Питер Мэй - Lockdown

He looked around the front room of this tenth-floor apartment, fading daylight falling in shadowed strips across the littered floor. Evidence of down-and-outs, or junkies, in the discarded cans and cigarette ends, the bundle of filthy clothes abandoned in the far corner, the mattress on the floor. Perhaps these shadow people would return when it was dark. Pinkie did not relish the thought of being here when they did. Who knew what contamination they might bring with them. And Pinkie was nothing if not fastidious. He disliked human contact of any kind. Just being in this place left him feeling unclean. He would shower and change as soon as circumstances allowed.

Meantime he was trapped here, for as long as MacNeil remained at the scene. He snapped shut the polished case that held the pieces of his profession and settled down to wait.

It was nearly twenty minutes before the uniforms arrived, and an ambulance, and an unmarked van which deposited two men and a woman in strangely luminescent white protective suits. Pinkie watched as MacNeil spoke to them, and the group assembled around the bodies of the two youths beneath the block opposite, before turning to follow MacNeil’s pointing finger. For a moment, Pinkie felt exposed, as if they could see him, and he drew back from the boards at the window. A reflex action. But of course they saw nothing.

The street lights had come on, and dusk was falling fast. Lights appeared in the few remaining inhabited flats on the estate, frightened residents peering out in the gathering gloom before drawing curtains and turning on TV sets to blot out the real world.

When Pinkie looked again, MacNeil had begun walking back to his car. Time, he thought, to move. He gathered his things and hurried down the deserted staircase. By the time he emerged into the area at the back of the block, once designated a parking area for residents, MacNeil’s car was turning the corner at the end of the street. A smear of brake lights in the cold twilight.

Pinkie put his case in the boot and started up Mr Smith’s BMW. It purred smoothly, leather seats softly creased. He eased it over traffic bumps into the lane that led out to the street behind the estate. He turned left, and left again, and breathed a sigh of satisfaction as he saw the lights of MacNeil’s car ahead of him. With luck the cop would lead him straight to Kazinski, and the useless lives of those two boys would have found some meaning in death.

It was dark in Kennington Road, lights all along the police station falling out across the deserted street below, reflecting in the darkened windows of the shops and restaurants opposite.

Laing waved MacNeil into a seat and shut the door. There were more people now out in the detectives’ office. It was almost seven, a changeover in shifts. A brief congregation of officers and staff who met only rarely when their rotas diverged. And in just a few minutes, all across the city, the curfew would begin. A signal for most people to lock down their homes for the night and wait for morning. A signal for others to emerge under cover of darkness to embark on a rampage of looting and vandalism. It was not a time anyone wanted to be out on the streets.

MacNeil had spent the last two hours writing up his reports on the bones found in Archbishop’s Park, and the two youths shot dead on the housing estate in South Lambeth. Laing had just finished going through them, half-moon reading glasses still perched on the end of his nose. He was shaking his head. ‘Weird,’ he said. ‘Fucking weird.’

‘What is, sir?’

‘These kids that got shot. Not some casual shooting, some lunatic with a gun. It was a real pro job. A professional weapon in professional hands.’ He regarded MacNeil speculatively. ‘Do you think there was a connection?’

‘With Kazinski?’ Laing nodded, and MacNeil shook his head. ‘I can’t see how. No one knew I was going there, or why.’ He’d had time in the intervening hours to think about it, and was quite spooked. Someone had saved his life. Someone had shot those kids to stop them beating hell out of him with iron bars and baseball bats. Without that someone, it was MacNeil who would be lying on Tom Bennet’s autopsy table right now instead of those boys. He could imagine how much satisfaction that would have given Bennet.

‘So you’ve just got some kind of guardian angel looking out for you, then?’ Laing said.

MacNeil could only shrug. How easily that gunman could have shot him, too. From some empty apartment in the abandoned block opposite, from where he must have been watching, even before MacNeil arrived. But watching for what? What on earth had he been doing there?

In normal circumstances, the flats would have been sealed off, and officers drafted in to search them unit by unit, until they found the gunman’s vantage point. And then forensics would have combed it for any tiny piece of evidence that might have been left at the scene. But they simply didn’t have the manpower, and the approach of darkness and the curfew would only have complicated things. Perhaps Laing would order some kind of search in the morning. But in any event, it would no longer be any of MacNeil’s business. In twelve hours he would not be a police officer any more. He would be a former cop, former father, former husband. Everything behind him, only uncertainty ahead.

Laing held out his hand. ‘I’ll take those pills off you now, Jack.’

It took MacNeil a moment to drag himself back to the present and realise what Laing was asking for. He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I don’t have them.’

Laing glared at him. ‘You’ve taken them?’

‘No, sir, I’ve lost them.’

Laing glared at him, disbelief burning in his eyes. ‘You’d better fucking find them, then. These bloody things are like gold dust. They’re not on my desk first thing tomorrow, you’re in big shit, son.’

MacNeil just nodded. What were they going to do? Shoot him? ‘I’ll need curfew clearance to go up to Soho, Mr Laing. If you could enter it up in the computer.’

‘What for?’

‘To check out the Black Ice Club.’

Laing regarded him as if he had two heads. ‘You mean you think those kids were telling the truth?’

‘I don’t think they meant to. But, you know, the black kid just sort of blurted it out.’

‘Well, if it’s open for business, it’s doing it illegally.’

‘I doubt if it’s advertising the fact, sir.’

‘You’d better put in a courtesy call to the local bobbies. Let them know you’re in the area.’

‘Fine.’ MacNeil got to his feet and turned towards the door.

‘MacNeil.’ He turned as Laing stood up and extended a hand towards him, before pulling it away again, as if from an electric shock. ‘Sorry, forgot. No shaking hands. No spreading germs.’ He grinned awkwardly. ‘Just wanted to say, you know, good luck. You’re a fucking idiot, MacNeil, but I don’t wish you any harm.’

MacNeil managed a pale smile. ‘Thank you, sir. I’ll always remember your final words of kindness.’

Laing grinned. ‘Fuck off.’

MacNeil was nearly halfway across the detectives’ office before he realised that things were not as they should be. A bunch of coloured balloons danced above his desk on the end of a string. Most of his colleagues were gathered in a semi-circle beyond it. Someone had filled a trayful of plastic cups with orange juice, and on a cue they all leaned forward to lift one, and began a refrain of ‘He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’.

MacNeil stood, frozen with embarrassment, as they sang their ragged but hearty way through to the last line. And so say all of us . Someone shouted, Hip, hip ! And there were three loud cheers before cups were tipped and orange juice downed. Rufus thrust a cup in his hand. ‘Sorry we couldn’t do anything stronger, me old son.’