cannot say to her.
All the hugs and holding he cannot give to her.
All the crying and healing he will not do with her.
DI Loss kneels beside his dead daughter and feels his own life drain out of him.
Leaving him empty
Alone.
Lost.
There are six tube tunnels running under Earl’s Court, and in my opinion the whole bloody structure could collapse at any minute. This is why the Mayor of London has given his consent for the thing to be torn down. What they’re thinking of doing is getting rid of the flyover, digging up the tunnels, and having one massive underpass for all the cars.
A fly-under.
Like that’s going to work. What with the super sewer, the new cross-London underground, and the trillion-tonne skyscrapers, they haven’t got a fucking prayer.
Still, all that’s in the future, so it won’t affect me. What I’m concerned about is the Antique Arms Fair that’s held there every year. All the antique dealers specialising in military artefacts go there and display their prize pieces. Sometimes it’s held at the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre itself, and sometimes at one of the workbot hotels just outside it.
I heard about it when I was pavement-surfing in Soho. All the street children get to hear about the big events in London. That’s where there would be surplus food thrown out at the end of the day. Where there might be casual work where you don’t need a pimp or a gang-hand. Where people are where they want to be, seeing something they want to see, so might be kinder.
Me, I never went there. After the hospital, I went somewhere else instead. Somewhere snowbound and hidden where I couldn’t be touched. Underground and in my head at the same time.
Later on, when I couldn’t find a safe way into the Imperial War Museum, when I was looking for a weapon fit for purpose, I remembered.
Of course, it’s not just Transport for London who have a stake in the ground beneath Earl’s Court. The National Grid recently put in more tunnelling for new power supplies as well. If they keep going on like this they’ll have to move Brompton Cemetery.
It’s all good for me, though. Each night, when the exhibition is shut, all the pieces are stored in the basement of Earl’s Court.
Really, it’s very safe down there: security guards on the doors and CCTV all around the curving corridors of the massive building. Absolutely no one would be able to break in.
Absolute fucking doddle to break
up
, though. I shadow my way to Hammersmith, which is one of the busiest stations going, and make my way into the part of the station closed for construction. It’s simple. Everyone is so busy no one notices the little Goth girl. I’ve even put on a hoodie so I tick all the boxes.
Once I’m through the construction site, I slip into the old tunnels that take me under the Exhibition Centre proper, then into the power conduits that let me go right up under the basement. All the plans for the building are available online, and all the tunnel schematics I lifted from the TFL Inter-site. The National Grid stuff is a bit harder to get hold of after the London bombings, but, unbelievably, the civil engineering surveys for where the tunnels are going to be, and all the tunnels that are there already, are easy to access. It’s amazing there’s any London left. I guess the whole system is so disorganized that most terrorists just can’t be arsed to wade through it all.
Once I’m in the Earl’s Court sub-station it’s easy to access the room where the artefacts are stored. I’d looked at the online catalogue and knew exactly what I wanted. I’d been practising with a sport crossbow and a dart gun I’d taken from a department store, but I’m sure this is going to be much more fun. As for the flare pistol, well what can you say?
Every girl should have one.
The Sparrow Estate is in meltdown. Following the phone calls in Brydges Place, DI Loss and DS Stone were picked up by an unmarked police car that was fitted with a live feed from the bomb-disposal vehicle at the scene.
‘The sodding bomb squad! It’s one teenage girl, not the Taliban!’ Loss’s thought processes are in tatters. The information from the police lab has thrown him into a vortex of pain. Memory pain of his daughter alive and happy, older and sad, suddenly never getting any older. Never getting anything at all. And memories of his daughter bring back memories of his wife.
Thin. Thinner. Thinnest.
The kebab shop is in ruins. All the windows have been blown out, and the stuttering neon sign is hanging by one wire and spitting sparks onto the pavement. Flames can be seen dancing in the back of the shop.
‘Well, at least the doner meat will be cooked for a change,’ Stone says. Loss isn’t really looking at the chaos on the monitor in front of him; he is looking at a scene from three years ago, when he is holding his dead daughter’s hand, unable to see her face properly through the blood and the tears.
‘Bloody hell.’
His attention is pulled back to the present by Stone’s tight voice. He rubs his eyes and looks at the monitor. It takes him a moment to understand what he is looking at. It takes him another to believe it.
‘Get onto the Super. We’re going to need the riot squad down there right
now
.’
Lily-Rose is on the swing in the Sparrow Estate courtyard, swaying gently backwards and forwards, when the detectives arrive. The swing has been used so little that there are weeds under her feet. She is one of fifty-seven people quietly occupying the area bordered by the four concrete housing blocks. There are candles lit everywhere, and a great sense of stillness. The lights from smartphones screens are giving the scene a surreal quality, like a medieval science fiction film. All around them the estate is electric. The kind of electric that builds and builds, before arcing to ground. There is screaming, and slamming of doors, and the silent sound of fear filling up every gap in between.
DI Loss picks his way through the crowd in the courtyard and sits down on the swing next to Lily-Rose. It has not rained in this part of London yet, and the air feels as though it could ignite with the flick of a lighter. The detective rubs his face and wonders if he will ever sleep again. Both he and Lily-Rose gaze at the messages that have been spray-painted onto the side of the building in front of them.
‘Well this is something, isn’t it?’ he says gently. Lily-Rose has not looked at him. She rocks gently back and forth. After a minute, she begins to talk in a quiet voice.
‘All the people sitting here, yeah? Every single one of them has been raped and shat on by someone on this estate. They’ve lived in shame, shut away in their own heads, hurting themselves over and over again, trying to make sense of what happened to their lives.’
‘She brought you together, didn’t she? Tuesday hooked you up?’
Lily-Rose spits on the floor in contempt and then grins at nothing, looking straight ahead. The grin contains no mirth.
‘
They
hooked us up.
They
put us together when they taped us and raped us.
They
lit the fuse. They just didn’t realize they’d made a bomb.’
Loss doesn’t really know what to do so he continues to swing gently. The motion is making him feel as if he’s made of air.
‘But where did you get all the names, Lily-Rose? All the …?’ he points at the crowd around them, at all the phones showing the same awful things. Lily-Rose sighs.
‘Look, Detective Loss. You’ve had your go, yeah? You’ve had your chance, and I couldn’t even leave my flat. I was gang-raped and beaten unconscious, and it was filmed and shown all round school, and the only thing I wanted to do was find a way to kill myself without breaking my mum. I was fucked up so bad that I was ashamed of my own flesh, as if there was something wrong with
me
.’ She emphasizes her point by punching her own thin frame.
Loss doesn’t look at her. If he looks at her he will fall down at her feet, or try to take her in his arms and protect her. Try to turn her into his daughter, to ease the pain that is threatening to split his head open. Do something that will not help either of them.
‘I hated my body so much I began to think it was a separate thing from me. That it somehow belonged to
them
. That I had to punish it, or cut it off, so it didn’t infect me.’ Lily-Rose is crying, but her eyes are hard.
‘Half the people here cut themselves to try to feel something other than the pain of what happened. They do it in secret, as though it’s way dirtier than anything that happened to them. They do it so much that it becomes the only way they can feel. Fucking hell,
Detective
, what do you expect us to do? Therapy? That’s therapy.’ She tosses him her phone, showing the footage from behind Candy’s
.
Loss looks at it for a moment, then hands it back.
‘Those weren’t the boys who attacked you, though, were they?’
‘Me. Her. Whoever. They all belong in the same gang. They’re all part of the same crew.’ Loss doesn’t know which ‘her’ Lily-Rose is referring to, but looking round at all the girls in the courtyard he guesses it doesn’t matter.
‘Well, I have to say this approach is novel.’ Loss focuses on what’s in front of him. ‘I guess you knew most of the names, between you all, but where did you get the phone conversations from?’
They both stare at the tag of Tuesday sprayed on the wall in front of them, until DS Stone catches Loss’s eye. He places his feet on the ground, stopping the swing.
‘Stay strong, Lily-Rose. There’s a storm coming, and I don’t think it’s going to stop for anything.’
Lily-Rose smiles at nothing straight ahead of her.
‘That’s the bare truth, Detective.’
He gets up and threads his way to his DS.
‘Well?’
‘At approximately nine o’clock this evening Lily-Rose and all these others left the Cross-Harbour Community Centre, and walked
en masse
back to the estate. It seems that all the people at the Centre had at some time been raped or brutalized by one or more of the gang members that run the estate. At the Centre was a list of names, mobile phone numbers, addresses, and alleged crimes, from sexual assault through to drug-dealing and fire-arm supply. All in all, a complete shit storm.’
‘Shit storm?’
‘Absolutely. Also supplied were various social media accounts, from Facebook to Flickr and everything in between, on which are what appears to be recorded conversations of the alleged rapists boasting about their prowess to other gang members, and generally being complete bastards. Also given were the phone numbers of the local radio stations, both pirate and legitimate, and the telephone numbers and email addresses of all the alleged rapists’ relatives and work colleagues.’ Stone pauses to allow her boss to take in everything she has said.
‘OK. Shit storm,’ agrees Loss. Police officers in riot uniform are milling around nervously, not sure quite what to do, but knowing that, whatever they do, it is almost certainly going to be the wrong thing. Above them a press helicopter is visible between the tower blocks.
‘When the group arrived back at the estate, they spray-stencilled the names of the alleged rapists, along with their phone numbers, Twitter accounts, Skype numbers,
hang-out
addresses and everything, plus links to the recorded conversations of them bragging about what they’d done.’