Tuesday Falling (12 page)

Because it had been so thoroughly sealed the air inside the room was dry. The room itself was really not much bigger than a cupboard, and the only thing inside it was a wooden crate with skull and crossbones on it. You know, like there’s deadly poison or something inside.

Obviously I opened the crate. Who’s not going to open a crate with a skull and crossbones on it?

As I said, inside was exactly what I need now. Even then, way back before all of this got rolling, I think I must have had an inkling that I would use them. Alongside the pain, when my head never stopped humming and my brain only worked in stutters, I think I must have had this plan, under the surface.

A wreck under the ocean. A ghost inside me.

I took a picture of the contents on one of my phones, and then I went about packing them up in my army bag, and taking them back to my crib.

DI Loss is sitting with DS Stone at a table drinking Coke again, proper Coke this time, from glass bottles rather than soda-stream. They are back outside the Marquis of Granby, in Brydges Place. Since the very public explosion of the case, the incident room has been taken over by top-notch investigators from the drugs squad, the anti-terrorist unit, the young offenders division, the serious sexual crime unit and any other department that could possibly have a shout in what the girl Tuesday had brought to the authorities’ doorstep. Although the whole thing was being overseen by their boss, the detectives were beginning to feel sidelined. Little people hanging around the edges of the in-crowd.

‘They’ve even convened a meeting of COBRA.’ Stone shakes her head and stares at the entrance to Brooks’ antique shop. The last time the government called a meeting of COBRA was when the capital was under an imminent terrorist threat. Loss sips his drink, which he has poured into a glass that already contains ice and a slice of lemon. The pavement painting of Tuesday has completely disappeared.

‘Do you know, Charles Dickens used to drink here?’ he says, his gaze drifting over the steam leaking out of the walls.

‘What,
the
Charles Dickens?’

‘The very one. He used to come here with his mistress. Not his proper mistress, mind, but his other mistress, his secretary, who incidentally was his sister-in-law.’

‘What a bastard.’

‘Oh, his wife knew. She just weighed up the pros and cons, and then decided to turn a blind eye. Or at least, that’s the theory. On the plus side, Dickens helped set up the first home for homeless women. What did the lab say?’

Stone takes a sip of her full fat, four-star Coke. When it comes to Coca Cola she doesn’t give a damn. It’s full fat or nothing. ‘Well, it’s definitely your daughter.’

‘Dead daughter.’ Loss’s voice is tight.

‘Your dead daughter, yes … The prints and DNA from the cigarette and knives all match. Also from the specimen slide she kindly left. Also from the cabinet, and from the handle of the door to the British Museum Secret Station that I, for one, had never even heard about. All the physical evidence points to the conclusion that the girl who calls herself Tuesday is your daughter Suzanne, who was murdered three years ago, and is now walking around London taking out pointy vengeance on evil gang-bangers.’

They sip their drinks. Above them the river of sky that can be seen running between the two buildings that shape the street is murky and the colour of a two-day-old bruise.

‘And you went back and checked outside Candy’s?’

‘Yes, sir. You were right. Underneath the bins there’s a manhole leading to the sewer system, which leads to an amount of tunnels, and bunkers, and God knows what else that I also never knew existed.’

‘And some of those lead to the underground train network?’

‘Possibly. No one seems to know. And incidentally
which
underground network? The network we’re using now, or the miles and miles of redundant underground that I was also completely unaware of? Frankly, I’m horrified by my lack of knowledge of the city I live and work in.’

A waiter comes out and clears away the empty glasses from the table next to them. Loss sighs and closes his eyes. He is seriously thinking of retiring; possibly from life, his heart hurts so much.

Eventually he forces himself to ask: ‘Could the DNA have been faked?’

‘Apparently impossible. The NKNAD …’

‘English, please.’ Loss interrupts her.

‘Sorry. The national DNA data storage facility for the UK took a sample of your daughter’s DNA when she worked at the hospital. They say it
might
be possible to plant a cigarette butt with her DNA on it, but not on the knives and slide and everything. Plus the fingerprints are a match.’

‘Right. So how did she do it? How did this girl steal my daughter’s identity?’

‘According to everyone, she didn’t. Even the tech guys are saying it’s impossible to hack into the database and falsify the results. As far as the evidence goes, sir, your dead daughter is going around messing up gang boys and creating the biggest civil unrest in London since the riots of 2011. Possibly since Cromwell.’

Loss misses his daughter so much; he can only look at what is happening sideways. He misses his daughter so much, with such guilt, that he doesn’t even have enough room to miss his wife. Stone puts her drink down and looks at her boss. He is un-stitching in front of her eyes.

‘You know what they’re saying, don’t you, sir?’

Yes, he knew what they were saying. He’d seen the TV. He’d read the papers. One of the rumours was that Tuesday was the daughter of a policeman. That she was a ghost on a haunting mission. Just one of the stories that were scurrying around the city, yes, but considering the DNA samples, one that was hitting Loss like a night terror.

‘What a fucking mess. Half of London believing in ghosts. Teenage rapists running scared. Victim posses roaming the streets with spray cans and the police can’t do anything because they’re
victims
, for Christ’s sake! And God knows what’s happening with the drug lords. They must be pissing in their Jacuzzis wondering what’s going to happen next.’

Like a child, Loss takes several breaths before asking his next question. ‘You know it can’t be her, Stone, don’t you?’

Stone stares at the brick wall in front of her. The mortar is old, and beginning to crumble. Since the DNA sample result she has looked into her boss’s personal history. Asked around about what happened three years ago. ‘Of course it can’t be her, sir. Your daughter died in horrible circumstances, and that’s awful. But ghosts don’t steal weapons or show up on film. Don’t send emails or spray-paint walls. Don’t create puzzles to mess with lowly police officers.’

Loss smiles a little. Stone drains the last of her Coke, chewing the lemon and swallowing the rind.

‘No,’ she continues, ‘nothing supernatural here. What we have here is some whacked-out ninja super emo, roaming the streets, killing bad guys, and fucking with our heads.’

Next to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, to the south of Knightsbridge tube station, is Number One, Hyde Park – one of the most exclusive apartment blocks in the world. On its lower floors are the accoutrements of the super-rich: the Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, the premier retail venue for Rolex, and the central London showroom where Formula One racing giants, McLaren, sell their supercars. Above this, behind tinted glass, are eighty-seven apartments that are among the most expensive anywhere on the planet. The apartments are reached by a glass elevator, and the security is beyond compare.

CCTV cameras are everywhere, including the lifts. Each apartment has its own video security link to the entrance, the lift, and outside its own door. The cameras are not linked to a police station, however, but to the management’s own security personnel. The security staff are immaculately dressed in £1,000 suits, complete with bowler hats. Each of them carries a side-arm, and all of them are ex-Special Forces. Each of the apartments have bullet-proof glass windows. Many of them have balconies with pools. All of them have safe rooms; rooms designed to keep the occupant free from harm in case of a full assault.

The cheapest one-bedroom apartment costs £3.6 million. The most expensive, with five bedrooms, is £140 million.

Residents are rumoured to include a pop star, a Russian oligarch, a Korean ex-president, and a Japanese software developer who may or may not work for a foreign government. Although all the apartments are sold, most have been sold to corporations registered in different countries, and it is almost impossible to find out who owns them.

The man’s apartment is on the west of the building and overlooks the Thames, as opposed to Hyde Park, and among the obscenely expensive furniture on his balcony is a Jacuzzi with fairy lights. No matter how rich the gangster becomes, how re-educated, how far away from his roots, he still needs a Jacuzzi.

He came originally from Brentwood, in Essex, but there was no way he was staying there. He had an extortion racket going on at his primary school when he was eight, and by the time he went to comprehensive school at eleven he was a runner for a local gang. In a few short years he had ripped through the crew until he had runners of his own, and had consolidated the local gang landscape into a new, lethal machine that cut out of Essex and into the city.

Drugs, guns, rape dates, it didn’t matter to him. All his lieutenants thought he was so cold he must have walked out of hell itself. He had no friends and all his family were dead – possibly, it was said, killed by him. Now that he was top of the pile, he rarely left his ivory tower, instead conducting his business electronically, or through Caleb, his network liaison man. He had a string of mistresses. Once he had used them up, he either paid off or had them buried on the Isle of Dogs, in a wasteland owned through one of his many shadow corporations.

His head was shaved and oiled, and he worked with a personal trainer every day to keep himself in shape. He never smoked, drank, nor took any drug other than coffee. He did not want to be anything other than in control. He had converted his safe room, which was sound-proofed, into what was euphemistically called an interrogation room, and it was his one true wish to get the girl who called herself Tuesday inside it.

She was ripping up his business as though it was nothing. The business he had dedicated his life to building.

His workforce was in hiding, fuck knows where, because not even their mothers would take them in now. His clientele were going elsewhere, because nothing loves a vacuum like a drug dealer. As soon as his runners were no longer available, the other gangs had moved right in. A junkie has to get his fix, a party girl has to get her pills and thrills, and if his boys aren’t there to supply them then someone else sure as shit will.

And it didn’t even seem to be about business. It seemed personal. What she’d done to his crew on the tube. Outside the club. On the pavement in front of the kebab shop. That wasn’t about money. That was grabbing his head and rubbing his nose in it.

Well, it was over. He had hired someone. He was going to have her caught and thrown into the room next door. He was going to rip her until even her mother wouldn’t recognize her. Then he was going to nail her remains up around the boroughs, and tag-spray ‘the ghost of Tuesday’ under the body parts.

But first, before he killed her, he was going to find out why. Why she had targeted him. How she knew what she knew.

Why him?

Why now?

Why?

DS Stone sits by the window in the police cafeteria, looking out over central London. The food hall is situated on the sixth floor, and as she gazes out through the rain she can see cars and buses turning slowly round the statue in Piccadilly Circus. Although she is looking out at London, she is not really seeing it. What she sees are images of her boss. DI Loss is falling apart in front of her. More than that. It is as if he is being washed away. Stone doesn’t have many close relationships with men; she has no insight into their mechanisms for dealing with loss and pressure, but she is certain that he is close to breaking point.

She has only been working with Loss for four months, after transferring from Lewisham. When she first arrived in the West End Division off Savile Row, colleagues had tried to draw her into the normal back-stabbing gossip machine that thrives in so many organisations, but Stone had frozen them out, effectively isolating herself. No change for her. She’d been doing the same thing since her school days. She was not the kind of person to succumb to crowd pressure. After the first few failed attempts to co-opt her into their circle her fellow officers marked her as cold and aloof, and left her alone. Which is why she was unaware of the murder of DI Loss’s daughter. When she first began working for him it was as if he were hidden in weeds; unseen and unreachable by the outside world. And she never knew why.

Stone sips her coffee and nibbles at the corner of her sandwich. The coffee is lukewarm and the sandwich is so old it probably arrived at the station before she did. Below her a police car pulls in, the lights on its roof making rainbows in the air.

Stone walks over to the sink, where she pours away her coffee, which she considers a mercy killing. She goes to the vending machine, feeds some coins into the slot, and picks out a Red Bull. She walks back to her seat, taking in the London view; rain, and buses, and birds, and neon, and buildings older than some countries.

‘I mean he’s really beginning to lose it, if you ask me. He’s not been right for some time, but now he’s really going over.’ The voices are coming from behind her. She knows they’re talking about her boss. Even more than Stone herself, he is outside of the machine, and the machine does not like outsiders.

Even less so in recent times. Not just because of the Tuesday thing. Stone has felt a weight hanging around the station. Around herself. As if the force is moving away from her.

Then again, the whole of London seems to be changing in front of her eyes. She doesn’t know what to make of it. Riots in the street, riots in the home. The power struggles and body battles on the estates. The killings of the drug boys. People taking the law into their own hands. But what was the purpose of the law, if it were not to protect and serve the people, which it had so obviously failed to do?