Tuesday Falling

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.

15

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.’

16

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?

17

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.’

18

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.

19

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.

‘And find that fag …’

20

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.

21

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.

22

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.’

23

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.

And then there was the Internet. Once he was in the Interzone he was away. A spider ghost in the World Wide Web. The way he described it, when people cruised the Web, they thought they were in their own little virtual bubble, their own private cyber car. That, he said, was bollocks. It was more like they were in a taxi, a black cab. You’d type in your web address and click, and then get in the cyber taxi and it would take you to your destination.

Recording all your information on the way.

Who ordered the cab.

Who got in the cab.

Where it picked you up. Where it dropped you off.