by S Williams
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.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Quite. These stupid pain-merchants actually filmed themselves talking about this stuff!’
‘And now none of it admissible in court.’
The detective is interrupted by a commotion above them.
‘I swear it wasn’t me, Gran!’
Stone watches as a woman of about sixty hurls a laptop over the balcony, closely following it with a bin bag full of clothes. The laptop shatters as it hits the tarmac.
‘I don’t want you ever coming back here. Ever. Some of what you did happened in my house! In my house!’ The woman is screaming as she slams the door shut.
‘I don’t think they give a toss about the courts, sir. In about five minutes we’re going to have a mob of very angry brothers and sisters gunning for this lot. I’d say the balance of power has taken a bit of a swing.’
All around the estate young men and women are quietly leaving their flats and coming to stand with the girls in the courtyard.
‘Sir?’ a young officer approaches the two detectives. She is holding a piece of paper and looking nervously at the growing group of people next to them.
‘What is it, Officer?’
‘The weapons used in the attack outside Candy’s, sir? The blindings and the fatality?’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, the report has just come back, sir. The crossbow pistol was made in the early nineteenth century by a Frederic Siber, and the flare gun was made in 1941, and was last used by the Luftwaffe in the Second World War. It looks as if this might have been the same weapon that was used on the kebab house.’
‘Brilliant. Doesn’t this girl like the twenty-first century or something?’ Stone takes the report from the officer.
‘If you’re not connected to gangs then it’s quite hard to buy guns, round here. And I don’t think they’d like to sell her one, do you?’ But she isn’t listening. She is scan-reading the report.
‘Sir, both these guns were stolen from the Antique Arms Fair at Earl’s Court last year, and prior to that had been loaned to the Imperial War Museum.’
Something clicks into place in Loss’s brain, and then clicks out again.
‘I’m too bloody tired for this,’ he says, desperately searching his pockets for the cigarette packet that hasn’t been there for three years.
‘Right. Officer …’ He looks fixedly at her badge, shining in the light from the fires being made from all the clothing thrown off the balconies. ‘Swallow, I want you to liaise with the righteous vigilantes gathering over there,’ he indicates the young men and women standing by the people sitting in the play area, ‘and explain to them that the last thing we want is the riot police, but due to some soon–to-be-fucked-off drug dealers, we have to leave them here for their protection.’ Officer Swallow looks scared stiff, but nods and moves towards the armoured vans. He turns to DS Stone, a disconnected look in his eye. ‘And I want you to get back on to the lab and find out what the hell’s going on with my daughter’s records. I will not have her dragged into this.’ He points at the unmarked police car that had brought them here. ‘Right now I’m going to go to that car and get some sleep. I want you to wake me up in two hours, and I want you to make us an appointment with someone at the British Museum who can show me those knives. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Fine.’ Stone watches as her boss dead-walks to the car and gets in. She signals to the driver leaning against the bonnet smoking a cigarette. He flicks it away and walks over to her. ‘Once he’s asleep, drive him home, and don’t let him come back to me until morning, OK?’ The driver nods, walks back to the car, gets in and drives away. DS Stone watches the car go, white plumes of diesel smoke snaking out of the exhaust, and drifting behind it, clear and distinct in the ionised air. Then she looks back at Lily-Rose and the other girls sitting in the courtyard.
Then she feels a drop of rain hit her forehead, and the sky opens up.
35
I wake up to the shipping forecast running out of the speakers like honey. I love the way I have absolutely, one hundred per cent, no idea what they’re talking about, yet everything they say makes perfect sense. The voice echoes around the station like a ghost, filling the space with names and places from a shadow world. I stare at the tiny tiles in the ceiling, letting my body tick back into focus. When the forecast is over I get up and set the laptop to scan for any mention of me on media networks, both on the Interzone and in the physical world.
It doesn’t take long.
I’m all over it. I practically am it.
I drink a protein shake, and do my business. I try not to eat any real food. I need to keep my body fat index under twenty-two, or I’ll start having periods, and there’s no way I’m going to let that happen. No chance. I’ve still got to stay healthy, though. Well, functioning healthy, anyway.
When I lived upstairs, on the street, it was all about scavenging.
Scraping off Mcwrappers. Kebab boxes from bins. Turned fruit left behind from Soho market. Endless chips and pizzas bought with beggar money.
Now, compared to then, I’m tip top. I drink nutritionally balanced health shakes designed for people recovering from illness. I don’t smoke, drink, take drugs, or eat shit fast food. I don’t sleep on cold pavements where you can actually see your life expectancy shedding off you, and fuck knows what living in a city with four million fume-spewing cars and buses does to you.
Then again, my lungs are probably full of micro-particles of metal from the tunnel dust and the nearest thing I get to a vegetable tends to wear a hood.
Still, it’s not like I’m planning a long future, is it?
When I’m done, I strip and sponge myself down and catch up with what’s happening on the ground.
The news footage looks like Ukraine. Fires all over East London. It seems that there was a riot in Docklands last night.
Well who’d’ve thought?
There’s an interview with a girl from the Sparrow Estate o
n an internet radio station, where the programme plays an audio clip of her rapists bragging about what they had done, then laughing about it. The girl names the boys, shouting their street tags down the microphone, and challenging them to get her arrested for slander.
There are pictures on the BBC, taken from a helicopter, of fires all over the estate, lock-ups being broken into and the contents doused in petrol and set alight. Mothers and grandmothers are in front of the burning buildings, their eyes screaming, talking about cleaning out the drug gangs. Talking about not taking any more. Talking about taking back control.
‘But surely this is a job for the police?’ a bewildered reporter asks a woman in her early forties. Oh dear.
‘The police? Fuck the police! The police had pictures of my daughter being tortured by these bastards! And they didn’t do nothing! Didn’t do f-all while my baby couldn’t even leave her room! Well let me tell you. We’re doing it!’ The woman punches her rigid finger into her chest. ‘Us and our children!’ There was more but the woman was unintelligible. Never mind. Plenty of others.
On and on it goes. Channel after channel. People in a state of disbelief at what their children were doing. Are doing. What had been done to their children. Was still being done. As the night wears on, the more vocal and focused everyone becomes. Tapes played. Audios aired. Victims interviewed. It was as if, once the secrecy had been blown away, and the predators’ identity plastered all over everywhere, the floodgates were opened.
And it didn’t just stop at the Sparrow Estate. Names started cropping up all over East London. Written on walls and on buildings. And in other cities and towns too.
Names, dates, personal details. It was insane.
And mixed in it all was the tag TUESDAY.
Me.
It was visible on the walls behind the reporters. Sometimes spray-painted in giant cartoon letters. Sometimes written dozens of times on doors and pillars.
It was all over the chat-rooms and in the scar-bars of the Interzone.
It was on the lips and in the hearts of all the fucked-up boys and girls on the battle-field.
It warms a girl’s cockles. It really does.
They’ll definitely be gunning for me now.
Even the police might start getting a clue.
Well, some of them.
Probably not.
I turn everything off and just lie there, listening to the dripping water finding its way through my home. Watching the shadows on the curved roof and the slowly spinning motes of dust in the air.
Not thinking of anything.
Not thinking at all.
Not thinking.
36
DI Loss’s house is a house of ghosts. The ghosts of his wife and daughter. The ghost of himself as he used to be. He stands in the living room of his small but unfeasibly expensive Victorian terraced cottage, looking out onto Cassland Road. The driver who brought him home is long gone, having promised to return again in the morning.
He looks out of the bay window at the street, the night lit orange by the lamp opposite. Even at this time the road is busy; it is often used as a cut-through to the main east trunk road, or into Hackney. When Suzanne was very young he and his wife had been terrified of the road, of all the cars parked against the kerb, blocking the view of drivers travelling too fast in vehicles containing too many distractions. No worries now. Just pain and emptiness and the grey, hard wall of an existence without them.
He turns away from the window and shambles out of the room, knocking to the floor weeks of unread post from a small table. No amount of drinking. No amount of crying. Nothing stops the snatches of past cutting into his brain.
The buzzing of the London traffic recedes as he passes through the hall and enters the kitchen at the back of the house. He takes a cup from the draining board and fills it with water from the tap. There is always a cup on the draining board. Loss never puts the cup in the cupboard: he does not look in cupboards. They are full of the past: plates that won’t be eaten off, glasses that won’t be drunk from. DI Loss’s interaction with his house consists of putting the take-away cartons in the bin and doing the laundry. He has a bed made up on the couch.
Upstairs, two bedrooms; one at the front and one at the back. Loss never goes upstairs: the ghosts are too present up there. But, even downstairs, he can still hear his wife crying. He can still hear his daughter’s nightmares.
Loss rinses the cup, places it back on the draining board, and goes out of the back door to what was the garden. He has had everything that grows removed and replaced with paving slabs. He sits down on the back step and doesn’t smoke a cigarette.
37
The man sits in his chair and looks at the various screens on his wall.
He monitors the destruction of his business streaming out across the media in front of him. His phones are hot from the news. Most of his workforce have been thrown out of their homes by their own families, and have gone into hiding. Their faces are on the sides of buildings and all over the Interworld.
Across the East End his stashes of drugs and guns are being trashed. He’d actually seen some of his drug money being incinerated by a mad-looking old bat of a woman in slippers, screaming that she’d found it under her grandson’s bed, that he’d filmed himself putting it there on his phone, bragging about what a player he was, and that the link had been sent to her. At least the fool hadn’t mentioned his name.
His mobile is on fire with questions from his soldiers, asking him what the fuck they should do.
He can’t comprehend how his power, the power he has held for so long, has slipped; how it is that the ordinary people have somehow gained strength and courage, when before they were the three blind monkeys.
Hear no evil. See no evil. Speak no evil.
He can’t understand it, but he has a name and a face at which to direct his fury.
He opens his desk and takes out a phone he has used only once before, and speed-dials a number. When it is answered he says one word.
‘Tuesday.’
He attaches a photo of the graffiti tag appearing all over London, and a picture of the small Goth girl who tore apart his boys on the tube train, and then he sits back and focuses on a still of the girl as she stares up at the camera, a scythe in each hand, eyes bright with madness.
‘You’re dead, little girl,’ he whispers.
38
By the time DI Loss and DS Stone arrive at the British Museum it has been raining heavily for three hours. The building appears to be floating as all the streets surrounding it are flooded.
‘It’s the sewerage system,’ Stone shouts over the noise of the water bouncing off the umbrella they’re sharing. ‘Every time it rains hard there’s a back-up. There’s talk of a super-sewer tunnel being built, but they’re afraid that if they did that, half of London would collapse!’
‘What?’ Loss yells. He is still angry about being sent home. He knows it was the right thing to do but he resents it.
‘Because of all the old tunnels, and underground rivers and stuff! It’s like a whole other city down there, apparently!’
‘Right.’ Loss isn’t really paying attention. He has things on his mind other than a history lesson. Like who is tampering with the memory of his daughter. ‘Have we heard any news back from the lab?’
‘Not yet, sir. I explained the situation, and requested that they do another check on the DNA from the cigarette. They said they’d rapid it through and give me the results later today.’
‘Fine.’
They walk up the stone steps in Montague Street to an unassuming green metal door in an annexe to the main building, and ring the bell. After a few moments the door is opened by a smartly dressed woman in her early sixties wearing a tweed suit.
‘Yes, can I help you?’
‘We’re here to see Professor Mummer. We’re expected.’ The police officers show their ID, and then follow the woman into a small room with a polished wooden floor. Loss feels the urge to whisper. They
are shown to a pair of high-backed chairs, and she excuses herself, saying that the professor will be along in a moment. As she leaves the room, her court shoes make a crisp tapping on the hardwood floor. They sit side by side, not looking at each other.
After a time Loss clears his throat. ‘You didn’t have to send me home. I was completely fine.’
‘You looked as if you were about to collapse, sir.’
‘I admit I was tired, but a cup of coffee would have sorted me out.’
Stone snorts in derision.
‘A skip of coffee wouldn’t have sorted you out, sir. You were dead on your feet.’
‘I was fine.’
‘By the time the driver got in the car you were snoring.’
‘I was just resting my eyes.’
‘Asleep.’
‘Resting my eyes.’
They fall into a tense silence. Loss has the distinct impression that his partner is smirking, but does not turn his head to check. After a couple of minutes the door is opened and a thin woman walks in and shakes their hands. She has a firm grip and reminds Loss vaguely of his primary school teacher. She is wearing a smart two-piece skirt suit, and smells of old books.
‘Professor Mummer,’ the woman speaks in a clipped, RP voice. ‘Awfully sorry to have kept you waiting.’
‘No problem, professor. I understand you’ve been told why we’re here?’
‘Absolutely. I was informed last night. In fact, I half expected someone to come immediately, once I saw on the news what had happened.’
Stone winces at the waves of triumphant vindication washing over her from her boss’s direction.
‘Still, never mind. You’re here now. It gave me time to locate the items. Please, follow me.’
Loss and Stone follow Professor Mummer out of the room and through the corridor. Loss is surprised when, instead of entering the museum proper, the professor leads them to an ancient-looking lift, and presses the brass call button. There’s a clunk of machinery from somewhere within the building as the mechanism comes to life.
