‘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 …’
‘Animals!’ Mrs Lorne interjects vehemently. ‘They raped my daughter, beat her up, and then raped her again. Everything that happened to those vermin, it wasn’t enough.’
‘And because it was those specific young men,’ Loss continues, lowering his voice, ‘well, I’m afraid I have to ask.’
The seconds tick by, and mother and daughter just stare at him. Finally Mrs Lorne understands what he is saying. Asking. She looks at him with loathing and says, ‘We were in all night. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’
‘The CCTV shows a young woman at the scene of the crime …’ Loss stops speaking as Mrs Lorne makes a cutting motion with her hand.
‘Enough. We were here all night. People called round. Unlike those animals who attacked my daughter, we have witnesses apart from ourselves.’ Mrs Lorne curls her lip in disgust. For a second Loss thinks she’s going to spit on her own floor. ‘They just back each other up. Cover each other’s tracks and sneer at us as if we’re nothing.’ Loss can see that Mrs Lorne is only just holding her rage in check. ‘Not that we’d need witnesses if those bastards had been locked up. The last month I’ve not been able to leave the flat without one of them hanging around, laughing into their phones. Even when I go to the shop downstairs I have to get a neighbour to sit in or else Lily starts screaming, or worse,’ Both Mrs Lorne and Lily-Rose seem to be falling apart in front of him, and Loss has a deep sense of self-loathing within himself. All these people want to do is heal, and here he is twisting a screwdriver into the wound, opening it up for inspection. Making things worse. So he twists it again.
‘Does the word “Tuesday” have any special meaning to either of you?’
‘Get out.’ The mother is striding to the door, barging past the DS. ‘I’d like you to leave now. My daughter needs to rest.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Loss stands up and follows her to the front door. As he passes Lily-Rose he has an urge to touch her shoulder, seeing his own daughter in her, but resists. ‘Even with the incident on the tube we’ll continue trying to corroborate your statement. The officers who were assigned to your case have handed over transcripts of all the interviews. It might be that given the new, ah, circumstances they have something more to add.’
Lily-Rose looks up at him, staring. And then she smiles, and it’s like the last rays of the sun before it sinks into the sea.
‘They’ll have difficulty raping anyone else from a wheelchair, yeah?’ And then she turns away from him and stares at the floor, leaving him cold and empty.
Outside on the concrete walkway in front of the closed flat, the detectives look out at the rain-soaked estate. Although the rain is coming down in sheets, they can still see the boys on their bikes with their rucksacks full of consumables. Commerce doesn’t stop because of the weather. Loss takes his e-cigarette out of his pocket, taps it a few times to charge the atomizer, and pulls a breath of nicotine down into his lungs. The DS sniffs, places her hands on the walkway balustrade, and looks down at the concrete playground beneath them.
‘Definite reaction when you said ‘Tuesday’, sir.’
After I’ve finished wiping everything from Lily-Rose’s computer I pull the hard-drive out of mine and put it and the console in my satchel for throwing in the sewer later. It’s not so much that I’m worried about getting caught, I couldn’t give a fuck about that, it’s more that I don’t want my clients to have to deal with any shit. No hard-drive, no record.
New client, new laptop.
I keep the speakers, though.
Clients. That’s what I call them. Girls and boys who have no one else to turn to when everything gets fucked up and they end up in the nowhere world of self harm and suicide …
Anyway, I won’t be getting any more clients, will I?
Before I get rid of the hardware I have a Red Bull and write down the names of the boys from the train on my wall. Later on, once I’ve hacked the CCTV footage from the underground, I’ll attach a QR code next to their names. I’ve already pre-linked the code to the site where they’ve put up video footage of Lily-Rose. If anybody tries to watch ‘the Lily-Rose rape show’ they’ll find themselves watching ‘the tube train gang boys getting completely outclassed and fucked up show’ instead.
I grab the hardware and my MagLite and enter the stairwell. The stairs aren’t in as good nick as the main areas, so I have to do a little scrambling. I go up a couple of levels to where there’s a tunnel that connects to the sewer system. The walls are made up of the same Victorian brickwork as in some of the stations. Really, what is it about Victorians and tiny bricks? The whole of the sewer network is full of them too. I know a lot of the sewers and the early Tube tunnels were built at the same time, but were all the bricks being made by midgets, or something? Was it some sort of work-house orphanage scheme?
I dump the laptop in the slow-moving effluence. There’s a kind of walkway by the side of the channel and I go along there for about half a mile and then dump the hard-drive. You’ve got to be quite alert in the sewers. There’s a lot of noise around, and workmen are often down here, doing something work-y …
I read in one of the free newspapers that litter the stations that London is going to get a new super-sewer tunnel, and that a lot of the old tunnels that stitch lower London together will be demolished. Good luck with that. There’s so much secret stuff down here that anyone trying to do a full recce will blow their mind. In my wanderings I’ve found hash farms, secret garages full of stolen super cars, and factories for making crystal meth. Half of the London underworld keeps its stuff underground. Once I even found a tank. A tank!
After I’ve got rid of the computer stuff I go back to the British Museum Station, and begin slowly checking all my alarms, working my way up to the ‘loot-chute’: a tunnel dug in the Second World War between the tube station and the basement of the British Museum. The thinking was that if the Nazis started bombing the crap out of London, then the most valuable artefacts could be brought down here and kept safe. The ones, that is, that the government hadn’t already hidden in mines in Wales, or sold off to the Americans as a bribe. It’s amazing what you can learn from documents people forget they even have. There’s a tunnel under MI6 as well. That’s the old MI6, not the swanky new one. It’s like the
Anyway, I put an ABUS disc-cylinder padlock on the connecting door between the tunnel and the station to make sure no one who found the entrance accidentally would get very far, and a trip alarm to let me know if they did. Not that I think anyone ever would, but it would give me time to run.
I undo the padlock and make my way up to the door that leads to the basement of the museum. I say basement, but there’re hundreds of rooms. The place has been going since 1753; that’s a lot of stuff, with more added year after year. I’m willing to bet that most of the stuff they’ve got they don’t even know they’ve got anymore. Old artefacts from around the world. Maps and clothing. Instruments and weapons.
They’ve got weapons from all over the empire, and beyond.
Like these Burmese hand-scythes, for instance.