by Peter May
Across the room there was a loud sneeze and all heads turned towards Zoe. Everyone was hypersensitive these days to the slightest sniffle. A sneeze was enough to cause cardiac arrest. Zoe raised a hand of apology and grinned. ‘It’s okay. Honestly. I’m not coming down with anything. It’s my parents’ cat. I’m really allergic to it.’
II.
The area between the road and the hole where the bag had been found was divided up into squares. Fine white plastic lines stretched between short stakes, a little like the lines of latitude and longitude on a map. Yellow and black crime scene tape fluttered around the perimeter in a chill breeze blowing down from the direction of the river. A six-man team in Tyvek and bootees and plastic caps moved from square to square, each allocated his own area to search, each tiny item recovered from the mud carefully placed in its own plastic evidence bag.
The workforce stood around in the park in small orange clusters. The cement trucks had gone, and the heavy machinery stood cold and silent, waiting with the rest of them.
The man from the ministry sat in the back of a black BMW parked up on the pavement by the hospital, smoking cigarette after cigarette, the window down, watching them through clouds of escaping smoke. MacNeil could feel his anger from where he sat on an upturned wheely bin next to the old basketball court. The foreman was pacing restlessly next to him. ‘It’s our bonuses, mate,’ he said. ‘The only reason we’re here, risking life and fucking limb, is ’cos of the money. And that’s dependent on meeting the targets.’
‘What is the target?’ MacNeil turned disinterested eyes towards him.
‘Seven days.’ The foreman shook his head. ‘It was tight before. But now . . .’
MacNeil shrugged. ‘What’s the point in setting unrealistic targets?’
‘Not me that sets them, mate. The Chinese built a whole hospital in a week during the SARS outbreak. So our lot figured, why couldn’t we do the same? We’re not even building a hospital here. Just an overspill facility. A space they can heat, a space that can take beds. A place for people to die in.’
‘And is it really worth the money?’
‘Well, we’re not making it any other way right now. And they’re treating us good, aren’t they? A lot of the lads come from outside the M25. And ever since they declared the ring road the outer limit, we knew that if we came inside we wouldn’t be allowed out again. It’s fucking creepy, you know, like something out of a movie. Seeing all those soldiers with guns on the bridges and flyovers.’
‘So where are you staying?’
The foreman chuckled. ‘That’s part of the deal. All the big tourist hotels are empty. So we get our own rooms, meals cooked for us at all hours. Me and some of the boys are at the Ritz. There’s others at the Savoy. And we get to stay there till the emergency’s over.’ A cloud cast a shadow on his smile and he remembered to glower at MacNeil. ‘Assuming we meet our targets, that is.’
In the distance, an ambulance siren pierced the cold January air. Another victim. Another bed required. Every hospital in the city was full, but at least the high mortality rate meant that beds were constantly becoming available. Illness had reduced staffing by nearly thirty per cent. Health workers were at greatest risk, and suffering the highest casualties. In spite of FluKill. Nobody went to work any more. Only a handful of shops were open for a few hours a day. There was no public transport. The airports had been closed indefinitely. The economy of the capital was in free fall, and the rest of the world was ready to do anything it could to help the city contain its sickness. Primarily by banning all traffic in and out of the UK. It was, of course, only a matter of time before the virus swept the world. But if it could be contained long enough to produce a vaccine . . .
MacNeil sighed and felt the first spots of rain on his face as he turned it up towards the bruised blue and black of the low cloud overhead.
‘Jack.’
He turned his head towards a Tyvek figure trudging across tyre tracks cut deep in the mud.
‘That’s us done.’
MacNeil checked the time. They’d taken less than the allotted two hours. ‘Find anything?’
The forensics man held up a clear plastic bag, and MacNeil saw a scrap of something faintly pink in it. ‘Might be something. Might be nothing.’
‘What is it?’
The officer handed it to him. ‘Remains of an Underground ticket. Off-peak, one-day pass. Can’t read the date on it, but we might just be able to retrieve something from the magnetic strip.’
MacNeil took the bag and held it up to the light. The printing on the ticket was blurred and smudged by the rain and all but obliterated by mud. One corner of it was torn away. It was nearly eight weeks since they’d closed the Underground. If this was all they had to go on, they weren’t going to get very far. He handed it back to the forensics man and jumped down from his wheely bin. He turned to the foreman. ‘Go build your hospital.’
III.
Amy ran her hand back over the smooth surface of the skull and felt a peculiar empathy for this little girl. There was no sign of damage. Except for the trauma inflicted by Nature on the maxilla. There was no way to determine cause of death, unless the tissue recovered by Tom revealed poison of some kind. Amy suspected that was unlikely. Why would you poison a child? A tiny, frail-boned creature like this? She would have been utterly vulnerable to the strength of an adult, defenceless against it.
That someone had killed her was beyond doubt. Why else would they have gone to the trouble of stripping all the flesh from her bones and removing the evidence? And yet, to have gone to all that bother, and then simply dumped the bones on a building site, was strangely careless. But that was for others to worry about. All of Amy’s focus and expertise would go into trying to identify her. To bring her back to life in a way that might lead them to her killer.
She looked at the empty eye sockets and knew that once they had held dark, liquid brown eyes. She knew that once this scalp had grown thick, blue-black hair. What length it might have been was impossible now to know. Amy ran her fingers along the high line of the left cheek and down to the jaw, distinguished by its deformity and the disfigured smile which would once have characterised it.
She was aware of Tom stooping down beside her. His face close to hers. ‘Don’t look now, but here comes the ape man.’
Amy raised her eyes and saw MacNeil making his way across the lab. She looked at him dispassionately, and wondered how she might view him if she didn’t know him. He was very tall – his most distinguishing feature. But not skinny. He was built in proportion. Which made him a big man. He certainly wasn’t conventionally good-looking, but there was extraordinary warmth in his green eyes flecked with orange. He didn’t suit his hair cut so short, but there was something distinguished in the touch of grey at either temple. His suit was too tight, and his coat too big, and there was a generally dishevelled air about him. One of his shoelaces was undone, she noticed. And then saw that his shoes were covered in dirt, and that he was leaving a little trail of dried mud in his wake. The ape man, Tom called him. Of course, Tom didn’t like him because he thought MacNeil was homophobic.
Amy couldn’t remember the first time she’d laid eyes on MacNeil, so it was impossible now for her to imagine that first impression. There were still odd little gaps in her memory from before the accident. Little things that frustrated her, sometimes to the point of tears. Though only when she was on her own. Tom would have no truck with self pity. But he stood beside her now, arms folded across his chest, like her guardian protector, jaw thrust towards the approaching MacNeil, almost daring him to be rude to his poor, crippled little friend. After all, it was he who had got her the work here after she had been unable to carry on as before.
MacNeil stopped in front of the table, ignoring him, and looked at the child’s skeleton. Then he looked at Amy and made a vague nod of acknowledgement. ‘So what can you tell me?’
&
nbsp; ‘Quite a lot, actually.’ Amy focused her attention on the child again. She ran the backs of her fingers across the forehead, almost as if she were still alive. ‘She was a poor soul, really.’
‘How do you know it’s a she?’
‘How do I know she is a she,’ Amy corrected him, as if the child might be offended by being described as it. ‘There is no single, conclusive factor,’ she said. ‘Rather, an accumulation of pointers, and a little instinct.’
‘Let’s leave your instinct out of it,’ MacNeil said, ‘and stick to the facts.’
Amy was unruffled. ‘Okay. The facts. Females generally have smaller, less developed muscle attachments than the male.’ She ran a fingertip along one femur. ‘You can quite clearly see the ridges here which provided attachments for the muscles and tendons.’ She moved up to the pelvic area. ‘The female pelvis is constructed to meet the needs of childbearing and has several features which distinguish it from the male. Notably wider hips.’
MacNeil allowed a tiny smile of recollection to stretch his lips. He remembered his mother describing the girl next door – when contemplating her as a possible future wife for her son – as having good childbearing hips.
Amy glanced up and caught the shadow of his smile. ‘Do you find this amusing, DI MacNeil?’
‘No, Miss Wu.’
She gave him a long look before returning to the bones on the table. ‘Apart from general appearance, a number of measurements can be made of the pelvic bones to help establish sex. Primarily the difference in ratio between the lengths of the pubis and ischium, commonly known as the ischium-pubis index.’
‘Of course, you’ll be familiar with the ischium-pubis index,’ Tom said, an irritating little smile turning up the corners of his mask.
‘Of course,’ MacNeil said. And to Amy, ‘And you took those measurements?’
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘In themselves, not conclusive. She is just a child, after all, and at her age, sexual characteristics have not yet fully developed. But the index does tend to suggest female rather than male.’ She picked up the child’s head and cupped it gently in her palms. ‘The skull is often a better indicator. For a start, it’s smaller than you would expect of a male. The mastoid processes and orbital ridges are less prominent in the female, and the eye sockets and forehead are more rounded.’ She traced those curvatures to illustrate her point. Then she looked MacNeil square in the eye. ‘I’m around ninety-five per cent certain this is a female.’
‘And the other five per cent?’
‘Instinct. But then, you told me to leave that out of the equation.’
MacNeil smiled. ‘So I did. What else can you tell me?’
‘I can tell you that this child probably came from one of the poorer developing countries, and that she had two very distinctive visual characteristics.’
MacNeil was taken aback. ‘How the hell can you tell all that from a bunch of bones?’
‘Because she’s good at what she does, Mr MacNeil,’ Tom said, taking obvious pride in her expertise. ‘Amy was one of the best forensic odontologists in London before . . .’ He’d started down the road before he could stop himself, and his hesitation only drew attention to itself. ‘Before the accident,’ he added quickly. ‘You don’t ever lose those skills.’
Amy blushed and kept her focus on the skull. ‘It’s Mongoloid, you see. I know that’s not very PC, but none of these terms are. Skulls are either Negroid, Caucasoid or Mongoloid.’
Tom said, ‘I’ve always thought that Caucasoid sounded like a sanitation robot from Star Wars.’
MacNeil didn’t smile. ‘And Mongoloid is what, Asian?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Amy said. ‘Eskimo, Japanese, Chinese . . . all Mongoloid. It’s how I’d describe myself.’
MacNeil looked at her slanted almond eyes and high cheekbones, her fine jaw and shallow brow, and thought that he would be more likely to describe her as beautiful. Her long, shiny black hair was drawn loosely back and tied at the nape of her neck, and her fringe came down almost to her eyelashes. She glanced up to find him staring at her, and her eyes flickered quickly back to the child.
‘But it’s really the teeth that tell us most about her. The Mongoloid characteristics of the skull are more muted in one so young, but Mongoloids typically have shovel-shaped upper incisors.’ She pointed to each of them in turn. ‘Also, the tooth crowns are more bulbous, and again the incisors tend to have shorter roots.’
‘So how do you know she wasn’t like you? Chinese, or Asian, in origin but born and raised in the UK?’
Amy smiled. ‘Because her teeth are perfect,’ she said. ‘She’s had no dental treatment. None whatsoever. Didn’t need it. No sugar in the diet, a decay-free mouth. Which would be very unusual in a ten-year-old British kid.’
‘She was ten?’
Amy nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Margin of error?’
‘Plus or minus three or four months. The development of the teeth is a very accurate indicator.’
MacNeil mulled over for a moment everything she had told him. ‘You said she had two very distinctive visual characteristics.’
‘She was Asian, of course. And by that I don’t mean Indian or Pakistani. More like Chinese. I know you think we all look alike, so to your eye she probably wouldn’t have looked dissimilar to me at the same age. Except for one particularly compelling feature.’ She paused, leaving MacNeil impatiently waiting to hear what that might be. ‘She had a very marked harelip,’ Amy said. ‘At least, that’s what you would know it as. We would call it a cleft palate.’ She turned the skull towards him and tilted it back so that he could see it better. ‘A serious defect in the maxilla – the bone which holds the upper teeth. The cleft can be minor, or severe, as in this case. It can be unilateral, or bilateral. This one is unilateral. You can see the severe displacement of the upper anterior teeth.’ Amy looked at MacNeil. ‘I’m afraid this was a very distinctive-looking little girl. She would have turned heads. And she probably got a really hard time from the other kids at school.’
An electronic rendition of ‘Scotland the Brave’ burbled inappropriately somewhere deep within the folds of MacNeil’s coat. He fumbled to pull his mobile phone from his pocket and expose the lab to the full, unmuffled performance of his ringtone. When he had switched it back on earlier, he had seen that there were two missed calls. Both from Martha. She had left messages, but he had not picked them up. The display told him it was her again. He cut off the call without answering it, and thrust the phone back in his pocket.
‘An important call, then,’ Tom said.
MacNeil shrugged off his embarrassment. ‘My wife.’
‘Ah,’ said Tom. ‘She who must be obeyed.’ He paused. ‘Or not.’
MacNeil said to Amy, ‘You’ll write me up a report before you go?’
‘Of course.’
He nodded. ‘Thanks.’ And he pushed his hands in his pockets and headed for the door. Tom watched him leave with clear contempt. ‘You were pure genius,’ he said to Amy, ‘and all he could say was thanks.’
‘I was just doing my job, Tom. When he does his job, there’s probably not many people who even say that.’
Tom humphed. ‘He’s a cretin. God knows what any woman sees in him.’
‘You mean his wife?’
‘She’s probably got a white stick.’
‘They’re separated.’
Tom looked at her, surprised. ‘Well, aren’t you just a fund of interesting information. How the hell do you know that?’
Amy blushed and shrugged and turned back to the bones to hide her discomfort. ‘I don’t know. It’s just something I heard, that’s all.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Pinkie often dreamt of his mother. He knew she was his mother, because in his dreams that’s what he called her. But she didn’t really look any
thing like the woman he remembered from his childhood. Which was always disappointing when he woke up. Pinkie usually found reality disappointing. He liked to think that his waking hours were really dreams, and that his dreams were real. That way he could do anything he liked, and when he fell asleep, well, none of it had happened. It was a neat way of dealing with the strange things that pleased him. Things that others might not understand.
Right now he was back in his grandparents’ house. This was real. He remembered it so clearly. All those nights spent sleeping on the sofa in the front room. Icy cold in the winter. Hot and stuffy in the summer. And the bookcase that stood against the far wall, at the end of the sofa where his pillow went. He had lost count of the mornings he had woken before anyone else, and lain looking at those books lined up along the shelf at his eye level. Books with weird and wonderful titles – Eyeless in Gaza, Cloud Howe, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Written by people with the oddest names – Aldous Huxley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Ernest Hemingway. Who in God’s name was called Aldous?
It had taken him a long time, two years maybe, before he had ventured to slide one of the books from the shelf and gingerly open its yellowed pages. His grandfather had taught English at the local grammar school, and so there were all kinds of books on that shelf. This one was called Brighton Rock by someone called Graham Greene. He had only meant to read the first sentence. Which stretched to a paragraph, and then a page. And then another. In a year, he had read every book on the shelf. But that first one had always stayed with him. A strange darkness about it, set in an era before his time, beyond his ken. And a hero, or rather, anti-hero, with whom he had found instant empathy. The teenage gangster, Pinkie. Ruthless, heartless, manipulative. Quite compelling. Flawed, of course, but then weren’t we all?
He immediately adopted the nickname for himself. Pinkie. And insisted that’s what the other kids at school call him. It never struck him how risible it might seem to them, or how ridiculous it sounded. Because for him the name was synonymous with the character. And that’s who he wanted to be. It caused a great deal of hilarity at first, but that soon stopped. No one laughed at Pinkie a second time.