Tuesday Falling Read Online Free PDF Page B

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, making a small squeaking sound.
    Then Lily-Rose goes back to bed.

21
    Well I think I’ve probably got everybody’s attention now.
    After my little bit of business at London Bridge I pack my gear away. Stuff my wig in my bag, reverse my shirt, and ghost through the underground. I use my pre-loaded Oyster card, topped up with cash. I used to clone it, but now, with the new high-resolution cameras focused on the turnstiles, you’re more likely to be spotted.
    I head down the escalator for the city branch of the Northern line. I love going down the escalators: the little push of pressure you 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