Lockdown

I

MacNeil turned past the deserted South Kensington tube station into Old Brompton Road. The Lamborghini London franchise had been cleaned out long ago. The showroom windows were smashed; the floor space beyond, which had once been graced by some of the most expensive cars in the world, was empty and exposed to the elements. The Royal Bank of Scotland next door was all boarded up, its vaults cleared out by the bank itself and transferred to more secure premises. There was no point in the looters trying to break in, and so they had taken out their frustrations in a multicoloured display of graffiti comprising even more colourful language.

The bench in the tiny triangle of parkland at the road junction was normally inhabited by two or more drunks congregating to share their misery, to drink from cans in paper bags and fill the air with their cigarette smoke and hollow laughter. To MacNeil’s shame, he had almost always heard a Scots voice amongst them. But they were long gone. The soup kitchens were closed, and men raddled by years of drink were easy prey for H5N1.

There was less damage here than in the city centre, less evidence of looting. Old Brompton Road was largely residential with small shops at street level. Pizza Organic, Mail Boxes Etc., Waterstones. Poor pickings compared to the big stores downtown. And no self-respecting looter was going to be seen dead breaking into a bookshop. Still, most of the shops were boarded up, and there were few lights on in the windows of the flats and offices above.

MacNeil dropped down to second gear and cruised slowly along the street checking the numbers. He found Flight’s gallery on the corner of Cranley Place, next door to the steel-shuttered Café Lazeez. The windows of the gallery had been boarded up, and then pasted over with layer upon layer of peeling bill posters advertising everything from mail-order art to underground concerts in unnamed locations. There was some sort of crest above the door on the corner, and in Cranley Place itself, an entrance to the apartments above the gallery.

MacNeil turned into Cranley Place and found a spot to park. Rows of pristine, white-painted terraced town houses stretched off into the night, black wrought-iron balconies supported on pillared doorways. There were a few hotels and guest houses here, empty of course, but mostly these were private homes, great rambling houses divided and subdivided into luxury apartments. Prime real estate, light years removed from the scruffy two-bedroomed lower terrace that MacNeil had been able to afford in Forest Hill. On the far side of the street, on the shuttered windows of Knightsbridge Pianos, beneath a large sign which read BILL POSTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, some graffiti artist with a sense of humour had sprayed BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT!

Steel grilles protected the glass in Flight’s door beneath a red and green decorative lintel. There were two bell-pushes on the electronic entry system. One marked STUDIO, the other marked FLIGHT. MacNeil stood back and looked up. Lights were on in the first floor studio. The apartment above it was in darkness. He stepped forward and pressed the STUDIO bell. After a few moments, a rasping electronic hum accompanied a man’s voice issuing from a speaker set into the wall. ‘Yes?’

‘Mr Flight?’

A moment’s pause, and then a voice laden with suspicion. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘Detective Inspector Jack MacNeil, Mr Flight. I’m investigating a murder in Soho tonight.’

‘I’ve been here all evening, Inspector,’ Flight said quickly.

‘Yes, I don’t doubt that, sir. I know you didn’t kill him, but you might have known him. Can I come up?’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Kazinski, Mr Flight,’ MacNeil said. ‘Ronald Kazinski.’ There was another long silence, which MacNeil broke. ‘Can I come up, sir?’ he repeated.

‘Have you had the flu?’

‘No, sir. But I’m protected,’ MacNeil lied.

‘Put a mask on, if you have one. If you haven’t, I’ll give you one. And please wear gloves. I don’t want you touching anything in my studio.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The buzzer went, and MacNeil pushed the door open. A carpeted stairway led up to a first floor landing and a door marked STUDIO. There was a window in it, and Flight appeared on the other side of it, his face almost obscured by a double mask. Even from his side of the door, MacNeil could see that Flight was tall. He had a strangely cadaverous head covered with a steel grey stubble. Blue eyes blinked suspiciously at him through the glass. ‘Let me see your hands,’ Flight said, and MacNeil held up his latex-gloved hands. ‘And your ID.’ Patiently, MacNeil took out his warrant card and opened it up to the glass. Flight scrutinised it carefully, before unlocking the door and stepping away from it. ‘You can’t be too careful these days,’ he said. ‘And please keep your distance.’

MacNeil walked into Flight’s studio. What had once been a polished wooden floor was stained and scarred and littered with the debris of an untidy artistic temperament. It was a large, well-lit space that covered just about the entire area of the gallery below. A dozen works in various stages of completion sat on the floor or on work benches. A grotesquely deformed head, intertwined arms, a mangled torso with breasts and a penis. The walls were covered with sketches. There was a potter’s wheel, and tall cabinets with half-open drawers full of art materials — paints, inks, dyes, sculpting tools, tracing paper. Centre stage was Flight’s work table, and the piece he was currently sculpting. An arm raised on its fingertips, partially fleshed, partially stripped down to the tendons and bone, half a head growing out of the armpit, an exposed brain sectioned through its centre revealing all its folds and colours and interior textures. MacNeil wondered how it remained standing, until he saw the support spike that passed through the upper arm. For all its unnatural distortion, there was an unpleasantly lifelike quality about it. Which was true of all of Flight’s works.

Something of MacNeil’s distaste must have been apparent to Flight. His eyes smiled, supercilious and superior. ‘Don’t you like my work, Inspector?’

‘I prefer a nice picture I can hang on my wall.’

‘Like?’

MacNeil shrugged. ‘Vettriano.’

‘Ah,’ Flight said. ‘The Singing Butler. I’ve often wondered who bought those things.’ He turned towards his work in progress. ‘The brain’s a fascinating subject, don’t you think? Of course, you have to know a little about it. The brachium pontis. The colliculus superior.’ He pointed to lobes and leafs of his sculpted brain. ‘An amazing piece of engineering. It’s extraordinary to think that just anyone can have one. Of course, they come in all models, from a Rolls Royce to a Mini.’

‘And what do you have, Mr Flight?’

‘I like to think I’m probably in the BMW bracket. What about you, Inspector?’

‘Oh, probably a Ford Granada,’ MacNeil said. ‘Solid, reliable, doesn’t need much servicing, and just keeps going till it gets there. So what can you tell me about Ronald Kazinski, sir?’

‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’ Flight began circling his sculpture, casting a thoughtful eye over its curves and planes. MacNeil saw now that he was, indeed, a tall man. Six-six, perhaps, and painfully thin, with long, feminine fingers. He was wearing a three-quarter-length white apron, like a surgeon’s gown. Only it was smeared with clay and paint rather than blood. ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

‘He’d heard of you.’

Flight flicked him a look. ‘Had he? Did he tell you that?’

‘No, Mr Flight. He was dead. Don’t you want to know how he died?’

‘It’s no concern of mine.’

‘He was shot three times in the chest.’

‘How unpleasant for him.’

‘And he had your business card in his wallet.’

‘Did he? Well, you know, there’s probably a few thousand people of whom you could say that.’

‘Most of whom are probably interested in art.’

‘And Mr Kazinski wasn’t?’

‘He was a crematorium worker, Mr Flight. He lived in a slum south of the river.’

‘Then I take your point.’

MacNeil let his eyes wander around the studio, flicking from one obscenity to another. He said, ‘It’s possible, of course, that he picked up your card at the Black Ice Club. Do you know it?’

‘I’ve heard of it, of course. Avante-garde performance art. Shock for the sake of shocking.’

‘Familiar territory for you, I’d have thought.’ Flight cast him a withering look. MacNeil said, ‘You’ve never been, then?’

‘Really, Inspector, credit me with a little taste.’

‘I do,’ MacNeil said. ‘Very little.’ He looked around the studio. ‘Most of it bad.’

Flight’s patience with him was starting to wear thin. ‘If that’s all, Inspector, I’d like to get on, if you don’t mind.’ He nodded towards the arm and head. ‘The hours of darkness are my most creative.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ MacNeil said. There was more than just something of the night about the cadaverous sculptor. He gave MacNeil the creeps. ‘Thank you for your cooperation, sir.’

II

Pinkie watched MacNeil back his car out into Old Brompton Road and turn towards South Kensington tube station. He waited until the tail lights were gone, and then he got out of the car and walked slowly across the road to the green, grilled door of Flight’s apartment. He hesitated there and looked around. There were lights shining in an atrium conservatory on the other side of Cranley Place, but he couldn’t see anyone moving around. Most of the other windows in the street were black holes, protective curtains drawn tight to shut out a scary world. Pinkie hated wearing a mask, but there was one good thing about it. It hid your face, and nobody thought it was strange. Any witness questioned by the police would always be certain of at least one thing. He was wearing a mask, officer.

He pressed the STUDIO buzzer. And after a moment, Flight’s angry voice growled through the speaker grille, ‘What is it now?’

‘It’s Pinkie.’ There was a long pause before the buzzer sounded and the electronic lock clicked open. Pinkie stepped inside and flicked up the snib on the lock so that it remained unlocked when the door closed behind him. He hated being locked in. He remembered the cupboard under the stairs where his mother locked him away when she had her visitors. She didn’t want them to know there was a child in the house. But she had made it comfortable for him, with a light, and a drawing book and some games. And a mattress for him to sleep on. It was his little den, secret and safe. He had never minded being shut in there, until the night he heard her screaming.

Flight peered at him through the glass in the studio door, and Pinkie grinned behind his mask and waggled his gloved hands in the air. Flight opened up. ‘What do you want?’ He was careful to keep distance between them.

‘You had a visitor, Jonathan.’

‘A very rude policeman.’

Pinkie shook a finger of admonition at him. ‘Don’t be so judgemental, Jonathan. Poor Mr MacNeil lost his son today.’

Flight was unaffected. ‘Perhaps that explains why he was so rude.’

‘What did he want?’

‘He wanted to know if I knew Ronnie.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘That I’d never heard of him, of course.’

‘And he believed you?’

‘Why shouldn’t he?’

‘Why did he think you and Ronnie would be acquainted?’

‘Apparently Ronnie had my business card in his pocket.’

‘Ahhh.’ That explained it. Pinkie wandered across the studio and poked the exposed half of the brain with unashamed curiosity. ‘Is this real?’

‘Don’t touch it!’ Flight snapped at him. Then, ‘Did you kill Ronnie?’

Pinkie smiled. ‘I could do with a drink, Jonathan.’

‘I’m working.’

‘I could do with a drink, Jonathan.’ Pinkie repeated himself as if making the request for the first time.

It had its effect on Flight. He seemed nervous. ‘We’ll have to go upstairs.’

The living room of Flight’s apartment overlooked Old Brompton Road and was what the design magazines would have called minimalist. Bare floorboards, polished and varnished. Naked cream walls. A glass table and six chrome and leather chairs in the window. There were two red leather recliners with footstools, a long, low, black-lacquered sideboard, and a wafer-thin plasma TV screen on a chrome stand. The only art in the room comprised a couple of Flight’s own sculptures raised on tall black plinths. Pinkie looked at them with distaste. ‘I don’t know how you can stand to have that stuff in your home.’

Flight didn’t grace the comment with a response. ‘Whisky?’ He opened up the drinks cupboard in his sideboard.

‘Cognac.’

‘I’ve only got Armagnac.’ Flight sounded annoyed. ‘It’s very expensive.’

‘That’ll have to do, then.’

Flight poured a conservative measure into a single brandy glass.

‘Aren’t you going to join me?’

‘I never drink while I’m working.’

‘Make an exception.’ Pinkie walked to the window and looked down into the street below. He heard Flight sighing and taking out a second glass. The unaccustomed sound of a car engine rose from the street, headlights raked the shuttered shops opposite, and a vehicle pulled up outside the gallery. Pinkie pressed his face against the window to see who it was, and recoiled as if from a blow. MacNeil was stepping out on to the pavement. Pinkie turned quickly towards Flight, who looked up in surprise, his bottle of Armagnac hovering over the lip of the second glass.

‘What is it?’

Pinkie smiled. This was the bit he enjoyed most. ‘Time for you to feature in one of your own sculptures, Jonathan.’

III

MacNeil glanced up and saw that there were lights on now in both the studio and the apartment. He walked around into Cranley Place and pressed both buzzers. There was no response. He waited nearly thirty seconds before trying again. Still no reply. MacNeil was losing patience. He’d got as far as the King’s Road before the thought struck him. A thought so breathtaking in the scope of its horror that it was almost unthinkable. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. And so he had felt compelled to return, if only to clear it from his mind. And now Flight was playing games. He raised his hand to bang on the door and shouted, ‘Come on, Flight, open up!’ His voice echoed angrily around the empty street, and the door moved under the beat of his clenched fist. MacNeil froze, his arm still in mid-air. His surprise gave way to an immediate sense of misgiving. The door had locked behind him as he left. He was sure of that. He had pulled it shut. Tentatively he pushed on the door with his fingertips, and it swung in. He stepped into the hallway and saw that the lock had been put on the latch. He inclined his head and peered up the stairs. A light still burned on the first landing.

‘Flight? Mr Flight?’ MacNeil’s voice got soaked up by the carpet and went unanswered. He climbed the stairs slowly to the first landing. The lights of the studio shone brightly through the glass panel in the door, and MacNeil peered inside. There was no sign of Flight. He pushed the door. It opened and he walked in. The arm and head looked just as it had fifteen minutes ago. Flight did not appear to have done any more work on it. MacNeil looked around the other works in the studio with new eyes. A door at the back led to what appeared to be another room. MacNeil crossed the studio and opened it. In fact, it led into a large walk-in, windowless storeroom. There was a long wooden workbench, scored and stained, a huge vice, and all manner of tools hanging from nails in the wall. Knives, saws, several different weights of chopper, of the kind you might find in a butcher’s shop. A tray on the worktop was lined with scalpels of various sizes. There was an autoclave plugged into the rear wall next to an oscillating saw and a row of plastic bottles containing bleach. It was cold in here, the air sharp with the acid scent of disinfectant. And something else that MacNeil couldn’t quite identify.

Several opaque containers lined up along a shelf were labelled SPRAY PLASTIC.

MacNeil had a bad feeling about this place, like the touch of icy fingers on his neck. He shivered, and felt as if he were in the presence of something deeply sinister. There was an odd jolt, and the air was filled with a loud electronic hum and the rattle of glass. He turned, and saw that behind the door stood a huge refrigerator which reached almost all the way up to the ceiling. It was divided in two halves, upper and lower. He opened the upper door, and a light flickered on to reveal shelves full of bottles with glass stoppers. They were filled with various coloured liquids. There was a strangely familiar, if unpleasant, smell in the fridge. MacNeil turned one of the bottles around. Its label read Formalin, and MacNeil knew why it smelled familiar. It was the ever present perfume of the autopsy room. Formaldehyde. Used in medical laboratories and mortuaries as a preservative. Three small sausage-shaped objects lay in a glass saucer in the meat tray. MacNeil lifted it out and nearly dropped it. ‘Jesus Christ!’ His revulsion forced the words involuntarily from his lips, and his voice sounded excessively loud in this confined space. The three sausage-like objects in the saucer were fingers. Human fingers. He slid it quickly back on to the shelf and shut the door. He was shaking. He took a moment to compose himself and control his breathing before opening the lower door to reveal four deep freezer drawers. He hardly needed to open them to know what was inside.

But still the shock when he slid the top drawer out forced him to step back. A man’s head stared out at him, eyes wide open, flesh chalk-white and faintly frosted. MacNeil had to force himself to open the others. Legs, arms, hands, feet. An entire torso in the bottom drawer. A woman.

MacNeil slammed the door shut and stood breathing stertorously, trying to stop the bile rising from his stomach. This was sicker by far than Foetus Man’s jam and bread sandwich. This was real. He staggered out into the studio and looked around at all the body pieces that Flight had ‘sculpted’. He strode across the studio floor and wrenched the work in progress from its support spike, raising it above his head and smashing it down on the edge of the table. The half head separated itself from the arm and rolled across the floor, and the exposed section of the arm split open. There was a crack like the report of a rifle, and the arm hung in two halves in his hand, the bone broken clean through. And bone, he now knew, it was. Human bone. Flight was no sculptor. He was plagiarising nature. Taking human body parts and manipulating them to his own twisted design. Disinfected, preserved, plasticised, painted, whatever the hell it was he did to them.

And MacNeil knew also that Flight had lied about knowing Kazinski. Knew that they must have been collaborating ever since Kazinski got his job at the crematorium. Supplier of body parts to the celebrated sculptor. He dropped the arm as if it were burning hot, barely able to control his anger and disgust. Is this where that little girl had been butchered? The flesh stripped from her bones, her skeleton disjointed. He looked back into the storeroom with its stained workbench and array of cutting tools and felt sick to his stomach.

‘Flight!’ he roared, but was greeted only by silence.

He ran out on to the landing and up the second flight of stairs two at a time. He called Flight’s name again, but there was still no response. Three doors opened off a short corridor. He threw them open in turn. The first was a bathroom, cool blue ceramic, a glass shower. The wash-hand basin was a free-standing bowl set on mahogany. MacNeil saw himself, wild-eyed, staring back from a huge mirror that took up one wall. His face was bruised and scored, and he barely recognised himself. The second door led to a bedroom. Black silk sheets, a cream carpet, a faint smell of feet and eau de cologne. The third door opened into a large, spartan sitting room. Flight was sitting in a red leather recliner, one foot up on a footstool, one arm hanging over the right side of the chair. He was still wearing his surgeon’s apron. Only now, it was blood that covered it, seeping from the signature three bullet holes in his chest. Flight’s silver-bristled head was tipped forward. MacNeil moved slowly towards him and felt for a pulse at his neck. There was none, and the flesh felt cold already. But MacNeil knew he could only have been dead a matter of minutes.

He spun around, suddenly sensing his own vulnerability. There was no one there. Not a sound disturbed the silence in the house.

MacNeil glanced at the black-lacquered sideboard. The door of the drinks cabinet stood open. There were two glasses on top of it, next to a bottle of Armagnac. One of the glasses held half an inch of dark, smoky amber. The other was empty.

MacNeil sat in the other recliner and dropped his head into his hands, running them through the fuzz of his short-cropped dark hair. There was no one in the house, he was sure of that. And yet in the time it had taken him to drive to the King’s Road and back, someone had come here and murdered Flight. Two glasses on the sideboard, one filled and untouched, the other empty. As if Flight had been interrupted in the act of pouring. One for himself. One for his killer.

Was it MacNeil who interrupted them? Was Flight’s killer still in the house when he came in? He supposed it was possible that while he was in the studio the killer had slipped down the stairs and made his escape. Silent, unseen. Like a ghost. A ghost that was haunting MacNeil wherever he went, killing everyone with whom he had contact: the kids on the housing estate in South Lambeth, Kazinski, and now Flight. He looked at the sculptor, head slumped on his chest, and thought that he was no loss to the world. He knew he would have to call this one in. But he didn’t want to be involved. An anonymous tip-off from Flight’s own phone would bring the local police, although maybe not until the curfew was over. What they found here would be largely self-explanatory.

MacNeil stood up and crossed to the sideboard. He went through all the drawers, careful not to disturb anything that might prove useful to the cops when they came. He found old flyers for exhibitions of Flight’s work, sketches and scribbled notes, a well-thumbed pack of Tarot cards, pens and pencils, receipts, some loose change. There was little else in the room that could be described as personal. MacNeil wondered where Flight kept the accumulated detritus of his own life. Or perhaps, since it was other people’s lives he collected, preserving them in pieces for posterity, he kept little or nothing of his own.

In the bedroom, next to his bed, MacNeil found the only piece of furniture in the apartment that didn’t look like it had been chosen from a Scandinavian mail-order catalogue. It was an antique roll-top bureau, a family piece, perhaps, from another life. MacNeil rolled back the top and found a mess of paperwork and accounts. Bills, receipts, invoices, an accounting notebook full of Flight’s tiny, neurotic scribbles. A brass holder was stuffed full of letters, still in their envelopes. A few pieces of private correspondence, but mostly paid and unpaid bills.

Finally MacNeil found gold. In a shallow drawer at the back of the bureau, nestling in green felt, was Flight’s address book. It was full to overflowing with business cards and addresses scribbled on folded scraps of paper. But here was the definitive collection of all Flight’s friends and acquaintances, from both his private and business lives, although MacNeil imagined that the dividing line between the two was probably pretty blurred.

Carefully, he started leafing through the alphabet. But there were so many names, and with no idea of what he was looking for, MacNeil quickly gave up and flicked through to K, where he found Kazinski’s telephone number. But no address. It would have been superfluous, a place Flight would never have gone, even in his worst nightmares.

He was about to thumb through the remaining pages, when MacNeil spotted a small square of paper, folded twice, and wedged in the spine. So he left the book open at K, pressed the spine flat and delicately retrieved the small scrap of paper. He unfolded it. There was a name scrawled on it, perhaps a nickname of some kind. Pinkie. And beneath it a telephone number. MacNeil could tell from the code that it was a mobile. Beneath the number was an address, but a line drawn across the paper seemed to separate the two, and MacNeil got the impression that they didn’t necessarily go together. Although it was possible that they were related in some way. And then he went very still. And in his head he heard Kazinski say, I don’t know the address. It was a big house. You know, some rich geezer’s place. It was somewhere near Wandsworth Common. Root Street, Ruth Street, something like that. MacNeil’s eyes were fixed on the piece of paper in his hand. The address was in Routh Road, Wandsworth.

MacNeil sat on the edge of the bed and held the paper between slightly trembling fingers, looking at the name and number and address until they blurred. He was hungry, and tired, and very possibly in shock. It was hard to concentrate. And then he had a thought. He reached for the telephone on the bedside and dialled the number on the piece of paper.

Pinkie sat in his car fifty yards away watching the lights burning in the windows of Flight’s apartment. He wondered what MacNeil was doing in there, what delights he had discovered, what secrets uncovered. He had been so preoccupied with Flight’s little house of horrors on the first floor that it had been a simple enough matter for Pinkie to creep silently down to the front door and out into the night. He tried to imagine MacNeil’s surprise when he went upstairs and found Flight waiting for him. Pinkie had been unable to resist the temptation to arrange the sculptor in welcoming pose on his expensive leather chair. If MacNeil had come straight up, well then, he’d simply have had to shoot him. Even at the risk of Mr Smith’s ire. Irritatingly, Flight’s head had refused to play ball and kept falling forward, and Pinkie had felt compelled finally, for reasons of self-preservation, to leave before he was satisfied.

His mobile phone purred on the seat beside him. He picked it up and looked at the display. Jonathan Flight, it said, and he dropped it again, as if it were contaminated. It couldn’t be Flight. He’d just killed him. He felt goosebumps rise up all across his neck and shoulders, before forcing himself to think logically. It couldn’t be Flight. But it was someone calling from Flight’s phone. So it had to be MacNeil. Where in the name of God had he got the number? Flight must have kept it in an address book, or in the memory of his phone. But how would MacNeil know to call it? Pinkie was spooked.

Tentatively he picked up the phone and pressed the green button to take the call. He put it to his ear and listened and said nothing. ‘Hello?’ he heard MacNeil’s voice. ‘Hello?’ But still Pinkie said nothing. And then he grinned. Now it was MacNeil’s turn to be spooked.

MacNeil listened to the ambient silence. He could hear someone breathing, someone listening but saying nothing, almost as if they knew who was calling. He wanted to hang up, to cut off the presence that was so eloquent in its silence. But there was something compelling in it, and he sat for a full minute saying nothing. Just listening. He felt evil in the silence, and the longer he listened to it the more oppressive it became, until finally he couldn’t stand it any more, and he banged the receiver back in its cradle. He was shaking now, his mouth dry. He had the unnerving feeling that he had just had an encounter with the ghost that was haunting him, this killer of men and boys, and perhaps of a little Chinese girl with a cleft palate. And he had, too, the sense that this ghost was somewhere very close.

‘Scotland the Brave’ burst into jolly refrain, and MacNeil’s heart nearly hit the roof of his mouth. He fumbled in his pocket for his mobile and saw Amy’s name on the display.

‘Hey, Amy,’ he said, trying to sound as natural as he could.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You sound weird.’

‘I’m just tired, Amy.’ He looked at his watch. It was after midnight. ‘You should be in bed.’

‘I can’t sleep. I wish I’d never brought the head home with me. It’s like she’s here in the house, that little girl. Haunting me. I can’t get her face out of my mind.’

Someone else, MacNeil thought, being haunted tonight.

‘How is it going?’

He knew he couldn’t tell her the truth. Someday, maybe, but not tonight. ‘I’ve got a couple of leads,’ he said. ‘I think she might have been murdered in a house near Wandsworth Common.’

‘My God, that’s more than a couple of leads. How did you get to that?’

‘Too complicated to go into now. How about you? Anything fresh? Any feedback from the lab?’

‘Actually, yes. Pretty strange, really, and I’ve no idea if it’s important or not. But she had the flu.’

MacNeil was taken aback. ‘Died of it?’

‘Impossible to tell. But she’d either had it and recovered, or she was suffering from it when she died.’

MacNeil thought about it. He had no idea, either, if there was any significance in it.

Then Amy said, ‘What’s weird about it, though, is that it wasn’t the H5N1 human variant that’s killing everyone else.’

MacNeil frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘It was another variation on the H5N1 bird flu virus. A man-made one.’