Питер Мэй - Lockdown

‘Probably gunfire.’

She frowned. ‘Who’s shooting?’

MacNeil’s response was mechanical. Like Martha, he felt the need to speak, to find words to fill an empty void in which they would otherwise drown in unwanted thoughts. ‘The Isle of Dogs has been sealed off. There’s no flu on the island, and a bunch of people with guns and some big financial backing are making sure that no one brings it on.’

‘Can they do that?’ Martha was incredulous. For just a moment she forgot why they were here.

‘Apparently. You can leave if you want, but you can’t go back. There’s a stand-off with the army, and the government seems to have backed down from confrontation. Occasionally there’s an exchange of fire. But I think it’s just posturing. If anyone got shot for real, then I guess they would send in the troops.’

There was another bout of crackling, and then silence. The slow chug of a tugboat pulling rafts of yellow containers downriver was the only sound to break it.

They walked slowly without speaking for several minutes. Then MacNeil said, ‘This is my last day.’

He felt her face turn up towards him, but he didn’t want to meet her eye. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I gave in my notice. I finish at seven tomorrow morning.’

‘I don’t understand.’ He heard the confusion in her voice.

‘What’s not to understand? I quit my job.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you had custody of Sean. Because I knew if I didn’t make the time to see him now I never would.’

She didn’t speak for a long time. And then she said, ‘It’s a pity you didn’t think of doing it sooner.’

‘Don’t start.’ He let his arm slide from her shoulder, and felt the same old anger again. It was always like this when they argued. ‘I don’t want to do this now. Sean’s the only thing that matters.’

She slipped her arm through his and squeezed it. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. Maybe if we’d both thought more about Sean and less about ourselves, things would have been different.’

Different for Sean, certainly, he thought. But he doubted if either he or Martha would have been any happier. If it hadn’t been for Sean’s unexpected arrival, their relationship would have burned itself out and they would both have moved on. How many couples, he wondered, were trapped in loveless marriages because of a child conceived in carelessness? And how unfair was that on the kid? All Sean had ever asked of them was their love. And while they had given it, it had never been unconditional. And now he lay dying, and all they had left were their regrets and their guilt. Each as culpable as the other.

‘What are you going to do?’ Martha asked. ‘For a living.’

MacNeil shook his head. It was something he’d been avoiding. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Maybe,’ she said suddenly, ‘maybe if Sean — if he pulls through — maybe we should think about giving it another go. For his sake.’

MacNeil gazed bleakly through the chill winter haze, and had a sensation of falling weightlessly into space. ‘Maybe we should,’ he said, without conviction.

Amy ran her cursor over the drop-down menu on her computer screen and selected SEND INSTANT MESSAGE. She had already chosen Sam from her list of messaging buddies. She typed quickly.

— Sam, I’m thinking of asking for them to try to get a DNA sample from the tissue Tom recovered from the bone marrow. What do you think?

She hit the return key and sent the message. It went off with a wwwooo-oop sound. She waited, watching the window on her screen for Sam’s reply. She had chosen a headshot of herself as her avatar which would appear on Sam’s screen with her message. Sam, for some reason, had picked a colourful picture of a parrot. Amy had always meant to ask the significance of it, but then forgotten in the course of conversation — if text messages could be called conversation. They were more instant than emailing, but not as tying as a phone call. You could just leave the window open and return to it to pick up a conversation when you wanted. She had already had numerous conversations with Sam that day, providing the retired anthropologist with a briefing on the bones.

Another wwwooo-oop alerted her to Sam’s reply.

— Why? was the response.

— Why the DNA, or why am I asking you?

— The DNA.

Their exchanges were often characterised by an almost childish flippancy, the only real way they had of expressing the mutual affection of two people who had only ever met in the ether. But Sam seemed grumpy today. Amy’s fingers rattled over the keyboard.

— There’s an outside chance she might be on the DNA database.

— If she’s from a developing country like you think, that’s unlikely.

— True, but we’d kick ourselves if she was. Never overlook the obvious, you always tell me.

— The yield from the marrow will probably be pretty low.

— We could take pulp from one of her teeth.

— I thought you had the skull there.

— Oops, so I do. Bone, then. I could ask Tom to cut a wedge from the femur. In fact, he’s probably already done that to get to the marrow.

There was a long pause. Amy watched the cursor blinking blankly at her from the screen. Then,

— Worth a try, I suppose. Another pause. — What other tests has Tom ordered up?

— I don’t know. Toxicology, probably.

— That won’t yield much. Qualitative rather than quantitative results. If there are drugs present, it’ll only be a trace. No way to tell how much.

Amy nodded at the screen, as if Sam might be able to see her. She knew that Sam was right. And it was frustrating. Somehow, you felt you ought to be able to tell more about a person from their bones.

— Okay, thanks, Sam. Talk later.

Amy looked across the room at her cast of Lyn’s skull. Even without the flesh to give it emphasis, the cleft in the maxilla was a substantial disfigurement, displacing the teeth it was supposed to hold in a straight, even line. She grabbed the lever on the right arm of her wheelchair and propelled it smoothly across the floor to the table by the window. She had drilled the holes and glued the dowels in place. And now that the glue had set she could start to build the layers of ‘muscle’ that would give definition and personality to the face. She started preparing the strips of plasticine, but her sense of frustration had not gone away.

It was the emotion she felt most frequently, and it often led to depression. It came from her inability to do her job, the thing she had been trained for, the work she had grown to love. While her brain was still sharp and clear, and her fingers had lost none of their skills, her limited mobility meant she could no longer fully function as the forensic odontologist she had been. There were things she simply could not do from a wheelchair. She got lecturing work, of course, but that was not something she had ever enjoyed. She hated the sympathy she saw in people’s eyes. It diminished, somehow, the value of what she had to say.

She had written some papers, and published some research. She provided a consultancy and advice service for the FSS, and her opinion had been sought more than once by investigating officers from forces outside of the Met. She had even started specialising in pattern bruising, on both the living and the dead. Tool marks, they called them — marks left by a ring in a murder case, belt buckle bruises in a rape, stabbing and incisive injuries inflicted during a fight. The principles of analysis were identical to bite mark analysis, which had always been one of her specialities, and it was possible to do it from a wheelchair. Still, her limitations were frustrating.