Питер Мэй - Lockdown

‘You’ve a wife and child waiting for you at home.’ There was a long silence. He was looking out of the window at the passing lights and didn’t respond. ‘Haven’t you?’

He turned to face her, and in the fleeting light of a passing streetlamp she saw a look in his eyes like a wounded animal. He couldn’t hold her gaze. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘No, I haven’t.’

It seemed like a very long time before she summoned the courage to ask. ‘Why not?’

‘We’ve separated,’ he said simply. He was looking at his hands in his lap, and turning his wedding ring around and around. This time she knew he wasn’t going to elucidate, and she knew better than to ask.

The Tower of London was discreetly lit as they drove past and across Tower Bridge to the South Bank. The taxi dropped them at the corner of Gainsford Street and Shad Thames.

‘I’ll see you to the door,’ MacNeil said when he’d got her out and back into her wheelchair.

‘There’s no need, really. I’m a big girl. I come home in the dark all the time.’

‘Aye, but not when I’m around to worry about it. It’s alright, I’m not looking to get asked up for coffee. I never drink the stuff.’ He paid the driver, and Amy punched in her entry code at the gate. He pushed it open and they crossed the courtyard to the ramp which led up to her front door.

She frowned. ‘That’s odd.’

‘What is?’

‘The light’s out above the door. I always leave it on when I go out.’

‘Just to advertise to burglars that the place is empty?’

She gave him a look. ‘I need to see to get in.’ She unlocked the door and opened it into the stairwell. The whole apartment was in darkness. There was a light switch within easy reach of the wheelchair, but it produced no light.

‘Where’s the fuse box?’ MacNeil asked.

‘On the top floor.’

MacNeil looked at the redundant stair lift at the foot of the stairs. ‘How the hell do you get up and down when the power’s out?’

‘It’s never been out before.’

He closed the door and picked her up out of the wheelchair again. She put her arms around his neck, and remembered how safe she had felt as a child, carried up the stairs to bed by her father who would sing to her every night as they went. Carry me, carry me ’ cross the world .

‘You’d better show me,’ MacNeil said, and he carried her in the dark up two flights of stairs to the sprawling attic room at the top. Here street lights shone through the windows, casting a pale yellow glow across the room. He lowered her gently into the top floor wheelchair and opened the door of the fuse box. He flicked a switch and all the lights came on. He shook his head. ‘Must have been a power surge or something. Tripped the fuse. You want to have some kind of battery back-up on those stair lifts if you don’t want to get stuck.’

‘I could always call you to carry me up and down.’

‘I’d be here like a shot.’

Something in the way he said it made her heart skip a beat then pulse a little faster, and he seemed suddenly self-conscious. Her mouth went dry, and she couldn’t believe that he might be interested in her. Not in that way.

Later, he told her the reason he’d hesitated was because he had no idea how to kiss someone in a wheelchair. It explained his clumsiness as he took a step towards her, and then stopped, before dropping awkwardly to his knees and taking her face gently in both of his big hands and kissing her.

It was a moment that would live with her always. A moment when she felt as if God had given her back her life.

MacNeil parked outside the police station which stood in what Scots would have called the gushet between Kennington Road and Mead Row. It was a word MacNeil had used several times when he first arrived in London, but which nobody seemed to understand. He looked once in a dictionary and couldn’t find it. The closest he got was the word ‘gusset’, which described a triangular piece of cloth sewn into a garment to reinforce it. And so he’d figured that must be it. And it described the positioning of Kennington Road Police Station precisely — built in the triangle created by two streets intersecting at acute angles.

He had been back to Islington to shower and change, and felt less contaminated now. Less mingin’ , some of his colleagues might have said. It was another Scots word, but one which this time had been unaccountably hijacked by the English to become trendy London slang.

DCI Laing, however, was sticking with good old-fashioned Glasgow profanity. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he bawled at MacNeil across the detectives’ room. ‘In here.’ And he pointed an aggressive finger into his office. No one else paid much attention. They were used to Laing by now.

MacNeil stood in front of the DCI’s desk. ‘I had some personal business to attend to, Detective Chief Inspector.’

‘There’s no such thing as personal on this job, sonny. I’d have thought you’d know that by now.’

‘Well, to be perfectly honest with you, Mr Laing, I don’t give a shit what you think. And if you’ve got a problem with that, feel free to fire me.’ He had meant to tell the DCI about Sean, but somehow this didn’t seem like the moment.

Laing glared at him. ‘If you don’t want me to fuck with your pension, MacNeil, I’d suggest you keep a civil tongue in your head.’ He didn’t appear to see any irony in that, and MacNeil bit back a retort. ‘I’ve had some prick from the Deputy Prime Minister’s office chasing me for a written explanation of why one of our officers held up work on the Archbishop’s Park site this morning. And I couldn’t even send them your report, because I don’t have it.’

‘It’ll be on your desk in the morning.’

‘I want it on my desk before I leave tonight.’

MacNeil stood and surveyed the paperwork accumulating in drifts on his desk. Reports and files and summonses, a hundred different Post-its stuck to the sides of his computer and all along his desk lamp, scribbled notes from dozens of investigations making a tower on the spike in his out-tray. Normally at this time the office would have been buzzing. Today there were no more than half a dozen officers and clerks sitting at desks. There were telephones ringing constantly, because there weren’t enough people to answer them.

DS Rufus Dawson slapped a Post-it on the screen in front of MacNeil. He was a big red-haired Irishman with a strange hybrid accent which owed as much to his upbringing in New Zealand as his Irish heritage. An inveterate joker, always with a ready one-liner and an infectious laugh, he had been uncharacteristically subdued in recent weeks. There wasn’t much he could find to laugh about these days. ‘Phil called from Lambeth Road with a name and address. A match for the print they found on the Underground ticket. He said he was going to fax more info.’ He was about to go again, but something in MacNeil’s demeanour stopped him. He gave him a long look. ‘You alright, mate?’

‘Yeah, fine, Ruf, thanks.’

He peeled the Post-it off the computer and looked at Rufus’s scrawl. Ronald Kazinski, was the name on the piece of paper. There was an address in South Lambeth. He got up and went to see if Phil’s fax had come in. It was sitting in the in-tray.

Kazinski was thirty-one. He had dark, thinning hair in the smudged mugshot that accompanied his details. High cheekbones and wide-set eyes. He had been an undertaker’s assistant at a south-side crematorium for the last two and a half years. Shortly after the start of the emergency he had been pressed into government service at the official body disposal centre set up south of the river in the derelict Battersea Power Station. His fingerprints were in the AFIS computer because he had a police record for reset. Now instead of handling stolen goods, he was disposing of dead bodies. MacNeil wondered if he had also been responsible for disposing of the bones of the little Chinese girl in Archbishop’s Park. It was an odd coincidence that his print should have been found on an old Underground ticket picked up near where the bones had been dumped. And coincidences, odd or otherwise, were not something in which MacNeil was inclined to believe.