get from below; the sub-rumble of machinery beneath your feet; and the feeling of above-ground time slipping away. This late at night it’s beginning to close down. The only people about are the drunks and the hustlers, each of them trying to get to somewhere that doesn’t exist. I love the feel of the underground when it’s almost empty: it’s like sneaking inside a machine. Gusts of warm air come at you unexpectedly, and if you put your hand to the walls you can feel a quiet throbbing. For such a massive structure to be so empty, it’s as if all the people have been stolen.
Which of course they have. They just don’t know it.
Sometimes my brain slows down and ticks gently, nothing going in, nothing going out. Just ticking. The Mayor is talking about opening some stations twenty-four hours. Non-stop progress to nowhere. Skeleton crews on a shadow train.
I make sure that the cameras spot me in London Bridge, and then again at Bank. But after that, I’m a ghost in the machine.
I’ve got stuff to do.
I hobo from Bank to Oxford Circus on the Central line. The train is one of the old ones, pre S-class, so I can crank down the window at the end of the carriage, filling my head with noise. From the connecting tunnel off the platform, I go through the maintenance door that joins the network to one of the tunnels under Oxford Street. Under the big stores.
I’m sure you must’ve wondered, when you’ve been in these massive department stores there, with their floors and floors of stuff. Where does it all come from? I mean, this is central London, not some robot dormitory town with mega aircraft hangars of retail space. All these shops, with thousands of people buying shit every day, where does it all get stored?
You’ve probably guessed, haven’t you?
All these stores, with their five or six floors of stuff, also have three or four floors below street level: a mirror store underground. For every object on display there are at least two or three stored in one of the basements. And coming off the basements are dozens of tunnels. And this isn’t just in one store. This is all the stores. It’s a wonder Oxford Street hasn’t collapsed in on itself. There’s practically nothing left under there. It’s like an ants’ nest.
I first heard about these tunnels when I was still living above, on the street. One of the people I hung out with was signed up to a shadow agency; a rip-off shop for immigrants and street rats, and was trying to get me to join. It was coming up to Christmas, and he had got some work in the basements of whatever the shop was called – Miss Selfish, Marks and Render, CockShop, who cares? – cataloguing the clothes and hanging them on racks
‘You wouldn’t believe it!’ he said to me in the café one night. ‘They’ve got racks a mile long! They’ve got whole tunnels full of racks!’
And it’s not just clothes. It’s hardware, too. They have to have air conditioning down there, so that stuff doesn’t rot or rust.
He’s dead now, the person who told me this stuff. I didn’t kill him. He shoved a bullet up his nose in the shape of cheap brown skag.
Never mind. Lie down.
The only lock on the maintenance door is the one I put there, but I check the traps just in case. I’ve got a camera set to detect any movement made by something bigger than a rat, and a pulse ‘disorientator’, which emits a 400-lumen strobe of light that’ll make your eyes bleed, should I need a quick getaway with no follow. I’ve got low-tack adhesive sprayed on both sides of the door with a layer of calcium-dust that’ll show a hand print if someone has touched it, and I’ve got a scary bio-hazard sign proclaiming ‘contaminated waste’, because sometimes a sign is all you need for a security guard who gets paid fuck-all on a zero-hour contract.
Once I’m in the tunnels I head for the one that contains the stuff I need. The tunnels are lit by low-watt festoon lighting and there are large pools of darkness between each light. Unlike the underground, these tunnels are red brick instead of white tiles, but they’re still teeny-tiny. Seriously, if I weren’t who I am, this thing with the tiny bricks would begin to seriously creep me out.
Finally, I come to the tunnel I want, and begin packing up the stuff I need.
DI Loss hasn’t had a lot of sleep. His suit is crumpled, and worn continuously for so many hours it has begun to smell of the cigarette brand he used to smoke. His hair is greasy and his skin has a lived-in look as though it needs to be cleaned. Possibly just replaced. Rain is slithering down his window as if it wants to be somewhere else. DI Loss doesn’t blame it. He’d be somewhere else if he could. The overhead fluorescent light in his office is making his eyes hurt, and that whine in his brain from too little sleep is making it hard for him to concentrate.
He misses his computer; it has been taken away to be analysed. The computer has pictures of his daughter on it. Their absence is a physical pain; he has so few pictures of her. He has no pictures of his wife.
Loss leans back in his chair and sighs heavily. DS Stone, sitting opposite, wonders if her boss will make it through the day.
‘OK,’ Loss stares at the window, but not out of it. ‘Tell me what we do know.’
‘Well, the good news is that Candy’s has been under surveillance by the Drugs Unit for some time; first in Docklands, and then later at London Bridge, and we have clear video footage of the entrance to St Clements Court right through the night in question.’
Loss is staring at the rain leaking past his office. He wishes he could close his eyes, but every time he does he thinks he’s going to fall over.
‘And the bad news?’
‘At 12.45 on Sunday morning, the officers on duty in the van witnessed two youths staggering out of St Clements Court, clutching their faces. The officers ran to assist, and upon discovering what appeared to be foul play, reported the incident and called for back-up.’
Loss looks at his DS and raises his eyebrows.
‘Foul play? You’re going with “foul play”?’
‘Absolutely.’
He feels unutterably weary. He misses smoking and sleeping and sunshine, but most of all, he misses his daughter. He waves his hand in the general direction of his DS, urging her to continue.
‘Still waiting for the bad news,’ he says.
‘Once another unit had arrived, the officers carried out a search. They found one youth, dead, who had been shot through the eye at close range with an antique crossbow bolt, and a large piece of graffiti, still wet, proclaiming one word: ‘Tuesday’. There were no other persons found in the alley, which is a dead end. The only exit was under all-night video surveillance. The officers took photos of the deceased, and the graffiti.’
Stone spins her laptop round for him to see. It’s the report from the surveillance officers, including pictures of the dead boy. Images of the video sent to his computer slices through his vision.
‘The club door?’ he asks.
‘Could only be opened from the inside. Apparently there was some form of knocking code.’
‘Very
