by S Williams
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.
28
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.
29
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.
30
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.
‘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.’
31
‘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 runni
ng 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.
32
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.
33
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.’
34
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?’
