Tuesday Falling (22 page)

‘Suzanne Loss,’ says Slater, glaring at a point on the wall.

‘Yeah, her. I don’t know what business you had with her, but whatever it was, this girl calling herself Tuesday was in on it too. I’m guessing it has something to do with your Eastern European venture. The next time we see the name ‘Tuesday’ is in a school, but I don’t think it’s connected. I mean it’s her, for definite, but I don’t believe it’s anything to do with you.’

His employer rises and walks out onto the balcony. He takes a shallow breath and gazes out, across the London cityscape. He is impressed that Constantine knows so much. In the distance he can see Harrods in all its chocolate-box splendour, and further on, an absence of light marks the Thames snaking its way through the city. His city.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll deal with that.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you will,’ says Constantine. ‘I’m sure with your, ah, special relationship with members of the fine British constabulary you’ll be able to put things back on track, once our business is concluded.’

‘What about now? Where is she now?’

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ he smirks, joining him on the balcony, and lighting a cigar. ‘She’s in the Underground. That’s how she can shine her way in and out of your world. She’s very good, actually. She’d put up some smoke-screens in the interzone, but I managed to blow through them. She’s been chatting with some of the girls your people had messed up. Building them up in chat rooms. I chased her footprint back to the IP in the underground. Looks as if she’s been piggy-backing off their Wi-Fi. Quite sophisticated stuff. I reckon she’s an educated girl, your Tuesday.’

‘What, so she’s living down there?’

‘Yes. From what I’ve found she’s been breaking into the big department stores on Oxford Street for her food and equipment, and according to the police report she got the blades from the British Museum and the antique guns from some arms fair. Apparently she tunnelled her way up and just stole them from under their noses.’

Slater is silent but his jaw tightens.

Constantine laughs. ‘Fabulous, isn’t it? She, my friend, has been tearing holes in your operation using weapons from the British Museum. Priceless! I can’t wait to meet this girl.’

‘And put her down, yes?’

The assassin nods. ‘As you say.’

Slater’s mobile rings discreetly. He answers it and listens for a moment, and then hangs up.

‘It looks as if you’ll get your chance now. She’s just shut down a major section of the tube system. There’ll be a car downstairs for you in two minutes.’

DI Loss and DS Stone walk down the tunnel which connects the British Museum to its old station. They have passed beyond where the festoon lighting vines from the ceiling, and their way is now lit by the powerful halogen torches they are carrying. The beams cross and re-cross each other as they stumble forward. Loss feels as if he’s underwater.

‘So how come you were out of touch with your daughter?’

‘The Commander told you to watch me, Stone, not to quiz me about my life story. Do you think that’s an appropriate question to be asking a senior officer?’

‘Yes’

He smiles to himself in the dark behind his torch. The new information about what happened three years ago has made him feel closer to his daughter.

He shrugs. ‘Fair enough. When she went away to college, I was working with the drug squad. It was fucking horrible. Horrible policemen. Horrible gangsters. Horrible drug addicts. There was nothing nice about the job. Not for me anyhow. Then one day I got a phone call from Brighton, where Suzanne was studying.’

‘I can see where this is going.’ A small amount of water is dripping from the ceiling, and pooling around their boots as they walk. Stone guesses that this tunnel must be beneath one of the hidden rivers. The Fleet, maybe, or the Tyburn.

‘Yeah. Suzanne, and a few of her medical student mates, had been arrested at a house party. Public nuisance. It seems that everybody there was on some smiley drug or other. Ecstasy, GBH, Ketamine. Bubble. Anyhow, once she’d been ID’d, the duty sergeant gave me a call, and I drove down and collected her. I got rid of the charge sheet for her and her mates, otherwise they’d never have been able to qualify, and took her back to her place.’

The detectives come to a set of stairs, which Loss assumes lead down into the old tube station. As they descend, Stone says, ‘She was only partying, sir. Everyone gets into trouble when they’re young.’

‘Yeah I know, and I know I over-reacted, but I’d been walking through so much shit that all I could see when I looked at Suzanne was the drugs. The lies about what they do to you. Anyhow, I lost it. We had a blazing row; I told her she was wasting her life, throwing her career away, and treating me like dirt, and she’d better change her ways or she was going to end up in a serious mess.’

‘Very subtle, sir. Let me guess; she threw herself upon your mercy?’

Loss smiles. ‘No. She threw my cigarettes out of the window to make a point, said that I was a hypocrite, and told me to fuck off.’

‘Ah, so she took your loving intervention well, then.’

Loss sighs heavily, happy he no longer smokes, but wishing once again that he had a cigarette. ‘I just cocked it up, basically. The only excuse I have is I did so with good intentions.’

‘But it worked. She graduated.’ The stairs come to an end and they start walking cautiously forward into an access tunnel.

‘Without me going to the graduation ceremony. Then she got a job at Charing Cross Hospital, and we’d just started building bridges again, when I got the phone call telling me she’d been attacked. By the time I got there she was dead. All I could do was hold her dead body and tell her I was sorry.’ Loss is glad that it is dark, that the only illumination is the beams from their torches bleeding on the walls. He is crying, letting out the pressure that has built up over three years. It is just a little hole in his shell, but it feels good, nonetheless. They walk on in silence, their footsteps echoing around them. Loss feels her hand on his shoulder. He halts at once.

‘What’s that noise?’ she whispers.

He sniffs hard, pulling back the past inside himself, and listens.

‘It sounds like someone talking,’ he whispers back, switching off the past as he kills the light from his torch. He motions to Stone to do the same. They can make out a dim light ahead of them. There is a corner in the tunnel, and the spectral reflection of colours plays on the wall. As they inch round the voice gets louder. It is a man’s voice, but because of the acoustics in the tunnel they can’t work out what he is saying. When they turn the corner, it opens up into a tube platform.

‘This must be the old station,’ Stone is still whispering. Tentatively, they step out onto the platform. Hundreds of strands of fairy lights hang from the ceiling. Loss feels as if he’s underwater. Submerged.

‘Wow. It’s an emo Narnia.’ Stone steps onto the station platform. He follows her. A warm airflow, which makes the bulbs sway slightly, is creating patterns on the tiled walls. He nudges his partner, pointing out a camp bed against the wall, and a crate of protein drinks on the floor next to it. The crate is embossed with a skull and crossbones symbol. The voices are coming out of speakers attached to the walls. The talking stops and is replaced with a soft tune.

‘Is that the
World Service
?’ Stone asks, snatching at a memory of a camping holiday in Greece, with a transistor radio clamped to her ear. The tune is the station tag. On the curved, tiled tube wall, next to an information poster left over from the Second World War warning people that walls have ears, is a massive poster of the old punk band, The Clash. The guitarist is smashing his instrument against the ground, the words ‘London Calling’ are written above him.

‘This must be where she lives,’ whispers Stone.

‘Lived,’ Loss corrects her, looking around them. ‘This place has been wrapped up and left for us as a present. Look.’ He points to a table against the station wall, with a milk bottle containing a single yellow rose, and next to it, a framed photograph. He walks along the platform, his footsteps loud in the silence, and picks up the frame. It is a picture of Suzanne. She is smiling, and has her arm around a young girl, maybe fourteen years old. The girl is also smiling. She is as street-thin as if a blown kiss would snap her, but she is smiling.

‘That’s her, isn’t it?’ Stone joins him. ‘That’s Tuesday.’ The picture was taken in what appears to be a hospital room. Loss supposes it must be Charing Cross Hospital. Where Suzanne worked.

And in the girl’s arms, held as if the world depended on it, is a tiny new-born baby. The baby who, a few hours after the photograph is taken, will be stolen, and possibly killed. Along with his daughter. Loss stares at the picture. Two daughters, murdered. He feels as though he is being rocked. Above him, the fairy lights sway gently.

‘Yeah, that’s her. No ghost. Just a girl holding a baby.’

Stone moves away from her colleague and starts examining the station. Loss examines the photograph more closely. There is obviously a great deal of trust between Suzanne and Tuesday. He can’t stand up any longer, so he sits on the cot and tries to breathe. To keep breathing.

Stone is focusing on the station wall. ‘What are these?’ she asks.

Loss takes the picture of his daughter and Tuesday out of the frame, folds it, and pushes it carefully into his pocket, before turning his attention to his partner.

‘What?’

‘These.’

He joins her in front of the wall. It is covered with tiny porcelain tiles, just as in many of the old tube stations, but on this wall the tiles have writing on them.

‘It looks like a list.’ On each tile is a name, a date, and a QR code, the type of code a smartphone can read to connect to a web page.

‘There must be thirty names here,’ says Stone, counting the tiles. Loss reads the name at the bottom of the wall, presumably the last one written. It is no surprise to him that he recognizes the name of the boy who was tasered and had acid poured on him outside of the kebab shop. On the tile above, is the name of the boy who was shot through the eye. Loss lets his gaze wander up the wall. Some of the names he has read before, in social workers’ reports and offenders’ photo-shots. Some he has seen in morgues.

‘Hey. Weren’t they the gang who tried to do over that boy at the school?’

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.

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.