Lockdown

by Peter May

  Pinkie knew he could not have survived in prison. Of course, they had never charged him. He had killed a man to protect his mother, and the authorities had deemed in any case that he was too young to accept any legal responsibility for his actions. But later, when he had started doing it for pleasure, and money, he knew that should he ever be caught he would have to take his own life, too. He could never be shut away in a confined space like that for days, weeks, years, the door locked – as it always had been in the cupboard under the stairs. The breathlessness would have crushed him.

  He wasn’t feeling so good now. Fluid was gathering around him on the floor. He felt nauseous and weak. His muscles were seizing up. He knew that the computer screen was casting light on his face, and that if he turned to his right he would see his reflection in the window which looked out on to the queuing area. But he did not want to see what he looked like. He wanted to remember himself as he had been the last time he looked in the mirror. He knew he wasn’t handsome – he had never harboured such illusions – but he’d had good, strong features. He couldn’t bear to see himself as he was now.

  The gurgling in his chest was getting worse. It was becoming harder to breathe. Where was Mr Smith? He should have been here long ago as arranged in their exchange of texts on the dead soldier’s phone. Pinkie looked out of the window. All the floodlit towers and spires of the Houses of Parliament pierced the black sky on the far side of the river, reflecting in the slow, steady flow of black water. A noise to his left made him turn, and there was Mr Smith, finally, standing in the doorway looking at him open-mouthed, eyes wide with horror. And Pinkie was reminded again of how he looked to others.

  ‘Who – who the hell are you?’ Mr Smith said uncertainly.

  Pinkie tried very hard to make what was left of his mouth form his name. ‘Sssphhh . . . phinkie,’ he said.

  Mr Smith gaped at him in disbelief. ‘Pinkie?’ Pinkie nodded. ‘Holy Mother of God,’ Mr Smith whispered. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Chhh . . . car crash.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  Pinkie could see in his eyes that Mr Smith knew he was going to die. But he was here, wasn’t he? He was going to finish the job. He had never started anything he couldn’t finish. He reached over to swing the black bin bag across the control room to his employer, and Mr Smith looked inside. Pinkie saw him flinch from the smell. The bones were still ripe.

  ‘Is that everything?’ Mr Smith asked.

  Pinkie nodded.

  ‘Good. Can you still walk?’

  Pinkie nodded again.

  ‘I want you to go with the girl up to the top. MacNeil is on his way. As long as she is up there out of his reach, I’ve got something to bargain with. Are you up to it?’

  *

  Amy sat silently on the slatted wooden bench, staring bleakly out at the Thames. It was hard to believe that the burned man was still alive. She knew that he could not survive for very much longer. He was losing so much fluid it was amazing he could still stand. She wondered what could possibly drive him to do what he was doing. Surely he knew that he was going to die?

  A tense silence had settled between her and Tom. He had made that phone call to her knowing full well that she was being lured into a trap. Trust me, he had said. And she had. Only to be rewarded with deceit and betrayal.

  ‘I had no choice,’ he’d told her. ‘It was you or Harry.’

  ‘So you chose me.’

  He’d turned away then, guilt in the very way he held himself. And there had been nothing more to say.

  There was a phssss of pneumatic pistons, and the end of the pod split open as the doors at the landing stage side disengaged and slid apart. Tom stood up. ‘There’s two of them now,’ he said.

  Amy could see the silhouettes of two men approaching the pod. The burned man could barely walk, but he was still carrying his SA80. He stepped up into the pod, followed by a man who looked vaguely familiar. He wasn’t tall. He had cropped fair hair and unusually dark eyebrows. Silver-rimmed oval glasses. His face looked drained of blood, and he was clearly tense.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Tom asked, and Amy could hear fear crack his voice.

  The man with the glasses ignored him. He looked at Amy, and then turned to the burned man. ‘Where’s the other one?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tom said. ‘Where’s Harry? You promised he would be safe.’

  If Pinkie could have smiled, he would. ‘Dead,’ he said, and he didn’t need lips to form the word. It came out of his mouth as clear as day.

  There was just a moment of silence before a dreadful, feral howl escaped Tom’s lips. He lunged across the pod at Pinkie. A short, deafening burst of fire from the semi-automatic rifle spat half a dozen bullets deep into the pathologist’s chest, nearly lifting him off his feet. Blood spattered all over the glass, and Tom hit the floor with a shuddering finality. Amy screamed. She could not believe what she was seeing. He might have betrayed her, but she still loved him. You didn’t just wipe out twelve years with a single phone call. And yet suddenly he was dead. There was no going back. No saying sorry. No fixing things. The burned man had killed him in a moment. He was gone forever. Life might be hard. But death was so frighteningly easy.

  The man with the glasses held his head in his hands, fingers pressed to his temples.

  ‘For God’s sake, Pinkie! You nearly burst my ear drums!’ And then he glanced anxiously across the Thames, wondering perhaps if the gunfire had been audible at any of the checkpoints on the north bank. But most of the sound of it had been contained within the capsule.

  ‘What do you want?’ Amy screamed at him.

  The man turned towards her. ‘I want you to shut up,’ he said tersely. ‘Pinkie’s going to take you up top. I need you as a bargaining chip in my discussions with Mr MacNeil. And I want you well out of his reach. Any trouble, and Pinkie will push you out.’

  Amy closed her eyes. The nightmare had just got worse. If that was possible. She would be trapped in this pod 443 feet above London with a horribly burned psychopath whose remit was to push her out if negotiations on the ground went badly. And there was nothing she could do about it. The only faint ray of hope was that MacNeil knew she was here, and that he was on his way.

  She said to the man, ‘What are you going to trade me for?’

  ‘Any remaining evidence that might implicate me in the death of little Choy.’

  It was the first time that Amy had heard her name. She had got so used to thinking of her as Lyn, it came as a shock to hear her real name. ‘Choy,’ she said. ‘You killed her?’ The man said nothing, and Amy said, ‘MacNeil will never agree.’

  ‘Then I’ll kill him, too.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have the guts to kill a serving police officer.’

  ‘If I can kill a ten-year-old child and strip the flesh from her bones, I can kill a policeman.’

  Amy shook her head, trying to stop the tremor in her voice, trying to appear calm and defiant when fear had turned her insides to mush. ‘There’s one big difference.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Ten-year-old girls can’t fight back.’ She hoped she had managed to convey the contempt she felt.

  He turned away, stepping over Tom’s body and out on to the landing stage. He paused, then, and turned back to Pinkie. ‘The green button on the right?’

  Pinkie nodded, and the man walked away to the control hut. After a moment, there was a slight judder, and then slowly they began to move. Amy clutched the edge of her seat and looked up through the roof of the pod. She could see the huge spokes start to turn, and a strange sense of weightlessness as their capsule moved forward, lifting as it went, starting its long, gradual ascent to the top of the wheel.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  There were voices calling in the night. They could hear the sound of running feet. The beams of torches crossed and criss-crossed in the dark. There was
no way back.

  Several vehicles were pulled up outside the park in Saunders Ness Road, motors running, headlights blazing, turning night into day. Somehow the man guarding the foot tunnel had got free, or someone had come to relieve him and found him bound and gagged. The alarm had been raised. Someone had got on to the island. Someone who might be carrying the flu. MacNeil knew, now, they would be shot on sight. Panic was a great dissipater of the rational.

  He grabbed Dr Castelli’s wrist, and they ran back along Ferry Road. Her sensible shoes clattered resoundingly in the night. Excitement raised voices behind them. A motor gunned, and they heard the squeal of tyres.

  ‘Get rid of the shoes!’ MacNeil told her, and half-hopping, half-running, she plucked the shoes from her feet, each in turn, and threw them away across the road. He dragged her off the street, down an alleyway between brick bungalows with shallow pitched roofs. He saw a street sign. Livingstone Place. Lights were going on in houses everywhere. Someone was screaming, ‘Intruders! Intruders!’

  MacNeil was starting to panic. They ran past neat little gardens behind well-trimmed hedges, more light falling on to manicured lawns.

  Someone shouted, ‘There they are!’ A shot rang out. MacNeil heard the bullet ricocheting off brick somewhere very close by.

  Someone else shouted, ‘Don’t shoot, for Chrissake! We’ll be shooting each other.’ There were more feet running now out in the street behind them.

  They reached the end of the alley and turned into a riverfront walkway. It was about a hundred yards long. And blocked at each end. They were trapped.

  ‘Excuse my French,’ Dr Castelli said. ‘But oh, fuck!’

  MacNeil peered over the wall, down to the river. The tide was washing in against a couple of yards of mud flat and rock, breaking fluorescent all along the river’s edge.

  Dr Castelli looked at him. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘No choice,’ MacNeil told her. ‘If they catch us, they’ll shoot us.’

  She dropped down first and landed ankle-deep in the mud. He landed beside her and fell to his knees. Mud sucked at his feet as he staggered upright and grabbed her arm, pulling her in flat against the wall.

  Voices and torches streamed out along the top of the wall above them. Beams of cold white light panned across the mud inches in front of them and then vanished. ‘They’re not here!’ someone called, and the footsteps immediately receded, running back up the alley towards the road. ‘Search the gardens!’

  ‘Now,’ MacNeil whispered, and still holding Dr Castelli’s wrist, pulled her after him along the edge of the wall. It was heavy going, through mud reluctant to let each footstep go. And then they reached a rocky outcrop and it became easier. The wall curved away to their right, apartments overhanging the retaining wall above them. There were dozens of lights now, shining out from windows across the water. It seemed as if everyone on this southern tip of the Isle of Dogs was awake. And looking for them. They clambered over rocks and boulders and the jetsam washed up by the tides, the refuse of a society careless with its world, until ahead of them they saw the dark shape of the old Felstead Wharf extending into the water.

  They reached the safety of the deep shadow it cast along the riverbank, and found steps leading up. On the wharf itself, they felt exposed again. They could hear voices somewhere beyond the apartment blocks. Windows everywhere were filled with light. On the far side of the wharf, more steps led down to a small jetty. An ancient, tiny, two-person speed boat was tied up there, rising and falling gently on the swell. MacNeil knew it was their only chance of getting off the island.

  Dr Castelli ran after him down the steps, and MacNeil jumped into the boat, sending it rocking dangerously. He ripped off the dash and looked at the bewildering spaghetti of coloured wiring that he had exposed. This was something he ought to know how to do. But he’d always been on the right side of the law. There had to be a logic to it, though, and he tried following the wires back to the ignition lock.

  Dr Castelli pushed him out of the way. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Let me. Where I came from we used to steal cars for fun on a Saturday night.’

  She quickly established the circuit logic and ripped out a green and then a red wire, exposing their frayed, silver ends. She touched them together and the motor coughed and died. ‘Shit,’ she said. It wouldn’t take many failed attempts to attract the whole of the island to the wharf.

  MacNeil reached across her and pulled out the choke. ‘Try again,’ he said.

  This time the engine fired and caught. She twisted the ends of the wires expertly together, establishing permanent contact, and then let him in behind the wheel. The motor was sluggish, and MacNeil pushed the choke in a touch, before gunning it hard. Diesel smoke and the smell of it filled the air.

  ‘Untie her!’ he shouted, and the doctor leaned over to slip the loop of tethering rope over the top of its wooden capstan. MacNeil engaged the gear, grabbed the wheel and pulled back on the throttle. The front of the boat lifted dramatically as the water behind them churned white, and they slewed out from the shadow of the wharf into the main drag of the river.

  Behind them, they heard voices raised in anger, and then several shots. MacNeil ducked instinctively, and saw tiny plumes of white raised from the Thames by bullets aimed in their direction. He wondered why they were bothering. If he and the doctor had brought the flu with them, then it was too late now anyway.

  He sent the boat weaving towards the far bank, out of range of the rifles on the island, and turned and called back to the doctor, ‘We’ll be quicker to take the boat all the way. There’s a pier at the Eye.’ She nodded, and as they reached the South Bank, he turned north to traverse the loop of the river, keeping his distance from the Isle of Dogs which was waking up in fear across the water.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I.

  The lights of the city spread out below them, an irregular hotchpotch of jumbled boroughs crowding one on top of the other around the serpentining eastward progress of the Thames. The Houses of Parliament, the controversial Portcullis House, the concrete iceberg that was the Ministry of Defence – two-thirds of it hidden underground. Away to their right, the lights of St. Thomas’ Hospital, and beyond it the building site in Archbishop’s Park, where Choy’s bones had been uncovered just twenty-four hours earlier, setting in train the unpredictable sequence of events which had led inexorably to this. Work had begun again after a short overnight break, and workers moved around like tiny orange ants beneath the arc lights. Too far away to help. Even if they were to look up towards the wheel, it was unlit, and moving too slowly to attract attention.

  Amy watched as the capsule which had been above them throughout their ascent reached its apex and started dipping away beneath them. Their pod sat proud now on the very top of this giant wheel, cold pre-dawn air whipping around its open doors. It whistled through all the spokes, whining amongst the cables, almost as if it were alive and giving voice to her fear.

  With a slight jerk, the wheel came to a standstill, and the pod rocked gently upon its axis. They were as high as they could go. Amy couldn’t look directly down. It made her giddy and turned her stomach. She glanced across the pod towards Pinkie. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the glass, and seemed semi-comatose. If there had been a moment when an able-bodied person might have overpowered him, it would have been now. But Amy was powerless to do anything. And as the pod came to a stop, Pinkie seemed to revive. He got back to his feet with difficulty, leaving a pool of serum on the floor, and shuffled across the pod to the door. He leaned out and looked down, and she heard his breath crackling in his ruined airways as he sucked in the cold air. He turned back and leaned his gun against the wall, and then with great difficulty began dragging Tom towards the opening.

  It took Amy a moment to realise what it was he was going to do. ‘Don’t!’ she called. ‘Please. He’s dead. He deserves better than that.’

&nbs
p; Pinkie looked up and held her eye for a moment. They seemed strangely sad, his eyes, full of a watery melancholy. And then he returned to his task, dragging the body to the very lip of the door. He stood up, fighting for breath, and tipped the body over with his foot. Tom fell silently out into the night, striking the superstructure of the wheel, before spinning off out of sight into darkness.

  Pinkie retrieved his gun and straightened himself against the glass wall to the left of the door. Amy looked at him with hate and revulsion in her heart. ‘I hope you rot in hell.’

  Pinkie tried to speak. But nothing would come, except for a bubbling noise in his throat. He was fading fast.

  II

  They were approaching Tower Bridge, St. Katharine’s Dock and the hideous concrete monstrosity that was the Thistle Tower Hotel off to their right. On their left were the converted warehouses of Butler’s Wharf. Not far beyond them lay Amy’s apartment, dark and empty. The wind was strong, blowing upriver from the estuary, and the flow of the tide helped their progress. Their wake glowed green behind them, like some luminous jet stream reflecting in the water.

  MacNeil kept his concentration on the river that lay ahead. The old entry to the Traitor’s Gate in the Tower of London was all bricked up. And there was no sign of life aboard HMS Belfast as they cruised past her mooring. A thousand years of history crowded the banks of the river all around them. The Golden Hind, the Globe Theatre, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and bridge after bridge spanning the waters of a river which had borne witness to everything from the beheading of kings to the Great Fire of London and the German Blitz. All that human endeavour, inspiration and wickedness, genius and evil, brought to this sad end. People cowering in their homes, frightened to walk the streets, reduced to a life of fear and loathing by a single, deadly organism.