by Peter May
MacNeil nodded.
‘The worst pandemic in human history. Killed more than fifty million people in 1918. It had a mortality rate of less than two per cent.’
‘I thought the Plague was worse than the Spanish Flu,’ MacNeil said.
‘It killed more people, certainly. But it took a few hundred years to do it. The Spanish Flu did its work in a matter of months.’
They left Choy’s room and went into the front bedroom.
‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘we were so sure that if the bird flu was going to be the source of the next pandemic, then it was going to start in south-east Asia and gradually spread to the rest of the world. That’s why we concentrated all our efforts there. It would have reached London in the end, of course. But no one thought for a minute that this is where it would start.’
The front bedroom was a big room, with bay windows looking out on to the street. But blinds had been drawn to keep out the light, along with prying eyes. There was a large double bed which had not been made up since the last time it had been slept in. The pillow on the left side remained undisturbed, as if there had only been one occupant. In the drawers and cupboards, there were only men’s clothes. No perfume or hairbrushes or make-up in the en-suite bathroom. If Mr Smith’s wife had spent any time here at all, it was clear she had left some time ago.
Dr Castelli watched as MacNeil searched methodically through the room. ‘The figures the government puts out,’ she said. ‘Crap! They’re much worse.’
‘How much worse?’
‘Well, the population of Greater London’s what, about seven million? Just do the math. A quarter of the population will get it. That’s about 1.75 million. Around three-quarters of them will die. That’s just over 1.3 million. Dead. No way back. Gone forever.’
MacNeil turned and looked at her in the ghostly yellow glow of the torch. It was clear that she thrived on statistics. ‘Numbers aren’t people, Dr Castelli. And people aren’t numbers.’ But he knew that’s just what Sean had become. A number, another faceless victim, fodder for the furnace.
Something in his tone made her look at him quizzically. ‘Was it someone very close?’ she asked after a moment.
‘My son.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah.’ He turned towards the door. ‘Let’s go downstairs.’
Most of the black and cream wall units in the kitchen were empty. A few cans, and several packets of dried food – noodles, spaghetti, sugar – was all MacNeil could find. The refrigerator contained a collection of half-used jars of sauce and olives and mayonnaise. There was an inch of milk left in a plastic bottle. MacNeil sniffed it and recoiled from its sour smell. He looked for the date. It was nearly two weeks beyond its use-by. A conservatory bay looked out from the kitchen on to the back garden. There was a small breakfast table in it, and two chairs. Perhaps Mr and Mrs Smith had not been in the habit of taking breakfast with their daughter. There were glass doors leading through to the main conservatory which was dominated by a large glass dining table with upholstered wrought-iron chairs. French windows opened into the living room.
‘What are you looking for, Mr MacNeil?’ Dr Castelli asked.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. What about you? What was it you thought you were going to find in here?’
‘Oh, I imagine like you, I’ll probably know when I see it. But anything that might give me an insight into where she caught her flu.’
MacNeil walked into the conservatory and she followed him through. He flashed light across the tabletop. It was littered with papers, documents and letters. All in French. A strip of paper fluttered to the floor as he lifted a letter to try to read it, but it was a long time since he had failed his French O level. It bore the Omega 8 letterhead, the same as the ones in the study.
Dr Castelli stooped to retrieve the strip of paper. ‘You’d better have a look at this,’ she said as she stood, and MacNeil turned to train his torch on it. It was a strip of passport photographs. There were three of them. The fourth had been cut off, presumably for use in a passport. In two of them, a little Chinese girl with a horribly disfigured upper lip was attempting to smile for the camera. Her hair looked as if it had been cut with pinking shears, and she wore an ugly pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses. In the first, she was looking off, camera right, a perplexed expression on her face, saying something to someone just out of shot. So this was Choy. The bag of bones he had been called out to look at just nineteen hours ago on a building site near Westminster. This was the head that Amy had re-animated in her warehouse attic. And she had achieved a fair likeness.
‘Is this her?’ asked Dr Castelli.
‘Probably.’
‘Why can’t you be certain?’
‘There’s nothing left of her but bones, Dr Castelli. She was stripped clean. Apart from a facial approximation made from her skull, we don’t really know what she looked like.’ He looked at the photographs again. The cleft lip was unmistakable. ‘But it’s a pretty good bet.’
He slipped the passport photographs into a plastic evidence bag and filed them away safely in an inside pocket, and they went back out into the hall.
A couple of days’ mail lay on the floor beneath the letter box. A wad of unopened letters was piled untidily on the hall stand. Dr Castelli leafed through them. She made a grunting sound. ‘Half of these are from me. He didn’t even bother to open them. No wonder I didn’t get any response.’
‘Why were you writing?’ MacNeil said. ‘And what led you here in the first place?’
Dr Castelli let out a long, weary sigh of what sounded like resignation. ‘I’m almost certain that the pandemic started at an outdoor activity centre for London schools in Kent. Back in October, during the mid-term break. Sprint Water Outdoor Centre. There were thousands of kids from London down there for the week, supervised by their teachers. It’s a residential centre. You know the sort of thing. They have sailing and canoeing and rock-climbing. There are team-building events, and some of the students take part in the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme. They spend some of the time under canvas, they have campfires. The one thing all these kids have in common is that they’re in each other’s faces the whole time. Living in each other’s pockets. In dormitories and dining halls and day-trips on buses. A perfect breeding ground for disease.’
She idly tore open one of her own letters and shook her head as she cast her eyes over it.
‘All the families we managed to identify as the first to come down with the flu had kids at that outdoor centre in October. We might have got to this point quicker if we’d been faster off the mark. But it was several weeks before anyone realised what was happening. By that time the flu was out of control, and all we could do was wade back through the statistics. We’ve managed to trace all of the kids who were there, and rule them out as a source. We were looking for any connections with south-east Asia. And the best we’ve been able to come up with is Choy. We knew she was Chinese in origin, an adoptive child of French parents. But we’ve no idea how recently she came out of China, or whether she has any connection with the east at all. She might have been born in France for all we know. But she’s the only one we haven’t been able to get information on. Her parents haven’t responded to letters or taken phone calls.’
She dropped her letter back on the hall stand and looked earnestly at MacNeil with darting little black eyes.
‘By a process of elimination, Mr MacNeil, and in the absence of proof to the contrary, we have to make the assumption that Choy may well have been the source of the pandemic.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
The flat in Parfrey Street was opposite Charing Cross Hospital. Pinkie knew it had a reputation for amputations and sex changes – although not necessarily in that order. Before the pandemic, residents used to joke that they couldn’t tell if someone coming out of the hospital was a man or a woman. The perfect place, Pinkie thought, for t
he couple he intended to visit.
Tom and Harry’s flat at 13A was just above a florist’s shop, which was also a café. Next door to the café was a twenty-four-hour general store that sold alcohol in blue plastic bags at all hours. Pre-pandemic there had been a regular traffic of pyjama’d patients, back and forth across the street. They went empty-handed, and returned with blue plastic bags.
Now most of the wards were filled with the dead and dying. The hospital’s regular trade had taken a back seat, and the twenty-four-hour shop was closed twenty-four-seven. As was the florist cum café, and the Pizza Express from which Tom and Harry used to feed themselves on the nights they couldn’t be bothered cooking.
Pinkie cruised up a side street, away from the lights of the hospital and the comings and goings of the ambulances. You hardly ever heard them coming these days. A lack of traffic had made their sirens redundant. He found somewhere to park, and walked back to the door at number one. He drew a crowbar from inside his coat and levered it open. The wood cracked and splintered as the lock burst. The time for subtlety was over. He climbed the stairs quickly to 13A on the top floor and glanced at the nameplate. Tom Bennet. Harry Schwartz. He slipped the wedge-end of his crowbar between the door and the jamb and forced it open. More splintered wood. The noise of it reverberated around the landing, and the hall of the flat beyond. He pushed the door open, then quickly closed it behind him and stood listening in the dark. He heard the rustle of bed sheets, a groan, a sleepy voice. ‘Jesus, Tom, is that you? What the hell are you doing?’
Pinkie turned and opened the bedroom door. He could see the prone figure of Harry wrapped in his duvet, half-raised on one elbow.
‘I thought you were on all night.’
‘I came home early,’ Pinkie said. ‘Because I wanted to put something in your mouth.’
Harry immediately reached for the bedside lamp. He turned it on, startled, and looked at Pinkie standing in the doorway. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
Pinkie looked at Harry appraisingly. He could see what Tom saw in him. He was definitely the alfa male. Tall, well-built, a good head of thick, brown hair. He reminded Pinkie a little of George Clooney. Yes, he definitely had a touch of the film star about him. It was no wonder he was in such demand. Pinkie smiled and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘A friend of Tom’s,’ he said. ‘He told me you might be pleased to see me.’ He glanced down at the duvet. ‘I don’t see any evidence of it yet.’
Harry sat upright and moved away from him. Pinkie didn’t feel as though he was presenting that much of a threat. Why did Harry seem so scared? Time to introduce him to real fear. He drew his gun from beneath his jacket and levelled it at Harry’s head. Harry’s eyes opened wide.
‘Jesus! Please don’t.’
‘Don’t what? I’m not going to hurt you.’ Pinkie moved the silencer to within an inch of Harry’s mouth, and flicked it once. ‘Come on. Open up. I told you I wanted to put something in your mouth.’
‘Oh, my God,’ Harry muttered, and with the parting of his lips, Pinkie pushed the silencer into his mouth and felt it clatter against his teeth. Harry froze, hardly daring to move or breathe.
‘There,’ Pinkie said soothingly. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ He enjoyed their fear. Sometimes there wasn’t time to dwell on it. Sometimes you just had to pull the trigger and be done. He remembered how it felt when the knife went down through the shoulder blades of his mother’s attacker. It had glanced off bone, a sickening, jarring sensation that shot up his arm, before driving on into the heart. The man was dead, even before Pinkie rolled him off her. There had been no chance to register his fear and pain, that moment of realisation that death was upon him. So he liked to savour moments like this. But not for too long. Time was running out. ‘I want you to do something for me, Harry. It will require me to remove the gun from your mouth. So I want you to be a good boy. Do you understand me?’
Harry nodded quickly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I.
MacNeil shone his torch into the tiny bathroom beneath the stairs and saw that there was a door just inside it, on the right. He grabbed the handle and pushed it open into darkness. The beam of his torch picked out narrow wooden steps descending steeply into the cellar.
‘You’d better wait here,’ he said.
‘I will not, Mr MacNeil,’ Dr Castelli said firmly. ‘Where you go, I follow.’
‘Be careful, then. These steps are very steep.’
‘Don’t worry about me. I have my sensible shoes on. My housebreaking ones.’
He had to turn sideways to place his feet squarely on the steps and ease his big frame down into the cold damp of the basement. It was a small room, divided in two by a brick wall. Faint yellow street light washed in from a narrow coal chute. A metal grille stopped animals from getting in. It was many years since the coalman had slid his last sack down this chute, but there was a pile of chopped pine beneath it, next to a small wood-burning stove. Low air pressure was forcing the smell of soot back down the black metal pipe that fed up into the chimney, sour like stale bacon. It was icy cold here, and MacNeil was unable to stop an involuntary shiver running through his upper body. He could feel the chill coming up through the floor, penetrating his shoes, wrapping itself around his feet and his ankles.
He ran the torch around bare walls. There was nothing much here. An empty wine rack, a damp cardboard box full of empty wine bottles. A rolled-up piece of carpet, an off-cut from one of the upstairs bedrooms. White, powdery damp oozed out through old brick. MacNeil had to duck as he passed through into the other half of the room. White-painted concrete beams supported a low ceiling. The walls were lined with empty wine racks.
‘Someone must have been very thirsty,’ Dr Castelli said, and her voice sounded strangely dead down here in this cold, claustrophobic space. On the back wall there was an old Belfast sink, a big white porcelain tub. In days gone by perhaps they had washed clothes down here. A single cold-water tap stuck out from the wall above it. Beneath it there was a large gas bottle, and an industrial-sized gas ring on a sturdy metal stand. A container the size of a small barrel stood next to it, covered with a towel. The centre of the room was taken up by a stout wooden table, like a giant butcher’s block, which may well have been what it once was. It was chopped and scarred, and worn into a deep dent at one side, and bleached clean. MacNeil sniffed. He could smell it in the air.
So could Dr Castelli. ‘Bleach,’ she said.
He shone the torch around the room until it fell upon a rusted metal door set into the wall. It was about two feet high and one foot wide. MacNeil tried it, but it wouldn’t move. It was either rusted solid, or locked.
‘Maybe this’ll open it.’
He turned to find the doctor holding up a big old iron key about six inches long. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘No big secret. It was hanging on the wall.’ As he took it from her and turned to try it in the door, she said, ‘What do you think it is? Some kind of safe?’
‘It’s probably an old silver safe. In a house like this the original owners would have been pretty wealthy. They’d have had silver cutlery, maybe a silver tea service. The servants would have locked it away in the silver safe after cleaning.’
The key groaned and complained as he twisted it clockwise. But it did turn, and the heavy steel door swung open, rusty hinges grating. There was a single wooden shelf set in the niche in the wall behind it. The beam of MacNeil’s torch reflected back at them from an array of knives and choppers neatly arranged on the shelf. Not dissimilar to the cutting implements he had found in Flight’s apartment.
He recoiled a little, as if the safe had breathed death in his face. This was no silver. This was stainless steel, lethally sharp, and he had no doubt that he’d found the instruments which had been used to strip the flesh from little Choy’s bones. He lifted out a large butcher’s knife and held it carefully between two gloved fi
ngers. The blade was clean, reflecting shards of light around the walls from the glow of his torch, but as MacNeil held it up to look at it more closely, he saw that where the steel entered the wooden haft, there was a line of thick, dark matter dried in along the edge of the wood.
He handed the torch to Dr Castelli. ‘Here, hold this for me.’ And he took the knife to the table, laying it carefully on the wooden surface, before taking out his notebook and tearing out a clean page. He placed it on the table, and opened up a small penknife, scraping delicately along the joining edge between blade and haft. A dark, rusty brown dust crumbled on to the page of his notebook.
‘Blood?’ Dr Castelli said.
‘It’s a fair bet.’
‘Choy’s?’
He nodded grimly. ‘I think this is almost certainly where it happened, doctor. I don’t know if they killed her in here, but I think they very probably laid her body out on this very table and hacked the flesh from her bones. There must have been blood everywhere.’
‘Then there’ll be traces,’ she said, ‘no matter how fastidiously they cleaned up afterwards.’
MacNeil folded up the white paper to seal in the brown dust and slipped it into an evidence bag. ‘Like this.’
‘What do you think they did with the flesh and the organs?’
‘Probably burned them. In that stove out there.’ He nodded towards the outer half of the room. ‘There should be traces in the ash.’ He crossed to the sink and stooped to examine the gas ring beneath it. He pulled away the towel next to it to reveal a huge copper pot, two feet or more across. It had probably been used in happier days to make jam. ‘I guess they must have boiled up the bones in this.’ He knocked it with his knuckles and it rewarded him with a dull ring. He hoped that they had killed her quickly, mercifully. Because the horror of what had followed was unthinkable.