Питер Мэй - Lockdown

He had taken Martha and the baby north only once. A trip he had dreaded, and not without cause. The atmosphere had been awful. While his parents had fussed and fawned over their grandson, they had been cool with him, and just short of rude to Martha. The day before they left, MacNeil had had it out with them, while Martha was walking the baby in the pram. A dour, painful, prickly confrontation in which the things left unsaid had almost been worse than those spoken. He had not been back since.

Now, as he sat on the bed his son would never sleep in again, he thought of them for the first time without anger. Remembered things he had forgotten. Things from his childhood. Laughter, kindness, safety. He had always felt safe with them, secure in a love that was real, if severe and perhaps lacking in warmth. It was very Scottish, very Presbyterian. You could feel affection, but you mustn’t show it.

He took his mobile phone from his jacket pocket and turned it back on. It beeped and told him he had several messages. He didn’t feel inclined to hear them. Instead, he scrolled through the numbers in its memory until he found his parents’ telephone number. He should have known it, but he didn’t. It was another element in their estrangement — they had moved house after he left, and it had never felt like home to him. The house where he had grown up was home, and he harboured just the smallest resentment at their selling of it.

He listened numbly while the phone rang in a house nearly six hundred miles away. In another time, another world. He wasn’t sure quite why he felt the need to call them, but he did. Perhaps he simply wanted to curl up into childhood again, insulated from reality, free from responsibility. His father answered the phone. Very correct, very precise, rhyming off the number in full.

‘Dad, it’s Jack.’

There was a long silence at the other end. ‘Hello, Jack. To what do we owe the honour?’

‘Sean’s dead, Dad.’

This time the silence was interminable. Then eventually he heard his father draw a long, slow breath. ‘I’ll get your mother,’ he said, in a very small voice.

It was more than a minute before his mother came to the phone, and he heard the tremor in her voice as she spoke. ‘Aw, son...’ she said, and the tears rolled down MacNeil’s face.

Martha was in the hall when he came out of the bedroom. He knew from the way she looked at him she could tell he’d been crying.

‘Who were you talking to?’

‘Mum and Dad.’

He saw her tense. ‘And what did they have to say?’

‘Not much.’

‘They didn’t suggest it was God’s way of punishing us, then?’

He looked away. ‘No.’ They stood for a long time without saying anything. Then he said, ‘I have to go.’

‘Work, I suppose.’ There was more than a hint of accusation in her tone.

‘A little girl was murdered.’

‘Your son’s dead, Jack.’

‘I can’t change that. I can’t even find someone to blame for it.’

She stood with her arms folded across her chest, barely in control. And then tears filled eyes already red from spilling them. ‘Stay,’ she said.

‘I can’t.’

‘Won’t.’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t, Martha. I’m not sure there’d be any point.’ He brushed past her towards the front door. Then he stopped and turned. ‘Would there?’

All the tension seeped out of her and she went quite limp. ‘Maybe not.’

‘Take the FluKill,’ he said. ‘I’ll only have to give them back tomorrow.’

She took the bottle from her pocket and looked at it for a moment. And then she turned and strode to the bathroom at the end of the hall. She flung the door open and unscrewed the lid of the bottle, emptying its contents down the toilet. She looked back at MacNeil defiantly. ‘To hell with the fucking FluKill,’ she said. ‘I hope I catch it. I hope I die.’ And she pulled the handle, flushing away any hope of salvation.

The auricles, or external ears, were the last feature to be added to Amy’s facial approximation of the child she called Lyn.

The mouth had taken her the longest time. Normally, the junction between the canine and the first pre-molar on either side would determine the positions of the corners of the mouth. Each lip would be equal in height to the corresponding enamel of the upper and lower anterior incisors. But in this case the cleft palate had so distorted the upper jawbone that Amy had been forced to exercise a degree of imagination, in addition to her experience, to flesh out the disfigurement of the upper lip.

She had spent more than an hour working on it, so absorbed that it wasn’t until she moved away to look at it objectively that she felt the full shock of its ugliness. It was brutal. And if she had empathised with the child before, now her heart went out to her unreservedly.

Gently she worked the soft tissue of the ears into place. There was no clue on the skull that made it possible to determine the size of the ears. The nose was the general guide, both to the length and position of the ears, but it could only ever be a rough estimation. The length and style of the hair was impossible, even to guess. Amy knew that Lyn would have had hair of similar colour and consistency to her own, but whether it was short or long, pigtailed or ponytailed, they would probably never know.

Amy had always worn her hair long. It was beautiful, fine, shiny black hair, and she had always been proud of it. Until one foolish moment of drunken bravado at a party at med school, when she had taken it into her head to cut it short and spiky. Herself. It was a disaster. She had wakened the next day, hungover but sober, to look at herself aghast in the mirror. She wept for nearly an hour before going out to buy a long, black wig. But it had never sat right, and in the end she had resigned herself to the months of waiting for her own to grow back.

She still had that wig somewhere at the back of the wardrobe in her bedroom on the floor below, and when finally she had finished the ears, she took the stair lift down to search for it. She was clutching it in her lap when she wheeled out of the bedroom to find MacNeil standing at the top of the stairs.

At first she was startled to see him, and then immediately knew the worst.

‘Oh, Jack, no...’

‘Don’t come any closer,’ he said. ‘I might be carrying. I just... well, I couldn’t bear to tell you over the phone.’

‘Jack, I don’t know what to say.’ He looked so utterly helpless. Like a small boy. A big man reduced by tragedy.

‘There’s nothing to say.’

And he was right. There were no words adequate to express her feelings. She wanted to show him how she felt, to hold him, the only thing she could do to offer comfort. But it was clear, even from his body language, that he didn’t want her anywhere near him.

‘Have you told Laing?’

He shook his head. ‘He’s been leaving messages on my voicemail for the last three hours.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I really need to go.’

‘You’re not thinking of going back to work?’ She was shocked.

‘What else is there for me to do, Amy? I need a focus. Something to stop me thinking, a reason to go on.’ He glanced up the stairs. ‘Have you finished her yet?’

‘The first rough. I was going to try an old wig of mine on her.’ She held it up. ‘Do you want to see?’

He stood at the far side of the attic room and watched as Amy leaned forward, placing the wig on the head she had fashioned on the table by the window. She took a full minute, adjusting and arranging before finally she was satisfied, and the electric motor of her wheelchair whined and propelled her to one side, revealing the child.