Питер Мэй - Lockdown

He was almost shocked to see the pale, frightened face of a middle-aged woman with short, silver-grey hair. But although there was fear in her dark eyes, there was determination there, too. She bucked one way then the other, desperately trying to free her wrists from MacNeil’s iron grasp. Her torch spun away into the grass, its beam pointing back at them, illuminating their struggle and casting its shadow against the fence.

‘I’ll scream!’ she said in a voice made so tiny by fear that it barely penetrated the dark.

MacNeil said breathlessly, ‘If you scream, then so will I.’

Something in his voice stopped her struggling. She lay on the ground below him, gasping for breath, a strange, wiry creature in a tweed jacket and skirt with a white blouse and pearl necklace. ‘Who the hell are you?’ she gasped.

‘Detective Inspector Jack MacNeil. Who the hell are you?’

He saw her panic recede. ‘My name’s Sara Castelli,’ she said in a voice that was unmistakably North American in origin. ‘I’m an investigator with the HPA.’

‘And what’s the HPA?’

‘The Health Protection Agency. I can show you my ID if you like?’

MacNeil let go of her wrists, but remained straddling her waist so that she was still pinned firmly to the ground. He reached to retrieve her torch and shone it on her.

‘Please don’t shine that in my face,’ she said sharply, and he averted the beam to follow her hand into an inside pocket from which she pulled out a laminated HPA identity card on a chain. It had her photograph on it. And her full name. Sara Elizabeth Castelli. It also had her date of birth, and MacNeil made a quick calculation. She was nearly sixty, and he suddenly felt guilty that he had manhandled her so roughly. He rolled to one side and got quickly to his feet, holding out a hand to help her to hers. But she ignored it and got up unaided, brushing pieces of broken plastic and mud and dead leaves from her jacket and skirt. ‘Ruined,’ she muttered. ‘You clearly have no idea how to treat a lady, Mr MacNeil.’

‘Clearly,’ MacNeil said. ‘What are you doing here, Miss Castelli?’

‘Mrs,’ she corrected him. ‘Castelli is my married name. But you may call me doctor.’

‘Doctor. You haven’t answered my question.’

She assiduously avoided his eye as she continued brushing herself down. ‘Well, I might consider doing so if you were to show me some ID of your own. You could be anyone pretending to be a policeman.’

MacNeil showed her his warrant card. ‘Well?’

‘I’m trying to trace the source of the pandemic, Mr MacNeil. That’s what I do. I trace the source of infections and make recommendations on how to contain them.’

‘You’re an American?’

‘Canadian. Although I’ve spent most of the last twenty years in the States. Even took citizenship when I married Mr Castelli. Wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known then that he owed more allegiance to the Sicilian flag than to the Stars and Stripes. You’ve heard of the movie, Married to the Mob , Mr MacNeil? Well, that was me. Turned out the Castelli family runs most of New York. Which went down well with the Justice Department when I worked there as a health adviser.’ She glared at him defiantly. ‘Anything else you’d like to know?’

‘I’d be interested to hear why you think the pandemic started in the back garden of a house in Wandsworth, Dr Castelli.’

‘Well, of course I don’t think that. But I think someone who lived in this house might have been a carrier, or one of the first to be infected.’

‘The house is empty.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘So how were you intending to get in?’

‘That’s academic, Mr MacNeil. Now that you’re here, you can break in for me.’ She paused and crooked an eyebrow. ‘That’s what you were going to do anyway, isn’t it?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Well, why else would you be sneaking around the back garden in the dead of night?’ It was his turn to avoid her eye, and she pressed home her advantage. ‘And you haven’t told me what you’re doing here, Mr MacNeil.’

MacNeil looked at this garrulous, defiant little woman with her coarse grey hair and tweed suit, and decided to come clean. ‘I’m investigating the murder of a ten-year-old child,’ he said. ‘A little girl. I think she lived here.’

Dr Castelli’s face darkened. ‘Choy?’

‘I don’t know her name.’

‘Well, there was only one little girl who lived here, as far as I know. And her name was Choy Smith.’

His glove protected his hand as the glass broke inwards, landing in jagged shards on the carpet beneath the window. He reached in, unsnibbed the sash and slid it up.

‘You do that very well, Mr MacNeil,’ Dr Castelli whispered. ‘Is it something you learned in the police?’

MacNeil gave her a look and held out a hand to help her over the sill and into the room. They had climbed up a tangled trellis on to the pitched roof above the kitchen, and slithered across it to this first floor window.

They stood now in what was clearly a study of some sort. MacNeil shone the doctor’s torch around the room, picking out a desk strewn with papers, a computer, a calculator, two telephones. MacNeil glanced through some of the paperwork. Utility bills. A letter, which appeared to be in French, from a company called Omega 8, with an address in Sussex — there were several more with the same letterhead. A scientific paper of some sort, again in French.

There was a bookcase filled with leather-bound omnibus editions of classic English writers, a legacy of the original owner of the house, perhaps. A huge framed reproduction of a mediaeval map of London. There were more papers scattered across the floor as if discarded in anger. Two steps led down from a small half-landing outside the door to a bathroom at the top of the first flight of stairs. More stairs led up to a larger landing with two doors leading off to first-floor bedrooms. MacNeil leaned over the wooden bannister and looked into the well of the downstairs hall, light from the streetlamp outside broken into a thousand coloured fragments by the stained glass around the door and strewn across the parquet floor. And then he looked up to the attic landing twenty feet above, more doors leading to more bathrooms and more bedrooms. This was a big house for a family of three.

Choy’s bedroom was at the back of the house on the first floor, half a flight up from the study. There was a narrow single bed pushed into one corner and a small desk under the window, a school satchel leaning against one of its legs. There was a homework jotter open on it, large, childish Chinese characters scrawled in coloured crayon. MacNeil shone the torch on it, and thought about all the bones he had seen laid out on the table at Lambeth Road. The tiny bones which had made up the little fingers that held the crayons to make these characters. How long ago had that been? Maybe only a matter of days. He looked around this sadly empty room. There were no pictures on the walls. No photographs, no drawings. No toys lying on the floor. He thought of the chaos that had been Sean’s room, full to overflowing with the trappings of childhood.

Dr Castelli slid open the door of a built-in wardrobe. Choy’s clothes hung in neat lines on wire hangers. Most of them seemed new. Blouses and skirts, a row of little shoes lined up beneath them. In a dresser they found a pile of charcoal grey jumpers, a school tie, knickers, socks. There were no T-shirts or jeans, no bright clothing to reflect a child’s vibrant personality. Nothing playful in anything they found. What strange, spartan kind of existence had she lived here?

‘Jeez, I’ve seen more fun in a kids’ ward full of terminal cancer cases,’ Dr Castelli said. She lifted one of the charcoal jumpers from its drawer and held it to her face. ‘Poor kid.’