Питер Мэй - Lockdown

‘Chhh... car crash.’

‘Jesus!’

Pinkie could see in his eyes that Mr Smith knew he was going to die. But he was here, wasn’t he? He was going to finish the job. He had never started anything he couldn’t finish. He reached over to swing the black bin bag across the control room to his employer, and Mr Smith looked inside. Pinkie saw him flinch from the smell. The bones were still ripe.

‘Is that everything?’ Mr Smith asked.

Pinkie nodded.

‘Good. Can you still walk?’

Pinkie nodded again.

‘I want you to go with the girl up to the top. MacNeil is on his way. As long as she is up there out of his reach, I’ve got something to bargain with. Are you up to it?’

Amy sat silently on the slatted wooden bench, staring bleakly out at the Thames. It was hard to believe that the burned man was still alive. She knew that he could not survive for very much longer. He was losing so much fluid it was amazing he could still stand. She wondered what could possibly drive him to do what he was doing. Surely he knew that he was going to die?

A tense silence had settled between her and Tom. He had made that phone call to her knowing full well that she was being lured into a trap. Trust me , he had said. And she had. Only to be rewarded with deceit and betrayal.

‘I had no choice,’ he’d told her. ‘It was you or Harry.’

‘So you chose me.’

He’d turned away then, guilt in the very way he held himself. And there had been nothing more to say.

There was a phssss of pneumatic pistons, and the end of the pod split open as the doors at the landing stage side disengaged and slid apart. Tom stood up. ‘There’s two of them now,’ he said.

Amy could see the silhouettes of two men approaching the pod. The burned man could barely walk, but he was still carrying his SA80. He stepped up into the pod, followed by a man who looked vaguely familiar. He wasn’t tall. He had cropped fair hair and unusually dark eyebrows. Silver-rimmed oval glasses. His face looked drained of blood, and he was clearly tense.

‘What’s going on?’ Tom asked, and Amy could hear fear crack his voice.

The man with the glasses ignored him. He looked at Amy, and then turned to the burned man. ‘Where’s the other one?’

‘Yes,’ Tom said. ‘Where’s Harry? You promised he would be safe.’

If Pinkie could have smiled, he would. ‘Dead,’ he said, and he didn’t need lips to form the word. It came out of his mouth as clear as day.

There was just a moment of silence before a dreadful, feral howl escaped Tom’s lips. He lunged across the pod at Pinkie. A short, deafening burst of fire from the semi-automatic rifle spat half a dozen bullets deep into the pathologist’s chest, nearly lifting him off his feet. Blood spattered all over the glass, and Tom hit the floor with a shuddering finality. Amy screamed. She could not believe what she was seeing. He might have betrayed her, but she still loved him. You didn’t just wipe out twelve years with a single phone call. And yet suddenly he was dead. There was no going back. No saying sorry. No fixing things. The burned man had killed him in a moment. He was gone forever. Life might be hard. But death was so frighteningly easy.

The man with the glasses held his head in his hands, fingers pressed to his temples.

‘For God’s sake, Pinkie! You nearly burst my ear drums!’ And then he glanced anxiously across the Thames, wondering perhaps if the gunfire had been audible at any of the checkpoints on the north bank. But most of the sound of it had been contained within the capsule.

‘What do you want?’ Amy screamed at him.

The man turned towards her. ‘I want you to shut up,’ he said tersely. ‘Pinkie’s going to take you up top. I need you as a bargaining chip in my discussions with Mr MacNeil. And I want you well out of his reach. Any trouble, and Pinkie will push you out.’

Amy closed her eyes. The nightmare had just got worse. If that was possible. She would be trapped in this pod 443 feet above London with a horribly burned psychopath whose remit was to push her out if negotiations on the ground went badly. And there was nothing she could do about it. The only faint ray of hope was that MacNeil knew she was here, and that he was on his way.

She said to the man, ‘What are you going to trade me for?’

‘Any remaining evidence that might implicate me in the death of little Choy.’

It was the first time that Amy had heard her name. She had got so used to thinking of her as Lyn, it came as a shock to hear her real name. ‘Choy,’ she said. ‘ You killed her?’ The man said nothing, and Amy said, ‘MacNeil will never agree.’

‘Then I’ll kill him, too.’

‘You wouldn’t have the guts to kill a serving police officer.’

‘If I can kill a ten-year-old child and strip the flesh from her bones, I can kill a policeman.’

Amy shook her head, trying to stop the tremor in her voice, trying to appear calm and defiant when fear had turned her insides to mush. ‘There’s one big difference.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Ten-year-old girls can’t fight back.’ She hoped she had managed to convey the contempt she felt.

He turned away, stepping over Tom’s body and out on to the landing stage. He paused, then, and turned back to Pinkie. ‘The green button on the right?’

Pinkie nodded, and the man walked away to the control hut. After a moment, there was a slight judder, and then slowly they began to move. Amy clutched the edge of her seat and looked up through the roof of the pod. She could see the huge spokes start to turn, and a strange sense of weightlessness as their capsule moved forward, lifting as it went, starting its long, gradual ascent to the top of the wheel.

There were voices calling in the night. They could hear the sound of running feet. The beams of torches crossed and criss-crossed in the dark. There was no way back.

Several vehicles were pulled up outside the park in Saunders Ness Road, motors running, headlights blazing, turning night into day. Somehow the man guarding the foot tunnel had got free, or someone had come to relieve him and found him bound and gagged. The alarm had been raised. Someone had got on to the island. Someone who might be carrying the flu. MacNeil knew, now, they would be shot on sight. Panic was a great dissipater of the rational.

He grabbed Dr Castelli’s wrist, and they ran back along Ferry Road. Her sensible shoes clattered resoundingly in the night. Excitement raised voices behind them. A motor gunned, and they heard the squeal of tyres.

‘Get rid of the shoes!’ MacNeil told her, and half-hopping, half-running, she plucked the shoes from her feet, each in turn, and threw them away across the road. He dragged her off the street, down an alleyway between brick bungalows with shallow pitched roofs. He saw a street sign. Livingstone Place. Lights were going on in houses everywhere. Someone was screaming, ‘Intruders! Intruders!’

MacNeil was starting to panic. They ran past neat little gardens behind well-trimmed hedges, more light falling on to manicured lawns.

Someone shouted, ‘There they are!’ A shot rang out. MacNeil heard the bullet ricocheting off brick somewhere very close by.

Someone else shouted, ‘Don’t shoot, for Chrissake! We’ll be shooting each other.’ There were more feet running now out in the street behind them.

They reached the end of the alley and turned into a riverfront walkway. It was about a hundred yards long. And blocked at each end. They were trapped.

‘Excuse my French,’ Dr Castelli said. ‘But oh, fuck!’

MacNeil peered over the wall, down to the river. The tide was washing in against a couple of yards of mud flat and rock, breaking fluorescent all along the river’s edge.