by Peter May
MacNeil disentangled himself from his sweat-soaked bed sheets and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Cold air embraced him. Wake up! The phone was still ringing. And, like in his dream, he knew that it was not going to go away. He reached for the bedside cabinet and lifted the receiver. His lips stuck to his teeth. ‘Yeah?’
‘I hope you’re sober, MacNeil.’
MacNeil unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth, and smelled stale whisky on his own breath. He rubbed grit and matter from his eyes. ‘I’m not on for another twelve hours.’
‘You’re on now, boy. Double shift. I figured since it’s your last day you could hack it. I’m another two men down.’
‘Shit.’
‘Shit’s right. Someone’s dumped in our backyard and I’ve got no one else to send.’
MacNeil tipped his head back and looked blearily at the great clock in the sky. He had no idea how else he would have filled the next twelve hours anyway. He could never sleep when it was light. ‘What’s the deal?’
‘Bones. Bunch of workmen on the site at Archbishop’s Park found them at the bottom of a hole.’
‘Sounds like they need an archaeologist, not a cop.’
‘They were in a leather holdall, and they weren’t there yesterday.’
‘Ah.’
‘Better go straight down. The ministry’s shouting blue fucking murder because they’ve had to stop work. Wrap it up fast, eh? I don’t need this shit.’
MacNeil winced as the phone crackled in his ear. Laing had hung up.
In the bathroom across the landing, MacNeil stared back at his vacant reflection as he brushed his teeth. Other people’s brushes crowded together in a cloudy tooth mug. He kept all his things in his room, and touched nothing in the bathroom. He even sprayed and washed the taps before touching them. He needed a shave. And a few more hours of sleep might have helped ameliorate the penumbrous shadows beneath his eyes. Nothing, however, was going to undo the damage of the last few months. The mask that stress had etched on a face not yet forty. It was not an image he cared to dwell on.
He scraped his razor across dark stubble and heard someone stirring in the room next door. The car salesman. When MacNeil had first taken a room here, the landlord, who still lived on the ground floor, had taken him through a roll-call of his fellow inmates. A divorced doctor, barred from practice, who could usually rustle up a medication for most ills. A handy person to have around the house, especially these days. The car salesman. Gay, the landlord thought, but not ready to accept it. There were two officials of the railworkers’ union, only it wasn’t called that any more and he couldn’t remember what they called it now. One was from Manchester, another from Leeds, and they were serving their time on the union’s executive committee in London. The union had a long-standing arrangement in Baalbec Road. There was only one woman in the house. She smelled a bit, and looked like death, and the landlord was sure she was on drugs. But she paid like clockwork, so who was he to judge her.
It was a strange collection of misplaced humanity, living on the edge of society, in a kind of twilight zone where you neither lived nor died. Just existed. When he had first moved in – was it really only five months ago? – MacNeil had felt like an outsider. Someone looking in. An observer. He didn’t belong, and he wouldn’t be staying. But they must all have thought that once. And now, like them, he couldn’t see a way out. He was no longer on the outside looking in, but on the inside looking out.
He had chosen this area because he felt it was somewhere he could bring Sean. It was no slum. There existed here, still, a sense of faded gentility. Highbury Field was at the end of the road. Somewhere he and Sean could kick a ball, walk a dog – if they’d had one. Some of the street names, too, had a ring of home about them. Aberdeen, Kelvin, Seaforth, Fergus. There was something familiar, and comforting, in the echoes of a Scotland he had left long ago. There was a swimming pool just up from Highbury Corner. The landlord told him it had once been open to the elements. But a less hardy generation had built walls around it and put a roof on top. Somewhere else he and Sean could spend – what was it they called it? – quality time. And MacNeil figured he would get them season tickets to go and see the Gunners at the Emirates Stadium.
But Sean’s mother had refused to let him cross the city to Islington. It was too dangerous, she said. Maybe when the emergency was over.
MacNeil pulled on his coat and turned up the collar. His suit needed pressing, and his white shirt was fraying just a little around the top of the collar. The top button was missing, and his tie was tied tight to hide it. He pulled on his gloves and hurried down the stairs to the narrow hallway at the bottom. There was a time, even just a month ago, when the landlord would have poked his head around the door to say good morning. But now none of them spoke. They were all too afraid.
III.
As he pulled the door shut, he could hear his phone ringing at the top of the house. He didn’t want to speak to Laing again, and so he quickly fished his mobile from his pocket and turned it off.
The air in his car was icy cold as he slipped behind the wheel. There had been no frost, but condensation clouded the windscreen. He set the blowers going and turned down Calabria Road. The radio was playing a selection of hits from last year. No one had released anything new in the last two months. The music segued from one song to another, and MacNeil was glad of the absence of the mindless, prattling DJs who used to fill the early morning airwaves. He had missed the seven-thirty newscast.
As always, his route into the city was determined by the army checkpoints. Certain areas were simply off-limits, even to him. There were demarcation lines that would require special permission to cross. He drove south to Pentonville, turning west along Pentonville Road into Euston Road. It was nearly seven forty-five, and the air was suffused with a grey light that forced its way through low pewtery cloud that seemed to graze the tops of distant skyscrapers. In another life, taxis and buses and commuter traffic would have choked the city’s arteries, like cholesterol. MacNeil still could not get used to the empty streets. There was a chilling quiet in this early morning light. He passed the occasional troop carrier, soldiers with gas masks and goggles staring from beneath khaki canvas covers, like faceless troopers from a Star Wars movie, nursing rifles they had been forced all too frequently to use.
Now that there was daylight, there was a limited traffic of private and commercial vehicles with the requisite clearance to move around designated areas of the city, tracked by cameras and satellite. Controls were most stringent around the city centre, where much of the looting had taken place. The government had used the old congestion charging infrastructure to monitor and control all vehicles moving in and out of the area. MacNeil cruised along its northern limit, passing a deserted Euston Station, before turning south into Tottenham Court Road, where a camera recorded his number plate and fed it directly into the central computer. Without clearance he could expect to be stopped within minutes.
The city’s shopping streets were like a battlefield. Those shops which hadn’t already had their windows smashed had boarded them up. The burned-out carcasses of stolen vehicles smouldered at the roadside, the debris and detritus of a once civilised society scattered across ruined streets. The wreckage of another night of violence. The Dominion Theatre, opposite the Tottenham Court Road Underground station, was a blackened, burned-out shell. Every time it rained, the air still filled up with the charred smell from The Death of a Salesman – the last piece to be performed there. McDonald’s too, in Oxford Street, had been gutted. Flame-grilled burgers overcooked. The Harmony Sex Shop had been broken into so many times, the owners no longer bothered to board it up, and a scantily clad siren in black leather pouted defiantly at MacNeil as he drove past.
Further south, The MouseTrap had finally ended its record-breaking run, and St. Martin’s Theatre, with all its neon lights smashed and ripped from the walls, looked sad and
neglected.
He was stopped at an army checkpoint at Cambridge Circus. He should have been used to it by now, but he could never feel comfortable with half a dozen semi-automatic rifles pointed at his head. A sullen soldier glowered at him from behind his mask, keeping his distance and reaching for his papers with latex-gloved hands. He handed them back quickly, anxious to be rid of them, as if somehow they might be contaminated – which well they might.
MacNeil drove on down Charing Cross Road, through Trafalgar Square and into Whitehall. There was more activity here, a Civil Service still functioning after a fashion, government seeking to deal with a disintegrating society. Men and women with masks leaving and entering the corridors of power with the same sense of bleak despair that gripped most of those who lived in the capital.
As he neared the river, he saw black smoke rising into the heavy morning sky from the four chimneys of the old Battersea Power Station. A more potent symbol of human helplessness in the face of an unforgiving Nature he could not imagine. How many dead was it now? Five hundred thousand? Six? More? No one believed the figures anyhow. There was no way to verify them. But even at their most optimistic, those the government put out were barely conceivable.
The eight o’clock news carried the story which had been running all night. But it was MacNeil’s first time hearing it, and it hit him hard. Shortly after midnight, doctors at St. Thomas’ Hospital had announced the death of the Prime Minister. Two of his children were already dead, and his wife was still critically ill. It had been no secret that his condition was serious. But if the most powerful person in the country could be taken so easily, what chance did the rest of them have?
In sonorous tones, the newsreader reported that there was now expected to be a power struggle between the Deputy Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer for control of the party. The Deputy Prime Minister, a toad of a man whom MacNeil had never liked, had the upper hand, since he would automatically fill the Prime Minister’s shoes – at least temporarily. Although MacNeil could not understand why anyone would want to, given the circumstances. The allure of power, it seemed, was irresistible to some. Quietly MacNeil hoped that the Chancellor would win the power struggle. The present incumbent of number 11 Downing Street was, it seemed to him, eminently more sensible, a man of intelligence and conscience.
As he drove across Westminster Bridge, through yet another army checkpoint, he glanced west to see the eleven-storey facade of St. Thomas’ Hospital rising up from the South Bank of the Thames. Somewhere, behind the concrete and glass, the man who had once run the country lay dead. Cold and powerless, infected by his own children. Beyond, the three remaining original wings of the hospital, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, were filled, he knew, with yet more stricken patients. Perhaps if the four other wings had not been destroyed by the Germans during the Blitz, it would not have been necessary to construct emergency overspill in the park across the road.
CHAPTER TWO
I.
MacNeil pulled his Ford Focus into the bus stop opposite the accident and emergency department in Lambeth Palace Road, confident in the knowledge that none of the four buses which used to traverse this route would be inconvenienced.
The gates and railings at the entrance to Archbishop’s Park had been torn down to create access for the heavy equipment brought in by the contractors. He recognised the unmarked vans of the Scenes of Crime officers from the FSS laboratories, although they might have been quicker on foot, since the lab was just a short walk away along a narrow path at the south end of the park.
The Forensic Science Service had been forced to draw its resources into one central facility following the lockdown of the Capital, and had established the former Metropolitan Police Forensic Science laboratory in Lambeth Road as the centre for most of the medical and scientific services required by the police. Right now, the officers they had sent were standing around waiting for MacNeil.
MacNeil surveyed the wreck of the park, monstrous machinery standing idle amongst the ripped-up remains of what had once been a tiny oasis of green in a sea of concrete and glass. Hundreds of workers in their distinctive orange jumpsuits stood around in groups, talking and smoking. In the misty early morning light, a group of ghostly figures in white Tyvek suits and masks clustered around a hole in the ground which should by now have been filled with cement. A man in a suit, wearing a calf-length camel coat and a white hard hat, picked his way delicately through the mud as MacNeil approached. He wore a standard-issue white cotton mask, as did MacNeil, but stopped well short of him. ‘DI MacNeil?’
MacNeil kept his distance and eyed him cautiously. ‘Aye. Who’s asking?’
‘Derek James. I’m from the office of the Deputy Prime Minister. You’ll understand if I don’t shake your hand.’
‘What do you want?’ MacNeil had never been slow in getting to the point.
‘I want,’ said James, with a certain edge, ‘to get this site back to work.’
‘Then the sooner we stop talking about it, the sooner I’ll do what I have to do and get out of your hair.’ MacNeil walked past him towards the gathering of ghosts.
James went after him, still concerned to keep his shoes mud-free. ‘I don’t think you understand, Mr MacNeil. This work is being carried out under an emergency decree of Parliament. Millions of pounds are being poured into this project. There is a strict timetable. A delay could cost lives.’
‘Someone’s already dead, Mr James.’
‘Which means they’re beyond help. Others are not.’
MacNeil stopped in his tracks and turned to face the man from the ministry who immediately recoiled, as if afraid MacNeil might breathe on him. ‘Look. Everyone in this country’s entitled to justice. Alive or dead. That’s my job. To see that justice is done. And when I’ve done it, you can do yours. Until then, stay out of my face.’ He turned again and trudged through the mud to the men in Tyvek. ‘What’s the score here?’
‘Bag of bones, Jack,’ one of them said, his voice muffled by his mask. ‘They only excavated yesterday. Someone must have dumped it overnight.’ He glanced around the hundreds of faces that watched them from a distance. ‘And these guys want us out of here toot sweet.’
‘All in good time.’
Another of the Tyvek suits handed MacNeil a pair of plastic shoe covers. ‘Here, you better put these on, mate.’
MacNeil pulled on the plastic and peered into the hole. There was a figure crouched in the bottom of it. ‘Who’s down there?’
‘Your old pal.’
MacNeil rolled his eyes. ‘Aw, shit,’ he said under his breath. ‘Tom Bennet!’
The forensics man grinned behind his mask, stretching it tight across his face.
MacNeil snapped on latex gloves and reached out a hand. ‘Help me down.’
It was an expensive sports holdall with a PUMA logo on the side. Tom was holding it open with gloved hands and looked up as MacNeil dropped down beside him. ‘Don’t come too close to me,’ he said. ‘You never know what you might catch.’
MacNeil ignored him. ‘What’s in it?’ he asked.
‘The bones of a child.’
MacNeil leaned over to peer in. The bones looked very white, as if they’d been left out in the sun, a sad collection of the bits and pieces of what had once been a human being. He recoiled from a stink like meat left in the refrigerator a month past its sell-by. ‘What the hell’s that smell?’
‘The bones.’ A crinkle around the young pathologist’s eyes betrayed his amusement at MacNeil’s disgust.
‘I didn’t know bones smelled.’
‘Oh, yeah. Two, even three months after death.’
‘So this kid was alive quite recently?’
‘Very recently, I’d say, from how much they stink.’
‘So what’s happened to the flesh?’
‘Someone’s stripped it off the bones. Using some pretty sha
rp cutting gear.’ Tom lifted out a long shanked bone, laying it delicately across both hands. ‘The femur. Thigh bone to you. You can see the scores left in the bone by the knife, or whatever it was he used. They’re quite deep, and broad, so it was a heavy instrument.’
MacNeil looked at the cuts and grooves in the bone, most running parallel, and cut in at an angle, as if from a repeated sideways chopping motion. ‘Not an expert, then?’
‘I don’t know who I’d describe as an expert in cutting flesh from bone, but it’s a pretty crude job.’ Tom ran a long, delicate finger around the bulb of the joint. ‘You can see the hash they’ve made of the disarticulation, and these dried-out remnants of tissue and ligament that they couldn’t get off.’
MacNeil looked into the bag again and carefully lifted out what looked like the curve of a small rib. He cocked his head and looked at it curiously, running his fingers along the smooth white bow of it. ‘How did they manage to get the bones so clean?’
Tom shrugged. ‘Washed them, likely. I’ve done it myself from time to time, when I’ve wanted to clean up a skull. Boiled it up with a little bleach and laundry detergent.’
‘Wouldn’t that kill the smell?’
Tom crinkled with amusement again. ‘The marrow’s still going to rot, whether you’ve cooked it or not.’
MacNeil slipped the rib back into the bag and stood. He peered up at the faces leaning over to try to catch their conversation, then looked down at Tom. ‘Can you tell what sex?’
‘Not right now. But I’d put the age at somewhere between nine and eleven.’
MacNeil nodded thoughtfully, and wondered how you performed an autopsy on a disarticulated skeleton.
Almost as if he’d read his thoughts, Tom stood up beside him and said, ‘Naturally, I can’t do any kind of real autopsy. All I can do is lay out the bones and look for clues.’ A stray strand of blond hair was caught in the elastic of his plastic shower cap, and his corn-blue eyes held MacNeil in a gaze so direct that the older man had to look away. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’m not much of an expert on what goes where. I can sort out the ribs, but not in the correct order. I can separate the finger bones, but not necessarily which goes to which hand. We really need an anthropologist for that.’