Lockdown

by Peter May

  She had written some papers, and published some research. She provided a consultancy and advice service for the FSS, and her opinion had been sought more than once by investigating officers from forces outside of the Met. She had even started specialising in pattern bruising, on both the living and the dead. Tool marks, they called them – marks left by a ring in a murder case, belt buckle bruises in a rape, stabbing and incisive injuries inflicted during a fight. The principles of analysis were identical to bite mark analysis, which had always been one of her specialities, and it was possible to do it from a wheelchair. Still, her limitations were frustrating.

  But she had always tried not to give in to self pity. That would have been just too easy. And so she shrugged off her frustration and lay the first strip in place across the cheekbone of the skull. Which is when the thought first came to her, and she wondered why it hadn’t occurred to her before.

  She reached for the phone and pulled Tom’s home number from its memory, then listened as it rang at the other end.

  ‘What!’ Tom didn’t sound happy.

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Jesus, Amy, I’d just dropped off. It’s been a long shift, and I’m on again at seven tonight.’

  ‘Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Can you talk?’

  Tom put his hand over the phone and there was a muffled exchange between him and another male voice. Then the hand was removed. ‘This isn’t a good time.’

  ‘I’ll call later.’

  But he relented. ‘Was it important?’

  ‘It can wait.’

  She heard him sigh deeply. ‘Aw, shit, Amy, I’m awake now. You might as well tell me.’ His voice went ambient and he said, ‘I’m still listening. I’m just going to make a cup of tea. How’s it going with the skull?’

  ‘It’s going well.’

  ‘Given her a face yet?’

  ‘Hey, come on, I’m not that fast. It’ll be a few hours.’ She paused. ‘Tom, what tests did you order up on the bone marrow?’

  He cursed as he dropped some piece of crockery. ‘Shit!’ Another muffled exchange, then, ‘You know, in the end I didn’t think it would be worth it, Amy. I mean, anything we get from toxicology is going to be really inconclusive.’

  ‘That’s what Sam thought.’

  ‘You’ve been discussing it with Sam?’

  ‘Yeah. Is that alright?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘We thought maybe we could get a DNA sample from the marrow.’

  ‘It’s possible. I’m not sure how useful it would be though, unless we had something to compare it with.’

  ‘And I had another thought,’ Amy said. ‘We could run a virology test. PCR. See if she’d had the flu.’

  ‘Half the bloody city’s got the flu!’ Tom didn’t sound particularly impressed by her thought.

  ‘Yeah, but that might be what killed her.’

  ‘So why would anyone try to cover that up?’

  Amy shrugged to herself. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It just seemed like something we should know. I mean, the information we’re going to get from a skeleton is limited enough. We might as well find out everything we can.’

  She heard him sigh again. Then a pause. ‘Tell you what. Why don’t you call Zoe and ask her to do it? It’ll give the little bitch something to do, rather than stand smoking on the steps all day.’

  V.

  The wind had stiffened, picking up cold, damp air from the estuary and carrying it upriver into the heart of the city.

  MacNeil and Martha made their way back around the perimeter of the Dome. It had been a long hour, and then MacNeil had made them wait another fifteen minutes. There was no point in going back too soon. But in truth, it was just a way of putting off the news they didn’t want to hear. Ignorance was hope.

  A group of soldiers, rifles pressed across their chests, trotted past them at the double, young boys with frightened eyes behind army-issue gas masks designed for a biological war in Iraq which had never materialised following the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. A little further around the curve of the Dome, several gates beyond theirs, they could see the unmarked black vans lined up to take the dead to the official disposal centres. The council-run crematoriums throughout the city had been overwhelmed by numbers, and the government had set up emergency facilities to dispose of the growing backlog of bodies. There were literally thousands awaiting disposal daily, and nowhere to keep them. It was considered a health risk for bodies not to be burned within twenty-four hours. Family funerals were impossible. Even commemorative religious services were banned because of the risks of spreading infection at public gatherings. The government had promised memorial services at a later date. And so the process of grieving remained unfulfilled, and the distress amongst relatives was almost unbearable.

  The double doors at Gate C still stood open. There was a different nurse behind the desk, but she was engaged in earnest conversation with a group of orderlies, and did not look in their direction as they walked past. MacNeil led Martha through the maze, following the yellow arrows until they reached section 7B. The beds were still occupied. Four children. But Sean wasn’t one of them.

  Martha clutched MacNeil’s arm. ‘Where is he?’

  MacNeil saw a medic beyond the next partition. He was re-attaching a drip to a young girl’s arm. It was not the young man they had spoken to earlier. MacNeil grabbed him. ‘The boy who was in the right-hand bed in 7B, where is he?’

  The medic pulled his arm free, irritated by MacNeil’s aggression. He glanced back along the passage between the partitions. ‘The dark-haired kid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He died.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MacNeil stood in his son’s bedroom, looking from the window into the back garden at the swing he had assembled from a kit and concreted into the grass. He could still hear Sean shrieking in delight as MacNeil pushed him higher and higher, terrified and exhilarated at the same time. Don’t stop, Daddy, don’t stop!

  A train rumbled past the foot of the garden, beyond the high wooden fence, and the vibration of it shook the house. It was something they had stopped even noticing.

  MacNeil let the net curtain drop and turned back into the room. Posters of Arsenal players adorned the walls, a red and white scarf draped over the bedside chair, pennants hanging from a wire strung across the ceiling. In the next room, he could hear Martha sobbing, and he kicked Sean’s football at the far wall in a sudden explosion of frustration. The ball rebounded into the chest of drawers, knocking over a framed family photograph. The glass shattered. MacNeil stooped to pick it up, and shook the photo free of its broken frame. They’d had it enlarged from a snap taken on a family holiday on the Costa Brava. The three of them crouching together in the sand, a crowded beach behind them, sunlight coruscating across an impossibly blue sea. They’d asked some young woman to take it with their camera, and it had turned out to be the best picture of them they’d ever had. A moment of happiness caught forever. And lost now for eternity.

  He sat on the edge of Sean’s bed, holding the photograph in his hand, and thought of his own parents for the first time in a very long time. Somehow the loss of his child made his feud with his parents seem futile and foolish. We all had only one life, and it was too short to waste on something as destructive as anger.

  He had told himself time and again that it was not his fault, but he knew he had done nothing to bring about a rapprochement. He had never been close to his parents, and called them only occasionally from London. And when he had, there had always been a tone. Veiled barbs. How nice it was to hear from him – when what they meant was why hadn’t he called before? His mother was the master of the acid reproach delivered with a silvered smile.

  When Martha had told him she was pregnant he had delayed in telling them. He knew they would not approve. They didn’t even know that he was livin
g with someone. Sex before marriage, in their world, was a sin. And the longer he put it off, the harder it became. Until the point where he decided not to tell them until after the wedding. He and Martha had married in a London registry office with a couple of friends as witnesses.

  And when he finally told them, his parents had been mortally offended. Not just because his vows had not been taken before God, but because they had not been invited. To their own son’s wedding. And when they learned about the coming baby, and put two and two together, that had been the last straw.

  He had taken Martha and the baby north only once. A trip he had dreaded, and not without cause. The atmosphere had been awful. While his parents had fussed and fawned over their grandson, they had been cool with him, and just short of rude to Martha. The day before they left, MacNeil had had it out with them, while Martha was walking the baby in the pram. A dour, painful, prickly confrontation in which the things left unsaid had almost been worse than those spoken. He had not been back since.

  Now, as he sat on the bed his son would never sleep in again, he thought of them for the first time without anger. Remembered things he had forgotten. Things from his childhood. Laughter, kindness, safety. He had always felt safe with them, secure in a love that was real, if severe and perhaps lacking in warmth. It was very Scottish, very Presbyterian. You could feel affection, but you mustn’t show it.

  He took his mobile phone from his jacket pocket and turned it back on. It beeped and told him he had several messages. He didn’t feel inclined to hear them. Instead, he scrolled through the numbers in its memory until he found his parents’ telephone number. He should have known it, but he didn’t. It was another element in their estrangement – they had moved house after he left, and it had never felt like home to him. The house where he had grown up was home, and he harboured just the smallest resentment at their selling of it.

  He listened numbly while the phone rang in a house nearly six hundred miles away. In another time, another world. He wasn’t sure quite why he felt the need to call them, but he did. Perhaps he simply wanted to curl up into childhood again, insulated from reality, free from responsibility. His father answered the phone. Very correct, very precise, rhyming off the number in full.

  ‘Dad, it’s Jack.’

  There was a long silence at the other end. ‘Hello, Jack. To what do we owe the honour?’

  ‘Sean’s dead, Dad.’

  This time the silence was interminable. Then eventually he heard his father draw a long, slow breath. ‘I’ll get your mother,’ he said, in a very small voice.

  It was more than a minute before his mother came to the phone, and he heard the tremor in her voice as she spoke. ‘Aw, son . . .’ she said, and the tears rolled down MacNeil’s face.

  *

  Martha was in the hall when he came out of the bedroom. He knew from the way she looked at him she could tell he’d been crying.

  ‘Who were you talking to?’

  ‘Mum and Dad.’

  He saw her tense. ‘And what did they have to say?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘They didn’t suggest it was God’s way of punishing us, then?’

  He looked away. ‘No.’ They stood for a long time without saying anything. Then he said, ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Work, I suppose.’ There was more than a hint of accusation in her tone.

  ‘A little girl was murdered.’

  ‘Your son’s dead, Jack.’

  ‘I can’t change that. I can’t even find someone to blame for it.’

  She stood with her arms folded across her chest, barely in control. And then tears filled eyes already red from spilling them. ‘Stay,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Won’t.’

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t, Martha. I’m not sure there’d be any point.’ He brushed past her towards the front door. Then he stopped and turned. ‘Would there?’

  All the tension seeped out of her and she went quite limp. ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘Take the FluKill,’ he said. ‘I’ll only have to give them back tomorrow.’

  She took the bottle from her pocket and looked at it for a moment. And then she turned and strode to the bathroom at the end of the hall. She flung the door open and unscrewed the lid of the bottle, emptying its contents down the toilet. She looked back at MacNeil defiantly. ‘To hell with the fucking FluKill,’ she said. ‘I hope I catch it. I hope I die.’ And she pulled the handle, flushing away any hope of salvation.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I.

  The auricles, or external ears, were the last feature to be added to Amy’s facial approximation of the child she called Lyn.

  The mouth had taken her the longest time. Normally, the junction between the canine and the first pre-molar on either side would determine the positions of the corners of the mouth. Each lip would be equal in height to the corresponding enamel of the upper and lower anterior incisors. But in this case the cleft palate had so distorted the upper jawbone that Amy had been forced to exercise a degree of imagination, in addition to her experience, to flesh out the disfigurement of the upper lip.

  She had spent more than an hour working on it, so absorbed that it wasn’t until she moved away to look at it objectively that she felt the full shock of its ugliness. It was brutal. And if she had empathised with the child before, now her heart went out to her unreservedly.

  Gently she worked the soft tissue of the ears into place. There was no clue on the skull that made it possible to determine the size of the ears. The nose was the general guide, both to the length and position of the ears, but it could only ever be a rough estimation. The length and style of the hair was impossible, even to guess. Amy knew that Lyn would have had hair of similar colour and consistency to her own, but whether it was short or long, pigtailed or ponytailed, they would probably never know.

  Amy had always worn her hair long. It was beautiful, fine, shiny black hair, and she had always been proud of it. Until one foolish moment of drunken bravado at a party at med school, when she had taken it into her head to cut it short and spiky. Herself. It was a disaster. She had wakened the next day, hungover but sober, to look at herself aghast in the mirror. She wept for nearly an hour before going out to buy a long, black wig. But it had never sat right, and in the end she had resigned herself to the months of waiting for her own to grow back.

  She still had that wig somewhere at the back of the wardrobe in her bedroom on the floor below, and when finally she had finished the ears, she took the stair lift down to search for it. She was clutching it in her lap when she wheeled out of the bedroom to find MacNeil standing at the top of the stairs.

  At first she was startled to see him, and then immediately knew the worst.

  ‘Oh, Jack, no . . .’

  ‘Don’t come any closer,’ he said. ‘I might be carrying. I just . . . well, I couldn’t bear to tell you over the phone.’

  ‘Jack, I don’t know what to say.’ He looked so utterly helpless. Like a small boy. A big man reduced by tragedy.

  ‘There’s nothing to say.’

  And he was right. There were no words adequate to express her feelings. She wanted to show him how she felt, to hold him, the only thing she could do to offer comfort. But it was clear, even from his body language, that he didn’t want her anywhere near him.

  ‘Have you told Laing?’

  He shook his head. ‘He’s been leaving messages on my voicemail for the last three hours.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I really need to go.’

  ‘You’re not thinking of going back to work?’ She was shocked.

  ‘What else is there for me to do, Amy? I need a focus. Something to stop me thinking, a reason to go on.’ He glanced up the stairs. ‘Have you finished her yet?’

  ‘The first rough. I was going to try an old wig of mine on her.’ She held it up. ‘Do you want
to see?’

  *

  He stood at the far side of the attic room and watched as Amy leaned forward, placing the wig on the head she had fashioned on the table by the window. She took a full minute, adjusting and arranging before finally she was satisfied, and the electric motor of her wheelchair whined and propelled her to one side, revealing the child.

  For a moment, MacNeil was shocked by the graphic disfigurement of the upper lip, and then his eyes saw beyond it to the face of a child. A face full of innocence and youth. Rounder than Amy’s, a flatter brow, perhaps a distinctive racial subtype. And somehow Amy had given her life, captured her spirit from somewhere amongst all those bones. Bones MacNeil had picked through in a leather holdall in a London park at first light. Sean had still been alive then, and MacNeil had had a reason to put one foot in front of the other. He knew now that he wanted to find this little girl’s killer more than anything else on earth.

  *

  As he was leaving, his phone went. He glanced at the display and saw that it was Phil, the Scenes of Crime officer who had shown him the Underground ticket recovered from the site in Archbishop’s Park. He took the call.

  ‘Jack, I called the office, but they said you hadn’t been around for a few hours.’

  ‘What is it, Phil?’

  ‘We got a date off that magnetic strip. No idea how significant it might be. It was October fifteenth. Just a couple of weeks before the emergency.’

  MacNeil couldn’t think how the date might be relevant. He glanced up to see Amy watching him from the top of the stairs. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Well, no. We managed to lift a partial thumbprint off the front side of it. Enough to make a match, if we can find one. We’re running it through the AFIS now.’ It seemed a lot to ask that a partial thumbprint recovered from a three-month-old discarded Underground ticket found on a building site would lead them anywhere. But if its owner was on the computer, the national Automated Fingerprint Identification System would match them up pretty fast.

  MacNeil hung up and opened the door. ‘Jack.’ Amy’s voice made him turn in the doorway. Her face was creased with anxiety. ‘Take your FluKill now. Don’t wait to see if you’re going to have symptoms.’