Питер Мэй - Lockdown

‘You don’t know how jealous we all are,’ someone shouted.

‘Lucky bastard,’ someone else said, to much noisy agreement.

MacNeil turned to see Laing standing grinning stupidly in the open door of his office.

DS George Murray leaned back behind his desk to pull out a box wrapped in brightly coloured paper, and peppered with the cartoon faces of smiling kids. ‘We had a bit of a whip-round,’ he said. ‘But we had no idea what to get for the man who has everything.’ A lot of loud laughter. ‘So we got something for your kid instead. A box set of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on DVD.’

‘And if you haven’t got a DVD player, you’re just going to have to buy him one, you mean Scots git,’ Rufus said.

MacNeil stared at the box they had gone to so much trouble to buy and wrap. How could they have known? How could they possibly have known? And yet it seemed so cruel. Like kicking a man when he was down. For just a few moments this afternoon, when so much else had crowded his thoughts that he hadn’t been able to think, he had found it possible to forget. And then felt guilty about it when he remembered. But this was the wickedest reminder of all.

And all he could see were their grinning faces, gathered around, watching for his reaction, waiting for his face to crease with the smile they knew so well. And all he could hear was Sean shouting excitedly, Don’t stop, Daddy, don’t stop!

A wave of nausea rose up through him like the chill of a winter draught. The detectives’ room burned out on his retinas. The cup of orange juice fell from his hand. He felt his eyes burning, and he turned and hurried from the room. Grown men didn’t cry. Certainly not in front of their peers.

He ran down the stairs, a voice shouting down the stairwell after him, full of concern and consternation. ‘Jack, are you alright...?’

He ran past the reception desk and burst through the front door on to the steps, passing between the pillars and grabbing the handrail. He retched several times, but nothing came up. Tears burned his cheeks and blurred the street lights. He slumped down on to the top step and tipped his head forward into his open palms.

He heard the door swing open behind him, and Laing’s angry voice. ‘What the hell are you playing at, MacNeil? These guys went to a lot of trouble for you tonight. Just being here for some of them was a big thing...’ His voice tailed away as he saw his DI bent over on the top step. ‘For Christ’s sake, what’s wrong with you, man?’ The anger had leeched itself from his voice. Now he just sounded shocked.

MacNeil straightened himself up and quickly wiped the tears away from his face. He didn’t want Laing’s pity. He couldn’t face that. But he knew he couldn’t avoid telling him. He stayed sitting on the top step, gazing down the street towards the Three Stags pub where he’d too often spent too much time avoiding going home. Beyond it, the park and the Imperial War Museum seemed drowned in a pool of darkness. The Days Hotel across the road was empty, its staff laid off weeks ago.

‘Sean died,’ he said. ‘This afternoon.’

He didn’t look round for a reaction, and none came. Nothing but silence. A very long silence, and then slowly Laing eased himself down on to the top step beside him, and both men gazed south along the darkness of Kennington Road.

‘We couldn’t have kids,’ Laing said finally. ‘Elizabeth was always dead keen. She wanted children. That was her raison d’être . A bright, intelligent woman with a great career, and all she wanted was to get pregnant and stay home with the kids.’

MacNeil felt his boss turning to look at him briefly, then gazing away again. ‘I wasn’t that interested. It never bothered me, you know, until they said it wasn’t possible. And then I wanted nothing more in this world. Funny that, isn’t it? How you only start wanting something when you canny have it.’ He scratched his head. ‘And you look around you, and you realise that most of the scum we put behind bars... most of them got kids. Seems like there’s nothing easier in this life. And so everyone just takes it for granted.’ He paused. ‘It’s been one of the great regrets of my life, not having kids. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have one, and then lose him.’

He put a hand briefly on MacNeil’s shoulder, then stood up, and MacNeil was grateful that it wasn’t pity he felt. It was sympathy, even empathy, not something of which he would ever have thought Laing capable.

‘Go home, son,’ Laing said. ‘You’re all finished here, now.’

MacNeil shook his head. There was nowhere he could go that he would have called home. He needed a focus. He needed something to get him through this night. ‘Someone murdered that little girl,’ he said. ‘I’ll not be finished here until I find him.’

The West End was eerily quiet, washed out beneath colourless streetlamps, and under the constant, watchful eye of the CCTV cameras. MacNeil had been in one of the control rooms once, watching the bank of screens flicker from camera to camera. All that they had seen moving, apart from soldiers, were rats. Thousands of them. Cautiously venturing out from the dark of the sewers, inheritors of a city abandoned to them by the humans. They must have wondered what had happened. But it hadn’t taken them long to stop wondering. They had grown bold quickly, and now joined the looters in their nightly endeavours to pick the city clean.

MacNeil drove up Haymarket. He could never quite get used to seeing the streets so empty, so devoid of life. Before the emergency, even in the small hours of the morning there would be taxis and private cars, and groups of revellers spilling out from clubs and pubs with late licences. But since the curfew, nothing stirred, and if it did, it would probably be shot.

The fountain and statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus were still fenced off. The huge neon ads for Sanyo and TDK that once clad the corner buildings above Gap seemed like black holes in their absence. All colour and animation was bled from what had once been one of the liveliest corners of town. The green news-stand on the corner was battened down and all locked up. Nobody these days was buying the sightseeing bus tour tickets it used to sell. A megastore on the corner brooded darkly behind charred plywood. If the looters couldn’t prise the boards free, they set them on fire. And they would almost invariably be gone by the time the army arrived.

Somewhere in the distance he heard the siren of a fire engine, and saw the faint orange glow of far-off flames reflecting in the low cloud that still hung over London. He went right, instead of left, around the roundabout to turn into Shaftesbury Avenue. It was the only plus side of the curfew. There were no traffic lights, and he could ignore one-way streets and roundabouts. The Mayor of London had tried hard to reduce traffic in the city. If only he had thought of this. It was far more effective than congestion-charging.

Immediately ahead of him, two trucks and an armed personnel carrier blocked the road. More than a dozen soldiers stood about in groups of two and three, removing their masks to smoke in isolation, before replacing them to rejoin their colleagues. But as soon as MacNeil’s car turned off Piccadilly, they were on instant alert, SA80s swung in MacNeil’s direction, twitchy fingers on sensitive triggers. One of them stepped forward, hand raised. MacNeil braked and pulled up short. The rifles trained on him made him tense, but he was confident that as soon as they checked his registration number on the computer, things would get more relaxed. He was wrong.

The lead soldier glanced over his shoulder as someone called something from one of the trucks, and he was immediately joined by five others who fanned out around the front of MacNeil’s car. They were clearly jumpy.