Tuesday Falling (11 page)

The media wants them because they all say they know Tuesday. They’re all over her. They’ve all seen her, with her knives and her tag paint. They’ve all watched her with her antique crossbow pistol and her army shirts. And they all know who she is, and they can’t wait to tell us.

Tuesday is a street kid who got raped by the gang drones, and is out for revenge.

Tuesday is a pistol for hire, cleaning up the city for the kids.

Tuesday is an escapee from a mental hospital.

Tuesday is a ghost, roaming night-time London in search of her killers.

Tuesday is the daughter of a policeman, and was subject of an atrocity he failed to stop.

Tuesday is this. Tuesday is that.

As Lily-Rose and her mother watch the street-dwellers paraded in front of them on the screen, an atrocity exhibition being branded as a lifestyle choice, a voice-over asks if perhaps they hold the key to the identity of Tuesday. The whereabouts of her base.

Lily-Rose can barely stop laughing through the tears.

DI Loss and DS Stone are sitting in a small room on the sixth floor of the London Metropolitan University. The room is institutional yellow, and couldn’t be more of a contrast from their last surroundings. After they left the British Museum they’d taken the tube to Holland Park and presented themselves at the front desk of the main university building. Five minutes later they are sitting in front of a twenty-five-year-old teenager who can’t seem to stop staring at DS Stone’s chest. The room has more high tech in it than seems physically possible. Loss sighs and wishes he was somewhere else, possibly even someone else.

‘And your PhD is in what exactly, Mr …?’ Stone asks.

‘Drake,’ the student replies. ‘The deconstruction of movement as pertaining to psychological profiling in abnormal behaviour categories.’

The young man has his hair tied back in a ponytail and wears rimless glasses reminiscent of John Lennon’s, although Loss suspects he might very well not know who John Lennon was.

Or indeed what music is.

He has the look of someone who rarely strays from his work. Even now, between furtive glances at Stone’s cleavage, he can barely take his eyes off the screens showing multiple Tuesdays doing terrible things to multiple gang boys. He seems to have been given access to every image of Tuesday they have.

‘And this means …?’ Loss tries not to sound sceptical.

The student clicks a few buttons on the laptop in front of him, freezing on a frame of Tuesday in mid-slash, and turns to face them.

‘Basically, it means that I’ve analysed thousands of prison fights, street brawls, football fracas, school beatings – anything, really, that’s been caught on camera and recorded, and then I’ve looked into the psychological profiles and histories of the subjects, and cross-referenced to everything that we have discovered thus far within animal behaviour pattern recognition, to see if it is possible to make an emotional map of the subjects by analysing their recorded actions. Unconscious facial movements. Body positioning. That sort of thing.’ Drake sits back and smiles at them.

There is a long pause while Loss tries to work out what Drake is saying. Stone folds her hands across her chest, pushing her breasts up, and grinning at him. ‘Subjects? As in social experiments?’

If Drake recognizes the sarcasm he fails to acknowledge it. ‘Like the Milgram experiment or Stanford Prison? Well not really, but yes, I have used all the data from the tests conducted by the social psychologists in my analysis.’

‘Stanford Prison?’ says DI Loss, staring at the frozen image of Tuesday. In one of the images she is looking directly at the camera. She is smiling.

‘Brilliant,’ says Drake, taking off his glasses and cleaning them. ‘It was an attempt to see if so-called normal behaviour can be radically altered by environment.’

‘What,
Big Brother-ish
?’

Drake grins tightly.

‘Not far off. What they did was randomly select twenty-four students to become ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’. Then they put them in a mocked-up prison, gave the ‘guards’ uniforms and wooden batons, and strip-searched the ‘prisoners’ and put them in de-humanising uniforms. Then they sat back and watched what happened.’

‘Who’s “they”?’ asks Stone. Drake smiles. ‘Professor Philip Zimbardo, funded by the US Military.’

‘What happened?’ Loss is interested now.

‘By day two the prisoners had barricaded themselves in and personalized their uniforms. By day three the guards started exhibiting sadistic tendencies. By day six the experiment was halted out of genuine fear for the ‘prisoners’ safety.’

‘Jesus. When did this happen?’

‘August 14 1971. You can probably find footage of it on YouTube if you’re interested.’

‘Not as bad as Big Brother, then,’ Stone adds. There’s an awkward silence, then Loss says, ‘And how does this experiment help us with the suspect exactly?’ Drake turns back to his computer and starts clicking buttons. Loss feels as though he is living in the future as Drake manipulates the images on the screen and they start zooming in and out.

‘With her? Probably doesn’t. With them …?’ He points at the gang of youths about to enter the train. ‘Probably loads. They’re like the guards in the experiment. See how they all dress the same?’ A superior note slips into his tone, probably unconsciously. The screen flips and is replaced with a still of the alley behind Candy’s. ‘And here? These guys crave an identity, and acceptance into the group. Not one of them wants to stand apart.’ He flips back to the train. ‘And see how they position themselves? Definite power structure exhibited in the space they create around each other. Their body language denotes their position in the group just as if they were wearing badges and insignia.’

‘Insignia?’ Stone obviously finds his use of the word amusing, but Drake ignores her, and flips and zooms, his fingers dancing. Loss doubts he even heard her.

‘And here,’ he says, the images reflected in reverse on the lenses of his spectacles. ‘This was taken from the CCTV outside the kebab shop. ‘See how he is looking at the street. Like he owns it.’ On the screen is the image of the boy who Tuesday burned with acid, prior to the attack, looking out across the street. ‘And look how the girls are staring at him? Power structure through body language, you see.’ All that Loss can see is brutality and fear, overlaid with the shroud of his dead daughter. He closes his eyes.

‘Now as to your suspect, the girl.’

Loss opens his eyes again, and stares into the face of Tuesday, repeated and fractured on all the screens in front of him. ‘Yes? What can you tell us about her?’

‘Well she’s not trained in martial arts, for a start. See how she moves? More like a gymnast or a dancer. No set or repeated moves or stances.’ Stone takes out her tablet and starts tapping.

‘Also, look at how she moves the blade? The hand to eye co-ordination is way off.’

‘She seems to be doing all right to me,’ Stone points at the screen.

‘But it’s not due to training. At least not the traditional sort.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look, I’ve studied these types of gang structures on hundreds of hours of CCTV. I’ve profiled them and talked to their parole officers. These boys get crewed up when they’re ten; by the time they’re fifteen they’re hard as nails, stone cold street thugs.’ He gives a nod to the screen. ‘By rights your girl should be lying on a slab in the morgue by now, but for two things.’

‘Which are?’

Drake holds up one finger. Loss gets the feeling he enjoys holding up his finger.

‘Surprise. None of these people saw her coming. They all think she’s just a little girl, or a tramp, or a clubber or something. They don’t see her as a threat. See how they’re standing? None of it is defensive. Jesus, in this one the main guy has even got his hand down his trousers!’

‘Yes. That did rather put him at a tactical disadvantage,’ says Stone dryly; Drake continues as if she hasn’t spoken.

‘As soon as she strikes, they go into shock. And then she simply doesn’t stop. She takes them apart as if they’re toys. It’s like it’s a play that’s already happened in her head.’

‘I thought you said she wasn’t trained?’

‘That’s not training. That’s something else. See how she’s smiling? Also, in the first two, it’s the gang who start it. I mean, she definitely seems to be putting herself up as bait, but it’s they who actually act as predator.’

‘Silly them. What about number two? You said two things.’

Drake turns his face from the screen and looks at them. ‘Borderline Personality Disorder; Schizophrenia; Dissociative Identity Disorder; what used to be called Multiple Personality, or Split Personality: all conditions that could explain the re-enactment movement patterns she’s displaying. To a certain degree it could also explain the discrepancies between the hand and eye co-ordination. Having a psychological condition also makes it hard to read the motivations behind someone’s body stance and facial expressions. Whether they’re frightened, lying, happy, and so on.’

Loss considers the young man in front of him. He is probably about the same age as his daughter was when she died. Was murdered. ‘But you don’t think she has any of those ‘conditions’, do you?’

‘No I don’t. Look at her movements. Look at her eyes. It’s not that she’s hard to read, it’s more as if there’s nothing even there
to
read. I think something terrible happened to her, or to somebody she loved, which produced a massive trauma in her psyche, and now she thinks she is dead.’

There is a long pause as what the student has said sinks in.

‘Dead. What do you mean, dead? Look at that one, for Christ sake! In that one she’s smiling straight at the camera!’

‘“Dead”. Nothing else to live for, as though she’s walking through a play that she’s written in her head. And yes, she is smiling, isn’t she? I understand, Inspector, that the second, um, incident was sent directly to your police email address, yes?’

‘Yes.’ They all stare again at the stills on the screens, one from the train and one from outside Candy’s. In both of them Tuesday is looking directly at the camera and smiling. Drake brings up all the screens so that they are zoomed in on Tuesday’s face.

‘Well, I think, Inspector, those smiles could be meant just for you.’

The Corinthia Hotel takes up almost one whole side of Trafalgar Square. It is one of the most luxurious hotels in London, since the building was sold by the Ministry of Defence in 2007, and then re-opened as an hotel in 2011. Me and the other scummers used to sit in a doorway opposite, watching all the rich people going in and out. We’d be sitting all squashed together for warmth, the place smelling of piss, with our road-kill pizza slices, and we’d try and guess what those rich people all did. Those people who could spend a thousand pounds to borrow a room for the night.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we were jealous, or resented their money or anything. It’s just like we were at a zoo, or in a lab or something. It was just so alien to us.

I know what you’re thinking. What was the Ministry of Defence doing owning such a large property in the centre of London?

What the fuck do you think?

I read up about it in a book I found lying abandoned one day; damaged goods at the back of a library skip I was sleeping in. At the outbreak of the First World War, the hotel was called The Metropole, and the government bagged it for the war effort. They did the same thing again during the Second World War, where they set up the SOE; a secret spook-y strand of M19 whose sole purpose was to develop dirty warfare: guns and bombs, and tactics no proper army would ever use. The thinking was, if the Nazis or fascists or whoever didn’t follow the conventions of war and committed atrocities, then the British government needed a secret branch that could do the same. Unbelievable, isn’t it? You don’t even have to delve in hidden offices for secrets to find this stuff out. You can look it up on ‘Quickapedia’, unless it’s been taken down or revised or whatever. Rather handily, the hotel is right above the tunnel that connects Whitehall to the Trafalgar Square tube station that was. What a surprise.

There’s all sorts of stuff down here.

When I first started exploring I thought I’d just find the odd relic. Old phones. Gas masks. Medical kits. Harmless stuff from a forgotten time that I could sell at Bermondsey Market. But underneath the Metropole I found all sorts of scary shit. The basement exits to the hotel are sealed up with lime cement so I guess not even the Ministry of Defence has a clue what’s down here. Stuff they were using in the trenches. Rifles. Swords. Cannons.

Cannons!

And all of it useless. The Trafalgar Square fountains were originally supplied by a natural spring, and the air down here is heavy and moist, and everything is mainly rusted. I guess it was all stored down here in case the country was invaded, and the capital needed to be protected. Nowadays there are loads of citadels under the city that do that, but I stay away from them. Those places are rammed full of hardware and they’d clock me if I got within fifteen metres of them.

It’s beautiful down here. Most of the tunnels are from the 1800s and the bricks that make them up are covered in a pale moss that glows gently when I turn off my torch.

Tiny bricks, made by waist-coated midgets, probably.

It was on my third or fourth visit, not long after I’d started living underground, that I found them. The things I’m going to use. They’d been walled away, and whoever had put them there had completely forgotten about them. Or maybe they were so secret that no one was ever told they were there. Maybe they were just put there by the dirty service, and then, when they were disbanded after the War, no one was left alive who knew anything about them. Who cares? The important thing is I found them and they are exactly what I need now. It was when I’d turned my torch off that I saw where the door had been walled up. The moss had grown into the seam, so I could see the outline of the door-frame.

It took me a while to break through. I had to go back under Oxford Street to get a pick-axe from the store, but when I finally smashed my way in and saw what was there, it was completely worth the effort.