by Peter May
He spun around, suddenly sensing his own vulnerability. There was no one there. Not a sound disturbed the silence in the house.
MacNeil glanced at the black-lacquered sideboard. The door of the drinks cabinet stood open. There were two glasses on top of it, next to a bottle of Armagnac. One of the glasses held half an inch of dark, smoky amber. The other was empty.
*
MacNeil sat in the other recliner and dropped his head into his hands, running them through the fuzz of his short-cropped dark hair. There was no one in the house, he was sure of that. And yet in the time it had taken him to drive to the King’s Road and back, someone had come here and murdered Flight. Two glasses on the sideboard, one filled and untouched, the other empty. As if Flight had been interrupted in the act of pouring. One for himself. One for his killer.
Was it MacNeil who interrupted them? Was Flight’s killer still in the house when he came in? He supposed it was possible that while he was in the studio the killer had slipped down the stairs and made his escape. Silent, unseen. Like a ghost. A ghost that was haunting MacNeil wherever he went, killing everyone with whom he had contact: the kids on the housing estate in South Lambeth, Kazinski, and now Flight. He looked at the sculptor, head slumped on his chest, and thought that he was no loss to the world. He knew he would have to call this one in. But he didn’t want to be involved. An anonymous tip-off from Flight’s own phone would bring the local police, although maybe not until the curfew was over. What they found here would be largely self-explanatory.
MacNeil stood up and crossed to the sideboard. He went through all the drawers, careful not to disturb anything that might prove useful to the cops when they came. He found old flyers for exhibitions of Flight’s work, sketches and scribbled notes, a well-thumbed pack of Tarot cards, pens and pencils, receipts, some loose change. There was little else in the room that could be described as personal. MacNeil wondered where Flight kept the accumulated detritus of his own life. Or perhaps, since it was other people’s lives he collected, preserving them in pieces for posterity, he kept little or nothing of his own.
In the bedroom, next to his bed, MacNeil found the only piece of furniture in the apartment that didn’t look like it had been chosen from a Scandinavian mail-order catalogue. It was an antique roll-top bureau, a family piece, perhaps, from another life. MacNeil rolled back the top and found a mess of paperwork and accounts. Bills, receipts, invoices, an accounting notebook full of Flight’s tiny, neurotic scribbles. A brass holder was stuffed full of letters, still in their envelopes. A few pieces of private correspondence, but mostly paid and unpaid bills.
Finally MacNeil found gold. In a shallow drawer at the back of the bureau, nestling in green felt, was Flight’s address book. It was full to overflowing with business cards and addresses scribbled on folded scraps of paper. But here was the definitive collection of all Flight’s friends and acquaintances, from both his private and business lives, although MacNeil imagined that the dividing line between the two was probably pretty blurred.
Carefully, he started leafing through the alphabet. But there were so many names, and with no idea of what he was looking for, MacNeil quickly gave up and flicked through to K, where he found Kazinski’s telephone number. But no address. It would have been superfluous, a place Flight would never have gone, even in his worst nightmares.
He was about to thumb through the remaining pages, when MacNeil spotted a small square of paper, folded twice, and wedged in the spine. So he left the book open at K, pressed the spine flat and delicately retrieved the small scrap of paper. He unfolded it. There was a name scrawled on it, perhaps a nickname of some kind. Pinkie. And beneath it a telephone number. MacNeil could tell from the code that it was a mobile. Beneath the number was an address, but a line drawn across the paper seemed to separate the two, and MacNeil got the impression that they didn’t necessarily go together. Although it was possible that they were related in some way. And then he went very still. And in his head he heard Kazinski say, I don’t know the address. It was a big house. You know, some rich geezer’s place. It was somewhere near Wandsworth Common. Root Street, Ruth Street, something like that. MacNeil’s eyes were fixed on the piece of paper in his hand. The address was in Routh Road, Wandsworth.
MacNeil sat on the edge of the bed and held the paper between slightly trembling fingers, looking at the name and number and address until they blurred. He was hungry, and tired, and very possibly in shock. It was hard to concentrate. And then he had a thought. He reached for the telephone on the bedside and dialled the number on the piece of paper.
*
Pinkie sat in his car fifty yards away watching the lights burning in the windows of Flight’s apartment. He wondered what MacNeil was doing in there, what delights he had discovered, what secrets uncovered. He had been so preoccupied with Flight’s little house of horrors on the first floor that it had been a simple enough matter for Pinkie to creep silently down to the front door and out into the night. He tried to imagine MacNeil’s surprise when he went upstairs and found Flight waiting for him. Pinkie had been unable to resist the temptation to arrange the sculptor in welcoming pose on his expensive leather chair. If MacNeil had come straight up, well then, he’d simply have had to shoot him. Even at the risk of Mr Smith’s ire. Irritatingly, Flight’s head had refused to play ball and kept falling forward, and Pinkie had felt compelled finally, for reasons of self-preservation, to leave before he was satisfied.
His mobile phone purred on the seat beside him. He picked it up and looked at the display. Jonathan Flight, it said, and he dropped it again, as if it were contaminated. It couldn’t be Flight. He’d just killed him. He felt goosebumps rise up all across his neck and shoulders, before forcing himself to think logically. It couldn’t be Flight. But it was someone calling from Flight’s phone. So it had to be MacNeil. Where in the name of God had he got the number? Flight must have kept it in an address book, or in the memory of his phone. But how would MacNeil know to call it? Pinkie was spooked.
Tentatively he picked up the phone and pressed the green button to take the call. He put it to his ear and listened and said nothing. ‘Hello?’ he heard MacNeil’s voice. ‘Hello?’ But still Pinkie said nothing. And then he grinned. Now it was MacNeil’s turn to be spooked.
*
MacNeil listened to the ambient silence. He could hear someone breathing, someone listening but saying nothing, almost as if they knew who was calling. He wanted to hang up, to cut off the presence that was so eloquent in its silence. But there was something compelling in it, and he sat for a full minute saying nothing. Just listening. He felt evil in the silence, and the longer he listened to it the more oppressive it became, until finally he couldn’t stand it any more, and he banged the receiver back in its cradle. He was shaking now, his mouth dry. He had the unnerving feeling that he had just had an encounter with the ghost that was haunting him, this killer of men and boys, and perhaps of a little Chinese girl with a cleft palate. And he had, too, the sense that this ghost was somewhere very close.
‘Scotland the Brave’ burst into jolly refrain, and MacNeil’s heart nearly hit the roof of his mouth. He fumbled in his pocket for his mobile and saw Amy’s name on the display.
‘Hey, Amy,’ he said, trying to sound as natural as he could.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You sound weird.’
‘I’m just tired, Amy.’ He looked at his watch. It was after midnight. ‘You should be in bed.’
‘I can’t sleep. I wish I’d never brought the head home with me. It’s like she’s here in the house, that little girl. Haunting me. I can’t get her face out of my mind.’
Someone else, MacNeil thought, being haunted tonight.
‘How is it going?’
He knew he couldn’t tell her the truth. Someday, maybe, but not tonight. ‘I’ve got a couple of leads,’ he said. ‘I think s
he might have been murdered in a house near Wandsworth Common.’
‘My God, that’s more than a couple of leads. How did you get to that?’
‘Too complicated to go into now. How about you? Anything fresh? Any feedback from the lab?’
‘Actually, yes. Pretty strange, really, and I’ve no idea if it’s important or not. But she had the flu.’
MacNeil was taken aback. ‘Died of it?’
‘Impossible to tell. But she’d either had it and recovered, or she was suffering from it when she died.’
MacNeil thought about it. He had no idea, either, if there was any significance in it.
Then Amy said, ‘What’s weird about it, though, is that it wasn’t the H5N1 human variant that’s killing everyone else.’
MacNeil frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It was another variation on the H5N1 bird flu virus. A man-made one.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I.
Amy hung up and stared at the head gazing back at her in the dim lamplight of the attic sitting room. Her eye was drawn again to the cleft lip. It was as if the child had been caught on a fisherman’s hook and then thrown back, permanently disfigured, into an ocean in which she would always find herself swimming against the tide.
It could just as easily have been Amy. Some tiny glitch in the genetic code determining the course of a life, separating the smart from the stupid, the beautiful from the ugly. Amy was both smart and beautiful. It wasn’t a genetic glitch which had determined the course of her life, it was a drunk behind the wheel of a car, and five seconds of madness.
They had other things in common, though – Amy and Lyn. A racial inheritance, perhaps even a cultural one. A girl born into poverty in China had little chance. Amy knew it only too well. She had been born in England, not China. She had been born into relative affluence, not poverty. But thousands of years of cultural preference for a son, rather than a daughter, had been hard for her parents to shake off. She had been the first born, but it was her younger brother, when he arrived, who had taken pride of place.
Had she been born in impoverished rural China, she may well have ended up in an orphanage, like millions of her peers. Abandoned by her family on the doorstep of a police station somewhere, so that they might try again for a son. The Chinese government policy of one child per family meant there were no second chances – unless you lived in the city, had money and knew how to buy your way around the system.
For as long as anyone could remember, in Chinese society, when the son married he brought his wife to live with his parents. And when the parents grew old, it was the responsibility of the son and his wife to look after them. But if you had a daughter, she would leave to look after her husband’s parents, and you would have to fend for yourself in your old age. So it was little wonder that boys were prized and girls despised.
Amy wondered if it had been Lyn’s fate to end up in an orphanage somewhere, unloved, unwanted, even by childless Western couples desperate to adopt – her deformity always working against her. And yet, here she was – or had been – living in London, this bastion of Western affluence and privilege. But only to meet a fate worse than any orphanage, murdered and hacked up and dumped in a hole in the ground.
A wwwooo-oop sound turned Amy’s head towards her computer. The window of her most recent conversation with Sam was still up on the screen. And now Sam had sent a new message. Amy manoeuvred her wheelchair over to the desk to see what Sam was saying.
– Amy, are you still around?
The cursor blinked with endless patience, awaiting Amy’s response.
– Hi, Sam. Yeah, I’m still up. It’s late.
– I couldn’t sleep for thinking about your little girl.
– Me neither. She keeps staring at me.
– It’s a terrible thing when you can put a face to someone, but not a name, or a history. I wish I could see her, too.
– I could take a photo of the head and email it to you.
– Maybe in the morning. The cursor blinked for a bit. Then – How is Jack holding up?
– I don’t know. He sounded pretty weird when I spoke to him last. I think he’s throwing himself into this investigation just to stop himself thinking.
– What do you mean, weird?
– I don’t know. Just a bit . . . spaced, I guess.
– How is the investigation going?
– He seems to be making progress. He thinks he knows where she was killed.
The cursor blinked again for a long time.
– How on earth does he know that?
– I’ve no idea.
– Where does he think it happened?
– He said something about a house out near Wandsworth Common.
– That’s not too specific.
– He wasn’t being very specific.
Their conversation lapsed. More blinking. This time two minutes, maybe three, passed without any further exchange. Amy found her eyes wandering across the room to the child’s head once more. The girl was watching her, almost reproachful in her silence. Why couldn’t Amy do more? How difficult could it be to find her killer?
Then wwwooo-oop.
– Amy, did you ask for a DNA sample in the end?
– Yes, Sam. Might be a day or two, though.
– I wouldn’t get your hopes up for finding a match.
– I’m not. And then Amy remembered about Zoe. – I did ask for a PCR test, though, to see if she’d had the flu.
Another long wait.
– Why did you do that?
– You always tell me every little detail helps when you’re trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle.
The cursor blinked some more.
– So did you get a result?
– Yeah. We’ve got a post-grad molecular genetics student training at the lab. Zoe. She’s a bit of a ladette. But really clever. She’ll be good when she grows up. Stupid girl took so long over the test that she missed the curfew, so she’s stuck at the lab all night. Tom’ll be pleased. He can’t stand her!
– What did she find?
– The little girl did have the flu.
There was a short, cursor-blinking hiatus before Sam replied.
– Which doesn’t really help with anything, does it?
– I suppose not. But here’s something strange – Zoe said it wasn’t H5N1. At least, not the version that’s caused the pandemic.
– How does she know that?
– She said she’d recovered the virus, and the RNA coding. It’s all a bit beyond me, Sam. Something to do with restriction sites and code words that shouldn’t be there. Anyway, she said this virus was genetically engineered.
Their conversation lapsed for so long, Amy began to think that Sam had gone.
– Hello, Sam, are you still there?
– I’m still here, Amy.
– So what do you think? Amy watched the hypnotic blinking of the cursor.
– I think that changes everything.
II.
Pinkie watched the drab rows of mustard-harled council flats drift by. It was fun driving about in the deserted city. No traffic, no lights. So much easier to get around. And he hadn’t been stopped once. It was sufficient for him to slow to walking pace as he approached the army checkpoints. Their cameras fed his number into the computer in seconds and they waved him on. VIP. No contact required. Everyone was happy.
At Clapham Common, MacNeil had taken a right turn, and Pinkie was sure he had no idea he was being followed. It was impossible at night to see a vehicle three hundred yards behind you with no lights. As long as Pinkie could see the merest hint of MacNeil’s tail lights he wouldn’t lose him. At least, not while he stuck to the main thoroughfares. The danger would be if he went off-piste and made turns that Pinkie couldn’t see. Then he would ha
ve to get closer, and that would become dangerous.
The phone lying on the passenger seat fibrillated in the hushed interior of the car. Pinkie glanced over at the display and then answered the call.
‘Hello, Mr Smith.’
‘Hello, Pinkie. Where are you now?’
‘We’re on Battersea Rise, Mr Smith. Heading towards Wandsworth Common. I think Mr MacNeil is heading for Routh Road.’
‘I’m afraid he is, Pinkie.’
‘We’re in trouble, then.’
‘In more trouble than you think. The stupid cripple asked for PCR on the bone marrow.’
‘And is that bad?’
‘It’s very bad, Pinkie. They found the virus.’
Pinkie shook his head. That stupid little shit, Ronnie Kazinski. He’d got them all into so much trouble. Pinkie almost wished he hadn’t killed him, so that he could be made to see the consequences of his actions. ‘What do you want me to do, Mr Smith?’
‘I think we need to leave Mr MacNeil for the moment, Pinkie. We are required to take other action now.’
III.
Routh Road was at the end of a collection of streets they called ‘The Toast Rack’. Not unreasonably, since Baskerville Road, which backed on to Wandsworth Common, and the five streets which ran off it at right angles, made a shape not unlike a toast rack. Although it might just as easily have been called ‘The Comb’. Wandsworth Prison was a stone’s throw away, on the other side of Trinity Road.