Читать книгу Tuesday Falling - S. Williams - Страница 19

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 account, or Google+. Something. Lily-Rose had nothing. Her presence in the Interzone barely skimmed the surface. There is something odd about it, but Loss can’t quite get to grips with what it is.

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.’