Lockdown

I

MacNeil parked outside the police station which stood in what Scots would have called the gushet between Kennington Road and Mead Row. It was a word MacNeil had used several times when he first arrived in London, but which nobody seemed to understand. He looked once in a dictionary and couldn’t find it. The closest he got was the word ‘gusset’, which described a triangular piece of cloth sewn into a garment to reinforce it. And so he’d figured that must be it. And it described the positioning of Kennington Road Police Station precisely — built in the triangle created by two streets intersecting at acute angles.

He had been back to Islington to shower and change, and felt less contaminated now. Less mingin’, some of his colleagues might have said. It was another Scots word, but one which this time had been unaccountably hijacked by the English to become trendy London slang.

DCI Laing, however, was sticking with good old-fashioned Glasgow profanity. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he bawled at MacNeil across the detectives’ room. ‘In here.’ And he pointed an aggressive finger into his office. No one else paid much attention. They were used to Laing by now.

MacNeil stood in front of the DCI’s desk. ‘I had some personal business to attend to, Detective Chief Inspector.’

‘There’s no such thing as personal on this job, sonny. I’d have thought you’d know that by now.’

‘Well, to be perfectly honest with you, Mr Laing, I don’t give a shit what you think. And if you’ve got a problem with that, feel free to fire me.’ He had meant to tell the DCI about Sean, but somehow this didn’t seem like the moment.

Laing glared at him. ‘If you don’t want me to fuck with your pension, MacNeil, I’d suggest you keep a civil tongue in your head.’ He didn’t appear to see any irony in that, and MacNeil bit back a retort. ‘I’ve had some prick from the Deputy Prime Minister’s office chasing me for a written explanation of why one of our officers held up work on the Archbishop’s Park site this morning. And I couldn’t even send them your report, because I don’t have it.’

‘It’ll be on your desk in the morning.’

‘I want it on my desk before I leave tonight.’

MacNeil stood and surveyed the paperwork accumulating in drifts on his desk. Reports and files and summonses, a hundred different Post-its stuck to the sides of his computer and all along his desk lamp, scribbled notes from dozens of investigations making a tower on the spike in his out-tray. Normally at this time the office would have been buzzing. Today there were no more than half a dozen officers and clerks sitting at desks. There were telephones ringing constantly, because there weren’t enough people to answer them.

DS Rufus Dawson slapped a Post-it on the screen in front of MacNeil. He was a big red-haired Irishman with a strange hybrid accent which owed as much to his upbringing in New Zealand as his Irish heritage. An inveterate joker, always with a ready one-liner and an infectious laugh, he had been uncharacteristically subdued in recent weeks. There wasn’t much he could find to laugh about these days. ‘Phil called from Lambeth Road with a name and address. A match for the print they found on the Underground ticket. He said he was going to fax more info.’ He was about to go again, but something in MacNeil’s demeanour stopped him. He gave him a long look. ‘You alright, mate?’

‘Yeah, fine, Ruf, thanks.’

He peeled the Post-it off the computer and looked at Rufus’s scrawl. Ronald Kazinski, was the name on the piece of paper. There was an address in South Lambeth. He got up and went to see if Phil’s fax had come in. It was sitting in the in-tray.

Kazinski was thirty-one. He had dark, thinning hair in the smudged mugshot that accompanied his details. High cheekbones and wide-set eyes. He had been an undertaker’s assistant at a south-side crematorium for the last two and a half years. Shortly after the start of the emergency he had been pressed into government service at the official body disposal centre set up south of the river in the derelict Battersea Power Station. His fingerprints were in the AFIS computer because he had a police record for reset. Now instead of handling stolen goods, he was disposing of dead bodies. MacNeil wondered if he had also been responsible for disposing of the bones of the little Chinese girl in Archbishop’s Park. It was an odd coincidence that his print should have been found on an old Underground ticket picked up near where the bones had been dumped. And coincidences, odd or otherwise, were not something in which MacNeil was inclined to believe.

He pulled on his coat and called over to Dawson, ‘If Laing’s looking for me, you can tell him I’ve gone to talk to Kazinski.’

II

In the Middle Ages, the site of Battersea Power Station was known as Battersea Fields, an area frequented by vagabonds and undesirables. In the 1800s it was used for pigeon shooting and county fairs. The Duke of Wellington and Lord Winchelsea were alleged to have fought a duel here, from which both walked away unscathed. The power station, with its four iconic chimneys, was built in the 1930s and belched thick, black smoke into the air above the city for half a century before being shut down in the 1980s. They took off the roof to remove the giant turbines, and for nearly thirty years the building had been exposed to the elements. Ambitious plans by a private consortium to convert the site into a leisure, retail and hotel complex, while retaining the power station’s distinctive outer shell, had been temporarily shelved by the government. A makeshift roof had been raised over the main hall, and the four chimneys were once again belching smoke into the skies over London. But it was not coal ferried up the river on barges that they were burning. It was human bodies. Victims of the pandemic. The smoke, however, was just as black, and hung over the south side of the river in a ghostly pall.

MacNeil drove past hoardings which hid the site from prying eyes. Hoardings raised by developers in more optimistic times. They created a bizarre screen of painted green fields and trees beneath a clear blue sky. Above them the red-brick towers of the power station pushed up into the real sky, dark and angry, and pierced on each corner by the tall white chimneys that bled off the fumes from the furnaces below. To the south-west, tall cranes stood idle over unfinished apartment blocks. To the north-east, the new Covent Garden Market — which described itself as The Larder of London — was deserted. And all along Chelsea Park Road, giant posters shouted slogans at empty streets — The Industrial Revolution is Over; The Information Age Has Ended; and I Think, Therefore I Can. Welcome to the Ideas Generation. MacNeil glanced up at the smoke hanging overhead and thought, welcome to hell.

He turned into Kirtling Street and drove up to the gatehouse, drawing up outside blue-painted metal gates. Opposite the gate was an army jeep with a machine gun mounted in the back. Two soldiers sat smoking through cotton masks. A security man in green uniform appeared on the other side of the gate. He too wore a white cotton mask, and kept his distance. MacNeil got out of his car and stood looking at him through the bars of the gate. ‘You got papers?’ the man called.

MacNeil held up his warrant card. ‘Police,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to one of your employees. A Ronald Kazinski.’

‘Hold on,’ the security man said. He went back into the gatehouse, and MacNeil saw, beyond the gate, a low building of odd angular-shaped white plastic and glass. It housed a model of the developer’s plans for the complex. But they had never imagined this. On the grass next to it were two larger-than-life bronze statues. A man, and a woman holding a baby, both with their hands raised in salute. To what, was anyone’s guess. To life, maybe, MacNeil thought. In which case there was something more than ironic about it. But they did seem to complement the sloganising posters he had seen earlier. There was something almost Stalinesque about them.

An electronic lock released the gate and it started swinging slowly open. The security man called from the door of the gatehouse, ‘Drive straight up to the administration block and ask for Mr Hartson. He’s in charge.’

MacNeil drove past the saluting statues and through another gate to a brick-built office block that rose halfway up the outer wall of the power station. Across a wasteland of crumbling asphalt, diggers and cranes stood motionless, like so many dinosaurs frozen in time. A line of unmarked black vans queued at the gates of a huge opening into the main hall, waiting to deliver their macabre cargo, before heading back to any of a dozen hospitals to reload and return. Latter-day ferrymen plying their trade back and forth across the River Styx.

He parked outside the office block and pushed open double doors into the entrance hall. A woman at a desk looked up from behind her mask. He waved his warrant card at her. ‘DI MacNeil for Mr Hartson. He’s expecting me.’

Hartson’s office was at the top of the building. A huge glass partition along one side of it looked down into the main hall of the former power station. Hartson was a man of about sixty, tall, lean and bald, and he had about him the obsequious air of an undertaker. MacNeil was drawn to the glass. The scene below was one he could barely have imagined. Thousands of naked bodies laid out three deep on wooden pallets stretching as far as you could see, cast in their piles like so many mannequins in a doll factory, arms and legs intertwined, strangely luminous, barely human. Fumigating mists obscured the detail, like the fog that would lie along the Thames on an autumn morning. Ghoulish figures in blue bio-suits, faceless behind tinted plastic visors, moved amongst the wisps and tendrils of it in slow motion, like astronauts on the moon, removing bodies from the trucks to pile on yet more pallets. One of the furnaces seemed designated for clothes and bedding. Bodies were slid into the other three, still on their pallets, by giant forklifts. In those few moments when the furnace doors remained open, the fires within cast a vaporous orange light through the fumigating mists, before giant cast-iron doors slammed shut again, their vibration felt throughout the building like seismic tremors.

MacNeil let his eyes drift over the piles of discarded humanity below him, and wondered if Sean was down there somewhere, the seed of his loins awaiting cremation with all the others. It was not a thought he could bear to dwell on, and he turned back into the office.

‘Sobering vision, isn’t it,’ said Hartson. ‘There, but for the grace of God, go you and I.’ He wandered past MacNeil to the window, and MacNeil saw his mask catch a momentary flicker of orange as one of the furnace doors opened to receive more dead. ‘I used to be devout,’ he said. ‘A good Catholic.’ He turned back to MacNeil. ‘Now I wonder.’ But then he dismissed his cosmic reflections in an instant. ‘What do you want with Ronnie?’

‘Just a word. You know him personally?’

‘I know every man here. Death has a way of bringing the living together. We’re all very close.’

‘Then you know he has a criminal record?’

‘Oh, yes. His file was made available to me when we were recruiting for the facility. But it’s in his past, I think. His experience in dealing with death took precedence. He’s an affable young man. Hardworking, conscientious.’

‘You won’t mind if I borrow him for half an hour?’

‘I wouldn’t mind in the slightest, Detective Inspector. But he’s not due on until midnight.’ Hartson’s smile bore the gravitas of a man used to being the bearer of bad news. ‘We work around the clock here. Twenty-four-seven, as our American friends would say.’

MacNeil glanced back down into the halls of Hades below, and for just a moment thought he saw Sean’s small body amongst all the others, tiny and twisted, sandwiched between a large, fat woman and an old man. And then the image was gone, vanished forever in a swirl of white smoke.

III

Kazinski lived with his mother in a 1960s council estate on the southern edge of Lambeth. High- and low-rise apartment blocks built to pluck people from the slums of 19th-century industrial London, and deliver them to a better life in a brave new world. The architects who designed them might have been emissaries of the devil, because they had instead removed the impoverished working classes from real communities, and brought them to a place which now resembled something worse than the hell from which they were supposed to have escaped.

At least half of the flats were boarded up, windows broken, others burned out. Crumbling concrete cladding bore the black streaks of insurance fires that for many had been the only way out. Tarmac concourses were strewn with broken glass and empty beer cans, a landscape punctuated by burned-out vehicles, like the carcasses of so many dead animals. The detritus of abandoned households — old mattresses, discarded clothing, broken furniture — was washed up against the ramps and walkways, like seaweed on a beach after a storm. Streetlamps had been smashed, many of them torn down. It would be a no-go area after nightfall, dark and dangerous. This was the brave new world.

MacNeil parked on the street and stood looking through the open gates of the estate. It was hard to believe that anyone still lived here. And yet, he could see, along the covered walkways on each floor, freshly painted doors, and windows with clean, white net curtains. Like the occasional good tooth in a mouth full of decay. Across the road, a multi-storey block had been abandoned. Every window boarded up, rolls of barbed wire dragged around its perimeter.

Glass crunched underfoot as he walked across a children’s play area, where doubtless architect’s drawings would have depicted a happy gathering of multicultural kids kicking a ball about. Even had that ever been a reality, it was long gone.

MacNeil had a strange sense of foreboding as he entered Kazinski’s block. There had not been a solitary sign of life. The world felt like a vessel whose captain had given the order to abandon ship, but nobody had told MacNeil.

The stairwell smelled of urine and stale beer, and something else he couldn’t quite identify. The walls were almost obscured by graffiti. He heard his own footsteps echoing all the way up to the sixth floor. On the second, he turned into the open walkway that ran along the outside of the block, leading to the individual flats. Every second doorway was boarded up. Others had been daubed with red paint, crude crosses warning that this home had been visited by the flu, a strange, frightening throwback to the days of the Plague. What misery, MacNeil wondered, lurked behind these doors?

Kazinski’s flat was number twenty-three. The door had been newly painted. Pillar-box red. To cover up the mark of the flu? Or to guard against it? MacNeil had no way of knowing. There was a polished brass knocker at head height, and he banged it three times. After a moment, he saw the lace curtain twitch in the window to his left.

‘What do you want?’ A woman’s voice came muffled from behind the glass.

‘Police, Mrs Kazinski. I want to talk to your son.’

‘Let me see your card.’ This was a woman used to dealing with cops.

MacNeil took out his warrant card and pressed it against the window. The curtain was dragged to one side, and by the daylight it let in, MacNeil saw the pale, pasty face of a woman in her fifties, features sharp and pinched, the genetic inheritance of generations of poverty. The curtain fell back into place.

‘He’s not here.’

‘Don’t tell me stories, Mrs Kazinski.’ He knew she would not open the door to him, and it would take too long to get a warrant and officers to break it down.

‘He left for work this morning.’

‘He doesn’t start work till midnight.’

‘No, he started at midday. He told me.’

‘Then he lied to you, Mrs Kazinski. I’ve just come from Battersea.’

‘No. He’s a good boy, my Ronnie.’

‘Was he at home last night, Mrs Kazinski, or was he at work?’

She hesitated, clearly not knowing which was the right answer to give.

‘What time did he get in from work this morning, Mrs Kazinski?’

‘I don’t know, it was late. I mean early. Five, maybe six. I was asleep. He was on the five o’clock shift last night. They work twelve hours.’

‘It was his day off yesterday. They told me at the power station.’

‘No!’ He heard the confusion in her denial. The hurt in her voice. Why had her son been lying to her? MacNeil believed now that she was telling the truth. That Kazinski really wasn’t there, and that she didn’t know where he’d gone if it wasn’t to work. ‘What’s he done?’

‘I don’t know that he’s done anything, Mrs Kazinski. I just want to talk to him, that’s all.’

‘You people never just want to talk.’ She was transferring her anger and hurt at her son’s lies and directing them at MacNeil. It was something he was familiar with. It was always the fault of the police when the people you loved got into trouble.

‘You can tell him I was looking for him.’ MacNeil folded his warrant card into an inside pocket. ‘And you might like to ask him what it was he was doing last night when he told you he was at work.’ He thrust his hands in his pockets and headed back along the stairwell, Mrs Kazinski’s imprecations following him along the walkway. But still, she wasn’t going to open her door under any circumstance. Even to abuse him to his back.

A few paces from the stairs, he heard a scuffle of feet, a voice whispering in the darkness beyond, and he stopped in his tracks. ‘Who’s there?’

A skinny youth stepped out into the walkway. His hair was gelled into spikes, and the triangle of a red and blue bandana covered his nose and mouth. His forehead above it was peppered with acne. He wore a hooded sweatshirt that looked two sizes too big for him, and a pair of khaki cargo trousers with the crotch almost at the knees. From a hand crudely tattooed with letters on each knuckle, a scarred baseball bat dangled to the ground. Three other youths, one of them black, stepped out behind him. They all wore bandanas and carried baseball bats or crowbars.

A noise behind him made him turn, and he saw another two young men emerge from a doorway which had been daubed with red paint. He felt the hostility in the eyes that fixed upon him and knew he was in trouble. He glanced over the side of the walkway. Even if he survived the jump he would break both legs.

‘Wot you want wiff Ronnie?’ the acne youth said.

‘We’ve got business,’ MacNeil replied, hoping that Ronnie might be on terms with these boys, and that they would leave him alone if they thought he was a friend of the ex-con.

‘Yeah, right,’ Acne said. ‘You’re the fuckin’ fuzz, aintcha? Fuckin’ rozza.’ MacNeil said nothing. Acne nodded towards MacNeil’s coat pockets. ‘Got ’em onya, ’ave ya?’

‘Got what?’

‘The fuckin’ drugs, coppa. Know what I mean?’

‘I don’t have drugs.’

‘Course you do. They give ’em tcha. All the cops got ’em, din they? Fuckin’ FluKill.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Give us ’em, then.’ He held out his hand.

‘I’ll give you my FluKill if you give me some information. That’s a fair exchange, isn’t it?’ MacNeil tried very hard to keep the tremor out of his voice.

Acne frowned. ‘Wot kinda fuckin’ info you looking for, rozza?’

‘I want to know where Ronnie goes when he’s not at work.

Acne looked at him as if he was insane. ‘You wot?’

‘I want to know where he hangs out.’

‘Sssa Black Ice Club, innit?’ the black youth said.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Acne told him.

For a moment, MacNeil forgot his plight. ‘In Soho? All the clubs up there were shut down weeks ago.’

‘At’s wot you fink, mate.’ A cold smile narrowed Acne’s eyes. ‘Not that it fuckin’ matters wot you fink, does it?’ He held his hand out again. ‘Cough up.’ And he roared at his own joke. ‘Funny, eh?’

‘Sorry,’ MacNeil said. ‘I’m afraid I lied.’

‘You wot?’ Acne looked perplexed.

‘I haven’t got any FluKill.’ And he swung his left fist full into the boy’s face. He knew he had to take the initiative, catch them off guard, if he was to stand a chance. He felt bone and teeth break beneath his knuckles, and immediately stooped to scoop up the baseball bat as it fell from Acne’s hand. He grasped it with both hands and swung around. The bat, at full extension, caught one of the youths behind him square on the side of the head, and he went down like a sack of coal. The door to MacNeil’s right had been boarded up with plywood. He kicked it as hard as he could, and the sheet of wood splintered into darkness in a cloud of dust. MacNeil plunged through it into the unknown, the voices of his assailants raised in pain and fury at his back.

He was in a length of hallway from which the floorboards had long ago been ripped up. He ran from rafter to rafter and turned into another doorway. From here he could defend his position. They could only come at him one at a time. And the first of them came, screaming down the hall like a demented spirit. A crowbar embedded itself in the plaster beside MacNeil’s head. He hadn’t even seen it coming. He swung his bat and caught the black youth in the mouth, and the kid fell backwards, blood bubbling through split lips. MacNeil braced himself against the door jamb and waited for the next attack. But it didn’t come. The black kid, still whimpering, staggered back out through the gloom to the walkway. He heard the murmur of voices, and then someone cursing loudly. And then silence.

All MacNeil could hear now was the rasp of his own breathing in the dark. As his eyes grew accustomed to it, he looked around the room behind him. The floorboards were gone here, too. There was a torn mattress pushed up into one corner, and the rusted remains of an old bedstead. A window giving on to the walkway was boarded up. MacNeil fumbled for his phone. He could call for help, but it would take time, and he didn’t know how long he could hold these kids off. But there was no time even for a call. A whooshing sound came down the hallway, along with a dazzle of flickering white light. A flaming bundle of rags soaked in petrol. MacNeil could smell the fumes, and thick black smoke immediately forced him back into the room. It was insane. They didn’t care if they burned down the whole block.

He reacted instinctively, in panic as much as anything, and threw himself at the window. The whole board tore itself free of the nails which held it, and he went out through the window frame with it, pulling his knees up to his chest, catching his shoulder and his head as he went. He landed on top of one of his attackers, the board a barrier between them, and he heard the air being forced from the youth’s lungs in a deep, painful retch. MacNeil didn’t wait to see who it was. He scrambled to his feet and ran for the stairwell, legs nearly buckling beneath him. In his panic he had lost the baseball bat. But it didn’t matter. He was on the stairs now. He was on his way down, three, five at a time. Behind him, he could hear them whooping and shrieking, out for blood and revenge. If they got him he was a dead man.

He could see daylight falling in through the open doorway at the foot of the stairs. Half a flight, and then once he was out he could sprint for the car.

He drew a lungful of sweet, fresh air as he swung through the doorway out on to the concourse, and a baseball bat caught him full across the chest, forcing it all back out. His momentum carried him on for several steps before he fell amongst the broken glass and felt it cut into the flesh of his palms and cheek. He rolled over and saw a tall, gangly black youth in drainpipe jeans grinning down at him, his bandana pulled down to his neck. Three others emerged from the stairwell behind him and pulled up short. Acne had discarded his mask, his face thick with blood drying around his nose and mouth. He held a metal bar in his hand now, eyes filled with hatred and fury.

MacNeil lay on the tarmac, pulled up on to one elbow, still trying to catch his breath. He knew there was no way he could reach the car before them. These kids were like wild, wounded animals. They were armed, and they meant to kill him.

Acne confirmed his intent. ‘You’ra fuckin’ dead man, rozza!’ He lifted the iron bar clutched in his hand and took a step towards him. Then his chest burst open in a spray of pink. The youth barely had time to register surprise, before toppling forward on to his face without a sound. His weapon clattered noisily away across the flagstones.

MacNeil looked at him in amazement. He had no idea what had happened. The others stood frozen in disbelief.

‘Wot the fuck...?’ The black kid who had smacked MacNeil in the chest with his baseball bat moved towards his fallen friend, and the right side of his head just vanished. He spun around, toppling on to his back, his one remaining eye staring sightlessly up at the cloud overhead.

‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ, he’s fuckin’ shot!’ MacNeil heard one of the others shout. ‘Someone’s got a fuckin’ gun!’ And then he heard them sprinting off in different directions, like animals scattering at the report of a hunter’s rifle. They were gone in moments, and MacNeil was left lying on his own with two dead kids at his feet. He swung around and got quickly on to his knees, remaining crouched there, eyes flickering along the skyline of the surrounding apartment blocks, trying to spot the marksman, wondering if he would be next. But he saw no one, and there was no third shot. He got to his feet on shaky legs and looked at the two youths lying in slowly gathering pools of their own blood. He winced, as pain seared across his chest, and drew a sharp breath. He put a hand to his chest, and gently pressed. He didn’t think there were any broken ribs, but he knew he was going to be black and blue.

As he walked to his car, he scanned the semi-derelict buildings that rose up all around him. Someone, somewhere, from one of these abandoned apartments, had saved his life. He had no idea why, and it was only later that it struck him as odd that he had not heard either shot.

He slumped behind the wheel of his car and took out his phone.