Tuesday Falling (26 page)

‘Yes. I saw the stills. Really, very nice work.’ Constantine smiles at her, as if he’s watching a clever animal in the circus, and then he stops smiling. ‘I’m going to put you to sleep now, Tuesday, and when you wake up you’ll be in hell, and I’ll have been paid and will be long gone. What do you think of that?’

Tuesday gazes at him, empty. Head empty, heart empty, womb empty.

‘I win, little girl,’ Constantine, grins. ‘You lose.’

Tuesday continues to stare at him a moment longer. Her pupils are pinpricks as the last of her adrenalin flies round her body, trying to keep it functioning.

‘Honeytrap,’ she whispers.

‘What?’

‘Just fucking shoot him, will you?’ Tuesday looks up at the ceiling.

‘What?’ Constantine is confused. ‘What did you say?’

‘You heard what he did? What he does? I’m too tired for fucking about. Just put a bullet in him so we can all go to sleep.’ Tuesday closes her eyes, and Constantine spins around, gun extended as the bullet enters his shoulder.

‘You, my friend, are fucking under arrest,’ says DI Loss, his gun rock-steady in his hand, pointing at Constantine’s heart.

Mister Ice-cold-dickhead is so busy rubbing himself up on having shot me that he didn’t see them by the ticket office.

Whoops.

My body feels like it’s crashing every time my heart beats. The pain is so bad I want to shut down and throw up at the same time, but I have to keep the man’s attention on me so that the detectives can get in a position to save my pretty self. I tell him about the Refuge, about how his people, the people he hangs with, would cut up little babies, and sell them off for scrap. It’s absolutely no surprise to me that he is unmoved, but I can see that Loss and Stone are devastated. Of course they are. They’re real people, one of them with a real dead daughter. I’m talking about Suzanne as well, trying to tell him what she meant to me. Trying to convey it to DI Loss, in case Fuck-head here goes all country and decides to shoot me dead anyway.

And all the time I can feel the tide turning. The waves of pain that crash in my body are having less impact. It’s lucky the lights are back on, because my senses are only working part-time.

I’m shutting down now.

Eventually, when I think that Assassin Boy has dug a big enough hole, I tell them to shut him up.

He looks confused. He thinks he’s so clever, bringing down a girl like me. What a shame he’s not.

Win, lose, who cares. I’ll leave it to them.

I lean my head back against the wall and close my eyes.

‘For fuck’s sake, just shoot him.’

I barely hear the sound of the gun.

DI Loss and DS Stone walk towards Tuesday and Constantine. Loss has his gun straight-armed out in front of him, and Stone is scanning the ticket office for signs of anyone else; anybody who might harm them. As far as she can hear, all the action seems to be coming from down on the platforms, but she’s not taking any chances. Loss continues to point his gun at Constantine, stepping over the bodies at the top of the escalator.

‘Well look who it is, Laurel and Hardy,’ Constantine is speaking through clenched teeth. There is a small wound in his shoulder where DI Loss’s bullet grazed it, but he does not appear to be too badly hurt.

Unlike Tuesday. Even if she isn’t wearing ghost-white make-up, she looks more dead than alive. Her breathing is irregular and her eyes are closed.

‘About bloody time,’ she whispers. Her voice is like a breeze, barely disturbing the silence of the station.

‘Tuesday,’ says Loss, never taking his eyes off Constantine. ‘I’m so sorry about your daughter.’ Constantine just smiles at him, as though he’s waiting for the detective to tell him a joke.

‘Same,’ says Tuesday, a worrying rattle in the back of her throat, eyes closed, her voice barely audible.

‘Well here’s another fine mess you’ve got yourself into, Mr Policeman,’ quips Constantine, scratching the top of his head with his right hand, in an imitation of Stan Laurel. ‘Why don’t you go and get some handcuffs off your friends outside?’ Constantine nods towards the steps leading to the street above them, and then widens his eyes in mock shock, and brings his hand down in front of his mouth. ‘Oh, that’s right; they’re
not
your friends, are they? They’re
my
friends. You and your partner are just in a little bit over your heads here. I tell you what. Why don’t you let me take our teeny murder-girl here back to my employer, and I promise not to ruin your lives forever?’ Constantine drops his hand to his side and grins at them.

DS Stone is still looking around. She can hear some noises coming from the levels below her. Maybe nearer than they were a few minutes ago. Maybe a lot nearer.

‘Sir? I think the bad guys are on their way up. Whatever we’re going to do, we’d better do it quickly.’

Loss shifts his attention from Tuesday, with her eyes closed, lines of pain mapping her face, to Constantine with his feral grin. He continues to point the gun at him. ‘I tell you what, Sunshine: my life was ruined forever when your boss decided to kill my daughter. How about I stop your clock and we call it a night?’

Constantine stops grinning and licks his lips.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ croaks the girl on the floor. ‘How about you knock him unconscious so I don’t have to suffer the pain of listening to his brain trying to work, and I’ll tell you the plan?’

‘There’s a plan?’ Stone looks at the girl practically dead in front of her.

Tuesday opens her eyes long enough to return her look. ‘’Course there’s a plan. I’ve spent three years doing this. There’s nothing
but
a plan.’

‘And this is part of it?’ Loss nods at the small river of blood leaving Tuesday’s body. Tuesday lowers her head slightly. Loss can’t tell if it’s in acknowledgment of what he said, or if she’s about to lose consciousness.

‘All right, Smart-arse. Plans, plural. Not plan A, I admit. More plan X.’

There is a weighty crunch and Constantine slumps prone to the floor. Behind him, Stone, holding a 20 centimetre length of a metal Tannoy microphone, looks extremely pleased with herself.

‘Wanker,’ she says, staring down at Constantine’s unconscious body.

‘There you are with the swearing, again,’ says Loss, kneeling down next to Tuesday and examining her wounds. He does not like what he sees.

‘Right, we’ve got to get you to a hospital. Immediately.’

‘You think?’ says Tuesday, managing to convey sarcasm whilst coughing. Her eyes are still closed. She takes a deep breath and then says: ‘All right, here’s how it is. You’ve got police and thieves coming up from the platforms below, hardwired to shoot anything that moves. You’ve got laughing boy here who, when he wakes up, will slit your throat just to clear his head. You’ve got corrupt coppers at every exit, no doubt with orders to make sure we never make it into custody, and you’ve got a half dead, but very good-looking, hard-as-nails girl who needs urgent medical attention. So how about you sack the double act and get me to hospital.’

Loss blinks as he takes in the information. The fact that there are enemy officers outside the tube station. That there are armed police officers working with underworld front-liners coming for them from the tunnels below.

If he believes her.

He looks at her. Dying in small ticks of time in front of him. He believes her.

‘What are you, our agent?’ says DS Stone, putting down the microphone.

‘How well did you study the map of this tube station, detectives?’ Tuesday asks.

In the silence that follows, Loss watches Tuesday. She has opened her eyes. Although they are fractured by pain, they are clear. He thinks about his daughter, and he thinks about
her
daughter, and the years she has lived on the street and underground, with nothing to do except grieve, and plan. And then plan again.

‘Not as well as you, I’m sure.’

And Tuesday manages a lop-sided smile.

‘Too fucking right,’ she whispers.

The police from the street, and the police/gang coalition from the tunnels, arrive in the ticket concourse at the same time. From the way they all seem to be working together this is not an accident. All the lights are on and they find Constantine just coming to. Despite searching they turn up no trace of DI Loss, DS Stone, or the girl known as Tuesday. What they do find, however, is that the TV feed is working in the reception foyer, and that it is showing earlier CCTV footage from the tunnels. It is showing the police and criminals next to each other, shouting and waving their weapons about. Although there is no audio, the news channel has helpfully ticker-taped some of the dialogue across the bottom of the screen, courtesy of a lip-reading expert; it reads ‘Kill the girl on sight, no f*****g witnesses’.

The screen then cuts to Constantine and his murder crew creeping down the escalator, armed to the teeth. Underneath, the scroll-line is now informing the audience of ‘breaking news’. The policemen stare at the screen in dismay.

DS Stone and DI Loss close the metal access panel quietly, shutting out the noise of the policemen storming down into the ticket hall, and half carry, half drag Tuesday along the maintenance corridor to the basement of the White Bear pub, twenty metres from the Charing Cross Road entrance to Leicester Square tube station.

When they walk out of its side entrance and look back across the road at where they have come from it is a disaster movie. There are media vans blocking the road. Blocking the already police-blocked road. There are helicopters fracturing the sky, speaker-distorted voices telling the crowd to disperse. There are police unsure whether to arrest the reporters or other officers. There are cordons stopping people going in, cordons stopping people going out. Nobody seems to be in charge. The two detectives and Tuesday limp themselves into the back of a black LTI taxi, and leave the chaos.

DI Loss instructs the driver to take them to Charing Cross Hospital. Light rain is falling, and the sound of the wipers are breaking his thinking into moments with no order or meaning. Even in the dim light of rainy London he can tell that Tuesday is not doing well. She is propped against DS Stone’s shoulder. Loss cannot believe how fragile she looks. All her bones look as though they want to live on the outside. As if they want to escape into a better body.

‘How the hell did they all get here so fast?’ wonders Stone aloud, staring through the ribbons of rain at the media carnage outside.

‘Well that was down to the blue-eyed boy who shot me, then stole my tablet,’ says Tuesday, her voice wearied beyond weeping. ‘Once he started pressing keys without the correct code it automatically sent the images I’d downloaded from the station CCTV to the
World Service
.’

DI Loss looks at her with consternation. ‘But that’s a radio station!’

‘I know. I just thought it would be nice if they had it first. I knew they’d have to pass it on immediately. Are we nearly there?’

‘I can see the gates,’ says Stone, staring through the rain.

‘Good, cos I can’t. I can’t see a thing.’

And then Tuesday falls unconscious in the arms of DI Loss.

The taxi pulls up outside A&E, and the detectives carry Tuesday in, held up between their arms, wave their badges around, and shout for a doctor. It is not lost on Stone, as various medical staff run towards them, that this is where her boss’s daughter worked, and where Tuesday’s daughter was born.

Constantine is not just hacked off, he’s incandescent with rage. Hate courses through his body in lightning bursts of white-hot fury. In all the confusion he escaped out of the station, and is now in a taxi on his way to Number One, Hyde Park. The fact that he is not alone in his failure, that everybody else also failed to stop Tuesday, is not a consolation to him. He knows that it will be no consolation to his employer, either. His employer is not a man known for his understanding and acceptance of other people’s failures.

Still, all is not completely hopeless. Clutched in Constantine’s hand is the tablet previously belonging to the girl known as Tuesday. Constantine has been examining its contents. The girl has listed all her actions, and all the observations and data she has uncovered on his employer. On it are all the codes and path-bringers that allowed her access to the tube system, and the security systems of the department stores she broke into. Without it she will be useless.

Constantine smiles a smile that barely even touches his mouth, let alone his eyes.

‘You may have won this time, little girl,’ he says, staring at the scarred and battered device. ‘But without this you’re nothing.’

Ahead of him, the glass and steel structure of One, Hyde Park comes into view. Constantine breathes slowly, humming tunelessly under his breath.

‘Constantine escaped, and the police are all over the place. Nobody knows what the hell’s going on.’ DS Stone shuts off her mobile and looks at the girl lying in the hospital bed. She looks better that she did two days ago, when she was brought in amid the shouting and badge-waving, but she still looks like shit. There are black circles under her eyes. Her shoulder is tightly wrapped in bandages, and there is a needle attached to a drip in her dagger-thin arm. From the time when they carried her into the hospital to now, the detectives’ lives have been up for auction. They have been suspended from active duty pending an investigation by the DPS. They are not alone in this. Their commander is also under investigation, following the recovery of the dead and injured from Leicester Square tube station.

‘Who’s Constantine?’ asks Tuesday, her voice butterflying with pain.

‘Wow. Something you don’t actually know!’ Stone says in fake amazement. ‘He’s the man who shot you. He was identified by the blood he helpfully left on the bit of metal I hit him with. He’s some sort of gun for hire, and wanted in more territories than exist in the world, apparently. Anyhow, he escaped, and presumably has your tablet with your entire life, such as it is, on it.’