Lockdown

I

MacNeil slumped to the ground and sat with his back against the wall. There was still a fire burning somewhere beyond the west end of St. Anne’s Court, but the looters had moved on, because all he could hear now was the crackling of the blaze.

Someone had shot Kazinski three times in the chest. Someone who had been waiting out here in the lane. MacNeil had heard no shots. Even with the ringing in his head he could not have missed them. He remembered Laing’s verdict on the sniper who had shot the kids in South Lambeth. It was a real pro job. A professional weapon in professional hands, he had said. This, too, had all the hallmarks of a professional. A clean, efficient execution. A weapon with a silencer. Someone did not want Kazinski talking to MacNeil, or anyone else. And it occurred to him that perhaps it was the same professional. Perhaps the marksman who had saved his life that afternoon had been waiting there for Kazinski. And now he had got him.

MacNeil tilted his head gently back against the brick and breathed deeply. He felt something like hysteria slip slowly over him, like a shroud. Everything seemed somehow out of control. His life, the city, his job, this investigation. It was as if he were being swept along on a tide of events he was powerless to affect. He was tired. He had barely slept the night before, and he had been on duty now for nearly fifteen hours. If he closed his eyes, he could sleep. Right here on the pavement, with a dead man at his feet.

But there was an anger in him, a tiny voice that screamed and raged inside, and he knew it would never let him sleep. In the distance he heard gunfire, and the far-off echo of voices raised in anger. Like the one in his head. He crawled forward on his knees and dragged on a pair of latex gloves to start going through Kazinski’s pockets. There was a wallet with an ID card, some bank notes, and a pouch with some loose change. A bunch of keys in his trouser pocket. Cigarettes and a lighter in his jacket. Nothing remotely helpful.

MacNeil looked at the wallet again. There was a zip pocket in the back of it. He fumbled with big fingers to open it up. There were some receipts in there from better times. A couple of restaurant bills, a till receipt from a bar. And a dog-eared business card. MacNeil tilted it to try to catch what light there was, and ran a finger over the red embossed lettering. Jonathan Flight, Sculptor, it read in curlicued script. It had the address of a gallery in South Kensington.

MacNeil knew the name. The arts columns of the broadsheets had been full of him last year, and some of his work had been controversial enough to make the tabloids, where MacNeil had read about him. He specialised in grotesque, often overtly sexual body sculpture. A headless man with his erect penis partially inserted in the anus of a female torso. A woman with one arm missing, holding her severed breast in her remaining hand. A facial sculpture whose smile stripped away flesh to reveal teeth and jaw. MacNeil could not imagine who might buy stuff like that, or who would want it in their homes. But his exhibitions attracted thousands, and his work sold for tens of thousands.

He wondered what someone like Kazinski was doing with Flight’s business card in his wallet, or what his connection had been with the Black Ice Club. The only thing that linked them was extreme art, and Kazinski did not seem to MacNeil like either a connoisseur or a collector. He slipped the card into an inside pocket, zipped up the wallet and returned it to Kazinski’s jacket. He sat back against the wall again and pulled off the latex. His head was pounding less severely now, but he ran his hand down the side of his face and felt a swelling on his cheek and knew that he would be black and blue by morning.

He sat for several minutes before deciding to do something he would never have contemplated in another life. He was going to leave Kazinski there on the pavement. He was dead. There was nothing that could be done for him. And if MacNeil called it in, he would spend the rest of his shift tied up in red tape. In eight hours he would walk out of the door of Kennington Police Station for the last time. And if he hadn’t found the little girl’s killer by then, he was pretty sure no one else would. So there was no time for red tape. This investigation had become something of an obsession. And he was about to cross a line into uncharted territory. A world alien to him, outside of the law, where he would be all alone. With just his angry voice for company.