Lily-Rose is getting dressed. Her clothes are too big for her now, and when she wears them, the impact of her recent experiences comes into sharp relief. She is a ghost inside her own skin. She puts on a pair of scuzzy old jeans, and uses a dressing gown cord threaded through the belt loops to keep them up. She doesn’t need a bra beneath her ripped black Joy Division tee shirt – since she stopped eating her breasts have almost completely disappeared. This is one of the reasons she still eats so little. She does not want her breasts to return. She does not want to be a sexual being. Over the tee shirt she wears a Russian army jacket with the collar cut off, and on her feet, a pair of Doc Martins. She does not look at herself in the mirror. She has broken all the mirrors.
When the police returned Lily-Rose’s computer she did not touch it. She was not sure if, when she started it up, knowing that everything on it had been examined, she would feel violated again. She wasn’t worried about them finding anything incriminating; the girl she met in the Pollyanna chat room was obviously very good at covering her tracks. But just the fact that strangers had electronically thumbed through her hard-drive. Her photos. Her texts. Her life.
Herself.
She wasn’t sure she could cope with it all.
In the end, she decided she couldn’t and, instead, used her iPad to re-connect to the Interzone. She created a new email address, which she gave to no one. Of course she didn’t. There was no one to give it to. Since her assault she has systematically shut down all her contacts with the school and the estate. It wasn’t hard. Most of her friends have abandoned her, seeing her as broken: damaged goods. Or worse, blaming her for bringing down trouble onto the estate. Her rape was in some way a difficulty that reflected badly on them. An inconvenience; rocking the boat, and allowing the corpse of fear to surface.
She collected all the information on the web concerning the girl the media were now calling Tuesday. She re-entered the anorexia/self-harm forums, the scar-bars she haunted after she was raped, searching for her.
This morning she received an email. It had no IP address and seemed to originate from nowhere. She opens it up and reads it.
The words make her break out in a shivering sweat but she reads it to the end.
Once Lily-Rose has finished dressing, covering her hands with a pair of fingerless grey mittens and wrapping a black keffiyeh round her throat, she leaves the house for the first time since her attack, and heads into town.
When Loss and Stone leave Mr Brooks’ premises, the sky is a ribbon of boiling black above them, and the busker and street painter have disappeared. Seeing the scythes at close quarters has brought home to the detectives just how much pain and fear must have been in the carriage on the night they were used.
‘I need to sit down.’ Loss lowers himself into a chair at one of the tables opposite the door from which he has just emerged. Stone walks through into the Marquis of Granby, and returns a few minutes later with two Cokes. Loss can feel the moisture in the air, as though the rain has already arrived and is just waiting for somebody to notice. There are glass beads of condensation on the outside of the glass. He takes a sip of the Coke. It is not real Coke, but some glucose-rich variant from a soda-stream.
‘So whoever she is, she probably nicked them from the British Museum – unless she had access to similar weapons elsewhere.’ Stone sits down next to him and sips her drink. Flashes of lightning cross the narrow strip of sky above them. ‘But what I don’t get is why? Why use such a bizarre weapon, one that’s going to be quickly identified? And why leave a calling card, look at the camera, and then go to such extremes as to disappear by walking through walls. It just doesn’t make sense.’
Loss can’t disagree. The whole case is making him feel stupid. He can’t seem to be able to grasp a bigger picture. He knows there must be one. He feels it deep inside him. He just doesn’t know what it could be. He drinks his Coke, examining the pavement in front of him. It takes him a few minutes to register what he is staring at.
‘Fuck!’
The rain starts to fall in large drops on the chalk picture the street artist has left. Although the picture is much the same as when they went into the antique shop, it differs in two main respects. The first is that the central character, the one Loss had assumed was Icarus, is now a tumbling, black-trousered Gothette in an army shirt. She is quite clearly the girl from the CCTV and the video sent to his computer. The second is that the drawing now has a title written beneath it, beginning to blur and run in the rain:
TUESDAY FALLING
‘Take a picture of that before it washes away, for God’s sake!’
Stone gets out her phone, but, before she can utilize the camera facility, it rings.
‘It’s the lab, sir,’ she clocks the ID window, and pushes the button to accept the call, and puts the phone to her ear.
While his DS deals with the call, Loss pulls out his own phone and takes a snap of the chalk drawing on the pavement. All the colours have merged into each other and the image is distorted and surreal; a pictorial representation of how he feels. His phone rings.
And that’s when DI Loss’s world blows apart.
Now they know that I’m not just some random fruit shoot, I have to be a bit more inventive. Not too inventive, cos I’m still dealing with empty-headed morons, but a little bit.
I’m not talking about the police here; I’m still playing Children’s’ Hour with them. It’s still Follow the Leader in that camp, and they haven’t got a clue what’s going on.
Of course, when I say the police, I mean DI Loss. I couldn’t give a fuck about the rest of them.
Poor DI Loss, all at sea and not a boat in sight.
No, I’m talking about the Sparrow Estate boys and girls. The rape merchants and the pain posses.
Really, they think they’re living in some film. They think they’re gangstas, or hooked-up players. They think they’re part of some crew and the world they live in is run by them, for them.
It’s almost unbelievable how people can be so stupid.
They all have smartphones they don’t understand, which is a joke in itself. Smartphones for stupid people. They all think it’s like chatting in their own cribs. All I had to do was send them a phishing email with a hack attachment piggy-backed onto a free game app, and I have a real-time screen on my tablet of all their texts, all their phone calls, emails, everything. They’re children, really. They don’t trust each other, but they trust a machine.
Heartless, raping robot children, obviously, but children.
Although technically, of course, I’m the child.
Anyhow, since my little run-ins with them, their phones have been on fire, trying to find out who I am. What I want. To begin with, once they knew it wasn’t just some psycho gig, they thought I must be some bit of fluff they’d fucked up in the past. Thought I was out for revenge.
They think that way. Like it’s all about them. Well, I’ll give them something, I suppose. In a way they’re right. Just not the way they think they are.
So they started to talk to each other on their little future-machines about all their victims, all the people they’d jumped in the past.
So many it makes you cry. All so casual. All so part of their everyday DNA.
And the way they think.