DI Loss stares at the whiteboard covering the back wall of his office, and wishes he still smoked. In the two weeks since the attack on the tube by the unknown girl, he has been slowly placing tiny bits of information on the board. Filling it up with snippets of facts and conjecture that he hopes will add up to some defining whole. There is a grainy still from the CCTV showing the girl staring out at him, a look that has begun to haunt odd moments of his day. Underneath the picture, using a bold black marker-pen, he has written:
HOW DID SHE LEAVE THE STATION?
DISGUISE?
The names of all six of the boys she attacked – defended herself against – a small voice inside him says, and their addresses, underneath he has written:
SPARROW ESTATE
DRUGS?
SEXUAL ASSAULT?
There is a picture of Lily-Rose, taken at the hospital, less than an hour after her mother found her. Loss can’t look at it without a little piece of his heart being sliced away and swallowed by despair. The bits of body that should be inside, but were outside. The swelling. The blood. The sheer brutal animalism that it must have taken to do that to another human being. It makes him think of his daughter, but he can’t think of his daughter because it will make him cry, and he’ll never be able to stop. Underneath he has written:
REVENGE?
LAPTOP? INTERNET RECORDS?
ALIBI?
That Lily-Rose is hiding something he has no doubt, but he can’t for the life of him work out what it is. They’d checked out her internet history, but, apart from some pro-anorexia sites and extreme self-help forums, found nothing unusual.
Apart, that is, from the lack of social networking. Girls her age normally had a Facebook
At the top of the board, in bold stark letters, he has written:
TUESDAY MEANS WHAT?
And at the bottom of the board, next to the picture of the white card stuck to the dead boy’s jeans, the card with ‘Tuesday’ scrawled on it, he has written:
WHAT DOES SHE WANT TO TELL US?
In the middle of the board is a still of the strange knives she used to cripple the youths. Loss has sent the image out to all the weapons dealers in the city, but so far has had no luck in identifying them. Underneath the still he has written
ANTIQUES?
As Loss is staring at the board, trying to make sense of the disparate pieces of information, his laptop chimes an alert: denoting a message. He looks at it, his mind still on the words and images on the whiteboard, and then suddenly his attention is fully on the incoming mailbox; there is no sender address, just two words in the subject line, along with an emoticon of a smiling face.
GUESS WHO?
DI Loss feels the hairs rise on his arm, as his skin contracts. There is no text when he opens up the email, just an MPEG attachment: a photo, or a video. He feels the tension in his body notch up as he stares at the screen, then presses the buttons that will access the file. He looks at it for a moment, eyes soaking up the image in front of him, and then he says one word:
‘Fuck.’
The boys fall out of the back door of the club and into the alley, the skanked-up bass music spilling out with them and bouncing off the walls. It’s completely beyond them to just walk out. They have to shove each other, and swagger and attempt to live up to some image in their video-drone heads. It’s pathetic. Who are they posing for? Certainly not me. They haven’t seen me yet. I’m sat by the bins, and they’d have to look beyond their own little-boy world to notice me.
Like that’s ever going to happen.
They take out glass pipes and little rocks of crystal meth wrapped in cellophane, and fire up. I hate watching people take drugs. It’s like watching someone stab themselves repeatedly in slow motion. If they weren’t such horrible bastards I’d feel sorry for them. But they are, so I don’t. I stand up and switch on the camera I’ve placed on the metal step of the fire escape next to the bins. Why the bottom of the fire escape is surrounded by bins is beyond me. What would happen if there was a fire? The boys are leaning against the club wall, laughing and sucking down their drugs. Each time they inhale, their faces are lit up, floating in the dark caves of their hoodies.
They look so cool; I’m surprised none of them are wearing sunglasses.
The alley is a dead end, with the opening to the main street at the front of the club, past the drug-boys, and me and the bins at the back, smack against the office wall. I take out a soft-pack of cigarettes from the top pocket of my Chinese army shirt. I can’t stand here all night waiting for one of them to notice me. I shake the pack, spilling a single smoke into my fingers.
‘Hey, boys! Got a light?’
All three of them stop what they’re doing and look up, squinting through the smoke to where I am.
Now they’ve noticed me.
Loss stares at the images unfolding on the screen. Without taking his eyes off the laptop, he reaches over and buzzes Stone to come in. The footage has no sound. It has been filmed on an expensive camera with night vision. The colours are various shades of green. When one of the boys lights the girl’s cigarette, it looks as if he’s using a roman candle. Some sort of thermal imaging, he thinks, reaching into his pocket for his e-cigarette. In the corner of the screen is a frame counter, chronicling the seconds as they tick by; cutting time into slices of violence and pain. There’s a knock on the door and Stone comes into the room.
‘Sir?’ she says.
Loss can’t drag his eyes away from the screen. He beckons the DS over. Raising her eyebrows, she comes around the desk and stands next to him. After a moment she registers what she is looking at on the computer.
‘Fuck.’
I walk up to the boys, letting them drink me in. I’ve got on a pair of black pilot trousers over black leggings, ripped at the knees, and my green Chinese red army shirt with the collar torn off. I can see them watching me come towards them, slightly addled by their drugs, but not so far gone that I’m freaking them out. One of them pulls back his hood and stares at me. His skin is speed-tight, with crack-burns around his nostrils. And he’s got cold eyes; eyes like weighing scales. He’s not judging me; he’s just trying to work out the odds. He’s a z-channel hurt-merchant with no future past this alley, but he’s trying to work out the chances of doing me. He cups his hands and sparks up his Zippo. Of course it’s a Zippo. With them it’s always a fucking Zippo. I lean in and light my cigarette.
‘Cheers,’ I say, and walk back towards the fire escape. Towards my satchel. Well, I’ve got to give them a chance to do the right thing, haven’t I?
I can feel their eyes on my back, working out the risk. Little Goth-girl like me, long night ahead, no witnesses. Really, for them, it’s a no-brainer. There’s a pause as the rusted cogs in what passes for their brains kicks in, then: