by Peter May
She transferred to her wheelchair and crossed to her desk. Was there a message from Sam? She moved the mouse to banish the screen saver and saw her dialogue window with Sam just as she had left it. Sam, are you still there? Hello? Sam? Talk to me!
She was halfway across the attic when she saw the head, and her scream was quite involuntary. Fear stabbed at her, tiny invisible spears, and she looked around the room in a panic. There was no one there. She sat perfectly still, listening. Not a sound. Then she forced herself to look again at the child’s head. The hair of the wig had been cut short, in uneven spiky clumps, just as she had imagined it earlier. She forced herself to grab the controller and move towards it.
The table was littered with fist-sized wads of black hair. A pair of scissors lay discarded amongst the cuttings.
Lyn stared back at her, her face changed quite radically by the altered hair. For a moment she wondered if it was possible that she had done it herself, and somehow forgotten. But even as she entertained the thought she dismissed it. And she knew with an absolute certainty that while she had been in the shower, someone had come into the house and cut the hair on the child’s head.
No matter how insane that seemed, the evidence was there before her eyes. And it scared her to death. There was a chance that whoever had done it was still there. She was shaking uncontrollably as she reached for the phone, and dropped it on the floor. She retrieved it with difficulty and with trembling fingers dialled MacNeil’s mobile. She heard it ring. And ring. And ring. And then his voicemail kicked in. She was about to hang up in despair, when she decided that she should leave a message anyway.
Her own voice sounded strange to her as she spoke, trying to control her hysteria. ‘Jack, there’s someone here in the house. Please, come quickly. I’m scared.’ And she hung up and clutched the phone to her chest, and thought she had never been so frightened in her life.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I.
MacNeil waited as the switchboard patched his call through. Then he heard Dawson’s voice. ‘DS Dawson.’
‘Rufus, it’s Jack.’
‘Hi, Jack. How’s it going out there?’
‘I think I’ve found where the kid was living. A house in Routh Road in Wandsworth. A rental property. According to the neighbour it was occupied for the last six months by a family, possibly French, called Smith.’
‘A likely story.’
‘They had a little Chinese kid with a cleft lip. I’m sure it’s our girl. But the parents were European. We need to find out who owns the house. The neighbour thinks it’s let by an agency. Find out who the agent is and get them out of bed. I want to know who’s currently renting the house, or who had it last.’
‘I’m right on it.’
‘Good man.’ MacNeil gave him the full address.
‘Jack . . .’ Dawson paused, something clearly on his mind. ‘About tonight . . .’
‘Rufus, I’m sorry.’ MacNeil pre-empted him.
‘No, I’m sorry, Jack. We all are. Bad enough what happened without . . .’ His voice tailed off. ‘Shit, we all feel really bad about it.’
‘Don’t. You didn’t know. And I appreciate the thought. I really do. Tell the guys thanks.’
He hung up and sat in the dark cocoon of his car, staring down the length of Trinity Road towards the prison. He’d heard that the flu had gone through the prisons like wildfire. Nature’s own form of capital punishment. Indiscriminate, all possibility of appeal denied. Nothing was moving out there. It was perfectly still. No sound. No cats, no barking dog. No traffic. He could almost have believed he was the last man alive. It felt like he was.
‘Scotland the Brave’ demolished the silence. He glanced at the screen on his mobile. A voicemail notification. There was a message for him. He hesitated for just a moment, then decided not to listen to it. Whatever it was could wait. He had more pressing business.
He walked back down Routh Road and stood gazing up at the house. It was where she had spent the last six months of her life. Very probably where she had died. She had walked these streets with a little satchel, to and from school every day. Eyes averted, perhaps, to avoid the stares of the people she would pass on the way. What kind of teasing and cruelty must she have suffered at school? Even the teachers would have found it difficult not to let their eyes be drawn. How sad that everything else about her – her personality, intelligence, character, temperament – would have been blighted by a single physical defect. How sad that so much is judged on appearance, rather than substance.
He went through the gate into Le Saux’s garden. He had warned Le Saux that it might be better to turn off his security lights, just for tonight, if he wanted to avoid being repeatedly disturbed. The blue door into the old bomb shelter opened into darkness. MacNeil felt his way through it, eyes adjusting to the little light that fell in from the street behind him. There were gardening tools, and watering cans and plant pots. It smelled earthy damp in here, and the chill cut right through his heavy outer coat. At the far end a door opened into the back garden. It was even darker here. No light made it through from the street out front. A high brick wall separated the two gardens. MacNeil felt along the top to see if there was glass set into the cement. But all he felt was soft spongy moss. He braced himself and jumped, pulling himself up, the toes of his shoes scraping for footholds, until he got one leg over, straddling the wall for a brief moment before dropping down on the other side, and into the garden of number thirty-three. He crouched in a short length of paved alleyway that ran along the side of a huge modern conservatory built out from the back of the house. And he listened to see if he had disturbed any of the neighbours. Le Saux had taken his advice. The security lights had stayed off, and there was no hint of activity in any of the neighbouring houses.
What he was about to do was illegal. But to get a warrant now, in the middle of the night, given all the circumstances, would have been next to impossible. It was unlikely he could even get a magistrate out of bed. If he found something in the house, then someone else could always come back with the proper paperwork and search the place legitimately. But MacNeil wasn’t prepared to wait. He was strangely driven. Not only by the fact that in just five hours he would no longer be a police officer. But by a compelling sense of urgency. A feeling that time was somehow of the essence. The murder of the two boys at the flats in Lambeth. The execution of Kazinski in Soho. The carefully arranged corpse of Jonathan Flight in South Kensington. Everywhere he went people were dying. People that someone was very anxious to keep quiet. The killer’s sense of urgency had transmitted itself to MacNeil, and he was determined to press on now, regardless of the niceties or the consequences.
Somewhere beyond the veil of clouds that masked the night sky, a nearly full moon was trying to force its way through. But only the merest trace of moonshine permeated the black folds of rain-laden nimbostratus. An icy wind rustled through the long, dead grass that choked the garden, rattling the leaves of evergreen shrubs left to grow ragged and wild.
MacNeil pressed his face against the glass of the conservatory and tried to see inside. But the dark was impenetrable. He skirted around its edge and caught his shin on a heavy marble planter and cursed violently under his breath.
Which was when he heard the movement in the grass. Bigger than any gust of wind might have made, more substantial than any domestic animal or urban fox. He stood motionless, listening. There was someone there. He could feel the presence, was almost certain he could hear the person breathing, staying very still, perhaps waiting for MacNeil to make the next move. Although he could not see the figure in the grass, whoever it was could probably see him. He decided to get pro-active. ‘Who’s there?’ he called, and thought how foolish it sounded. As if anyone was going to tell him!
But his words spurred a sudden movement off to his left in the shadow of the undergrowth. He heard the rapid whoosh-whoosh of dead grass against running legs a
s a figure darted towards the back fence. He could barely see the intruder, a light, shadowy figure, someone quite a bit smaller than himself. MacNeil went after him, throwing himself through the wilderness of the back garden, abandoning any attempt at stealth. Just short of the high wooden fence that ran along the back of the garden, he grabbed a handful of what felt like jaggy tweed, and both he and the intruder fell hard amongst a pile of discarded plastic plant pots next to a dilapidated potting shed. The plastic whined and cracked and snapped beneath their combined weight. Whoever he’d caught squirmed and wriggled below him, tiny squeals of panic issuing forth in the dark. And then a light suddenly exploded in his face, blinding him. A torch. He grabbed the hand that held it, and its beam skewed off into the night. Another hand scratched and clawed at his face until he grabbed it, too, and turned the torch on to the face of his attacker.
He was almost shocked to see the pale, frightened face of a middle-aged woman with short, silver-grey hair. But although there was fear in her dark eyes, there was determination there, too. She bucked one way then the other, desperately trying to free her wrists from MacNeil’s iron grasp. Her torch spun away into the grass, its beam pointing back at them, illuminating their struggle and casting its shadow against the fence.
‘I’ll scream!’ she said in a voice made so tiny by fear that it barely penetrated the dark.
MacNeil said breathlessly, ‘If you scream, then so will I.’
Something in his voice stopped her struggling. She lay on the ground below him, gasping for breath, a strange, wiry creature in a tweed jacket and skirt with a white blouse and pearl necklace. ‘Who the hell are you?’ she gasped.
‘Detective Inspector Jack MacNeil. Who the hell are you?’
He saw her panic recede. ‘My name’s Sara Castelli,’ she said in a voice that was unmistakably North American in origin. ‘I’m an investigator with the HPA.’
‘And what’s the HPA?’
‘The Health Protection Agency. I can show you my ID if you like?’
MacNeil let go of her wrists, but remained straddling her waist so that she was still pinned firmly to the ground. He reached to retrieve her torch and shone it on her.
‘Please don’t shine that in my face,’ she said sharply, and he averted the beam to follow her hand into an inside pocket from which she pulled out a laminated HPA identity card on a chain. It had her photograph on it. And her full name. Sara Elizabeth Castelli. It also had her date of birth, and MacNeil made a quick calculation. She was nearly sixty, and he suddenly felt guilty that he had manhandled her so roughly. He rolled to one side and got quickly to his feet, holding out a hand to help her to hers. But she ignored it and got up unaided, brushing pieces of broken plastic and mud and dead leaves from her jacket and skirt. ‘Ruined,’ she muttered. ‘You clearly have no idea how to treat a lady, Mr MacNeil.’
‘Clearly,’ MacNeil said. ‘What are you doing here, Miss Castelli?’
‘Mrs,’ she corrected him. ‘Castelli is my married name. But you may call me doctor.’
‘Doctor. You haven’t answered my question.’
She assiduously avoided his eye as she continued brushing herself down. ‘Well, I might consider doing so if you were to show me some ID of your own. You could be anyone pretending to be a policeman.’
MacNeil showed her his warrant card. ‘Well?’
‘I’m trying to trace the source of the pandemic, Mr MacNeil. That’s what I do. I trace the source of infections and make recommendations on how to contain them.’
‘You’re an American?’
‘Canadian. Although I’ve spent most of the last twenty years in the States. Even took citizenship when I married Mr Castelli. Wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known then that he owed more allegiance to the Sicilian flag than to the Stars and Stripes. You’ve heard of the movie, Married to the Mob, Mr MacNeil? Well, that was me. Turned out the Castelli family runs most of New York. Which went down well with the Justice Department when I worked there as a health adviser.’ She glared at him defiantly. ‘Anything else you’d like to know?’
‘I’d be interested to hear why you think the pandemic started in the back garden of a house in Wandsworth, Dr Castelli.’
‘Well, of course I don’t think that. But I think someone who lived in this house might have been a carrier, or one of the first to be infected.’
‘The house is empty.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘So how were you intending to get in?’
‘That’s academic, Mr MacNeil. Now that you’re here, you can break in for me.’ She paused and crooked an eyebrow. ‘That’s what you were going to do anyway, isn’t it?’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Well, why else would you be sneaking around the back garden in the dead of night?’ It was his turn to avoid her eye, and she pressed home her advantage. ‘And you haven’t told me what you’re doing here, Mr MacNeil.’
MacNeil looked at this garrulous, defiant little woman with her coarse grey hair and tweed suit, and decided to come clean. ‘I’m investigating the murder of a ten-year-old child,’ he said. ‘A little girl. I think she lived here.’
Dr Castelli’s face darkened. ‘Choy?’
‘I don’t know her name.’
‘Well, there was only one little girl who lived here, as far as I know. And her name was Choy Smith.’
II.
His glove protected his hand as the glass broke inwards, landing in jagged shards on the carpet beneath the window. He reached in, unsnibbed the sash and slid it up.
‘You do that very well, Mr MacNeil,’ Dr Castelli whispered. ‘Is it something you learned in the police?’
MacNeil gave her a look and held out a hand to help her over the sill and into the room. They had climbed up a tangled trellis on to the pitched roof above the kitchen, and slithered across it to this first floor window.
They stood now in what was clearly a study of some sort. MacNeil shone the doctor’s torch around the room, picking out a desk strewn with papers, a computer, a calculator, two telephones. MacNeil glanced through some of the paperwork. Utility bills. A letter, which appeared to be in French, from a company called Omega 8, with an address in Sussex – there were several more with the same letterhead. A scientific paper of some sort, again in French.
There was a bookcase filled with leather-bound omnibus editions of classic English writers, a legacy of the original owner of the house, perhaps. A huge framed reproduction of a mediaeval map of London. There were more papers scattered across the floor as if discarded in anger. Two steps led down from a small half-landing outside the door to a bathroom at the top of the first flight of stairs. More stairs led up to a larger landing with two doors leading off to first-floor bedrooms. MacNeil leaned over the wooden bannister and looked into the well of the downstairs hall, light from the streetlamp outside broken into a thousand coloured fragments by the stained glass around the door and strewn across the parquet floor. And then he looked up to the attic landing twenty feet above, more doors leading to more bathrooms and more bedrooms. This was a big house for a family of three.
Choy’s bedroom was at the back of the house on the first floor, half a flight up from the study. There was a narrow single bed pushed into one corner and a small desk under the window, a school satchel leaning against one of its legs. There was a homework jotter open on it, large, childish Chinese characters scrawled in coloured crayon. MacNeil shone the torch on it, and thought about all the bones he had seen laid out on the table at Lambeth Road. The tiny bones which had made up the little fingers that held the crayons to make these characters. How long ago had that been? Maybe only a matter of days. He looked around this sadly empty room. There were no pictures on the walls. No photographs, no drawings. No toys lying on the floor. He thought of the chaos that had been Sean’s room, full to overflowing with the trappings of childhood.
Dr Castelli slid open the door of a built-in wardrobe. Choy’s clothes hung in neat lines on wire hangers. Most of them seemed new. Blouses and skirts, a row of little shoes lined up beneath them. In a dresser they found a pile of charcoal grey jumpers, a school tie, knickers, socks. There were no T-shirts or jeans, no bright clothing to reflect a child’s vibrant personality. Nothing playful in anything they found. What strange, spartan kind of existence had she lived here?
‘Jeez, I’ve seen more fun in a kids’ ward full of terminal cancer cases,’ Dr Castelli said. She lifted one of the charcoal jumpers from its drawer and held it to her face. ‘Poor kid.’
MacNeil looked at her. ‘Isn’t there a danger of infection?’
‘The flu?’ She shrugged. ‘I doubt if I’ll catch anything. I’ve been exposed to so many infectious diseases, Mr MacNeil. There are so many antibodies floating around my system, you could probably immunise the whole of London with a few pints of my blood.’ She shook her head. ‘I spent most of last year in Vietnam, chasing down cases of bird flu, trying to establish if there were any instances of human-to-human transmission. I didn’t find any, but I came in contact with most of the victims. We decided to do blood tests on some of the relatives. And in a handful of cases we found that they had antibodies in their blood. It was like they’d had the flu, but without symptoms. Which gave us hope that maybe it wouldn’t be the killer we all feared. We were wrong, of course. But then we tested my blood, and I had the antibodies too. Weird, huh?’
‘You said you didn’t find any cases of human-to-human transmission.’
‘I didn’t, no. But others did. The first widely accepted case was in Thailand. A family cluster in Kamphaeng Phet, about five hours north of Bangkok. They did some crude modelling on what would have happened if the transmission had been efficient. In the twenty-one days it took them to get up there, there would have been six hundred cases. Ten days after that, it would have been six thousand. That’s why we were so worried, Mr MacNeil. With efficient transmission, and a mortality rate of seventy to eighty per cent, the death toll worldwide would have been unthinkable. You’ve heard of the Spanish Flu?’