by S Williams
Loss looks at the names his DS is pointing at. He feels his heart breaking and floating away from his body. So many names. ‘Yeah, that was about two years ago.’
‘Almost exactly two years ago,’ says Stone, noting the date next to the name, and taking her phone out of her pocket. ‘I remember, cos I was at Henley just about to graduate. It looks as if our girl got some practice in before she moved onto the main event.’
‘What are you doing?’
Stone points her phone at the QR code and snaps the camera button. She looks at Loss, her eyes clear and wide, ‘Going to the movies?’
‘You’ve been practising that in front of a mirror, haven’t you?’ She grins at him and nods her head towards the phone. The screen on her phone goes blank for a second, and then it is filled with what appears to be a school gymnasium.
80
They come into the gym in a tight pack. There are six of them, all about fifteen, and in front, pushed and stumbling, his tie all crooked and his shirt untucked, is the boy who’s been talking to me. No one’s putting on any lights and the squeak from their stupid-expensive trainers echoes around the hall, setting the air on edge.
I found him on a self-help suicide site, this boy. He’s thirteen years old and he’s had enough. Once his parents are asleep, he spends his nights trawling the Interzone, finding places that will tell him how to kill himself.
He wakes up an extra hour early so that he can empty himself of tears before his mother comes into his bedroom.
That’s on the nights he can go to sleep at all.
‘Hey, Derrick, what’s it like to be a meatspinner?’ The pack snigger, and the boy cringes, trying to make himself disappear inside his own body.
Derrick. That’s his name. The pack has decided he’s gay, and has fucked him over so much that the pain of living is just too much for him. Me, I don’t care if he’s gay or not. I check that the camera sitting on the bleacher in front of me is on.
The pack makes a rough circle around the boy. They’re in their school uniforms, but the older boys all have hooded sweatshirts.
It’s a big sports hall in a big school. It’s got climbing bars running up one wall, and, running along the opposite wall are tiered benches that retract for storage when there isn’t some event on.
Well there’s an event on now. I’m all cosy underneath those benches, in the area where the retracting mechanics are. I can see out between them. The pack are pushing Derrick like a pinball between them. It’s hard to tell from this distance, but I’m pretty certain he’s crying. I don’t blame him. If all my tears hadn’t been ripped out of my body, I’d be crying too.
It’s seven o’clock at night, and the only other people in school are the illegal immigrant cleaners who get paid below minimum wage, which they give over to their handlers, and other packs of kids like this one. Not quite old enough to own the streets, but big enough to own the school. They know all the alarm codes and they have all the keys. The teachers can’t wait for the working day to be over so they can leave the war zone.
During the day they’ve got CCTV and metal-detecting machines like you’d see at an airport. At night, though, they’ve got fuck all. All I had to do was stroll in.
Pathetic. During the day it’s a prison, but at night it’s a pain park patrolled by torture drones. I look at my tablet to make sure I have what I need, then turn my attention back to Derrick.
Derrick’s not doing too well. They’ve got him down on the floor and are making dog sounds at him. Barking and yapping.
‘Hey Derrick, why don’t you show us some tricks? Why don’t you show us what you do with your boyfriends?’ The pack can smell blood now. They’ve worked themselves up, and there’s no turning back. They can smell it, and they’ve got all jittery, jumping from foot to foot, as if they’ve taken too much speed.
Actually, they probably have. These brothers have speed eyes; all hard and shiny, like a frozen piece of filthy water.
Derrick can sense it too. He knows it’s going to be worse than the other times. He looks round wildly. The pack laugh, thinking he’s looking for a way out.
What he’s really looking for, though, is me.
When I found him on the suicide site, he’d been there for a while, trying to find a way to snuff himself out without hurting his parents. Not possible. Not if they care. Then again, if they cared, why hadn’t they noticed what was happening to their son? Anyhow, we get to it, and sooner rather than later I have a client.
The pack have their heads up now, egging each other on. The only light comes from the safety lighting in the corner of the big room, and the shadows dance and stagger around the walls. They’re going to rape him. They don’t even admit it to themselves but you can see it in their body language.
Derrick knows it too, and has stopped struggling. He’s trying to make himself dead inside so the pain won’t reach him.
The body pain. The head pain. The soul pain.
The pack won’t even think of it as rape. It’s just about power to them. About controlling someone completely. They’re so fucking boring. They never even try to think about what they are doing.
Quietly, I come out from beneath the benches.
‘Leave him alone!’
Everybody freezes.
‘What’s he ever done to you?’ I walk further into the room so the drones can get a good look at me. I’m wearing my grey cargoes with the Burmese army shirt, collar ripped off. On the uniform front, I’ve got them stone-fucking-cold.
The pack stares at me. Slowly the surprise leaves their faces to be replaced with a look of pleasure. As if someone handed them a bag of crack for free.
‘Well, Derrick my man, it looks like you’ve got a little fag-hag as a fan! Come over here, Valentine, help your girlfriend out.’ He starts walking towards me. I reach down under the bench, and pick up the wooden relay baton and throw it at his head. It hits with a satisfying clunk, and he goes down. I’m quite surprised. Normally my aim’s not that good.
‘Fucking Christ! What did you do that for?’ Blood is pouring from his eye as he stands up. His crew leave Derrick and start towards me.
‘Because you’re going to hurt my friend, shitheads.’ I think it would probably be the wrong time to tell them that Derrick isn’t a friend. It might overload them.
‘Yeah, bitch,’ Bleeding Eye snarls, ‘we’re going to do your friend, and then we’re going to turn you inside out!’
Wow. He’s so scary I might fall asleep. Still, he did threaten me, so bingo. I throw another baton at them for good measure then duck back under the benches. Derrick runs for the door, as if I’d told him to, and once he’s out I pick up the camera.
It’s brilliant. They’re going to follow me under the tiered benches, two going one way and two the other. That way they’ll trap me in a pincer movement. I go to the middle and climb up the ladder that leads to the top tier. It’s super-dark under here but, unlike the drones, I know what the fuck I’m doing.
When I hear them under me I drop the flash bomb and climb down to the centre of the gym. When it goes off, I can hear them screaming that they’ve gone blind.
Calm down, boys, it’s only temporary.
I take out my tablet and touch the screen. The benches begin to retract back against the wall. It will take about ten seconds for them to retract to the point where there will be no space left under them. Now that’s what I call a fighting chance.
I put the camera on the floor, press the button that fires it up, and walk out of the gym, my electric blue DMs not making one fucking squeak.
The phone fades to black, and Stone silently puts it back in her pocket.
‘Jesus.’ Loss takes the photograph of Suzanne and Tuesday and her daughter out of his pocket and stares at it. ‘What happened? What the hell happened to you?’
81
It’s just a matter of waiting now.
I’m used to waiting. Waiting till I was old enough to walk. Waiting till I was old enough to run. Always w
aiting. If you don’t wait, you don’t watch. And if you don’t watch, you get fucked. Stone cold fact. When I lived on the street, waiting was mainly what you did. Hours and hours of waiting for nothing. Just ticking. When I was pregnant there was more waiting, but that was a scared waiting. Hard waiting. Not knowing if it was going to go wrong. Or be wrong when it was born. Or if I could love her. A rape baby is not a planned event.
I needn’t have worried. Of course I loved her. I loved her more than it is possible to say. I loved her so much that I started thinking of a future. Started thinking of forgetting a past. I couldn’t believe anyone could do anything but love their child with every strand of their being.
Except, of course, I’d seen it. Felt it with my own skin. Anti-love.
There’s a poem by some dead bloke that begins: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’.
Too right.
And even me. I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t save her with my body, and I couldn’t save her with my heart, and I just couldn’t save her, period.
Stop thinking. Just live in the present. Make the future a play you’ve seen before.
***
I’ve chosen Leicester Square. I was toying with leading them to an abandoned tunnel under the Thames and drowning the fucking lot, but it’s really not my style. Plus there’s no escape route if something goes wrong. Not that something’s going to go wrong. No way. Leicester Square has got really deep tunnels, and the sound down here is like the sea. An empty sea with just me in it. Everyone else has been cleared out. The air is warm on my face and the walls vibrate. I just sit against the tunnel wall and tick. I can feel the smoothness of the tiny ceramic rectangles behind my back. I have really got to find out what they’re all about. I’m wearing my black pilot trousers, my black collarless British army shirt, and black nail varnish. I’ve sacked the wigs and re-bleached my hair, put on my silver, steel toe-capped DMs, and have more weapons down here than Russia.
Well, you’ve got to make an effort, haven’t you?
There are no sirens anymore and I’ve shut the Tannoy down, at least until later. The emergency red lighting is on and I love it. I’ve made the whole station into a ghost.
I turn my head to the side. Above me, I can hear them walking down the escalator, the sound echoing back on itself. They’re coming for me now. Gang boys and killers who want to shut me down.
Listening to the noises of death creeping towards me in the dark should make me scared, I suppose, but after I lost my daughter it got too hard to feel anything.
Anything at all.
Here they come, with their guns and their animal hate.
They think they’re in control.
They think they’re hunting me.
Don’t they know I live here?
82
The Hummer pulls up outside the tube entrance on Charing Cross Road. The whole station has been cordoned off, and is being patrolled by the police. There are uniformed officers everywhere, and the strobing from all the police cars appears to be doing nothing to calm the situation down. The street is alive with people. Tourists and locals pack together as though it’s a free show – which, Constantine muses, it is.
The fact that there are uniformed officers everywhere doesn’t bother Constantine. Together with the other people who have been sent with him, he gets out of the back of the vehicle where all the guns are hidden away in two large FILA hold-alls. He weaves his way through the crowd and ducks under the black and yellow hazard tape that cordons off the tube entrance. He approaches the policeman planted right outside the stairs leading to the station and whispers something in his ear. The policeman nods, and steps aside. Constantine and the others walk past him and descend below street level.
‘What did you say to him, man?’ Constantine doesn’t answer him. He understands that knowledge is power. Plus, if they’re too stupid to know that his employer has bribed their way in here, or perhaps even had a conversation with some bent officer further up the food chain, then the less conversation they have, the happier he is.
‘Right. I’m going to give each of you a gun. Now I want you to pay close attention to me. The bit with the hole at the end, that’s the barrel. That’s what you point at the girl. The bit with the trigger, that’s the end you hold.’
‘There’s no need to take the piss, man.’ Constantine looks at him as though he’s nothing, which is in fact what he is. ‘I’m not “taking the piss”, he says, jabbing the man in the chest for emphasis, ‘I’m just making absolutely certain you don’t do Tuesday’s job for her, and shoot your own empty fucking head off. Or mine. Now follow me and don’t make any noise.’
Constantine and his gang walk through the silent ticket hall. Emergency lights cast a sickly glow over everything. The turnstiles are open and the escalators are shut down. Strange shadows animate the walls as the murder crew walk around the hall.
‘This is freaky man,’ says one of the gang as they head for the escalators. The emergency lights stutter and hum, making the shadows flick and fracture.
‘Which line, Northern or Piccadilly?’
Constantine breathes deeply. He thinks it is absolutely incredible that his employer has managed to build a criminal empire with such a bunch of subhuman, screen-drunk, skunk-ridden, crack-frazzled fuckheads.
‘Both, you idiot. We split up.’
‘Right. I knew that.’ The four gang members start walking down the stationary escalator towards the Piccadilly Line platforms. Constantine watches them go, smiling gently. He takes a quiet pleasure in having absolutely no expectation of seeing them again. At least not alive.
‘Come on’, he whispers, ‘and don’t make any bloody noise.’
Along with the remaining two members of the gang, he begins to walk quietly down the escalator towards the Northern Line platform.
83
‘Where the hell is Cranbourn Station? I’ve never heard of it.’ DI Loss is finding it difficult to keep up. The picture of his daughter, and Tuesday and her daughter, is a weight in his pocket threatening to sink him. The World Service is talking about the melting of the ice-caps, and DS Stone feels she is in the middle of a David Lynch film; one of the earlier ones that make no sense, but scare the crap out of you.
On the table, under the milk bottle containing the rose, was a scrap of paper with a smiley face drawn on it in blue felt-tip, and the name of the tube station Loss has never heard of. Stone pulls off her rucksack and gets out the augmented map of underground London that Colin Stevens gave her. She spreads it out on Tuesday’s camp bed, the slight indentation where Loss sat on it still visible, and peers at it. After a moment she stabs her finger on a section near the centre.
‘There. It’s the original name for Leicester Square, back in the 1800s.’ She studies the map, her fingers drumming on the makeshift table. ‘You know, Tuesday might as well be a ghost for the amount of past she lives in.’ Loss draws near and looks at the map with her, taking in the scratches and scribbles for a moment, deciphering them into something he can understand.
‘OK. So to get from here to there we’re going to – what? – go through first the sewer system, then an abandoned tube tunnel, then an actual live tube tunnel and … what is that, anyway?’ He points to a section of the map cross-hatched in red.
‘A stretch of private subterranean canal, sir, which frankly I find a bit of a head-fuck.’
‘OK. And then we reach Leicester Square.’
‘Well, then we reach the old lift shaft in Leicester Square that used to contain, surprise, the lift, before the escalators were put in, and for some unknown reason still exists as a ventilation shaft, and has an exit into the ticket office.’
‘Brilliant. And tell me again, why aren’t we just going back up here and taking a nice police car across town?’
‘Well, mainly because of this note, I suppose, sir,’ says Stone dryly.
‘Ah yes, the note.’ They look at the scrap of paper that Tuesday left behind. On the one side are the smiley face and th
e name of the ghost station, on the back is a single sentence.
‘Yes sir.’
‘That would be the note that says that some police officers were involved in my daughter’s murder, and not to trust them, yes?’
‘That’s the one.’
DI Loss stares at Tuesday’s home: the crate bed, and the yellow rose, and the old punk poster.
‘And we’re feeling that it puts a slightly different slant on what the Commander said to you, about reporting anything we find straight back to him, are we?’
‘We are.’
‘And we’re thinking that, perhaps the investigation into my daughter’s murder might have been somewhat compromised, if what this girl is saying is true?’
‘In a nutshell, yes.’
Stone puts her rucksack back on, and hands a halogen torch to Loss. The detective feels that the information on the note has finally pushed him over into a new state of being. He takes a deep breath and looks at his DS.
‘Right then. After you, Sergeant.’
They walk away from Tuesday’s home; from the World Service, and the fairy lights, from the sad camp bed, and The Clash poster. They walk through the station to the old platform, jump off and onto the tracks, the metal rails long since removed, switch on their torches, and enter the black tunnel.
84
Smartphones are like tracking devices you can make calls on. They’re like little homing beacons; a GPS tag you want to wear cos it’s cool. Really, considering these boys are meant to be scary, mean bad guys, they’re a walking joke. Seven of them coming down the escalators, another six coming up the tunnels from the stations down the line, and according to my police feed, the boys in blue have sealed everything off so I can’t run away. I’m shaking in my silver boots. I just sit here for a while, looking at the little dots on my tablet, showing me the GPS from their phones. Because of the station Wi-Fi, it even works underground. Who’d ’ve fucking thought?
