by S Williams
Drugs, guns, rape dates, it didn’t matter to him. All his lieutenants thought he was so cold he must have walked out of hell itself. He had no friends and all his family were dead – possibly, it was said, killed by him. Now that he was top of the pile, he rarely left his ivory tower, instead conducting his business electronically, or through Caleb, his network liaison man. He had a string of mistresses. Once he had used them up, he either paid off or had them buried on the Isle of Dogs, in a wasteland owned through one of his many shadow corporations.
His head was shaved and oiled, and he worked with a personal trainer every day to keep himself in shape. He never smoked, drank, nor took any drug other than coffee. He did not want to be anything other than in control. He had converted his safe room, which was sound-proofed, into what was euphemistically called an interrogation room, and it was his one true wish to get the girl who called herself Tuesday inside it.
She was ripping up his business as though it was nothing. The business he had dedicated his life to building.
His workforce was in hiding, fuck knows where, because not even their mothers would take them in now. His clientele were going elsewhere, because nothing loves a vacuum like a drug dealer. As soon as his runners were no longer available, the other gangs had moved right in. A junkie has to get his fix, a party girl has to get her pills and thrills, and if his boys aren’t there to supply them then someone else sure as shit will.
And it didn’t even seem to be about business. It seemed personal. What she’d done to his crew on the tube. Outside the club. On the pavement in front of the kebab shop. That wasn’t about money. That was grabbing his head and rubbing his nose in it.
Well, it was over. He had hired someone. He was going to have her caught and thrown into the room next door. He was going to rip her until even her mother wouldn’t recognize her. Then he was going to nail her remains up around the boroughs, and tag-spray ‘the ghost of Tuesday’ under the body parts.
But first, before he killed her, he was going to find out why. Why she had targeted him. How she knew what she knew.
Why him?
Why now?
Why?
46
DS Stone sits by the window in the police cafeteria, looking out over central London. The food hall is situated on the sixth floor, and as she gazes out through the rain she can see cars and buses turning slowly round the statue in Piccadilly Circus. Although she is looking out at London, she is not really seeing it. What she sees are images of her boss. DI Loss is falling apart in front of her. More than that. It is as if he is being washed away. Stone doesn’t have many close relationships with men; she has no insight into their mechanisms for dealing with loss and pressure, but she is certain that he is close to breaking point.
She has only been working with Loss for four months, after transferring from Lewisham. When she first arrived in the West End Division off Savile Row, colleagues had tried to draw her into the normal back-stabbing gossip machine that thrives in so many organisations, but Stone had frozen them out, effectively isolating herself. No change for her. She’d been doing the same thing since her school days. She was not the kind of person to succumb to crowd pressure. After the first few failed attempts to co-opt her into their circle her fellow officers marked her as cold and aloof, and left her alone. Which is why she was unaware of the murder of DI Loss’s daughter. When she first began working for him it was as if he were hidden in weeds; unseen and unreachable by the outside world. And she never knew why.
Stone sips her coffee and nibbles at the corner of her sandwich. The coffee is lukewarm and the sandwich is so old it probably arrived at the station before she did. Below her a police car pulls in, the lights on its roof making rainbows in the air.
Stone walks over to the sink, where she pours away her coffee, which she considers a mercy killing. She goes to the vending machine, feeds some coins into the slot, and picks out a Red Bull. She walks back to her seat, taking in the London view; rain, and buses, and birds, and neon, and buildings older than some countries.
‘I mean he’s really beginning to lose it, if you ask me. He’s not been right for some time, but now he’s really going over.’ The voices are coming from behind her. She knows they’re talking about her boss. Even more than Stone herself, he is outside of the machine, and the machine does not like outsiders.
Even less so in recent times. Not just because of the Tuesday thing. Stone has felt a weight hanging around the station. Around herself. As if the force is moving away from her.
Then again, the whole of London seems to be changing in front of her eyes. She doesn’t know what to make of it. Riots in the street, riots in the home. The power struggles and body battles on the estates. The killings of the drug boys. People taking the law into their own hands. But what was the purpose of the law, if it were not to protect and serve the people, which it had so obviously failed to do?
‘I don’t think he should even be here. I mean, there’s definitely something fishy, don’t you think? Between him and the Murder-Goth? Something’s not right.’
The hatchet machine behind her is ratcheting up. Stone begins a slow count in her head as she looks out. She reckons she’ll get to twelve. She’s wrong. She gets to six.
‘And the Ice Queen must know something. I mean you can’t work with someone and not know, can you? No one can be that thick.’
She takes a deep breath. The silence behind her has a quality of both anticipation and malice. They know she can hear them. Of course they do. Baiting her. Trying to raise a reaction. Ever since the new Commander arrived things had got worse. Difference was less tolerated. Discussion less encouraged. An atmosphere of suspicion and closed ranks seemed to be the order of the day.
‘So. Can any of you ladies tell me what that statue is called?’ Stone points at the winged messenger in the centre of Piccadilly Circus. The fact that some of the people behind her are men makes her comment perhaps slightly more barbed than is necessary.
‘It’s Eros, Stone. Surely even you know that. Not,’ sniggers one of the detectives, a nasty quality to his laugh, ‘that you’re ever likely to need him.’
Stone sighs, and finishes her Red Bull. Maybe she’s been following Tuesday too long. Or maybe she’s had too many years of stupid, bullish men making snide comments about her, but she’s had enough for tonight.
‘Actually it’s Anteros, his brother. The patron of counter-love.’ She turns and looks at the man who made the comment. She stares right at him and says, ‘Not that I’d expect you to understand, what with keeping your brains in your trousers and everything.’
She walks away, dropping the empty can in the bin as she goes. She is nearly out of the room before the officer realizes she has just called him a dickhead.
47
I love graveyards.
Not in the Gothy-Dracula-floaty-swoon way, but in the ‘it’s usually just really peaceful and you often get flowers in them’ sort of way. Flowers don’t grow underground.
Mind you, when I say graveyards, I don’t mean all of them. I’ve been to some fucking grim ones. Inner-city municipal shitholes full of old needles and used condoms, places where you wouldn’t even bury a bad dream. No, the ones I mean are the forgotten ones. The ones hidden from the world, full of weeds and weeping angels. Full of ghosts and sweet whispers from history.
Everyone knows Highgate Cemetery. Karl Marx. Ian Dury. Catherine Dickens.
Not Charles, though. He’s not buried with his wife.
Anyhow, too bloody highbrow for me. The one that really does it for me is Abney Park, at Stamford Hill.
When I really can’t cope with my head then I’ll sleep here for a night. It’s within an arrow’s distance of North London Central Mosque, off Finsbury Park, so you can hear them calling for evening prayer; the sound a spicy scent in the air. It was the first graveyard in London that didn’t give a toss what you were. You’ve got Jews, Christians, and Muslims in here, all rotting next to each other. You’ve got prostitutes and pa
upers as well, although they have their own graveyard in Southwark. Hell of a ghost party that place must have.
It’s been abandoned by the city for years, and in parts of it all the graves are overgrown with moss and ivy. Cataracts on the dead. There are catacombs that were used by the Hellfire Club back in the day, and I swear there’s a wolf living in the Gothic tower.
Anyhow, this is where I come if I just need to tick at a different speed for a time. I can just open the gates into my head, and it makes me happy and sad at the same time.
I sometimes think about Suzanne Loss. All the mess that surrounded her death.
And I sometimes think about my daughter.
I sometimes see all the blood and spit and struggle through the jerky shattered mirror of my memory.
But mostly I just sit here and listen to the sounds of the city, connecting me to a world above ground that I rarely ever see.
I never think about a future that isn’t this.
I imagine the person they would have hired to kill me is in London by now. I really fucking hope they’ve got someone good, so that all the clever clues I’ve left for them won’t be wasted.
Who knows, they might even surprise me and end my short days.
Of course they might.
48
Lily-Rose is back looking out of her bedroom window, down into the war zone between the blocks of flats. It is a little after 3 a.m., and cold in the early morning. A creeping mist blurs the ground in the orange light splaying out from security meshed fluorescent task bulbs that are attached to the side of the buildings. Lily-Rose has not gone to bed, and is still wearing her day clothes. Her armour. The black combat trousers. The Caterpillar boots. The long-sleeved shirt that covers her pressure cuts. Protecting her body from the world. What has happened over the last few days has wired her mind beyond sleeping. The vigils and the meetings. The media cartooning and moral posturing. The destruction of the power structures she has grown up with. From her window she can see the remains of all the candles on the playground. Rape candles, the tabloids called them. Each one representing a violent event, ripples of which seem to be expanding with every passing day.
Lily-Rose doesn’t care about that. She stares down at the tags spray-stencilled to the walls and walkways below her. The names and the numbers. The dates and the Q-codes.
The Tuesdays.
Lily-Rose sings softly under her breath.
49
DI Loss is collecting the things he needs from his office. Not that there is much there anymore. The lab technicians still have his computer. The days when he kept his cigarettes in the bottom drawer are long gone.
The Commander has had a quiet word with him, and he has been asked to step down from the investigation. The Tuesday paraphernalia: the pictures and the questions on the whiteboard. The files and the print-outs collaging the desk. Well they were for someone else to fathom, now. Until the exact relationship between Tuesday and his daughter had been established, Loss was officially compromised. Unofficially, of course, he was a much-needed asset. All his years of experience invaluable, et cetera, et cetera.
In some ways Loss isn’t surprised. Looked at analytically, it seems that he must have something to do with Tuesday; the girl masquerading in his daughter’s identity. How could he not? Why she is doing this to him, to Suzanne, he doesn’t know.
But he intends to find out.
As he tidies his drawer a folder catches his eye. It is new, or recently been delivered by the computer tech tracing all instances of Tuesday across the internet. He picks it up and starts to read. Two minutes later he is heading out of the door, all thoughts of leaving the investigation forgotten.
‘Stone! Let’s go.’ She looks up from her terminal. Her desk is an island in the office. There is a tangible space around it, as if it belongs somewhere else.
‘Go where, sir?’ But Loss is already breezing past, and so is completely oblivious to the smirks and sniggers when he shouts,
‘The cinema!’
50
Back in the bad old days – the ones the clockwork steam punk boys and girls are so dreamy about, the toshers – the panhandlers of the city – used to scrim the London sewers, searching for jewellery, and nuggets of loose change that might have been washed down the drains. There were a lot more drains in those days, and the access to them a lot easier. All they needed was an empty alley and an iron bar to lift the metal cover.
Me, I need construction plans, access codes, lock picks, and stealth cameras.
Lucky I’m me, then, isn’t it?
I leave my crib, setting up all my traps and snares, and hobo up to Kensington High Street Station. Then I ghost back down the line to Brompton. Brompton Road Station was closed in 1934 but, surprise surprise, was bought by the MOD and used for fuck knows what right up to 2014, when they flogged it.
I’ve got a soft spot for Brompton. A few years ago some bloke staged a play here. All the people who watched it had to climb down the metal stairs because the lifts were long gone. It was way before my time, but one of the older people I was on the streets with told me about it. The play was performed on the derelict platform, and lit by electric candles. It was just these two blokes walking round talking, but they were being followed by Death, waiting to take them away. The character Death, that is. I don’t know if it was the full black cloak and dry ice scenario; my mate never said. All he said was that it scared the living shit out of him.
Then again, he was pretty much out of his mind on cider and speed most of the time; crisp packets used to scare the shit out of him. Every now and then I like to come here and try to re-create it. Not the play. The atmosphere. I light up the whole platform with candles. There’s no chance of a fire. There’s nothing left to burn down here, just oxygen. I like to sit here, watching the tiny flames dance to the tune of the tunnel winds, and look for him.
Death.
Is he stalking me? Following me through the London under?
I’d like to think so.
When I’m not doing what I’m supposed to do. When I’m not focused and allow space to seep in, I get so tired. Sometimes I think I could sit down with my back against the tunnel wall and just stop ticking.
But then again, if I’m not ticking, how can I go bang?
From Brompton Station I enter the sewer system and start working my way north-east, under the Natural History Museum, and across Queen’s Gate. Most of the Victorian sewers in this area are redundant or just used for something else; cables and pipelines and fuck knows what, so all in all it’s a pretty dry experience. In the reflection from my halogen headlamp the eyes of the rats sparkle blue. Like underground stars. No red light in halogen. The sound in the sewer system is completely different from the sound in the tube. It’s all body sounds. Wet and visceral and somehow urgent. Like the sound of a drunken tramp riddled with emphysema.
Or the sound of a drowning girl trying to breathe underwater.
Not this girl, though. Not tonight, anyway.
I’ve got a way up into the Natural History Museum I made some time ago but that’s not where I’m going tonight. I’ve already got what I want from there, stored back in my crib.
All I need for tonight I’ve got in my backpack.
51
The London black taxi cab that carried the man through Hyde Park is no longer in commission. It is an old, but lovingly restored 1973 FX4 black hackney with orange roof indicators. The noisy diesel Perkins engine has been replaced with a whisper-quiet electric model, making it the most emission compliant taxi in the city. The interior has been re-upholstered in brown calfskin leather and the bulletproof windows have been tinted president-black.
As the man gazes out at the tourists soaking up the last of the city sunshine he gives quiet instructions on his mobile to the various people he has positioned around and within his destination. It was not often that he agreed to meetings outside of his residence, but Constantine, the assassin whom he had employed to deal with Tuesday, was adamant. The m
an feels that perhaps he has been too adamant. He smiles tightly, replacing the mobile phone in the jacket pocket of his Anderson & Sheppard tailored suit. It could be, he muses, that anyone who thought they could dictate to him where and when a meeting would be held should not leave the city intact. As the cab leaves the park and approaches its destination, the man reconsiders, thinking of the way that Tuesday has sliced through his street gangs. Anyone who had the balls to tell him where and when they could meet could well be someone he might want in his organisation. The black taxi indicates left, and then pulls into a narrow alley between two tall buildings. The ex-boxer whom he employs to be his cabbie turns round in his seat and slides back the partition glass.
‘Right you are, Mr Slater,’ he says, his grin showing a solid collection of gold teeth. ‘Derry Street. Kensington Roof Gardens, back entrance.’
Slater checks out his crew positioned against the building that houses one of the biggest roof gardens in Europe. On a nod from the one closest to him, he opens the door of the cab and steps out into the street.
52
The building supporting the Kensington Roof Gardens is fucking massive. It used to be a department store back in the Victorian era. Now it’s just robot offices for plastic people: men and women sitting at computer terminals spending half their time sending pointless information about themselves to other pointless people using emoticons, and non-reflection texting, and Facebook updates. Updates, for fuck’s sake. How can you update emptiness?
But it’s got a very pretty basement.
I follow the sewer system until I’m under the building. I’ve got most of the system schematics downloaded onto my tablet, but the people who built it labelled everything anyway, stencilling grid references into their tiny ceramic tiles.