Питер Мэй - Lockdown

For a moment, MacNeil was shocked by the graphic disfigurement of the upper lip, and then his eyes saw beyond it to the face of a child. A face full of innocence and youth. Rounder than Amy’s, a flatter brow, perhaps a distinctive racial subtype. And somehow Amy had given her life, captured her spirit from somewhere amongst all those bones. Bones MacNeil had picked through in a leather holdall in a London park at first light. Sean had still been alive then, and MacNeil had had a reason to put one foot in front of the other. He knew now that he wanted to find this little girl’s killer more than anything else on earth.

As he was leaving, his phone went. He glanced at the display and saw that it was Phil, the Scenes of Crime officer who had shown him the Underground ticket recovered from the site in Archbishop’s Park. He took the call.

‘Jack, I called the office, but they said you hadn’t been around for a few hours.’

‘What is it, Phil?’

‘We got a date off that magnetic strip. No idea how significant it might be. It was October fifteenth. Just a couple of weeks before the emergency.’

MacNeil couldn’t think how the date might be relevant. He glanced up to see Amy watching him from the top of the stairs. ‘Is that it?’

‘Well, no. We managed to lift a partial thumbprint off the front side of it. Enough to make a match, if we can find one. We’re running it through the AFIS now.’ It seemed a lot to ask that a partial thumbprint recovered from a three-month-old discarded Underground ticket found on a building site would lead them anywhere. But if its owner was on the computer, the national Automated Fingerprint Identification System would match them up pretty fast.

MacNeil hung up and opened the door. ‘Jack.’ Amy’s voice made him turn in the doorway. Her face was creased with anxiety. ‘Take your FluKill now. Don’t wait to see if you’re going to have symptoms.’

He nodded. ‘Sure.’ He turned away.

‘Jack.’ Her voice was imperative, and he turned again. ‘Promise me.’

He drew a deep breath. He hated to lie to her. ‘Promise.’

Outside, he looked up into a grey and purple bruised sky, and it spat tiny drops of rain in his face. He remembered standing helplessly in the hallway as Martha emptied the pills down the toilet. They said that twenty-five per cent of the population would catch the flu. Between seventy and eighty per cent of them would die. He had been directly exposed to it, and the odds weren’t good.

Amy steered her wheelchair across the vast expanse of floor in her attic living room, the whine of its motor piercing a silence laden with depression and regret. If anything, the cloud had thickened, and the afternoon seemed darker. But she couldn’t face the glare of the electric lights.

The daylight from the window cast deep shadows across Lyn’s face, animating it in a way that somehow full light on it did not. And from those shadows, the little girl stared back at her. From a distance the hair looked real. Only the putty-coloured plasticine betrayed the fact that this was a head sculpted from inanimate materials. Amy felt impotent to do any more. She had given the child back her face, but not her identity, and beyond that she was helpless. Trapped in her wheelchair while others sought her killer.

She wondered if things would ever be the same between her and MacNeil again. Grief could change people, scar them irrevocably. Especially the loss of a child. And then there was the very real possibility that either, or both of them, might be struck down by the flu. It was easy for her to forget, locked away here in her ivory warehouse where once the air had been filled by cinnamon and clove, that out there in the real world, the able-bodied world, people were dying in their thousands. In their tens of thousands.

Her entry buzzer cut through the silence and startled her. For a moment she thought that perhaps it was MacNeil returning, that maybe there was something he had forgotten. And then she remembered that he had a key and would not need to buzz. She wheeled her chair across to the entry phone and lifted the receiver. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Tom.’ He knew the entry code to the outer gates.

‘Come on up.’

She pressed the buzzer and waited a few moments for him to open the door. And then she heard him on the stair. When finally he emerged from the staircase into the attic he looked pale and tired.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, concerned.

‘Oh, just the usual.’

‘Harry?’

‘It’s because I’m on nights at the moment. He just can’t seem to stay home alone. I used to worry about AIDS, now I wonder what else he might be bringing home with him.’

‘Where does he go?’

‘Oh, God knows. He won’t tell me. We had a blazing row after you phoned, and there was no way I could get back to sleep.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Amy said, suddenly full of guilt. ‘That was my fault. I shouldn’t have called you at home.’

Tom waved a hand dismissively. ‘It’s been brewing for days. It was bound to blow up sometime.’ He crossed to the kitchen. ‘Okay if I make myself some tea?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘You want a cup?’

She shook her head. ‘No, thanks.’ She watched him for a while, preparing his tea in a strange, brooding silence. Then, mug in hand, he crossed to the window to take a look at the head. He stood, his own head canted at an angle, staring at it for some time.

Then, finally, ‘God, she’s ugly,’ he said.

And Amy felt unaccountably defensive. ‘No, she’s not. There’s something beautiful about her. Almost serene. If someone had cared to spend the money they could have fixed that lip, or at least improved it. You have to see past that.’

Tom looked at her curiously. ‘It’s just plasticine,’ he said. ‘She’s not real.’

Amy detected an odd antagonism in his tone. ‘She was once.’

Tom sipped thoughtfully at his tea, never taking his eyes off her, until she felt quite discomfited by his stare. Then he said, ‘So what was he doing here?’

‘Who?’

‘Oh, come on. You know who I mean. MacNeil. I saw him leave.’

Amy felt her face flush. ‘He came to see the head.’

‘Oh? And did he think she was beautiful, too?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Oh, so I’m ridiculous, am I? Since when did police officers start coming round your house to see your facial reconstructions?’

She said nothing.

‘I wondered this morning, when you seemed to know all about him and his wife being separated.’ He paused. ‘What’s going on, Amy?’

She didn’t want to lie to him. ‘It’s none of your business, Tom.’

‘Amy, he’s the ape man ! A big stupid gay-hating ape . I can’t believe you’re having a relationship with him.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, for a start, because you never told me. I thought I was supposed to be your best friend.’

‘You are.’

‘Not any more, apparently.’

‘Now you really are being ridiculous.’

‘Am I?’ Tom puffed himself up with indignation. ‘How do you think we could ever co-exist, Amy. You, me and the ape man ?’

‘He’s not like you think he is.’ Amy knew that this was all slipping away from her.

Mirthless laughter exploded from Tom’s lips. ‘Oh, of course he’s not!’

‘He’s not! He’s not homophobic. He doesn’t hate you; he just doesn’t understand you, that’s all. He might even be a little afraid of you.’

‘Oh, yes, shaking in his boots.’

Amy was angry with him now. ‘You’re so obsessed with your sexuality, Tom, you let it define everything you are. You’re gay, and proud of it, and want the world to know — which is great. But you thrust it in people’s faces, and you don’t realise how intimidating or embarrassing that can be. Especially to a Presbyterian country boy from the Scottish Highlands.’