Nirvana. Jesus, they can’t even get their sub-cultures right.
I smile and reach into my bag.
Fun. Why not?
DI Loss and DS Stone watch as the girl walks towards the camera. Even in the strange green light of the thermal imaging they can tell it’s her: the girl from the tube. She’s not wearing the same clothes, but the hair is the same, and the face, and the smile. The detectives know that something awful is going to happen next, but they can’t look away. The timer continues to count the scene. The smallest numbers, the hundredths of a second, are just a blur. The girl stops in front of the camera, looks right at them, and throws the cigarette to her left. Even though Loss knows that the image isn’t live, he can’t help feeling that she is looking directly at him.
The boys behind her grin at each other and begin to walk forward: leopards approaching a deer. The one with the hood down is saying something to her. Loss can guess what it is. Stay with us. Play a while. Don’t make any long-term plans. The girl bends down out of shot, and then straightens. The detectives can see that there’s something in her hand, but she’s too close to the camera for them to identify what it is. She turns round to face the boys slinking toward her, and Loss whispers:
‘Here we go.’
I shoot Mr Hood-down through the right eye. His right, not mine. There’s no sound because I’m using a crossbow pistol. The bolt leaves the mechanism at a million miles an hour then buries itself in Hood-down’s brain. Or what passed as his brain.
Night-night, on the ground. Sleepy-time now.
I turn away while his friends are still trying to work out what the fuck is going on, and put the weapon back in my bag.
‘Danny? Hey Danny! What the fuck are you doing, man?’
Danny’s not doing a whole lot right now, except maybe twitching a bit. I take out the flare gun and shoot the other two in the face.
When the flare gun detonates its charge, the entire screen goes white, then black; the super-sensitive setting on the camera overloading.
‘What the hell was that?’ DS Stone asks. DI Loss doesn’t answer her, nor does he take his eyes off the screen. Swirls of green light, and black and white heat flowers are blooming all over the screen, then dying and fading in front of him. When the image returns, the two boys are on the floor, clawing at their faces, white hot blobs thrashing left and right on the screen as the super-heated metal filaments embedded in their skin sputter and die. The girl is walking away from the camera towards the three figures on the ground. Loss instinctively clenches his jaw, expecting to see some new slice of violence, but instead the girl steps over them as though they’re litter and walks to the club wall.
‘What the hell is she doing?’ breathes Stone. Loss shakes his head, his eyes never leaving the screen. The girl is shaking something in her right hand, the image blurring. She stops by the door to the club. The detectives watch her as she starts to graffiti the wall with spray paint. After the first two letters, Loss grabs the phone on his desk and dials the crime-processing division, requesting all information on a triple assault involving a flare gun in the past two weeks. He hangs up when he has the information he wants. On the screen in front of him the girl has finished writing on the wall. In letters three feet high she has sprayed:
TUESDAY
in Gothic bold print.
‘Bloody hell, sir.’ Stone is shaken by the brutality of the last few minutes. On screen, the girl walks back to the camera, looks directly through the lens, then reaches forward and turns it off. The screen goes blank, and both detectives stare at it, as if expecting something else to happen. Something to make it make sense. And then Loss taps some buttons and makes it start all over again in a pop-up window in the top right-hand corner of the monitor. The rest of the screen is taken up as he utilizes the information given to him on the phone.
‘Candy’s. It’s a pop-up drug club, last in residence,’ he says, his fingers working the keyboard, ‘just off London Bridge. St. Clements Court. Incident reported at 12.45 this morning; one dead, two blinded, probably permanently. No witnesses.’
He runs his fingers through his hair, trying to scrape his brain into top gear. Any gear.
‘I want you find any CCTV that shows the entrance to this alley. Interview the FOS officers, find out if anybody saw this girl, saw anything, and fingerprint the fire escape, just in case.’
He stops the scene on his laptop and swipes his fingers over the touchpad, re-winding a few seconds. The girl in front of him pulls the cigarette out of her mouth and throws it away. He rewinds again, pausing it just as she is pulling the cigarette out of her mouth. He can’t tell in the weird green light, but he’s pretty sure she’s smiling.
‘And find that fag …’
It was all over the news. Again.
The youths, all of whom are known by the police to be associated with the Sparrow Estate drug gangs, were found mutilated in the early hours of this morning in an alley near London Bridge. The police will not confirm that one of the youths, a Mr Simon Garth, was found dead at the scene …
Lily-Rose sips her tea and nibbles a Ryvita, tuning out the voice on the radio. Since the murder of one of the boys who raped and brutalized her, she has gained a shadow of weight to her frame. She does not think of what happened to the boy as murder. She thinks of it as redemption. Redemption for her, for her mother, and for many other girls on the estate. After the attack, the whole block went into lockdown. All the drug boys on their bikes disappeared, their handlers holding onto their gear until the trouble had settled. Lock-ups remained locked. There were no tattooed men sitting outside pubs, smoking countless contraband cigarettes and talking on cloned mobiles, their muzzled status dogs at their feet. Lily-Rose even saw a young mother pushing her child on a swing in the playground courtyard.
Lily-Rose smiles and sips her tea. Of course, the mother was young. Round here, any woman over thirty was more likely to be a grandmother than a mother. Seeing Lily-Rose smile is like seeing a flower growing in a smashed-out window. She knows that the person who attacked the boys outside Candy’s is the same person who attacked the youths who raped her. And she doesn’t have to be signed up to any of the social networks to know what is going on. It’s all over the Interweb, all over the street. She only has to look out of her window.
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,