Lockdown

I

MacNeil waited as the switchboard patched his call through. Then he heard Dawson’s voice. ‘DS Dawson.’

‘Rufus, it’s Jack.’

‘Hi, Jack. How’s it going out there?’

‘I think I’ve found where the kid was living. A house in Routh Road in Wandsworth. A rental property. According to the neighbour it was occupied for the last six months by a family, possibly French, called Smith.’

‘A likely story.’

‘They had a little Chinese kid with a cleft lip. I’m sure it’s our girl. But the parents were European. We need to find out who owns the house. The neighbour thinks it’s let by an agency. Find out who the agent is and get them out of bed. I want to know who’s currently renting the house, or who had it last.’

‘I’m right on it.’

‘Good man.’ MacNeil gave him the full address.

‘Jack...’ Dawson paused, something clearly on his mind. ‘About tonight...’

‘Rufus, I’m sorry.’ MacNeil pre-empted him.

‘No, I’m sorry, Jack. We all are. Bad enough what happened without...’ His voice tailed off. ‘Shit, we all feel really bad about it.’

‘Don’t. You didn’t know. And I appreciate the thought. I really do. Tell the guys thanks.’

He hung up and sat in the dark cocoon of his car, staring down the length of Trinity Road towards the prison. He’d heard that the flu had gone through the prisons like wildfire. Nature’s own form of capital punishment. Indiscriminate, all possibility of appeal denied. Nothing was moving out there. It was perfectly still. No sound. No cats, no barking dog. No traffic. He could almost have believed he was the last man alive. It felt like he was.

‘Scotland the Brave’ demolished the silence. He glanced at the screen on his mobile. A voicemail notification. There was a message for him. He hesitated for just a moment, then decided not to listen to it. Whatever it was could wait. He had more pressing business.

He walked back down Routh Road and stood gazing up at the house. It was where she had spent the last six months of her life. Very probably where she had died. She had walked these streets with a little satchel, to and from school every day. Eyes averted, perhaps, to avoid the stares of the people she would pass on the way. What kind of teasing and cruelty must she have suffered at school? Even the teachers would have found it difficult not to let their eyes be drawn. How sad that everything else about her — her personality, intelligence, character, temperament — would have been blighted by a single physical defect. How sad that so much is judged on appearance, rather than substance.

He went through the gate into Le Saux’s garden. He had warned Le Saux that it might be better to turn off his security lights, just for tonight, if he wanted to avoid being repeatedly disturbed. The blue door into the old bomb shelter opened into darkness. MacNeil felt his way through it, eyes adjusting to the little light that fell in from the street behind him. There were gardening tools, and watering cans and plant pots. It smelled earthy damp in here, and the chill cut right through his heavy outer coat. At the far end a door opened into the back garden. It was even darker here. No light made it through from the street out front. A high brick wall separated the two gardens. MacNeil felt along the top to see if there was glass set into the cement. But all he felt was soft spongy moss. He braced himself and jumped, pulling himself up, the toes of his shoes scraping for footholds, until he got one leg over, straddling the wall for a brief moment before dropping down on the other side, and into the garden of number thirty-three. He crouched in a short length of paved alleyway that ran along the side of a huge modern conservatory built out from the back of the house. And he listened to see if he had disturbed any of the neighbours. Le Saux had taken his advice. The security lights had stayed off, and there was no hint of activity in any of the neighbouring houses.

What he was about to do was illegal. But to get a warrant now, in the middle of the night, given all the circumstances, would have been next to impossible. It was unlikely he could even get a magistrate out of bed. If he found something in the house, then someone else could always come back with the proper paperwork and search the place legitimately. But MacNeil wasn’t prepared to wait. He was strangely driven. Not only by the fact that in just five hours he would no longer be a police officer. But by a compelling sense of urgency. A feeling that time was somehow of the essence. The murder of the two boys at the flats in Lambeth. The execution of Kazinski in Soho. The carefully arranged corpse of Jonathan Flight in South Kensington. Everywhere he went people were dying. People that someone was very anxious to keep quiet. The killer’s sense of urgency had transmitted itself to MacNeil, and he was determined to press on now, regardless of the niceties or the consequences.

Somewhere beyond the veil of clouds that masked the night sky, a nearly full moon was trying to force its way through. But only the merest trace of moonshine permeated the black folds of rain-laden nimbostratus. An icy wind rustled through the long, dead grass that choked the garden, rattling the leaves of evergreen shrubs left to grow ragged and wild.

MacNeil pressed his face against the glass of the conservatory and tried to see inside. But the dark was impenetrable. He skirted around its edge and caught his shin on a heavy marble planter and cursed violently under his breath.

Which was when he heard the movement in the grass. Bigger than any gust of wind might have made, more substantial than any domestic animal or urban fox. He stood motionless, listening. There was someone there. He could feel the presence, was almost certain he could hear the person breathing, staying very still, perhaps waiting for MacNeil to make the next move. Although he could not see the figure in the grass, whoever it was could probably see him. He decided to get pro-active. ‘Who’s there?’ he called, and thought how foolish it sounded. As if anyone was going to tell him!

But his words spurred a sudden movement off to his left in the shadow of the undergrowth. He heard the rapid whoosh-whoosh of dead grass against running legs as a figure darted towards the back fence. He could barely see the intruder, a light, shadowy figure, someone quite a bit smaller than himself. MacNeil went after him, throwing himself through the wilderness of the back garden, abandoning any attempt at stealth. Just short of the high wooden fence that ran along the back of the garden, he grabbed a handful of what felt like jaggy tweed, and both he and the intruder fell hard amongst a pile of discarded plastic plant pots next to a dilapidated potting shed. The plastic whined and cracked and snapped beneath their combined weight. Whoever he’d caught squirmed and wriggled below him, tiny squeals of panic issuing forth in the dark. And then a light suddenly exploded in his face, blinding him. A torch. He grabbed the hand that held it, and its beam skewed off into the night. Another hand scratched and clawed at his face until he grabbed it, too, and turned the torch on to the face of his attacker.

He was almost shocked to see the pale, frightened face of a middle-aged woman with short, silver-grey hair. But although there was fear in her dark eyes, there was determination there, too. She bucked one way then the other, desperately trying to free her wrists from MacNeil’s iron grasp. Her torch spun away into the grass, its beam pointing back at them, illuminating their struggle and casting its shadow against the fence.

‘I’ll scream!’ she said in a voice made so tiny by fear that it barely penetrated the dark.

MacNeil said breathlessly, ‘If you scream, then so will I.’

Something in his voice stopped her struggling. She lay on the ground below him, gasping for breath, a strange, wiry creature in a tweed jacket and skirt with a white blouse and pearl necklace. ‘Who the hell are you?’ she gasped.

‘Detective Inspector Jack MacNeil. Who the hell are you?’

He saw her panic recede. ‘My name’s Sara Castelli,’ she said in a voice that was unmistakably North American in origin. ‘I’m an investigator with the HPA.’

‘And what’s the HPA?’

‘The Health Protection Agency. I can show you my ID if you like?’

MacNeil let go of her wrists, but remained straddling her waist so that she was still pinned firmly to the ground. He reached to retrieve her torch and shone it on her.

‘Please don’t shine that in my face,’ she said sharply, and he averted the beam to follow her hand into an inside pocket from which she pulled out a laminated HPA identity card on a chain. It had her photograph on it. And her full name. Sara Elizabeth Castelli. It also had her date of birth, and MacNeil made a quick calculation. She was nearly sixty, and he suddenly felt guilty that he had manhandled her so roughly. He rolled to one side and got quickly to his feet, holding out a hand to help her to hers. But she ignored it and got up unaided, brushing pieces of broken plastic and mud and dead leaves from her jacket and skirt. ‘Ruined,’ she muttered. ‘You clearly have no idea how to treat a lady, Mr MacNeil.’

‘Clearly,’ MacNeil said. ‘What are you doing here, Miss Castelli?’

‘Mrs,’ she corrected him. ‘Castelli is my married name. But you may call me doctor.’

‘Doctor. You haven’t answered my question.’

She assiduously avoided his eye as she continued brushing herself down. ‘Well, I might consider doing so if you were to show me some ID of your own. You could be anyone pretending to be a policeman.’

MacNeil showed her his warrant card. ‘Well?’

‘I’m trying to trace the source of the pandemic, Mr MacNeil. That’s what I do. I trace the source of infections and make recommendations on how to contain them.’

‘You’re an American?’

‘Canadian. Although I’ve spent most of the last twenty years in the States. Even took citizenship when I married Mr Castelli. Wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known then that he owed more allegiance to the Sicilian flag than to the Stars and Stripes. You’ve heard of the movie, Married to the Mob, Mr MacNeil? Well, that was me. Turned out the Castelli family runs most of New York. Which went down well with the Justice Department when I worked there as a health adviser.’ She glared at him defiantly. ‘Anything else you’d like to know?’

‘I’d be interested to hear why you think the pandemic started in the back garden of a house in Wandsworth, Dr Castelli.’

‘Well, of course I don’t think that. But I think someone who lived in this house might have been a carrier, or one of the first to be infected.’

‘The house is empty.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘So how were you intending to get in?’

‘That’s academic, Mr MacNeil. Now that you’re here, you can break in for me.’ She paused and crooked an eyebrow. ‘That’s what you were going to do anyway, isn’t it?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Well, why else would you be sneaking around the back garden in the dead of night?’ It was his turn to avoid her eye, and she pressed home her advantage. ‘And you haven’t told me what you’re doing here, Mr MacNeil.’

MacNeil looked at this garrulous, defiant little woman with her coarse grey hair and tweed suit, and decided to come clean. ‘I’m investigating the murder of a ten-year-old child,’ he said. ‘A little girl. I think she lived here.’

Dr Castelli’s face darkened. ‘Choy?’

‘I don’t know her name.’

‘Well, there was only one little girl who lived here, as far as I know. And her name was Choy Smith.’

II

His glove protected his hand as the glass broke inwards, landing in jagged shards on the carpet beneath the window. He reached in, unsnibbed the sash and slid it up.

‘You do that very well, Mr MacNeil,’ Dr Castelli whispered. ‘Is it something you learned in the police?’

MacNeil gave her a look and held out a hand to help her over the sill and into the room. They had climbed up a tangled trellis on to the pitched roof above the kitchen, and slithered across it to this first floor window.

They stood now in what was clearly a study of some sort. MacNeil shone the doctor’s torch around the room, picking out a desk strewn with papers, a computer, a calculator, two telephones. MacNeil glanced through some of the paperwork. Utility bills. A letter, which appeared to be in French, from a company called Omega 8, with an address in Sussex — there were several more with the same letterhead. A scientific paper of some sort, again in French.

There was a bookcase filled with leather-bound omnibus editions of classic English writers, a legacy of the original owner of the house, perhaps. A huge framed reproduction of a mediaeval map of London. There were more papers scattered across the floor as if discarded in anger. Two steps led down from a small half-landing outside the door to a bathroom at the top of the first flight of stairs. More stairs led up to a larger landing with two doors leading off to first-floor bedrooms. MacNeil leaned over the wooden bannister and looked into the well of the downstairs hall, light from the streetlamp outside broken into a thousand coloured fragments by the stained glass around the door and strewn across the parquet floor. And then he looked up to the attic landing twenty feet above, more doors leading to more bathrooms and more bedrooms. This was a big house for a family of three.

Choy’s bedroom was at the back of the house on the first floor, half a flight up from the study. There was a narrow single bed pushed into one corner and a small desk under the window, a school satchel leaning against one of its legs. There was a homework jotter open on it, large, childish Chinese characters scrawled in coloured crayon. MacNeil shone the torch on it, and thought about all the bones he had seen laid out on the table at Lambeth Road. The tiny bones which had made up the little fingers that held the crayons to make these characters. How long ago had that been? Maybe only a matter of days. He looked around this sadly empty room. There were no pictures on the walls. No photographs, no drawings. No toys lying on the floor. He thought of the chaos that had been Sean’s room, full to overflowing with the trappings of childhood.

Dr Castelli slid open the door of a built-in wardrobe. Choy’s clothes hung in neat lines on wire hangers. Most of them seemed new. Blouses and skirts, a row of little shoes lined up beneath them. In a dresser they found a pile of charcoal grey jumpers, a school tie, knickers, socks. There were no T-shirts or jeans, no bright clothing to reflect a child’s vibrant personality. Nothing playful in anything they found. What strange, spartan kind of existence had she lived here?

‘Jeez, I’ve seen more fun in a kids’ ward full of terminal cancer cases,’ Dr Castelli said. She lifted one of the charcoal jumpers from its drawer and held it to her face. ‘Poor kid.’

MacNeil looked at her. ‘Isn’t there a danger of infection?’

‘The flu?’ She shrugged. ‘I doubt if I’ll catch anything. I’ve been exposed to so many infectious diseases, Mr MacNeil. There are so many antibodies floating around my system, you could probably immunise the whole of London with a few pints of my blood.’ She shook her head. ‘I spent most of last year in Vietnam, chasing down cases of bird flu, trying to establish if there were any instances of human-to-human transmission. I didn’t find any, but I came in contact with most of the victims. We decided to do blood tests on some of the relatives. And in a handful of cases we found that they had antibodies in their blood. It was like they’d had the flu, but without symptoms. Which gave us hope that maybe it wouldn’t be the killer we all feared. We were wrong, of course. But then we tested my blood, and I had the antibodies too. Weird, huh?’

‘You said you didn’t find any cases of human-to-human transmission.’

‘I didn’t, no. But others did. The first widely accepted case was in Thailand. A family cluster in Kamphaeng Phet, about five hours north of Bangkok. They did some crude modelling on what would have happened if the transmission had been efficient. In the twenty-one days it took them to get up there, there would have been six hundred cases. Ten days after that, it would have been six thousand. That’s why we were so worried, Mr MacNeil. With efficient transmission, and a mortality rate of seventy to eighty per cent, the death toll worldwide would have been unthinkable. You’ve heard of the Spanish Flu?’

MacNeil nodded.

‘The worst pandemic in human history. Killed more than fifty million people in 1918. It had a mortality rate of less than two per cent.’

‘I thought the Plague was worse than the Spanish Flu,’ MacNeil said.

‘It killed more people, certainly. But it took a few hundred years to do it. The Spanish Flu did its work in a matter of months.’

They left Choy’s room and went into the front bedroom.

‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘we were so sure that if the bird flu was going to be the source of the next pandemic, then it was going to start in south-east Asia and gradually spread to the rest of the world. That’s why we concentrated all our efforts there. It would have reached London in the end, of course. But no one thought for a minute that this is where it would start.’

The front bedroom was a big room, with bay windows looking out on to the street. But blinds had been drawn to keep out the light, along with prying eyes. There was a large double bed which had not been made up since the last time it had been slept in. The pillow on the left side remained undisturbed, as if there had only been one occupant. In the drawers and cupboards, there were only men’s clothes. No perfume or hairbrushes or make-up in the en-suite bathroom. If Mr Smith’s wife had spent any time here at all, it was clear she had left some time ago.

Dr Castelli watched as MacNeil searched methodically through the room. ‘The figures the government puts out,’ she said. ‘Crap! They’re much worse.’

‘How much worse?’

‘Well, the population of Greater London’s what, about seven million? Just do the math. A quarter of the population will get it. That’s about 1.75 million. Around three-quarters of them will die. That’s just over 1.3 million. Dead. No way back. Gone forever.’

MacNeil turned and looked at her in the ghostly yellow glow of the torch. It was clear that she thrived on statistics. ‘Numbers aren’t people, Dr Castelli. And people aren’t numbers.’ But he knew that’s just what Sean had become. A number, another faceless victim, fodder for the furnace.

Something in his tone made her look at him quizzically. ‘Was it someone very close?’ she asked after a moment.

‘My son.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah.’ He turned towards the door. ‘Let’s go downstairs.’

Most of the black and cream wall units in the kitchen were empty. A few cans, and several packets of dried food — noodles, spaghetti, sugar — was all MacNeil could find. The refrigerator contained a collection of half-used jars of sauce and olives and mayonnaise. There was an inch of milk left in a plastic bottle. MacNeil sniffed it and recoiled from its sour smell. He looked for the date. It was nearly two weeks beyond its use-by. A conservatory bay looked out from the kitchen on to the back garden. There was a small breakfast table in it, and two chairs. Perhaps Mr and Mrs Smith had not been in the habit of taking breakfast with their daughter. There were glass doors leading through to the main conservatory which was dominated by a large glass dining table with upholstered wrought-iron chairs. French windows opened into the living room.

‘What are you looking for, Mr MacNeil?’ Dr Castelli asked.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. What about you? What was it you thought you were going to find in here?’

‘Oh, I imagine like you, I’ll probably know when I see it. But anything that might give me an insight into where she caught her flu.’

MacNeil walked into the conservatory and she followed him through. He flashed light across the tabletop. It was littered with papers, documents and letters. All in French. A strip of paper fluttered to the floor as he lifted a letter to try to read it, but it was a long time since he had failed his French O level. It bore the Omega 8 letterhead, the same as the ones in the study.

Dr Castelli stooped to retrieve the strip of paper. ‘You’d better have a look at this,’ she said as she stood, and MacNeil turned to train his torch on it. It was a strip of passport photographs. There were three of them. The fourth had been cut off, presumably for use in a passport. In two of them, a little Chinese girl with a horribly disfigured upper lip was attempting to smile for the camera. Her hair looked as if it had been cut with pinking shears, and she wore an ugly pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses. In the first, she was looking off, camera right, a perplexed expression on her face, saying something to someone just out of shot. So this was Choy. The bag of bones he had been called out to look at just nineteen hours ago on a building site near Westminster. This was the head that Amy had re-animated in her warehouse attic. And she had achieved a fair likeness.

‘Is this her?’ asked Dr Castelli.

‘Probably.’

‘Why can’t you be certain?’

‘There’s nothing left of her but bones, Dr Castelli. She was stripped clean. Apart from a facial approximation made from her skull, we don’t really know what she looked like.’ He looked at the photographs again. The cleft lip was unmistakable. ‘But it’s a pretty good bet.’

He slipped the passport photographs into a plastic evidence bag and filed them away safely in an inside pocket, and they went back out into the hall.

A couple of days’ mail lay on the floor beneath the letter box. A wad of unopened letters was piled untidily on the hall stand. Dr Castelli leafed through them. She made a grunting sound. ‘Half of these are from me. He didn’t even bother to open them. No wonder I didn’t get any response.’

‘Why were you writing?’ MacNeil said. ‘And what led you here in the first place?’

Dr Castelli let out a long, weary sigh of what sounded like resignation. ‘I’m almost certain that the pandemic started at an outdoor activity centre for London schools in Kent. Back in October, during the mid-term break. Sprint Water Outdoor Centre. There were thousands of kids from London down there for the week, supervised by their teachers. It’s a residential centre. You know the sort of thing. They have sailing and canoeing and rock-climbing. There are team-building events, and some of the students take part in the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme. They spend some of the time under canvas, they have campfires. The one thing all these kids have in common is that they’re in each other’s faces the whole time. Living in each other’s pockets. In dormitories and dining halls and day-trips on buses. A perfect breeding ground for disease.’

She idly tore open one of her own letters and shook her head as she cast her eyes over it.

‘All the families we managed to identify as the first to come down with the flu had kids at that outdoor centre in October. We might have got to this point quicker if we’d been faster off the mark. But it was several weeks before anyone realised what was happening. By that time the flu was out of control, and all we could do was wade back through the statistics. We’ve managed to trace all of the kids who were there, and rule them out as a source. We were looking for any connections with south-east Asia. And the best we’ve been able to come up with is Choy. We knew she was Chinese in origin, an adoptive child of French parents. But we’ve no idea how recently she came out of China, or whether she has any connection with the east at all. She might have been born in France for all we know. But she’s the only one we haven’t been able to get information on. Her parents haven’t responded to letters or taken phone calls.’

She dropped her letter back on the hall stand and looked earnestly at MacNeil with darting little black eyes.

‘By a process of elimination, Mr MacNeil, and in the absence of proof to the contrary, we have to make the assumption that Choy may well have been the source of the pandemic.’