Lockdown

I

MacNeil shone his torch into the tiny bathroom beneath the stairs and saw that there was a door just inside it, on the right. He grabbed the handle and pushed it open into darkness. The beam of his torch picked out narrow wooden steps descending steeply into the cellar.

‘You’d better wait here,’ he said.

‘I will not, Mr MacNeil,’ Dr Castelli said firmly. ‘Where you go, I follow.’

‘Be careful, then. These steps are very steep.’

‘Don’t worry about me. I have my sensible shoes on. My housebreaking ones.’

He had to turn sideways to place his feet squarely on the steps and ease his big frame down into the cold damp of the basement. It was a small room, divided in two by a brick wall. Faint yellow street light washed in from a narrow coal chute. A metal grille stopped animals from getting in. It was many years since the coalman had slid his last sack down this chute, but there was a pile of chopped pine beneath it, next to a small wood-burning stove. Low air pressure was forcing the smell of soot back down the black metal pipe that fed up into the chimney, sour like stale bacon. It was icy cold here, and MacNeil was unable to stop an involuntary shiver running through his upper body. He could feel the chill coming up through the floor, penetrating his shoes, wrapping itself around his feet and his ankles.

He ran the torch around bare walls. There was nothing much here. An empty wine rack, a damp cardboard box full of empty wine bottles. A rolled-up piece of carpet, an off-cut from one of the upstairs bedrooms. White, powdery damp oozed out through old brick. MacNeil had to duck as he passed through into the other half of the room. White-painted concrete beams supported a low ceiling. The walls were lined with empty wine racks.

‘Someone must have been very thirsty,’ Dr Castelli said, and her voice sounded strangely dead down here in this cold, claustrophobic space. On the back wall there was an old Belfast sink, a big white porcelain tub. In days gone by perhaps they had washed clothes down here. A single cold-water tap stuck out from the wall above it. Beneath it there was a large gas bottle, and an industrial-sized gas ring on a sturdy metal stand. A container the size of a small barrel stood next to it, covered with a towel. The centre of the room was taken up by a stout wooden table, like a giant butcher’s block, which may well have been what it once was. It was chopped and scarred, and worn into a deep dent at one side, and bleached clean. MacNeil sniffed. He could smell it in the air.

So could Dr Castelli. ‘Bleach,’ she said.

He shone the torch around the room until it fell upon a rusted metal door set into the wall. It was about two feet high and one foot wide. MacNeil tried it, but it wouldn’t move. It was either rusted solid, or locked.

‘Maybe this’ll open it.’

He turned to find the doctor holding up a big old iron key about six inches long. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘No big secret. It was hanging on the wall.’ As he took it from her and turned to try it in the door, she said, ‘What do you think it is? Some kind of safe?’

‘It’s probably an old silver safe. In a house like this the original owners would have been pretty wealthy. They’d have had silver cutlery, maybe a silver tea service. The servants would have locked it away in the silver safe after cleaning.’

The key groaned and complained as he twisted it clockwise. But it did turn, and the heavy steel door swung open, rusty hinges grating. There was a single wooden shelf set in the niche in the wall behind it. The beam of MacNeil’s torch reflected back at them from an array of knives and choppers neatly arranged on the shelf. Not dissimilar to the cutting implements he had found in Flight’s apartment.

He recoiled a little, as if the safe had breathed death in his face. This was no silver. This was stainless steel, lethally sharp, and he had no doubt that he’d found the instruments which had been used to strip the flesh from little Choy’s bones. He lifted out a large butcher’s knife and held it carefully between two gloved fingers. The blade was clean, reflecting shards of light around the walls from the glow of his torch, but as MacNeil held it up to look at it more closely, he saw that where the steel entered the wooden haft, there was a line of thick, dark matter dried in along the edge of the wood.

He handed the torch to Dr Castelli. ‘Here, hold this for me.’ And he took the knife to the table, laying it carefully on the wooden surface, before taking out his notebook and tearing out a clean page. He placed it on the table, and opened up a small penknife, scraping delicately along the joining edge between blade and haft. A dark, rusty brown dust crumbled on to the page of his notebook.

‘Blood?’ Dr Castelli said.

‘It’s a fair bet.’

‘Choy’s?’

He nodded grimly. ‘I think this is almost certainly where it happened, doctor. I don’t know if they killed her in here, but I think they very probably laid her body out on this very table and hacked the flesh from her bones. There must have been blood everywhere.’

‘Then there’ll be traces,’ she said, ‘no matter how fastidiously they cleaned up afterwards.’

MacNeil folded up the white paper to seal in the brown dust and slipped it into an evidence bag. ‘Like this.’

‘What do you think they did with the flesh and the organs?’

‘Probably burned them. In that stove out there.’ He nodded towards the outer half of the room. ‘There should be traces in the ash.’ He crossed to the sink and stooped to examine the gas ring beneath it. He pulled away the towel next to it to reveal a huge copper pot, two feet or more across. It had probably been used in happier days to make jam. ‘I guess they must have boiled up the bones in this.’ He knocked it with his knuckles and it rewarded him with a dull ring. He hoped that they had killed her quickly, mercifully. Because the horror of what had followed was unthinkable.

‘You’ll call in a forensics team, then,’ the doctor said.

MacNeil stood up and sighed. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Because we entered the house illegally. Any evidence we find here will be inadmissible in court.’

‘That’s ridiculous!’

‘It’s the law. Someone’s going to have to come back with a warrant and search the place all over again. Legally this time. We were never here, doctor.’

‘I was at home all night, Inspector.’

MacNeil managed a pale smile. ‘You catch on quickly.’

‘I was always fast. Made me very popular with the boys.’

MacNeil took back the torch and replaced the knife, locking the safe and returning the key to its nail on the wall. He looked around this grim little killing room and shivered. Only this time, it was not from the cold.

Back in the hall, coloured light rained in on them from the stained glass around the front door. MacNeil took out his mobile phone. The display blinked at him, telling him he still had one message waiting. He ignored it and dialled the FSS lab in Lambeth Road and asked for Dr Tom Bennet.

Tom sounded weary, as if perhaps he had been sleeping, slumped behind his desk with his door closed, willing away the hours of darkness and an end to the curfew, so that he could finally go home. ‘Dr Bennet.’

‘Tom, it’s Jack MacNeil.’

There was a silence at the other end of the phone, and MacNeil could almost feel the hostility in it. ‘Yes?’ he said eventually, ice in his voice.

‘Tom, I need a favour,’ MacNeil said, without much hope now that he would get it. ‘I have a sample of what I believe to be dried blood. I think it came from the little Chinese girl with the cleft palate. I need to compare it with DNA from the girl’s bones.’

‘That’s hardly a favour, Detective Inspector. If you make an official request, then someone will do it. You don’t even have to ask nicely.’

‘I know that. But I need it to be off the record.’

More silence. Then, ‘Why?’

MacNeil sighed. He had no time to be anything but honest. ‘Because the sample was obtained illegally.’

‘Then that would make me an accomplice to a crime.’

‘I’m trying to catch a killer, Tom, and I’m running out of time.’

‘Time to what? Be a hero?’

‘I’m asking nicely.’

‘Then why don’t you ask your... friend... Amy? I’m sure she’d be happy to oblige.’

MacNeil understood immediately that he knew about him and Amy, and that the knowledge had filled him with poison and spite, just as Amy had always feared. She had known him too well. He heard another phone ringing somewhere in the background in Tom’s office, and it gave the pathologist the perfect excuse to end their conversation.

‘I’m sorry, I have another call. I have to go.’ He didn’t sound at all sorry, and he hung up abruptly.

II

Harry sat fully dressed now on the side of his bed. His face was so pale it very nearly glowed in the dark. Pinkie sat close beside him, the barrel of his silencer pushed softly into Harry’s neck. Harry held the phone to his ear with trembling fingers and listened as it rang at the other end. Then Tom’s voice, crisp and businesslike, drove a sick feeling, like a sharpened wooden stake, deep into the pit of his partner’s stomach. It might have been better for both of them if Tom had not been there.

‘Dr Bennet.’

‘Tom, it’s Harry.’

Pinkie leaned in close to Harry’s ear so that he could hear, too. And what he heard was Tom’s pleasure.

‘Hey, guy,’ Tom said. ‘Does this mean we’re talking again?’

Pinkie nodded and Harry said, ‘I guess.’ He drew a deep, tremulous breath. ‘Jesus Christ, Tom!’

Pinkie pushed the barrel hard into the soft flesh of Harry’s neck and he squealed.

‘What is it?’ Tom sounded concerned now. ‘Harry, are you alright?’

Pinkie took the phone from Harry. ‘Harry’s fine, Tom,’ he said.

‘Who the hell’s this?’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Pinkie said soothingly. ‘All you need to know is that if you do what I ask, then Harry is going to be just dandy. I won’t harm a single hair on his pretty little head.’

III

Amy had turned out all the lights, and sat now in the dark. She knew that the apartment was warm, but she was chilled through, her skin cold to the touch. She sat with a kitchen knife clutched tightly in her lap, watching the stairwell. Light from the landing below rose up and reflected in a distorted oblong on the pitched ceiling above it. If anyone came up the stairs, she would see his shadow immediately. She would have the advantage of surprise, and an elevated position, on her side. But in the hour or more since she had called MacNeil, there had been not a sound, not the faintest shadow of a movement.

That should, perhaps, have reassured her that whoever had cut Lyn’s hair was long gone. But she found it hard to accept. She had been left so completely unnerved. It made no sense at all, and every time she thought of how he must have entered the house while she was so innocently naked and exposed in the shower, she wanted to curl up in a foetal ball and simply shut out the world. If only it was possible to pretend that none of this had happened, that in another moment she would turn over and wake up looking at the digital display on her bedside clock, daylight seeping in around the edges of her curtains.

But she knew that there was no such easy escape, and so she sat, rigid with tension and cold, and waited.

Across the room, the shorn head watched her in the dark, almost scornfully. Amy didn’t know what fear was. Amy was still alive. Amy had hope, Amy had a future.

The telephone rang, and it so startled her that she nearly screamed. She grabbed the receiver. At last!

‘Jack!’

‘Sorry to disappoint. It’s only Tom.’ But she was disappointed. The momentary relief which had flooded her senses receded immediately, leaving her edgy and tense. And in spite of his attempt at flippancy, she detected something strangely off-key in Tom’s tone.

‘What do you want, Tom?’ She hadn’t meant to be so terse.

‘I want you to come down to the lab,’ he said evenly.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want to go into it on the phone. I just need you here now. As soon as possible.’

‘Tom, have you any idea what time it is?’

‘About three, I should think.’

‘Well, what can you possibly want me there for at three in the morning?’

‘I need you to bring the head and the skull.’

Amy’s feeling of danger momentarily deserted her, to be replaced by consternation. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t have to understand, Amy.’ Tom’s self-control was deserting him. He sounded tetchy now. ‘Just do it. Please.’

‘Tom...’

‘Amy!’ he nearly shouted. ‘Just do it.’

She almost recoiled from the phone. They’d had their rows over the years, but he had never spoken to her like this. And he seemed, immediately, to regret it.

‘Amy, I’m sorry.’ He was pleading now. ‘I didn’t mean to shout at you. It’s just... this is really important. Just come. Please.’ He paused. ‘Trust me.’

Trust me. How could she not? They had been friends for so long, and he had been with her all the way to hell and back. They were the two words most guaranteed to invoke all the friendship and gratitude she owed him. Trust me. Of course she trusted him. And for all her misgivings, there was no way she could refuse him.

‘It’ll take me forty, maybe fifty minutes.’

The relief in his voice was nearly palpable. ‘Thanks, Amy.’

The phone call had banished the sense of imminent danger in the apartment. And she began to wonder just how much her imagination had played a role in it. She turned on the light again and wheeled across the room to lift the child’s head from the table. She removed the wig before carefully wrapping the head in soft wadding and slipping it into an old hat box that she kept for transporting her heads. She dropped the wig in on top of it and replaced the lid.

As the stair lift droned slowly down to the first landing, her sense of acute vulnerability returned. She still clutched the kitchen knife on top of the hat box. But there was nobody there. Nobody in the bedroom or the bathroom, or in the coat cupboard when she retrieved the thick winter cape she used to drape over her shoulders.

The tiny hall at the foot of the final flight was deserted, cold and unadorned in the harsh yellow lamplight, and the smell of the skull rose up to greet her, through all its layers of plastic. A reminder, if she needed one, that the child was dead, and that they were still in the business of trying to find her killer.

She opened the door, and the night breathed its cold breath in her face. She pulled it shut behind her and motored down the ramp into the deserted square of granite cobbles. A tear opened up suddenly in the cloud overhead, and the briefest glimpse of silver light spilled across the courtyard, vanishing again in an instant. There was not a living soul to be seen, and Amy wondered if she had ever felt more alone. She turned her wheelchair and headed for Gainsford Street and the multi-storey car park.