Lockdown

by Peter May

  MacNeil tilted his head gently back against the brick and breathed deeply. He felt something like hysteria slip slowly over him, like a shroud. Everything seemed somehow out of control. His life, the city, his job, this investigation. It was as if he were being swept along on a tide of events he was powerless to affect. He was tired. He had barely slept the night before, and he had been on duty now for nearly fifteen hours. If he closed his eyes, he could sleep. Right here on the pavement, with a dead man at his feet.

  But there was an anger in him, a tiny voice that screamed and raged inside, and he knew it would never let him sleep. In the distance he heard gunfire, and the far-off echo of voices raised in anger. Like the one in his head. He crawled forward on his knees and dragged on a pair of latex gloves to start going through Kazinski’s pockets. There was a wallet with an ID card, some bank notes, and a pouch with some loose change. A bunch of keys in his trouser pocket. Cigarettes and a lighter in his jacket. Nothing remotely helpful.

  MacNeil looked at the wallet again. There was a zip pocket in the back of it. He fumbled with big fingers to open it up. There were some receipts in there from better times. A couple of restaurant bills, a till receipt from a bar. And a dog-eared business card. MacNeil tilted it to try to catch what light there was, and ran a finger over the red embossed lettering. Jonathan Flight, Sculptor, it read in curlicued script. It had the address of a gallery in South Kensington.

  MacNeil knew the name. The arts columns of the broadsheets had been full of him last year, and some of his work had been controversial enough to make the tabloids, where MacNeil had read about him. He specialised in grotesque, often overtly sexual body sculpture. A headless man with his erect penis partially inserted in the anus of a female torso. A woman with one arm missing, holding her severed breast in her remaining hand. A facial sculpture whose smile stripped away flesh to reveal teeth and jaw. MacNeil could not imagine who might buy stuff like that, or who would want it in their homes. But his exhibitions attracted thousands, and his work sold for tens of thousands.

  He wondered what someone like Kazinski was doing with Flight’s business card in his wallet, or what his connection had been with the Black Ice Club. The only thing that linked them was extreme art, and Kazinski did not seem to MacNeil like either a connoisseur or a collector. He slipped the card into an inside pocket, zipped up the wallet and returned it to Kazinski’s jacket. He sat back against the wall again and pulled off the latex. His head was pounding less severely now, but he ran his hand down the side of his face and felt a swelling on his cheek and knew that he would be black and blue by morning.

  He sat for several minutes before deciding to do something he would never have contemplated in another life. He was going to leave Kazinski there on the pavement. He was dead. There was nothing that could be done for him. And if MacNeil called it in, he would spend the rest of his shift tied up in red tape. In eight hours he would walk out of the door of Kennington Police Station for the last time. And if he hadn’t found the little girl’s killer by then, he was pretty sure no one else would. So there was no time for red tape. This investigation had become something of an obsession. And he was about to cross a line into uncharted territory. A world alien to him, outside of the law, where he would be all alone. With just his angry voice for company.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Pinkie cruised west on Piccadilly towards Hyde Park Corner. He kept his eyes on the red tail lights at the far end of the boulevard, the faintest of pinpricks shining back through the darkness ahead of him. He had extinguished his headlights, and could see perfectly well by the light of the streetlamps. If he was stopped by soldiers he would simply say he was trying to avoid attracting attention. Private vehicles were being attacked in the street by looters every night.

  He had a niggling sense that all was not well, and suspected he might know where it was MacNeil was headed. Although how he could have made that connection was a mystery to him. Pinkie could not imagine that Kazinski would have told him.

  Poor Kazinski. If only he had burned the bones as he had been paid to do, none of this would be happening. Pinkie would be at home, back in his real world life, where his mother would be preparing supper. Kazinski would still be alive. As would those kids in South Lambeth. And the old lady on the Isle of Dogs. All because the stupid little bastard hadn’t done what he promised he would do.

  Pinkie shook his head. It was extraordinary. One simple failure, one unscripted act, and look at the chaos that ensued. Spiralling out of control. This is what happened when you didn’t see a job through to the end. How in the name of God was it all going to finish?

  The mobile phone on the seat beside him began to ring. He reached across and pressed the green answer button and clamped it to his ear. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, Pinkie, how’s it going?’ Mr Smith had such a restful voice. Pinkie could listen to it all day. Even though he knew it was just a veneer, a smoothing over of the turmoil beneath.

  ‘Kazinski’s dead, Mr Smith.’

  He heard the pleasure in Mr Smith’s voice. ‘Well done, Pinkie. That should be an end of it, then.’

  ‘I hope so, Mr Smith.’

  But Mr Smith clearly detected the reserve in Pinkie’s response. ‘Why do you only hope so, Pinkie?’

  ‘Because the cop got to him first. They had quite a tête-à-tête.’ That was French, Pinkie knew, and he wondered if Mr Smith would be impressed. ‘I don’t know what he told him. Could have been anything.’

  Mr Smith was silent for a long time.

  ‘Hello? Mr Smith? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m still here, Pinkie. What are you doing now?’

  ‘I’m following the cop. Looks like he might be heading for South Ken.’

  Another silence, then, ‘Do you think he knows?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, Mr Smith.’ He paused. ‘Something odd, though.’

  ‘What’s that, Pinkie?’

  ‘He never called it in. Kazinski’s murder. Just left him lying there on the pavement.’

  ‘I think our Mr MacNeil might be a little out of control, Pinkie. Which could make him very dangerous.’

  ‘How do you mean, out of control? Why would he be out of control?’

  ‘It’s his last day, Pinkie. He quits the force at the end of his shift. And it’s been an emotional day for him. He lost his son.’

  Pinkie frowned. ‘Lost his son?’

  ‘He died, Pinkie. The flu. Policemen’s kids are just as likely to get it as anyone else.’

  ‘Aw, shit.’ Pinkie focused on the distant pinpricks of red light, and now they signalled only grief. ‘That’s a shame, Mr Smith,’ he said. And meant it. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Keep following him, Pinkie. Do what you feel you have to. And keep me informed.’

  Mr Smith hung up, and Pinkie felt unaccountably sad. He wondered how his own father might have felt if he had died of the flu when he was just a kid. If his father had known he existed. If he had known who his father was. His mother, he knew, would have been bereft.

  Kids didn’t deserve to die. They hadn’t done enough bad things yet to deserve it. What harm had that poor little girl done anyone? None of it had been her fault, but she was the one that Mr Smith blamed. She’d got on his wrong side. And the wrong side of Mr Smith was not a good place to be.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Amy sat out on the metal balcony at the back of the apartment looking down on to the empty concourse below. It was cold, and she had a travelling rug wrapped around her shoulders to keep her warm. But the fresh air was good, and she had left the French windows open to let it blow through the top floor. The skull still smelled. And although she had wrapped it in several plastic bags and taken it down to the bottom landing, it had left an unpleasant odour lingering in the air.

  She loved to sit out here on summer evenings, screened from the gaze of her neighbours by the w
isteria she had trained to grow all around it. On long, lazy summer afternoons it was a sun trap, and in the evenings it was fanned by the cooling movement of the air. A delicious retreat from life, a place to forget.

  Now the wisteria was naked and gnarled, providing no kind of a screen, and it was hard to believe that fresh growth would appear in the spring, cascades of lovely purple flowers falling all around the railings, drawing the first honeybees of the year in search of nectar. This was only her second winter since the accident, and that first year she had found November through March to be the hardest months. Cold days when you wanted to be out walking, striding out with the wind in your face, the cold sting of rain on your cheeks. Hurrying home for a bowl of hot soup, curtains drawn against the night, curled up on the settee with a good book and a glass of soft red wine.

  And here she was, huddled bleakly in her wheelchair, cold and depressed and letting dark thoughts creep in to cloud her usual sunny disposition. Her heart bled for MacNeil, and wept for the memory of the young man who had died at the wheel of his car that fateful night just thirty months ago. The young man she was to have married. The young man whose baby she’d been carrying.

  It had been just seven days since the test proved positive. They had already decided to marry, and so it was just one more reason for celebration. They couldn’t have been happier. Perhaps that’s why fate had dealt them such a cruel blow. They had dared to be so happy. Happier than anyone else they knew. Happiness had radiated from every pore. She had been so happy she glowed. She couldn’t stop smiling. Had anyone ever been happier in the history of the human race?

  David had drunk only mineral water that night. He was driving, he said, and he had responsibilities now that he was to be a father. Amy had kept him company. She was pregnant. No alcohol for mum until after the baby was born. And then they could celebrate. Champagne to wet the baby’s head.

  How ironic that it should have been a drunk driver whose car ploughed into the side of theirs at the junction. Straight through the traffic lights on red. Experts called to give evidence at the trial judged that he had been doing more than sixty. Even more ironic that he had walked away unscathed. In another three years he would be out of prison, with most of his life still ahead of him, able-bodied and fit. A job waiting for him in his father’s business. A forgiving family.

  Amy found it difficult to forgive, but she had tried hard not to let it make her bitter. She had lost so much else, that to lose that core of sunshine that lit her personality would have plunged her into a dark world, depressed and defeated, and unable to face the challenges ahead. Challenges that would need all her reserves of courage and resolve and optimism.

  But tonight she wasn’t sure how much deeper she could dig into those reserves. She grasped the controller on the arm of her wheelchair and manoeuvred herself back into the attic of the warehouse, closing the French windows behind her and drawing the curtains against the night. Time, she thought, for a glass of red wine to cheer herself up. She went to the kitchen and poured herself one. If only now she could curl up on the settee with a good book.

  The electric motor whined as she crossed the floor to gaze for the umpteenth time at the little girl whose face she had recreated. She wasn’t sure about the hair. Something told her – instinct, the thing that MacNeil so hated when it came to analysis of evidence – that Lyn would suit her hair short. Not a bob cut. Something more primal – ragged and spiky. After all, a child from a developing country would not have had access to a stylist. And yet she had been here in London. Living here, perhaps. But not long enough, certainly, for a change of diet to affect her teeth. And there had been no surgery attempted to fix her lip.

  Was she adopted? If so, who were her adoptive parents? Hadn’t they reported her missing? Questions, questions, questions. They had been rattling around her head all evening. An attempt, she recognised, to stop her dwelling on other things. But there had been no answers. Only flights of fancy. Speculation. Assumption. She knew no more now than she had this morning.

  The phone rang and she crossed the room to answer it.

  ‘Amy, it’s Zoe.’

  ‘Hi, Zoe.’ Amy glanced at the time. It was after eleven. ‘You’re not still at the lab?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You should have been home before the curfew.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m stuck here now, aren’t I? And it’s all your fault.’

  Amy gasped her indignation. ‘My fault! How?’

  ‘You asked me to run a virology test on the bone marrow Dr Bennet recovered from the skeleton of the little girl.’

  ‘You’ve done a PCR test already?’

  ‘I did more than that.’ She sounded pleased with herself. ‘I recovered not only the virus, but the RNA coding.’

  Amy experienced momentary confusion. ‘What? You mean you’re telling me she had the flu?’

  ‘She sure did. And the virus I recovered is definitely infectious. I mean, the pure RNA alone is still infectious. But the RNA and protein together, well, that’s sheer dynamite.’

  ‘Jesus, Zoe,’ Amy said, alarmed. ‘You should be working in a Level Three lab with infectious material like that.’

  ‘Yeah, probably.’ There was a hint of a yawn at the other end of the phone.

  ‘You don’t have lab three facilities there.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘But you used lab three precautions, right?’

  ‘Well, not exactly.’

  ‘Zoe!’ Amy was shocked. ‘You stupid idiot!’

  ‘Hey, keep your hair on, Amy. It’s cool. Honest. I know what I’m doing. I could have done it in my kitchen.’

  Amy was furious. ‘Is Dr Bennet there?’

  ‘He’s got a couple of autopsies.’

  ‘Well, get him to call me as soon as he’s free.’

  ‘Aw, come on, Amy, you’ll get me into trouble.’

  ‘You should be in trouble, Zoe. You could infect yourself. You could infect everybody in the building.’

  ‘It’s all locked down and safe as houses. Honest.’ She paused, nursing her silent resentment at Amy’s anger. ‘So I suppose you won’t want to know what else I found, then?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Hah. Got your interest now, haven’t I?’

  ‘Zoe . . .’ Amy’s voice carried its own warning.

  ‘It’s not real.’

  Amy heard the words, but she didn’t understand them. ‘What do you mean it’s not real?’

  ‘The flu virus. It’s not the H5N1 mutant that’s killing everyone. It’s been genetically engineered.’

  Amy was having difficulty taking on board the implications of what Zoe was saying. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Well, it’s all just code, right? When you boil it right down to basics, any virus is just a series of letters – code words. And somebody left some words in the code that shouldn’t be there. I mean, for example, you would find the words Stu I AGGCCT and Sma CCCGGG in synthetic polio. And you know these create a restriction site that is easily recognised by treating the DNA copy of the virus RNA with a battery of restriction enzymes that cut the DNA at that site.’

  ‘Woah! Jesus, Zoe, hold on! Speak English.’

  ‘I thought I was.’

  ‘Okay, think molecular genetics for idiots.’

  She heard Zoe sighing at the other end of the phone. ‘People have been collecting library sequence banks for the flu virus for years. I’ve got them all on file. Took only a few minutes on my laptop to compare the RNA of the virus we got from the girl with the sequence banks on the hard drive. The introduced restriction sites stood out like a sore thumb. I’m telling you, that kid didn’t just have any old garden-variety flu. She had a twenty-four carat, genetically engineered humdinger.’

  Amy sat for a moment replaying what Zoe had just told her. None of it made any sense. ‘Is that what killed h
er?’ she asked. ‘This man-made flu?’

  Zoe blew air through her lips three miles away across town. ‘I haven’t got the first idea.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I.

  MacNeil turned past the deserted South Kensington tube station into Old Brompton Road. The Lamborghini London franchise had been cleaned out long ago. The showroom windows were smashed; the floor space beyond, which had once been graced by some of the most expensive cars in the world, was empty and exposed to the elements. The Royal Bank of Scotland next door was all boarded up, its vaults cleared out by the bank itself and transferred to more secure premises. There was no point in the looters trying to break in, and so they had taken out their frustrations in a multicoloured display of graffiti comprising even more colourful language.

  The bench in the tiny triangle of parkland at the road junction was normally inhabited by two or more drunks congregating to share their misery, to drink from cans in paper bags and fill the air with their cigarette smoke and hollow laughter. To MacNeil’s shame, he had almost always heard a Scots voice amongst them. But they were long gone. The soup kitchens were closed, and men raddled by years of drink were easy prey for H5N1.

  There was less damage here than in the city centre, less evidence of looting. Old Brompton Road was largely residential with small shops at street level. Pizza Organic, Mail Boxes Etc., Waterstones. Poor pickings compared to the big stores downtown. And no self-respecting looter was going to be seen dead breaking into a bookshop. Still, most of the shops were boarded up, and there were few lights on in the windows of the flats and offices above.

  MacNeil dropped down to second gear and cruised slowly along the street checking the numbers. He found Flight’s gallery on the corner of Cranley Place, next door to the steel-shuttered Café Lazeez. The windows of the gallery had been boarded up, and then pasted over with layer upon layer of peeling bill posters advertising everything from mail-order art to underground concerts in unnamed locations. There was some sort of crest above the door on the corner, and in Cranley Place itself, an entrance to the apartments above the gallery.