Lockdown

Chapter Eleven

It was dark in Kennington Road, lights all along the police station falling out across the deserted street below, reflecting in the darkened windows of the shops and restaurants opposite.

Laing waved MacNeil into a seat and shut the door. There were more people now out in the detectives’ office. It was almost seven, a changeover in shifts. A brief congregation of officers and staff who met only rarely when their rotas diverged. And in just a few minutes, all across the city, the curfew would begin. A signal for most people to lock down their homes for the night and wait for morning. A signal for others to emerge under cover of darkness to embark on a rampage of looting and vandalism. It was not a time anyone wanted to be out on the streets.

MacNeil had spent the last two hours writing up his reports on the bones found in Archbishop’s Park, and the two youths shot dead on the housing estate in South Lambeth. Laing had just finished going through them, half-moon reading glasses still perched on the end of his nose. He was shaking his head. ‘Weird,’ he said. ‘Fucking weird.’

‘What is, sir?’

‘These kids that got shot. Not some casual shooting, some lunatic with a gun. It was a real pro job. A professional weapon in professional hands.’ He regarded MacNeil speculatively. ‘Do you think there was a connection?’

‘With Kazinski?’ Laing nodded, and MacNeil shook his head. ‘I can’t see how. No one knew I was going there, or why.’ He’d had time in the intervening hours to think about it, and was quite spooked. Someone had saved his life. Someone had shot those kids to stop them beating hell out of him with iron bars and baseball bats. Without that someone, it was MacNeil who would be lying on Tom Bennet’s autopsy table right now instead of those boys. He could imagine how much satisfaction that would have given Bennet.

‘So you’ve just got some kind of guardian angel looking out for you, then?’ Laing said.

MacNeil could only shrug. How easily that gunman could have shot him, too. From some empty apartment in the abandoned block opposite, from where he must have been watching, even before MacNeil arrived. But watching for what? What on earth had he been doing there?

In normal circumstances, the flats would have been sealed off, and officers drafted in to search them unit by unit, until they found the gunman’s vantage point. And then forensics would have combed it for any tiny piece of evidence that might have been left at the scene. But they simply didn’t have the manpower, and the approach of darkness and the curfew would only have complicated things. Perhaps Laing would order some kind of search in the morning. But in any event, it would no longer be any of MacNeil’s business. In twelve hours he would not be a police officer any more. He would be a former cop, former father, former husband. Everything behind him, only uncertainty ahead.

Laing held out his hand. ‘I’ll take those pills off you now, Jack.’

It took MacNeil a moment to drag himself back to the present and realise what Laing was asking for. He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I don’t have them.’

Laing glared at him. ‘You’ve taken them?’

‘No, sir, I’ve lost them.’

Laing glared at him, disbelief burning in his eyes. ‘You’d better fucking find them, then. These bloody things are like gold dust. They’re not on my desk first thing tomorrow, you’re in big shit, son.’

MacNeil just nodded. What were they going to do? Shoot him? ‘I’ll need curfew clearance to go up to Soho, Mr Laing. If you could enter it up in the computer.’

‘What for?’

‘To check out the Black Ice Club.’

Laing regarded him as if he had two heads. ‘You mean you think those kids were telling the truth?’

‘I don’t think they meant to. But, you know, the black kid just sort of blurted it out.’

‘Well, if it’s open for business, it’s doing it illegally.’

‘I doubt if it’s advertising the fact, sir.’

‘You’d better put in a courtesy call to the local bobbies. Let them know you’re in the area.’

‘Fine.’ MacNeil got to his feet and turned towards the door.

‘MacNeil.’ He turned as Laing stood up and extended a hand towards him, before pulling it away again, as if from an electric shock. ‘Sorry, forgot. No shaking hands. No spreading germs.’ He grinned awkwardly. ‘Just wanted to say, you know, good luck. You’re a fucking idiot, MacNeil, but I don’t wish you any harm.’

MacNeil managed a pale smile. ‘Thank you, sir. I’ll always remember your final words of kindness.’

Laing grinned. ‘Fuck off.’

MacNeil was nearly halfway across the detectives’ office before he realised that things were not as they should be. A bunch of coloured balloons danced above his desk on the end of a string. Most of his colleagues were gathered in a semi-circle beyond it. Someone had filled a trayful of plastic cups with orange juice, and on a cue they all leaned forward to lift one, and began a refrain of ‘He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’.

MacNeil stood, frozen with embarrassment, as they sang their ragged but hearty way through to the last line. And so say all of us. Someone shouted, Hip, hip! And there were three loud cheers before cups were tipped and orange juice downed. Rufus thrust a cup in his hand. ‘Sorry we couldn’t do anything stronger, me old son.’

‘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.’