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Down in the war zone between the concrete blocks that make up her estate is a new tag: a whitewashed wall with a name graffitied across it in paint the colour of dried blood.
TUESDAY
No one on the estate knows whether it refers to an event in the past that sparked off the spree of retribution, which occurred on a Tuesday, or whether it refers to an event yet to happen, on a future Tuesday. Everyone is holding their breath, waiting for more details.
A date. A target. A name.
Lily-Rose smiles and frosts the glass with her breath, obscuring the world outside. On the misted pane she draws three little Xs with her finger, making a small squeaking sound.
Then Lily-Rose goes back to bed.
21 (#ulink_627ecf81-98b6-5f6c-b233-0f05e2ff84db)
Well I think I’ve probably got everybody’s attention now.
After my little bit of business at London Bridge I pack my gear away. Stuff my wig in my bag, reverse my shirt, and ghost through the underground. I use my pre-loaded Oyster card, topped up with cash. I used to clone it, but now, with the new high-resolution cameras focused on the turnstiles, you’re more likely to be spotted.
I head down the escalator for the city branch of the Northern line. I love going down the escalators: the little push of pressure you get from below; the sub-rumble of machinery beneath your feet; and the feeling of above-ground time slipping away. This late at night it’s beginning to close down. The only people about are the drunks and the hustlers, each of them trying to get to somewhere that doesn’t exist. I love the feel of the underground when it’s almost empty: it’s like sneaking inside a machine. Gusts of warm air come at you unexpectedly, and if you put your hand to the walls you can feel a quiet throbbing. For such a massive structure to be so empty, it’s as if all the people have been stolen.
Which of course they have. They just don’t know it.
Sometimes my brain slows down and ticks gently, nothing going in, nothing going out. Just ticking. The Mayor is talking about opening some stations twenty-four hours. Non-stop progress to nowhere. Skeleton crews on a shadow train.
I make sure that the cameras spot me in London Bridge, and then again at Bank. But after that, I’m a ghost in the machine.
I’ve got stuff to do.
I hobo from Bank to Oxford Circus on the Central line. The train is one of the old ones, pre S-class, so I can crank down the window at the end of the carriage, filling my head with noise. From the connecting tunnel off the platform, I go through the maintenance door that joins the network to one of the tunnels under Oxford Street. Under the big stores.
I’m sure you must’ve wondered, when you’ve been in these massive department stores there, with their floors and floors of stuff. Where does it all come from? I mean, this is central London, not some robot dormitory town with mega aircraft hangars of retail space. All these shops, with thousands of people buying shit every day, where does it all get stored?
You’ve probably guessed, haven’t you?
All these stores, with their five or six floors of stuff, also have three or four floors below street level: a mirror store underground. For every object on display there are at least two or three stored in one of the basements. And coming off the basements are dozens of tunnels. And this isn’t just in one store. This is all the stores. It’s a wonder Oxford Street hasn’t collapsed in on itself. There’s practically nothing left under there. It’s like an ants’ nest.
I first heard about these tunnels when I was still living above, on the street. One of the people I hung out with was signed up to a shadow agency; a rip-off shop for immigrants and street rats, and was trying to get me to join. It was coming up to Christmas, and he had got some work in the basements of whatever the shop was called – Miss Selfish, Marks and Render, CockShop, who cares? – cataloguing the clothes and hanging them on racks
‘You wouldn’t believe it!’ he said to me in the café one night. ‘They’ve got racks a mile long! They’ve got whole tunnels full of racks!’
And it’s not just clothes. It’s hardware, too. They have to have air conditioning down there, so that stuff doesn’t rot or rust.
He’s dead now, the person who told me this stuff. I didn’t kill him. He shoved a bullet up his nose in the shape of cheap brown skag.
Never mind. Lie down.
The only lock on the maintenance door is the one I put there, but I check the traps just in case. I’ve got a camera set to detect any movement made by something bigger than a rat, and a pulse ‘disorientator’, which emits a 400-lumen strobe of light that’ll make your eyes bleed, should I need a quick getaway with no follow. I’ve got low-tack adhesive sprayed on both sides of the door with a layer of calcium-dust that’ll show a hand print if someone has touched it, and I’ve got a scary bio-hazard sign proclaiming ‘contaminated waste’, because sometimes a sign is all you need for a security guard who gets paid fuck-all on a zero-hour contract.
Once I’m in the tunnels I head for the one that contains the stuff I need. The tunnels are lit by low-watt festoon lighting and there are large pools of darkness between each light. Unlike the underground, these tunnels are red brick instead of white tiles, but they’re still teeny-tiny. Seriously, if I weren’t who I am, this thing with the tiny bricks would begin to seriously creep me out.
Finally, I come to the tunnel I want, and begin packing up the stuff I need.
22 (#ulink_164ba348-e37a-5659-b0ac-fb04c9e8aa56)
DI Loss hasn’t had a lot of sleep. His suit is crumpled, and worn continuously for so many hours it has begun to smell of the cigarette brand he used to smoke. His hair is greasy and his skin has a lived-in look as though it needs to be cleaned. Possibly just replaced. Rain is slithering down his window as if it wants to be somewhere else. DI Loss doesn’t blame it. He’d be somewhere else if he could. The overhead fluorescent light in his office is making his eyes hurt, and that whine in his brain from too little sleep is making it hard for him to concentrate.
He misses his computer; it has been taken away to be analysed. The computer has pictures of his daughter on it. Their absence is a physical pain; he has so few pictures of her. He has no pictures of his wife.
Loss leans back in his chair and sighs heavily. DS Stone, sitting opposite, wonders if her boss will make it through the day.
‘OK,’ Loss stares at the window, but not out of it. ‘Tell me what we do know.’
‘Well, the good news is that Candy’s has been under surveillance by the Drugs Unit for some time; first in Docklands, and then later at London Bridge, and we have clear video footage of the entrance to St Clements Court right through the night in question.’
Loss is staring at the rain leaking past his office. He wishes he could close his eyes, but every time he does he thinks he’s going to fall over.
‘And the bad news?’
‘At 12.45 on Sunday morning, the officers on duty in the van witnessed two youths staggering out of St Clements Court, clutching their faces. The officers ran to assist, and upon discovering what appeared to be foul play, reported the incident and called for back-up.’
Loss looks at his DS and raises his eyebrows.
‘Foul play? You’re going with “foul play”?’
‘Absolutely.’
He feels unutterably weary. He misses smoking and sleeping and sunshine, but most of all, he misses his daughter. He waves his hand in the general direction of his DS, urging her to continue.
‘Still waiting for the bad news,’ he says.
‘Once another unit had arrived, the officers carried out a search. They found one youth, dead, who had been shot through the eye at close range with an antique crossbow bolt, and a large piece of graffiti, still wet, proclaiming one word: ‘Tuesday’. There were no other persons found in the alley, which is a dead end. The only exit was under all-night video surveillance. The officers took photos of the deceased, and the graffiti.’
Stone spins her laptop round for him to see. It’s the report from the surveillance officers, including pictures of the dead boy. Images of the video sent to his computer slices through his vision.
‘The club door?’ he asks.
‘Could only be opened from the inside. Apparently there was some form of knocking code.’
‘Very Scarface. Any other doors? Windows? An office, perhaps?’
‘Nothing. And the fire escape only went up two floors, once again ending in a door that could only be opened from the inside.’
Loss rubs his hands over his eyes, wondering how much worse he can possibly feel. ‘And I suppose our boys were on the ball enough to check the bins?’
‘And girls. Just full of paper from the offices, and bottles and cans from the club. It’s all in the report, sir. The Drugs Unit were staking out that club front all night, and as far as the video shows, the only people who went into the alley were our three crack friends, and only two came out. The girl, who we clearly saw on the video sent to your computer, seems to be a spirit who can walk through walls.’
Loss contemplates the incident board. He is pretty certain that very soon it’s going to need to be much, much bigger.
‘However, there’s one other bit of news,’ Stone adds.
‘Yes?’
‘The back-room boys and girls taking apart your computer, were able to use the video to determine where we might find the cigarette butt our ghost-girl threw away. This was reported to the forensics team who were nit-combing the alley, and the said butt has been recovered and sent off for DNA analysis. With any luck in the next day or so our girl will have a name.’
The phone rings, its single loud trill making DI Loss’s ears hurt. He knows that he is becoming unwrapped, and badly needs some sleep. He looks intently at the DS as she speaks to the person on the phone. He can tell she is excited about something. She frantically taps notes into her iPad, thanks the caller and hangs up.
‘Let me guess. That was our MurderGoth, asking where we want her to appear next?’ he says, trying for grim humour and missing by a country mile.
‘No,’ she says. ‘That was Mr Brooks, of Brooks Military Antiquities, saying he can tell us all about the scythes that were used in the tube train assault, and who he sold them to.’
23 (#ulink_b55b5c19-e5c6-5dc4-b72e-79ba85ffeba4)
It’s not the hardware, it’s the operating system
I avoid the systems most people use. They’re always updating, always prying. It’s like sticking a tiny plaster over a great big cut: loads of crap just keeps oozing out. And the more they try to fix it, the longer it takes to run, and the more they know about you. I always go free source. You’re still on the grid, but at least you’ve got a bit more control.
When I was living on the street there was this boy called Diston, but everybody called him Deadman. He was rib-puncture thin with stinking dreads and had a unique approach when it came to panhandling for money. He used to go up to a person and ask them if they could give him some cash for his coffin. He would stare at them, hair down in front of his eyes, like some fucking zombie, and ask them for money. The poor sods used to be so freaked out they’d hand over whole wads of cash just to make him stop staring at them.
The thing is Diston truly believed he was dead. He was just trying to raise enough cash so he could lie down and go to sleep forever. He had borderline personality disorder, or at least that’s what he told us.
Me, I always thought he was a fucking liar. Anyhow, one of Diston’s things, one of the things that sparked up his plugs, was computers. He used to say he could leave his soul scattered across the Interweb. Diston knew all about computers.
How to build them. How to link them up through the ether.
And, most importantly for me, how to program them.
We used to sit in the underpass by Tottenham Court Road, surrounded by hobos, blinded by anti-freeze-strength white sui-cider, and sludge-blooded, old-school clock junkies, one needle away from being compost. Diston had this Asus tablet that ran open-source: completely adaptable. Fuck knows where he charged it up. I know he used to steal the Wi-Fi codes from local offices. He said it was easy. I never knew how easy until he taught me.
Really, just changing your password every week isn’t enough. You need to change your keypad too. Once Diston was into a computer, he had programs that could tell how frequently a key was pressed and then work out the passwords that allowed access to whatever the system was linked to. He blacked out whole swathes of information for fun, and then gently wiped his electronic feet, and left.
And then there was the Internet. Once he was in the Interzone he was away. A spider ghost in the World Wide Web. The way he described it, when people cruised the Web, they thought they were in their own little virtual bubble, their own private cyber car. That, he said, was bollocks. It was more like they were in a taxi, a black cab. You’d type in your web address and click, and then get in the cyber taxi and it would take you to your destination.
Recording all your information on the way.
Who ordered the cab.
Who got in the cab.
Where it picked you up. Where it dropped you off.
Diston used to tell stories, his face mad and rippled in the flames from a tramp fire. Stories of governments and corporations. Of cyber-tracking and data surveillance. He used to tell ghost stories too. About people who built clone cabs, cabs that navigate the Interzone without detection. About people who became the taxi driver rather than the passenger.
He was a scary boy, Diston. I didn’t trust him, and I didn’t like him, but he knew what he was talking about when it came to computers. He taught me all about C codes, and UNIX, and open-source hacking. He taught me how to spirit-slide behind legit apps and about mirror protocols, and mimic programs. Really, it’s quite simple once you’re into the groove, so to speak. It’s like anything else; it’s just a matter of application.
It’s not fucking art, is it?
Anyhow, that was then, when I wasn’t what I am now.
Branching off the main tunnels are little alcoves, cul de tunnels. They’re twelve metres long and kitted out with polymer racking systems to allow maximum storage. There are big, square, silver condensers bolted to the alcove roof with concertinaed tubing snaking away to remove the moisture and prevent corrosion.
I walk in, open up my satchel, and grab a couple of high-end laptops with solid-state delivery, and a bunch of mid-level phones. Most smart phones these days have a GPS chip soldered directly onto the board so the phone can be tracked, but you can still find units that only have it as an add-on, but are still ok for Wi-Fi hot-spotting. I also pick up some external drives and some Bluetooth headsets.
All the stuff down here in the tunnels isn’t registered yet, cos half the staff are on the steal. It doesn’t actually get on any books until it goes front-of-house. Perfect for me. I take a couple of prestige pieces to sell and then shadow-walk my way out of there, through the system and back to my crib.
For a while I toyed with buying stuff off the Silk Road before it got shut down. And then off BMR. I kept one laptop solely for subbing through the Dark Web: the web hidden under the Web, used by criminals and hackers, and art-terrorists and, for that matter, real terrorists. The BMR is a kind of eBay for Dark-webbers. I thought I could get my hardware there. Maybe some guns.
Well I could have, but the whole system was so full of spooks from all the covert security agencies that it was like scuba-diving through police sea, so I sacked it.
When I get back to my crib I do the rounds, making sure everything’s safe and secure, and then I hook up my new gear to my speakers and cue up the World Service. It’s late and there’s a programme on about the formation of matter. I tune out my head, and wash myself down, and do my business.
Then I drink down a protein shake and go night night.
Nothing to see here.
24 (#ulink_844edfe3-dfe1-5a04-bd47-3dcba1f78704)
Brooks Military Antiquities is the kind of shop in the kind of alley that demands dark skies and even darker conspiracies. From the moment they come out of the tube station at Leicester Square and walk down St Martin’s Lane, DI Loss is filling up with foreboding. The sky is a seething mass of grey, and black, and blue, and as low as if London had a ceiling over it. His phone vibrates in his pocket: a text. He pulls out the phone and opens it up.
‘Jesus!’
‘What, sir?’
‘The footage of Lily-Rose’s rape, which kept on being posted on all those revenge-porn sites that we failed to shut down cos they never show faces and are not controlled in this country, and God knows what else … it’s been replaced with footage of the mayhem on the tube.’
‘Good.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t mean good as in it was good what happened to those boys. I just mean good as in I’m glad the Lily-Rose images aren’t there anymore. Just because no one was identifiable, well, it’s still going to be understood by all those kids on the estate, isn’t it? And now they’re seeing those boys who did it.’
‘Allegedly.’
‘Whatever. Now they’re going to see them get fucked over. So “good”.’
Loss replaces his phone, feeling as if control is not so much slipping away from him, as running full-pelt. The air of the capital is hot and humid, and the bombardment of smells coming from all the street vendors makes him both nauseous and light-headed. The noise is incredible: tourists armed to the teeth with electronic gadgetry, clicking, and whirring, and flashing, all shouting at each other. The locals no better; many speaking a language he can’t understand, either because he’s too old and can’t decode the intonation, or they aren’t speaking in English. Almost half have strange contraptions in their ears and are shouting at the air in front of them. Amazingly, his DS seems to be enjoying herself. She even stopped and bought them each an ice-cream from a vendor working out of a rickshaw with a cooler-box attached to the back.
As they stroll down the lane towards the Coliseum Theatre, a deep throb of thunder pulses across the sky, as if it’s being fracked. Loss is having difficulty walking. He isn’t sure whether it’s because he is so tired, or because the pavement has begun to melt in the heat. The entire city is becoming surreal to him as though he’s a few seconds out of sync. A permanent shudder in reality. Stone stops suddenly, and grabs his arm.
‘What?’ he asks. Stone smiles at him and points. Loss looks at what she’s pointing at.
‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
Between the theatre and a music shop is an alley, no more than fifty centimetres wide. Spanning the gap, attached to both sides of the narrow street, is a lamp, making an arched entrance-way.
‘Brydges Place, sir. I believe this is us.’
The day is now so dark that the lamp marking the entrance sputters into life. As they walk single-file under it and into the alley, Loss briefly wonders if he has gone back in time. Steam seeps out of the walls in front of him through cracks in the mortar, and he feels as if the walls are barely staying upright that, at any moment, they might close up and crush him. He is dizzy with hunger, sleep deprivation, and claustrophobia. If it weren’t for the narrowness of the lane he might very well fall down.
After ten metres the alley opens up into a tiny courtyard, and Loss feels the constriction in his chest ease slightly, although his sense of displacement increases. The courtyard has a scattering of tables and chairs; an outside extension of the Marquis of Granby pub. In one corner sits a ragged dust-coated scarecrow of a figure, playing a violin, with an upturned bowler hat at his feet. Loss doesn’t recognize the tune, but it sounds vaguely eastern European. The only other occupant is a pavement artist, chalking a winged figure falling from the skies. From his perspective Loss can’t make out much of the picture, but he suspects that it’s Icarus, who flew too close to the sun. From where he is standing Loss can only see the back of the artist and he can’t tell if they are male or female.
