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The DS taps at her keyboard and the scene backs up a few frames, and then freezes at the place where the girl is smiling up at the camera. Loss can feel a pressure building in his stomach and quietly belches; his hand in front of his mouth. The room fills with the smell of bacon fat. It makes him feel nauseous. More nauseous.
‘The cameras outside the station?’ he asks, reaching inside his jacket for some antacid tablets. His DS indicates the split-screen on her laptop, showing the CCTV views of the entrance to Embankment tube station, where all the passengers had to disembark after the emergency cord was pulled on the train.
‘Nothing, sir. According to the cameras she never left the station. She walked through those boys as if she was some sort of ghost ninja and then …’, she makes a throwing away gesture with her hands, ‘puff, disappeared.’
The DI continues looking at the girl on the screen. She couldn’t be more than seventeen. ‘And how many of those fine young men did she kill?’
‘Amazingly, only one. The leader.’ The DS taps a few keys. ‘One Jason Dunne from Sparrow Close, Crossquays.’
‘Lovely.’ Sparrow Close was well known to DI Loss. If one took a sink estate, an estate so deprived of government investment, but so rich in monies from drugs and stolen goods, and then dumped a load of stone-cold bastards in it, you’d have Sparrow Close.
‘Although none of the others will walk again,’ continues his DS. ‘She sliced their Achilles tendons and cut through the hamstrings behind the knee.’
The DS stops looking at her laptop and turns to face him. ‘Actually, she did more than that but I don’t want to think about it.’
Loss doesn’t blame her. All the blood in front of him on the screen is starting to make him light-headed. Even though on the monitor it’s not in colour, it’s in colour in his head, and it’s turned up to full-tilt. ‘And what was it she put on his body?’ he asks
She turns back to her laptop and starts tapping, her fingers hammering at the keys, and the screen is filled with a close-up of the body of Jason Dunne. Lying on his jeans, stuck onto them with blood, is a piece of white card, like a business card. Typed in Ariel font is one word: Tuesday. The DI sighs heavily.
‘And is it?’
‘Is it what, sir?’
‘Tuesday.’
Stone smiles tightly, staring at the image on the screen.
‘No, sir. It’s Friday.’
7 (#ulink_c8a90205-e5cf-5d94-b3bc-b99f9cf3ee20)
It‘s all over the news, screaming out on every media platform going.
One murdered and five crippled for life!
Jason Dunne, 16, and five other teenagers, all excluded pupils of Sparrow Secondary School, were brutally attacked in a Tube train late last night. Mr Dunne died at the scene. At present the police are asking for witnesses of the crime to come forward, and say they will shortly be giving a statement. They are particularly keen to speak to a young woman whom they believe to be at the centre of the incident.
When Lily sees the report she feels faint; she thinks she’s the young woman the police want to question. After a moment reality slams back in, and she breathes a shaky sigh of relief.
Of course it isn’t. It can’t possibly be her.
She was in all night.
Just as she’d been instructed.
Lily kills the image on her laptop and climbs out of bed. Without the noise of the news report filling the room, the rain can be heard plainly, tip-tapping at the window, behind the curtains. Lily is dressed in her favourite M&S brushed-cotton blue PJs. She has to roll the top of the pyjama bottoms over a few times to stop them falling off her. Lily has lost weight fast, and now weighs just under five and a half stone. Her bones hold up her skin in the same way a hanger does a hand-me-down dress. They look like they’ve borrowed a smaller girl’s body. Putting on her dressing-gown, she goes slowly to her bedroom door and presses her head against the wood, listening for sounds that shouldn’t be there. All she can hear is the noise of the radio in the kitchen, and her mother systematically beating breakfast into submission.
No sounds of doors being smashed. And people stumbling in.
No reek of drugs, and booze, and hate.
No jackal laughter. No violence and ripping and body greed.
Well, there wouldn’t be, would there?
Lily pulls back the bolt on the lock that she had fitted three weeks ago and walks through the flat into the kitchen. She doesn’t walk much these days, and she is slightly unsteady on her painfully thin legs. Her mother is standing over the cooker, a look of complete incomprehension on her face. Lily smiles. It feels good. Lily doesn’t smile much anymore.
Before it all, her mother rarely cooked for her; too busy working three jobs just to make sure there was food in the fridge and credit on her phone. Lily had repaid her by working hard at school and trying not to get in too much trouble. On Lily’s estate that wasn’t easy, but she had tried really hard. Now her mother doesn’t leave Lily alone in the flat. Lily no longer goes to school and rarely leaves her room. There is no longer any need for the cooker.
You don’t eat when you want your body to die.
Lily’s mum looks up from the cooker and stares at her daughter. Lily sees her own eyes in her mother’s face. Bruised from too much crying. Dry from too little tears.
‘Have you heard?’
Lily nods and stares back at her. Outside, the rain speaks a language all of its own as it lashes at the window. Lily’s mum looks at the radio; the quiet, measured radio-voice is talking about the attack on the six boys on the tube train. Lily’s mum nods her head sharply. Just once.
‘Bastards deserved everything they got.’
Lily smiles again. Hearing her mother swear, however mildly, makes her feel grounded. Not like she is walking through a cotton-wool dream world in her head where nothing matters and everything’s all right.
Lily goes over and gives her mum a hug, but only gently so that she doesn’t feel how sharply her bones are pushing at her thin skin. Lily knows her mum blames herself for what happened to her. When she was at work.
‘I tell you what, Mum. You mix me a Complan while I check my messages, and then we’ll swear at the radio together.’
It isn’t much, but it’s the best she can do. Interaction is a skill that has become lost to her. Weaving words to make a shield used to be part of her structure. Now words are a maze that confounds her. Lily leaves her mum crying in the kitchen, staring after her as she walks back to her bedroom. The last time she saw her daughter eating was two days ago, and that was a carrot sliced so thinly it looked as if it had been shaved.
8 (#ulink_1f889d21-1b94-5adc-bb54-61269c5967c5)
There are over forty abandoned tube stations in London, some of them only a short distance from the ones that are still used, but only a few of them fit my needs.
They need to have more than one way in or out, for a start. It’s no use making a crib with no escape tunnel. When I first started living underground I holed up in an old tunnel just off Green Park: near enough to the platform to feel safe, but far enough away so as not to attract attention. There are hundreds of these tunnels in the system. Some of them are for storage, or work stations. Some connect to lines that are now redundant. Some, well some I haven’t got a scooby what they’re for. I thought the one I was bundled up in was perfect. The walls and ceiling were made up of all these little white porcelain bricks as if someone had used toy bricks to make a full-size thing. Like I felt all the time. It had an old camp bed in there and a lamp and stuff.
Compared to where I’d been living before I thought it was the Ritz.
Never occurred to me that it might still be used. I thought it was a remainder from the War or something.
Third night in and I get woken up by a workman, skimming a few hours off a ghost-shift. I don’t know who was more freaked: him or me. Anyhow, there was no back door to the tunnel, so I ended up having to bite him just to get past. Living as I was then, he must have thought I was an animal.
That was then, this is now.
After I leave the boys on the train, I walk through a service tunnel to Charing Cross, taking off my wig and stuffing it in my satchel, and putting on a baseball cap. I reverse my army shirt so it shows green rather than black, then wait until a train pulls into the station. I have a skeleton key for the emergency tail-door, which is always still in the tunnel when the train stops, so all I have to do is slip out of my alcove, climb on board, and bump it one stop to Leicester Square. Change to the Piccadilly line and ride it up to Holborn.
Little-known fact about Holborn Station is that it’s a replacement station. There’s another station almost opposite it, on the other side of Oxford Street, that closed in 1933; the British Museum Station.
You can probably guess, can’t you?
I get off the train with the other passengers, keeping my hat low and my satchel slung round my back like a haversack, its leather straps over my head but under my arms. I follow the crowd so far, then ghost through a maintenance door and slip along the running tunnel that takes me to the abandoned station. I light the way with the halogen torch I take from my satchel, and then shade through the winding chambers and connecting corridors that bring me to the air-raid shelter that was used in the Second World War.
Home sweet home.
9 (#ulink_155df397-65a9-50e5-92e9-e4412f6e38f2)
Lily turns on her computer, directs the arrow to the Google icon, and clicks. As she waits for the machine to connect to the Internet she goes to her window and snitches back the curtain, looking through snakes of rain crawling down the pane at the estate outside.
Lily lives on the first floor of a three-floor block. On each of the floors there are ten flats, all identical to hers. Across the battle-ground below her that passes as a play area is a block of flats that exactly mirrors hers. To her left and right are precisely the same again: four blocks of identi-flats; lives wrapped in concrete.
Everybody knows each other to look at, but not to confide in: living in a war zone. There are at least a dozen languages spoken on Lily’s estate, but only two that are understood by everybody: fear and power. Below her Lily can see teenagers on children’s bikes. Peddling from block to block with drugs, phones, iPads, whatever. Above the blocks, in the distance, she can make out the neon lights and shiny bank-towers of Canary Wharf: an untouchable future from another world.
Behind her the computer makes a quiet, muted noise, indicating it’s connected to the Interweb, and Lily turns away from the window, and sits down gingerly. One month on and the bruising has gone, but the stitches still hurt. She opens up the Facebook page specially created for her, and is unsurprised to find it completely empty. There is no photo tag, no likes or dislikes, no friends.
Of course, no friends.
Lily types, ARE YOU THERE?
A computer pause; the cursor flashing like fingers tapping on a desk, then:
YES.
The reply font is electric blue.
Lily is unconsciously biting her lip, causing petals of blood to flower as she stares at the screen. There is so much she wants to ask, but knows she can’t. That isn’t how it works.
She types, HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS?
Pause
YES. WHERE WERE YOU?
Pause
AT HOME WITH MY MUM ALL NIGHT WATCHING TV
Pause
GOOD. ARE WE DONE?
Lily turns to look at the raindrops sliding down her window, then back at the words on the screen. They are so simple. Are we done? So simple, but impossible for her to fathom. Lily sucks at the cut on her lip and uses her sleeve to drag the tears away from her eyes.
ARE WE DONE, LILY-ROSE?
Pause
YES. WE’RE DONE. THANK YOU.
OK. FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS, AND THEN HAVE A NICE LIFE. YOUR BODY IS YOURS. MEND IT.
Lily is given directions for her to manipulate her laptop settings, allowing her computer to be accessed remotely. Once done, she watches the ghost hands systematically remove all traces of their correspondence from her laptop. All references of the Pro-Anna forum where they first made contact. All the conversations they have had in the cyber-basements of the Interworld. Omecle. Whisper. All of them. The Facebook account specially set up for their meetings ceases to exist. Everything. Every connection between Lily-Rose and the person remotely-controlling her keyboard. The last thing written on the screen before the computer shuts itself down is:
GOODBYE, LILY-ROSE
Lily-Rose sits in front of her blank laptop, its dead screen, and the future-girl stickers with which she’d personalized it in another life, and wonders what is going to happen next. She feels as if there is a door between her and the rest of the world, and the handle has been removed. Even though she has never met the person on the other end of her computer there was a connection: a way of understanding the pain and self-loathing inside. Lily-Rose does not know whether she will ever be able to take the advice and stop being frightened. Whether she’ll be able to take control of her life enough to live it. She wraps her arms around herself and stares past the curtain of rain at the grey world outside, seeing nothing. There is a knock on her bedroom door. She turns round to see her mum standing in the doorway to her bedroom, a mug of Complan in her hand, and her face set in an expression Lily-Rose is unable to read.
‘Mum? Are you all right?’
Lily-Rose sees past her to a tired-looking man in a zero-style suit and a weary-looking woman in an even worse one staring back at her.
‘It’s the police,’ her mother says, her voice tight-leashed. ‘They want to ask us some questions.’
10 (#ulink_fc9f4cde-c052-5f68-ac94-d91cd276e824)
It’s not hard to hack a computer. Anyone who says differently is a liar. It’s like lock-picking, or face-reading: all you need is the right teacher, and the correct motivation. All these films showing nerdy kids sitting around watching Star Trek, and Quantum Geek, and hacking into NASA or whatever, it’s just bollocks. Just another way to bully the weirdies. Box them in. Make them this. Make them that. Make them sit alone in the dark.
Mind you, I like sitting alone in the dark. It means nobody else is there.
Most of the tube stations have Wi-Fi now, including Holborn, so all I had to do to get a signal was set up a booster along the running tunnel between there and the British Museum Station. It’s not hard. There are so many redundant cables and junction boxes down here that finding a power source was easy, and disguising it unnecessary. The walls look like something out of Alien, all rubber-coated armoured cable and danger signs. No one can tell what belongs to what, down here. That’s why they never remove anything. Pull the wrong thing out and a train stops moving. Or all the lights go out. Something awful might happen, so leave it alone; that’s the thought process.
Works for me.
I’ve made my crib in the part of the station that was used as an air-raid shelter, the deepest part of the structure. It’s still got the ‘Dig for Britain’ posters on the walls. I’ve got fairy lights hanging from the ceiling, a camp bed, a laptop with remote speakers, and a rail for my clothes. There’s still a working toilet in the main part of the station, although I have to fill it with water from a stand-pipe in the running tunnel. Really, It’s more home-y than home ever was.
I’ve got other cribs in other stations for other things, scattered all across London … I don’t like to have all my eggs in one basket in case one of them breaks.
There’s three ways out of this crib, so I feel OK. Any less and I start getting jittery. I set the alarms, tune the laptop to the World Service, and lie down in my cot. I stare at the fairy lights sparkling above me, their little twinklings reflected in the millions of tiny dust particles that are no doubt poisoning my lungs. The computer is all news speak. Fucked-up country this. Fucked up climate that. All happening in a world I’m so separate from, it might as well be made up. I tune out and just lie here, looking at the tiny porcelain tiles that make up the ceiling. Honestly, it must have taken them years to fit all those bricks in. Why did they do it? Why did they make the bricks so small? And where did they make them? I can’t think of an answer so I stop thinking about it, and just lie here, breathing in and out.
Like I’m alive.
That’s about it really.
Lights out. Night-night.
11 (#ulink_cce17280-d657-5cc4-97b6-6bc3c2d640f2)
Even from the doorway where he and DS Stone are standing, DI Loss can tell the girl has been messed over good and proper. She’s got that gaunt look of someone who’s lost weight suddenly: skin too tight and eyes too big. Like a cancer victim, or someone who’s undergone extreme circumstances. War. Famine. Or, he thinks sadly, someone who’s been repeatedly raped and beaten and no longer sees her body as an ally.
They are shown into the living room. It is a rectangular box identical in structure to thousands of other rectangular boxes the DI has been shown into over the years. The mother has tried to personalize it with pictures and paint, furniture and rugs, but to Loss’s mind it’s still a rabbit hutch on a sink estate that might as well be a prison.
The mother is staring hard at them, her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Protecting her. Pouring strength into her. Neither of them wants him here. Or his DS. He can tell that from their faces. He can see that from their posture. Have to be blind not to. What he can’t tell is why. It could be that, after the attack, the police were brutish and unsympathetic. They often are where rape is concerned. In some police circles, rape is just another word for ‘changed her mind’. Not in all. Much better than it used to be, but some. It could be that, mother and daughter have simply had enough, and want to shut themselves away and heal, or try to heal, and they, the police, are just a reminder of past horrors. It could be all these things and more besides. Loss had noticed a strange expression on the daughter’s face when she’d first caught sight of him. Almost guilt. And that furtive look at her laptop? The DI doesn’t know what to make of it, so decides to make nothing of it and get on with why he is here. He leans forward in his chair.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you this morning, Mrs Lorne, Lily, but I’ve got some information possibly relating to your, er …’ He is at a loss what to say. Sitting here in this tidy small flat with its touches of humanity, even using the word ‘rape’ seems to invite an evil that doesn’t belong in this place. He can see the mother’s hand whiten as she squeezes the daughter’s shoulder.
‘We heard it on the radio, Inspector …?’ The mother wants his name again. Even though he’s told her. Wants to keep control. He doesn’t blame her.
‘Loss.’
‘Inspector Loss, all I can say is those animals got everything they deserve.’ The mother’s face is flushed high with anger, and the daughter is staring at her hands. Loss notices she has bitten her nails down to such an extent that the skin has been chewed and the end of each finger is raw and bloody.
‘I’m sorry to have to ask, Mrs Lorne, but because of the nature of the attack on the young men …’
