Питер Мэй - Lockdown

He pulled on his coat and called over to Dawson, ‘If Laing’s looking for me, you can tell him I’ve gone to talk to Kazinski.’

In the Middle Ages, the site of Battersea Power Station was known as Battersea Fields, an area frequented by vagabonds and undesirables. In the 1800s it was used for pigeon shooting and county fairs. The Duke of Wellington and Lord Winchelsea were alleged to have fought a duel here, from which both walked away unscathed. The power station, with its four iconic chimneys, was built in the 1930s and belched thick, black smoke into the air above the city for half a century before being shut down in the 1980s. They took off the roof to remove the giant turbines, and for nearly thirty years the building had been exposed to the elements. Ambitious plans by a private consortium to convert the site into a leisure, retail and hotel complex, while retaining the power station’s distinctive outer shell, had been temporarily shelved by the government. A makeshift roof had been raised over the main hall, and the four chimneys were once again belching smoke into the skies over London. But it was not coal ferried up the river on barges that they were burning. It was human bodies. Victims of the pandemic. The smoke, however, was just as black, and hung over the south side of the river in a ghostly pall.

MacNeil drove past hoardings which hid the site from prying eyes. Hoardings raised by developers in more optimistic times. They created a bizarre screen of painted green fields and trees beneath a clear blue sky. Above them the red-brick towers of the power station pushed up into the real sky, dark and angry, and pierced on each corner by the tall white chimneys that bled off the fumes from the furnaces below. To the south-west, tall cranes stood idle over unfinished apartment blocks. To the north-east, the new Covent Garden Market — which described itself as The Larder of London — was deserted. And all along Chelsea Park Road, giant posters shouted slogans at empty streets — The Industrial Revolution is Over; The Information Age Has Ended ; and I Think, Therefore I Can. Welcome to the Ideas Generation . MacNeil glanced up at the smoke hanging overhead and thought, welcome to hell.

He turned into Kirtling Street and drove up to the gatehouse, drawing up outside blue-painted metal gates. Opposite the gate was an army jeep with a machine gun mounted in the back. Two soldiers sat smoking through cotton masks. A security man in green uniform appeared on the other side of the gate. He too wore a white cotton mask, and kept his distance. MacNeil got out of his car and stood looking at him through the bars of the gate. ‘You got papers?’ the man called.

MacNeil held up his warrant card. ‘Police,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to one of your employees. A Ronald Kazinski.’

‘Hold on,’ the security man said. He went back into the gatehouse, and MacNeil saw, beyond the gate, a low building of odd angular-shaped white plastic and glass. It housed a model of the developer’s plans for the complex. But they had never imagined this. On the grass next to it were two larger-than-life bronze statues. A man, and a woman holding a baby, both with their hands raised in salute. To what, was anyone’s guess. To life, maybe, MacNeil thought. In which case there was something more than ironic about it. But they did seem to complement the sloganising posters he had seen earlier. There was something almost Stalinesque about them.

An electronic lock released the gate and it started swinging slowly open. The security man called from the door of the gatehouse, ‘Drive straight up to the administration block and ask for Mr Hartson. He’s in charge.’

MacNeil drove past the saluting statues and through another gate to a brick-built office block that rose halfway up the outer wall of the power station. Across a wasteland of crumbling asphalt, diggers and cranes stood motionless, like so many dinosaurs frozen in time. A line of unmarked black vans queued at the gates of a huge opening into the main hall, waiting to deliver their macabre cargo, before heading back to any of a dozen hospitals to reload and return. Latter-day ferrymen plying their trade back and forth across the River Styx.

He parked outside the office block and pushed open double doors into the entrance hall. A woman at a desk looked up from behind her mask. He waved his warrant card at her. ‘DI MacNeil for Mr Hartson. He’s expecting me.’

Hartson’s office was at the top of the building. A huge glass partition along one side of it looked down into the main hall of the former power station. Hartson was a man of about sixty, tall, lean and bald, and he had about him the obsequious air of an undertaker. MacNeil was drawn to the glass. The scene below was one he could barely have imagined. Thousands of naked bodies laid out three deep on wooden pallets stretching as far as you could see, cast in their piles like so many mannequins in a doll factory, arms and legs intertwined, strangely luminous, barely human. Fumigating mists obscured the detail, like the fog that would lie along the Thames on an autumn morning. Ghoulish figures in blue bio-suits, faceless behind tinted plastic visors, moved amongst the wisps and tendrils of it in slow motion, like astronauts on the moon, removing bodies from the trucks to pile on yet more pallets. One of the furnaces seemed designated for clothes and bedding. Bodies were slid into the other three, still on their pallets, by giant forklifts. In those few moments when the furnace doors remained open, the fires within cast a vaporous orange light through the fumigating mists, before giant cast-iron doors slammed shut again, their vibration felt throughout the building like seismic tremors.

MacNeil let his eyes drift over the piles of discarded humanity below him, and wondered if Sean was down there somewhere, the seed of his loins awaiting cremation with all the others. It was not a thought he could bear to dwell on, and he turned back into the office.

‘Sobering vision, isn’t it,’ said Hartson. ‘There, but for the grace of God, go you and I.’ He wandered past MacNeil to the window, and MacNeil saw his mask catch a momentary flicker of orange as one of the furnace doors opened to receive more dead. ‘I used to be devout,’ he said. ‘A good Catholic.’ He turned back to MacNeil. ‘Now I wonder.’ But then he dismissed his cosmic reflections in an instant. ‘What do you want with Ronnie?’

‘Just a word. You know him personally?’

‘I know every man here. Death has a way of bringing the living together. We’re all very close.’

‘Then you know he has a criminal record?’

‘Oh, yes. His file was made available to me when we were recruiting for the facility. But it’s in his past, I think. His experience in dealing with death took precedence. He’s an affable young man. Hardworking, conscientious.’

‘You won’t mind if I borrow him for half an hour?’

‘I wouldn’t mind in the slightest, Detective Inspector. But he’s not due on until midnight.’ Hartson’s smile bore the gravitas of a man used to being the bearer of bad news. ‘We work around the clock here. Twenty-four-seven, as our American friends would say.’

MacNeil glanced back down into the halls of Hades below, and for just a moment thought he saw Sean’s small body amongst all the others, tiny and twisted, sandwiched between a large, fat woman and an old man. And then the image was gone, vanished forever in a swirl of white smoke.

Kazinski lived with his mother in a 1960s council estate on the southern edge of Lambeth. High- and low-rise apartment blocks built to pluck people from the slums of 19th-century industrial London, and deliver them to a better life in a brave new world. The architects who designed them might have been emissaries of the devil, because they had instead removed the impoverished working classes from real communities, and brought them to a place which now resembled something worse than the hell from which they were supposed to have escaped.