Питер Мэй - Lockdown

MacNeil stood up, brushing the mud from his coat, and shaded his eyes against the light. ‘Or you’ll what, shoot me?’

‘I’m warning you.’

‘Do you have a licence for that thing?’

‘I’ll call the police.’

‘Too late. They’re already here.’

The man let the shotgun slip a little from his shoulder, and he peered down through the leafless branches of a mountain ash at the figure in the adjoining garden. ‘You’re a police officer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me see some identification.’

‘You’re hardly likely to be able to read it from there, sir.’

‘Climb over the fence and approach the front door. There’s a security camera there. Hold it up to the camera.’

MacNeil did as he was told, snagging his coat as he climbed over the fence. He heard it tear behind him. He approached the security camera which was set just out of reach above one of the twin columns supporting the archway above an open porch. He held his warrant card open towards the lens. The man with the gun had disappeared from the window, but now his voice came from a speaker set somewhere in the porch. ‘Okay, Inspector. Why are you creeping around my house at one o’clock in the morning?’

‘It’s the house next door I’m interested in, Mr Le Saux.’ The name was on a plate on the door.

‘It’s empty.’

‘So I gather. Who was last in it?’

He heard Le Saux’s frustration. ‘It’s a letting concern. There’ve been a succession of people over the years.’

‘But most recently?’

‘A foreign couple. Although I never saw much of her. They were only here about six months, and let the garden go to wrack and ruin. A short-term contract, he said. Setting up a new production line somewhere. But I’ve no idea what business he was in. He wasn’t very talkative.’

It felt odd conducting an interview on a doorstep with a disembodied voice. ‘When did they leave?’

‘Well, that’s the odd thing. There were comings and goings up until just a day or so ago. Although that might have been the agents. The house seems to be empty now, but I don’t know where they would have gone. Not back home, certainly, because no one can leave London right now.’

‘Where was home?’

‘I’m not sure. They might have been French. But his English was so good it was hard to tell.’

‘And the wife?’

‘Never spoke to her. She never seemed to leave the house. They had a young adopted daughter who started at the local school in September.’

MacNeil frowned. ‘How do you know she was adopted? Did they tell you that?’

‘Didn’t have to, Inspector. She was Chinese, and they weren’t. And after the child caught the flu, there was no further contact. Although neither of the parents seemed to catch it.’

‘Did she survive?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ There was a pause. ‘She was a poor soul, though.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘She had a terrible facial deformity, Inspector MacNeil. The ugliest harelip I’ve ever seen.’

Pinkie walked quickly between towering warehouses, narrow metal footbridges running at odd angles overhead, cobbles underfoot. Past Maggie Blake’s Cause on his left, and a row of fancy-goods shops all boarded up on his right. The wealthy, in their warehouse conversions, slept safe and sound behind barred windows, no more than gilded cages in this pandemic-stricken city. Once plague-carrying rats had streamed off the boats that docked here. Now the narrow canyon that was Shad Thames was utterly deserted, and deathly quiet, emptied by a different kind of plague.

Pinkie followed it around past Java Wharf until he found the address he was looking for. Butlers and Colonial. He climbed easily up over the electronic gate, straddling the spikes along the top and jumping down into the courtyard beyond. Lights were set in the heads of low posts that led him around into the rear square, and he saw the ramp leading up to Amy’s door. He smiled to himself. It had taken him no time at all to find it.

Amy was restless. It was nearly two in the morning, and she didn’t feel the least bit sleepy. She was tired, yes. But she could not have slept. Sam’s final words had left her strangely uneasy. I think that changes everything . What had Sam meant? Try as she might, Amy had been unable to get any further response from her mentor. The window of their conversation remained on her screen, the cursor blinking beyond the end of several failed attempts to re-establish communication. Sam, are you still there? Hello? Sam? Talk to me! Nothing. Clearly Sam was no longer at the computer. Gone to bed, maybe. But why such an abrupt and enigmatic conclusion to their conversation?

Amy had finished the bottle of red wine and felt a little drunk. She had spent nearly half an hour talking to Lyn, telling her all about her brother. Telling her how Lee had resented her success. Her academic prowess and the prizes she had won at school. Acceptance then to med school, graduating top of her year. Her hugely successful practice in forensic odontology, her engagement to David. After a childhood of parental indulgence in which every sacrifice had been made for Lee, and Amy had been forced to fend for herself, it came as a huge blow to his ego that his big sister should be such a success while he was not. He had never had good grades at school, dropping out before A-levels, and ended up working as a sous-chef chopping vegetables in a restaurant in Chinatown. Every little gift Amy’s success had enabled her to buy her parents he had viewed with jealousy and resentment.

And so he had positively glowed in the aftermath of Amy’s accident. Full of kind words and ersatz sympathy. But Amy had sensed his glee. Big sister chopped down to size, confined to a wheelchair. Now he would be the one to take care of the family, buy the gifts, take his rightful place at the head of the table next to his father.

But he had not counted on Amy’s determination to rise above her disability, and when she won her million in damages, he had felt that he deserved a share. That they all did. After all, hadn’t Amy’s success really been down to the sacrifices of her family?

For once in her life Amy had stood up to him. She needed that money to get herself back on her feet, metaphorically if not literally. Did he have the least idea how much it cost a disabled person to try to lead a normal life?

It had created a rift in the family, and Amy had moved away from the Chinese community, to the splendid isolation of her old spice warehouse in Bermondsey. They had been to visit once, the whole family, resentment in everything they saw burning in envious eyes. And they never came again. And so Amy’s splendid isolation had turned into a not-so-splendid loneliness — until Jack MacNeil came into her life.

Poor Jack. She thought of him, out there somewhere in the night, fixated on a murder he was unlikely to solve, trying hard not to think about the son whose affection he had neglected. Something he had realised too late to change, and now never could.

She arched her back to flex muscles and try to change her position in the chair. She had been in it too long. Pressure points had become painful. She needed to lie in her bed and give her body a rest. But she couldn’t face the thought of it while MacNeil was still out there. She wanted to be here for him if he needed her, and around when he clocked off for the very last time at seven. Perhaps a shower, she thought, would relieve some of the pressure and ease the pain. At the very least it would help her stay awake and alert.

Pinkie heard the stair lift before he saw her. He had already searched her bedroom, confident that he would have plenty of warning if the stair lift started up. He had heard her voice drifting down from the attic, and at first thought she had company. But as he listened, unable to pick out the words, he came to realise there was only one voice. Perhaps she was speaking to someone on the telephone. He could not have known that she was talking to the little girl whose flesh he had seen stripped from its bones by Mr Smith.