by Peter May
‘You’ll call in a forensics team, then,’ the doctor said.
MacNeil stood up and sighed. ‘I can’t.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because we entered the house illegally. Any evidence we find here will be inadmissible in court.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’
‘It’s the law. Someone’s going to have to come back with a warrant and search the place all over again. Legally this time. We were never here, doctor.’
‘I was at home all night, Inspector.’
MacNeil managed a pale smile. ‘You catch on quickly.’
‘I was always fast. Made me very popular with the boys.’
MacNeil took back the torch and replaced the knife, locking the safe and returning the key to its nail on the wall. He looked around this grim little killing room and shivered. Only this time, it was not from the cold.
Back in the hall, coloured light rained in on them from the stained glass around the front door. MacNeil took out his mobile phone. The display blinked at him, telling him he still had one message waiting. He ignored it and dialled the FSS lab in Lambeth Road and asked for Dr Tom Bennet.
Tom sounded weary, as if perhaps he had been sleeping, slumped behind his desk with his door closed, willing away the hours of darkness and an end to the curfew, so that he could finally go home. ‘Dr Bennet.’
‘Tom, it’s Jack MacNeil.’
There was a silence at the other end of the phone, and MacNeil could almost feel the hostility in it. ‘Yes?’ he said eventually, ice in his voice.
‘Tom, I need a favour,’ MacNeil said, without much hope now that he would get it. ‘I have a sample of what I believe to be dried blood. I think it came from the little Chinese girl with the cleft palate. I need to compare it with DNA from the girl’s bones.’
‘That’s hardly a favour, Detective Inspector. If you make an official request, then someone will do it. You don’t even have to ask nicely.’
‘I know that. But I need it to be off the record.’
More silence. Then, ‘Why?’
MacNeil sighed. He had no time to be anything but honest. ‘Because the sample was obtained illegally.’
‘Then that would make me an accomplice to a crime.’
‘I’m trying to catch a killer, Tom, and I’m running out of time.’
‘Time to what? Be a hero?’
‘I’m asking nicely.’
‘Then why don’t you ask your . . . friend . . . Amy? I’m sure she’d be happy to oblige.’
MacNeil understood immediately that he knew about him and Amy, and that the knowledge had filled him with poison and spite, just as Amy had always feared. She had known him too well. He heard another phone ringing somewhere in the background in Tom’s office, and it gave the pathologist the perfect excuse to end their conversation.
‘I’m sorry, I have another call. I have to go.’ He didn’t sound at all sorry, and he hung up abruptly.
II.
Harry sat fully dressed now on the side of his bed. His face was so pale it very nearly glowed in the dark. Pinkie sat close beside him, the barrel of his silencer pushed softly into Harry’s neck. Harry held the phone to his ear with trembling fingers and listened as it rang at the other end. Then Tom’s voice, crisp and businesslike, drove a sick feeling, like a sharpened wooden stake, deep into the pit of his partner’s stomach. It might have been better for both of them if Tom had not been there.
‘Dr Bennet.’
‘Tom, it’s Harry.’
Pinkie leaned in close to Harry’s ear so that he could hear, too. And what he heard was Tom’s pleasure.
‘Hey, guy,’ Tom said. ‘Does this mean we’re talking again?’
Pinkie nodded and Harry said, ‘I guess.’ He drew a deep, tremulous breath. ‘Jesus Christ, Tom!’
Pinkie pushed the barrel hard into the soft flesh of Harry’s neck and he squealed.
‘What is it?’ Tom sounded concerned now. ‘Harry, are you alright?’
Pinkie took the phone from Harry. ‘Harry’s fine, Tom,’ he said.
‘Who the hell’s this?’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Pinkie said soothingly. ‘All you need to know is that if you do what I ask, then Harry is going to be just dandy. I won’t harm a single hair on his pretty little head.’
III.
Amy had turned out all the lights, and sat now in the dark. She knew that the apartment was warm, but she was chilled through, her skin cold to the touch. She sat with a kitchen knife clutched tightly in her lap, watching the stairwell. Light from the landing below rose up and reflected in a distorted oblong on the pitched ceiling above it. If anyone came up the stairs, she would see his shadow immediately. She would have the advantage of surprise, and an elevated position, on her side. But in the hour or more since she had called MacNeil, there had been not a sound, not the faintest shadow of a movement.
That should, perhaps, have reassured her that whoever had cut Lyn’s hair was long gone. But she found it hard to accept. She had been left so completely unnerved. It made no sense at all, and every time she thought of how he must have entered the house while she was so innocently naked and exposed in the shower, she wanted to curl up in a foetal ball and simply shut out the world. If only it was possible to pretend that none of this had happened, that in another moment she would turn over and wake up looking at the digital display on her bedside clock, daylight seeping in around the edges of her curtains.
But she knew that there was no such easy escape, and so she sat, rigid with tension and cold, and waited.
Across the room, the shorn head watched her in the dark, almost scornfully. Amy didn’t know what fear was. Amy was still alive. Amy had hope, Amy had a future.
The telephone rang, and it so startled her that she nearly screamed. She grabbed the receiver. At last!
‘Jack!’
‘Sorry to disappoint. It’s only Tom.’ But she was disappointed. The momentary relief which had flooded her senses receded immediately, leaving her edgy and tense. And in spite of his attempt at flippancy, she detected something strangely off-key in Tom’s tone.
‘What do you want, Tom?’ She hadn’t meant to be so terse.
‘I want you to come down to the lab,’ he said evenly.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want to go into it on the phone. I just need you here now. As soon as possible.’
‘Tom, have you any idea what time it is?’
‘About three, I should think.’
‘Well, what can you possibly want me there for at three in the morning?’
‘I need you to bring the head and the skull.’
Amy’s feeling of danger momentarily deserted her, to be replaced by consternation. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You don’t have to understand, Amy.’ Tom’s self-control was deserting him. He sounded tetchy now. ‘Just do it. Please.’
‘Tom . . .’
‘Amy!’ he nearly shouted. ‘Just do it.’
She almost recoiled from the phone. They’d had their rows over the years, but he had never spoken to her like this. And he seemed, immediately, to regret it.
‘Amy, I’m sorry.’ He was pleading now. ‘I didn’t mean to shout at you. It’s just . . . this is really important. Just come. Please.’ He paused. ‘Trust me.’
Trust me. How could she not? They had been friends for so long, and he had been with her all the way to hell and back. They were the two words most guaranteed to invoke all the friendship and gratitude she owed him. Trust me. Of course she trusted him. And for all her misgivings, there was no way she could refuse him.
‘It’ll take me forty, maybe fifty minutes.’
The relief in his voice was nearly palpable. ‘Thanks, Amy.’
The phone call had banished the sense of imminent danger in the apart
ment. And she began to wonder just how much her imagination had played a role in it. She turned on the light again and wheeled across the room to lift the child’s head from the table. She removed the wig before carefully wrapping the head in soft wadding and slipping it into an old hat box that she kept for transporting her heads. She dropped the wig in on top of it and replaced the lid.
As the stair lift droned slowly down to the first landing, her sense of acute vulnerability returned. She still clutched the kitchen knife on top of the hat box. But there was nobody there. Nobody in the bedroom or the bathroom, or in the coat cupboard when she retrieved the thick winter cape she used to drape over her shoulders.
The tiny hall at the foot of the final flight was deserted, cold and unadorned in the harsh yellow lamplight, and the smell of the skull rose up to greet her, through all its layers of plastic. A reminder, if she needed one, that the child was dead, and that they were still in the business of trying to find her killer.
She opened the door, and the night breathed its cold breath in her face. She pulled it shut behind her and motored down the ramp into the deserted square of granite cobbles. A tear opened up suddenly in the cloud overhead, and the briefest glimpse of silver light spilled across the courtyard, vanishing again in an instant. There was not a living soul to be seen, and Amy wondered if she had ever felt more alone. She turned her wheelchair and headed for Gainsford Street and the multi-storey car park.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I.
There were times when it was almost possible to believe that the millions of people who had once lived in this great city had simply packed up and left it. In this darkest of the small hours, when there were no vehicles on the road, no lights in any of the windows amongst the rows of silent houses they drove past, it felt abandoned. Lost.
Dr Castelli had left her car at Wandsworth, opting to stay with MacNeil, somewhere on the wrong side of the law. For his part he was glad of the company. The presence in the passenger seat beside him of this odd little lady, in her sensible housebreaking shoes and tweed suit, was comforting in a peculiar sort of way. Human contact. A voice to drown out the one in his head.
And she did like to talk. Perhaps it was nerves. A need to drive out her own demons.
She was talking now about H5N1. ‘Of course, you’ve heard of antigenic shift?’ she said, as if it might have been a topic of everyday conversation.
‘No.’
‘It’s what we call an abrupt, major change in an influenza-A virus. Doesn’t happen that often, but when it does, it creates a new influenza-A subtype, producing new hemagglutinin and neuraminidase proteins that infect humans. Most of us have little or no protection again them.’
‘And H5N1 is an A virus?’
‘It is. And it’s probably been around for a very long time, in one form or another.’
‘Before it shifted?’
‘Exactly. And when it did that, it became lethal, not only to birds, but to humans as well. Of course, it still had to find an efficient way of transmitting itself from human to human, while retaining its remarkable propensity for killing us. They’ll do that, you know, viruses. Real little bastards! Almost as though they’re pre-programmed to find the best way of killing everything else. A virus only has one raison d’être, you know. To multiply exponentially. And once it starts, it’s a hell of a hard thing to stop.’
‘So what happened to make it transmit so efficiently from human to human?’
‘Oh, recombination. Almost certainly.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Put simply, one virus meets another, they exchange genetic material, and effectively create a third virus. Pure chance whether or not it turns out to be something worse. A kind of little Frankenstein’s monster of the virus world.’
‘But that’s what happened to the bird flu?’
‘Oh, sure. On its travels, H5N1 probably encountered a human flu virus in one of its victims. They got together, swapped the worst, or best, of each of them, and created the nasty little SOB that’s killing everyone now.’
They cruised past the flower market at the junction of Nine Elms Lane and Wandsworth Road, and MacNeil stared thoughtfully downriver towards the floodlit Houses of Parliament, and the unmistakable tower of Big Ben. ‘Could something like that be done, you know, in a lab?’
‘Well, of course.’ Dr Castelli was warming to her subject. ‘With genetic manipulation you could quite easily create an efficiently transmittable version of H5N1. Swap a human receptor binding domain from a human flu virus into an H5 backbone and you’d improve transmission efficiency enormously. The last couple of years, they’ve been doing that in labs all over the world to try to anticipate what a human transmissible H5N1 would look like.’
‘To create a vaccine.’ MacNeil remembered the Stein-Francks doctor explaining it on television yesterday morning. Was that really only twenty-four hours ago? Less!
‘Except that they all got it wrong, and had to start again from scratch when the real thing came along.’ She sat silently for a moment, before turning towards him, a tiny frown playing around her eyes. ‘What made you ask that?’
He said, ‘A girl at the lab isolated a flu virus in marrow recovered from Choy’s bones.’
He felt Dr Castelli watching him intently. ‘And?’
‘Well, it didn’t mean much to me. But it seems like they were all excited because it wasn’t H5N1. Or at least, not the version of it that we know. They said that it was artificial. That it had been man-made.’
II.
Pinkie drove across the square, past Westminster Hall and the Houses of Parliament. Westminster Abbey sat brooding in silent winter darkness, the branches of the trees in the park stark and leafless, brittle black skeletons standing witness to a plague sent, it seemed, from God to punish Man for his wickedness. For some reason they had sealed off Westminster Bridge, and so Pinkie was heading south to cross the river at Lambeth Bridge. Which, in any case, would bring him out almost opposite the laboratories.
Harry was gagged and masked and tied up in the back seat. At first he had struggled and whined, but he had long since given up, and Pinkie had not heard so much as a whimper from him in the last fifteen minutes.
Pinkie was feeling good. He liked it when he had to improvise. It tested his intelligence. It stretched him. It was a challenge. He had detected just a hint of hysteria buried somewhere deep in Mr Smith’s voice. A rising panic that he was trying hard to hide. But Pinkie was still in control. It was what he was paid for. To get the job done. Never start something you can’t finish, his mother had said. If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Pinkie always finished the job. And he always did it well. He could hardly be held responsible for the shortcomings of others.
The fact that it was he who had introduced Kazinski to Mr Smith in the first place had niggled for a time. There was a chance that Mr Smith would blame Pinkie for Kazinski’s failure. But Kazinski was gone, and Pinkie was back in charge. Whatever happened now, he would see it through to the end.
Victoria Tower Gardens separated them from the river to their left, St. John’s concert hall just beyond Smith Square on their right. Pinkie could see Lambeth Bridge spanning the Thames ahead of them at the Millbank roundabout.
He slipped into third gear and slowed to make a left turn across the bridge. There was an army roadblock halfway across. A couple of trucks and half a dozen soldiers. Pinkie dropped another gear to slow his approach and give them plenty of time to check out his registration plate.
Roped hands suddenly looped over his head from behind, and he heard Harry grunt from the effort as he pulled back hard, pinning Pinkie to the headrest. The rough fibres of the rope burned Pinkie’s skin, and he felt his windpipe being crushed. Involuntarily, his foot pushed down on the accelerator as he braced himself, and the car lurched forward at speed. Both his hands shot up to grab the rope and try to release the
pressure on his throat. Harry head-butted him on the top of his head, and he felt a sickening pain like a vice closing around his skull. Light exploded behind his eyes. Harry was strong. He was not going to let go.
Pinkie could hear the soldiers shouting now, even above the roar of the engine. Panic in their voices. But he was powerless to do anything about it. He could see them through the windscreen, rifles raised, pointed at the car, standing their ground and ready to fire. Harry was growling as he tightened his grip on Pinkie, sensing success in overcoming his abductor.
The first bullets hit the engine block. Pinkie knew that the soldiers were instructed to fire into the engine block of any vehicle that failed to stop. The next rounds would come through the windscreen. He knew he was going to die, and was powerless to do anything about it. But the second wave of bullets never came. He felt the car slewing sideways, saw pale, masked faces flashing past as soldiers scattered across the road. There was the sickening sound of metal tearing like paper, as the car struck one of the trucks and went spinning across the carriageway. Pinkie’s foot was still pushed hard to the floor. The car was stuck in second gear, and the engine was screaming. He saw flames exploding out of the bonnet as Mr Smith’s BMW struck the parapet, and Harry flew past him, narrowly missing Pinkie’s head, and his face burst against the windscreen in a spray of red.
Pinkie smelled petrol, and then his whole world was engulfed by flames.
III.
MacNeil was approaching the roundabout at Lambeth Palace when they saw the explosion. Initial flames leapt twenty or thirty feet into the air. MacNeil jammed on his brakes and turned on to the bridge. They could see a vehicle half up on the parapet. It had demolished a lamp post, and all the lights had gone out. But the blaze lit the night sky and sent the shadows of running soldiers flitting across the roadway like fleeing rats.
‘Sonofabitch!’ Dr Castelli shouted. ‘There’s someone in the car. There’s someone alive in that car!’
MacNeil could see an arm flapping behind the flames in the driver’s seat, someone trying desperately to get out. He jumped out of the car and saw soldiers turn their rifles towards him. He waved his warrant card in the air and bellowed above the roar of the flames. ‘Police. I’ve got a doctor with me. Is there anyone hurt?’