Tuesday Falling. S. Williams
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Название: Tuesday Falling
Автор: S. Williams
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Полицейские детективы
isbn: 9780008132743
isbn:
From out of another case the antiquarian produces a slim box and places it on the display glass in front of the detectives. When he opens it Loss feels a slick of saliva flood his mouth. Inside are two scythes, identical to the ones he’d last seen separating flesh from bone on a tube train, not very far from here. Beside him his DS gives a sharp intake of breath. Loss sways slightly.
‘Steady on, old chap.’ Mr Brooks places a concerned hand on the DI’s arm.
‘Where did you get them?’
‘These are one of two sets I brought back with me from Burma. Actually, it’s quite remarkable to find one pair in such good condition, let alone two.’
Loss can’t take his eyes off the knives, at the wicked curve of them, and the way they seem to sliver the light into flat silver snakes.
‘And who did you sell the other set to?’
Mr Brooks strokes the knives gently, as if he is putting them to sleep.
‘Why, the British Museum.’
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.
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