Lockdown

I

MacNeil drove like a man possessed. Reflected street lights floated across their windscreen like a stream of disembodied yellow heads. They passed Kennington Oval and headed north-east along Kennington Park Road. MacNeil was trying Amy’s number every few minutes. Each time it rang out. He reached for the phone again, but this time Dr Castelli got to it first. ‘I can do that,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s not beyond me. And it’s better than winding up wrapped around a lamp post.’

She made the call and let it ring for thirty seconds or more. Then she shook her head and hung up.

MacNeil had a horrible vision of Amy lying dead on the floor of her apartment. He knew that these people were utterly ruthless. Why wouldn’t they go after Amy, too? She had the skull, after all, and she’d rebuilt the head of the murdered girl. Why in the name of God had he not picked up her message earlier? He knew he could never forgive himself if anything had happened to her. This whole investigation had been about him. About his obsession. About his need to close his mind off from the death of his son. It had made him blind to everything else.

There was an army roadblock at Elephant and Castle. It wasn’t enough to slow down to let them check his number. After the incident on Lambeth Bridge, all checkpoints were under orders to stop every vehicle. A senior officer checked their papers, and took his time about it. MacNeil knew it was pointless to try to hurry him. He gripped the steering wheel with still burning hands and clenched his jaw. The tension in him was greater than his pain. He felt like an elastic band stretched to breaking point. The edges were fraying. It was only a matter of time before he would snap.

Finally the officer stood back and waved them on. MacNeil left rubber and smoke in his wake as he accelerated along New Kent Road to the junction with Tower Bridge Road and turned north. Straight ahead, in the distance, they could see the lights of Tower Bridge itself, and the Tower of London beyond on the far side of the river. MacNeil swung the wheel sharp right, and they careened across the junction into Tooley Street.

In Gainsford Street, he abandoned his car and ran. Dr Castelli chased gamely after him. He punched in the entry code at the gate to Butlers and Colonial and sprinted across the cobbles to Amy’s door. He fumbled infuriatingly with clumsy, bandaged fingers to get his key in the lock. The door flew open, and he immediately saw the stair lift at the foot of the staircase.

He stood looking at it with a mixture of relief and confusion. Dr Castelli caught up with him in the doorway, gasping for breath. ‘I haven’t run that fast since I came in second at the egg-and-spoon race,’ she said. He looked at her, and she said, ‘I know, I’m sorry. I’m renowned for saying the most inappropriate things at the most inopportune moments.’ She looked at the stair lift. ‘So she’s out, huh?’

‘If the lift’s at the foot of the stairs, that’s usually what it means. And her wheelchair’s gone.’ But he wasn’t taking it as read. He ran up the stairs two at a time to the first landing. The other stair lift was there, silently waiting at the foot of the next flight. He searched her bedroom, the bathroom, the coat closet, flicking on lights as he went, and then ran up to the attic. He switched on all the lights at the top of the steps and flooded the roof space with hard, bright light.

‘Amy!’ He called her name, but knew she wouldn’t answer. She wasn’t here. He checked the little metal balcony, but the French windows were locked, and he could see that there was no one out there. And then he noticed that the head of the child had gone. All that was left on the table were clippings from the black wig. As Dr Castelli reached the top landing MacNeil said to her, ‘Wait here.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she called after him. ‘It’ll take me half an hour to get my breath back.’

He was gone less than five minutes, and when he returned he looked troubled. ‘Her car’s gone,’ he said. ‘She has a place in the multi-storey next door. It’s gone.’ He looked at the doctor, who had recovered her breath by now, although her face was still pink. She was sitting at Amy’s computer. ‘Where would she have gone in the middle of the night?’

‘Maybe you should take a look at this,’ Dr Castelli said, and he crossed the room to stand behind her and look at the computer screen. It was Amy’s instant message dialogue window. ‘Who’s Sam?’

‘Sam’s Amy’s mentor in an organisation that specialises in identifying human remains.’ He read the final exchange.

Amy — Here’s something strange — Zoe said it wasn’t H5N1. At least, not the version that’s caused the pandemic.

Sam — How does she know that?

Amy — She said she’d recovered the virus, and the RNA coding. It’s all a bit beyond me, Sam. Something to do with restriction sites and code words that shouldn’t be there. Anyway, she said this virus was genetically engineered.

Amy — Hello, Sam, are you still there?

Sam — I’m still here, Amy.

Amy — So what do you think?

Sam — I think that changes everything.

And then clearly Sam had left the conversation without explanation. There was a sense of confusion and hurt in Amy’s plaintive Sam, are you still there? Hello? Sam? Talk to me!

Dr Castelli said, ‘Seems to me like Sam was taking just a little too much interest in your investigation. And Amy was doing just a little too much talking.’

MacNeil leaned over her shoulder to take the mouse and scroll back through a day’s worth of dialogue. Sam had come back to Amy repeatedly, asking how the investigation was going. Were there any new developments? Had DI MacNeil picked up any new leads? Questions about the head, about the recovery of the bone marrow. Discussions about toxicology, the request for DNA, the discovery of the flu virus.

‘She told him everything,’ MacNeil said, and a red mist of depression and anger descended on him. ‘Every little detail.’ Sam had been able to follow his investigation every step of the way. Every time MacNeil had phoned Amy, she had talked to Sam. There wasn’t anything he had done that Sam hadn’t known about. Amy had been an unwitting conduit, an unknowing spy in his camp. She had trusted Sam with everything. MacNeil had to choke off his anger and think rationally. Why shouldn’t she? Amy and Sam had a history. They discussed stuff all the time. They were on the same side. Weren’t they?

Thoughts crowded MacNeil’s head like a flock of startled pigeons. So who the hell was Sam? This name in the ether who had been looking over his shoulder all day. Watching him all night. He spotted Amy’s address book on the dock at the foot of the screen.

‘Let me in,’ he said to Dr Castelli, and she vacated the seat. He clicked on the address book and its window opened up on the screen in front of him. It didn’t occur to him to wonder why it was Tom Bennet’s address that came up first — the last address to be searched for. He was in too much of a hurry to consider why Amy would need to look it up. He typed Sam in the search window, and the software immediately pulled Sam’s name and address out of its database. Dr Samantha Looker, 42A Consort House, St. Davids Square, Island Gardens, Isle of Dogs. He swore softly.

Dr Castelli peered at the screen. ‘So Sam’s a woman,’ she said.

More startled pigeons in MacNeil’s head. He desperately tried to focus on a single one, like a hunter with a gun attempting to bring one down. But he kept missing. Nothing made any sense. How could this Dr Samantha Looker possibly be involved? And yet somehow she was.

Almost as if she had read his mind, Dr Castelli said, ‘I guess you’re going to have to ask her.’

MacNeil lifted Amy’s phone from beside the computer and dialled Sam’s number from the address book. He waited a long time before hanging up on the unanswered call. He shook his head. ‘Looks like we’ll never know.’

‘Maybe she’s just not answering the phone. We can always go to her house.’

‘She lives on the Isle of Dogs.’

‘So?’

‘They haven’t been allowed to report it in the press, but it’s a no-go area. Sealed off from the rest of the city. A little island of flu-free London that the people who live there want to keep that way.’

‘But you’re a police officer.’

‘I could be the Queen and it wouldn’t make any difference. If we try to get on to the Isle of Dogs they’ll shoot us.’

‘Sounds more like the Wild West than the East End of London,’ the doctor said. She frowned for a moment, and then her face lit up. ‘I know how we might be able to get on.’

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ MacNeil said. ‘Especially anywhere near the Isle of Dogs.’

Dr Castelli shrugged. ‘Then you can find your own way.’ He gave her a dangerous look, but she only smiled. ‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘I’m a doctor.’

But MacNeil wasn’t smiling. Samantha Looker was a doctor, too. Amy had trusted her, and now she’d disappeared. And MacNeil couldn’t think of any other way of finding out what had happened to her. He turned to Dr Castelli. ‘Okay. Tell me.’

II

In the narrative poem ‘Tam O’Shanter’, by the Scots bard Robert Burns, the eponymous hero sees a young woman clad only in a cut-down shift, dancing to the Devil’s tune in a haunted churchyard. He cries out, quite involuntarily, ‘Weel done, Cutty-sark!’, thereby attracting the unwanted attention of witches and warlocks. And providing the name for the most famous tea clipper ever to ply its trade across the world’s oceans. The Cutty Sark, lovingly restored to its former glory, was visited each year by millions. It sat now in the brooding darkness of its dry dock at Greenwich, five hundred miles from its birthplace at Dumbarton on the River Clyde.

MacNeil left his car in Greenwich Church Street, and he and Dr Castelli hurried past the towering masts of the clipper, across the huge open concourse that led to Greenwich pier and the distinctive red-brick rotunda above the entrance to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. Just four hundred yards to the north, the lights of the Isle of Dogs reflected across the sluggish waters of the Thames. They could see the apartment blocks lining the embankment on the far side, the street lights in St. Davids Square. They were so close. Almost within touching distance. And yet it seemed to MacNeil that the gap was an impossible one to bridge. He knew that snipers kept watch from the rooftops. He knew, too, that although no one had yet been shot in this stand-off, the risk of it was real enough. And he didn’t want to be the first.

The domed roof of the rotunda was glazed like a conservatory, and in the daylight hours let in light to illuminate the lift shaft and the spiral staircase that led down to the tunnel below. Tonight, the hundreds of panes of glass reflected what little light there was back at the sky, and the interior was mired in the deepest gloom. There were two entrances side by side. One was completely closed off by a heavy, black-painted steel door. The way through the other was barred by a steel gate with a row of tall spikes along the top. There was a gap of about three feet between the spikes and the lintel.

MacNeil surveyed it warily. ‘Supposing I manage to scale the gate and get inside without wrecking my manhood, what guarantee is there we’d be able to get out at the other side?’

‘Because it’s exactly the same,’ said the doctor. ‘They’re like peas in a pod. Twin rotundas. The Victorians were pretty anal about their need for symmetry.’ She paused. ‘Although strictly speaking, I should say Edwardians. Because the tunnel didn’t open until the year after Victoria died. But it was conceived and mostly built during her reign, so I think we could safely say it was Victorian.’

MacNeil regarded her with a mixture of awe and irritation. ‘How the hell do you know all this?’

‘Oh, you know, when I first came to London, I had to do all the tourist stuff. The Greenwich Foot Tunnel was just one of the items on the itinerary.’

‘I suppose you probably know how long it is.’

‘Twelve hundred feet,’ she said without hesitation. ‘It’s nine feet high, and lined with more than two hundred thousand tiles. Ask me another.’

‘I’d ask you to shut up, but I’m too polite.’

MacNeil held the torch and helped the doctor up to a foothold at the bottom of the spikes. She had to draw up her tweed skirt, revealing muscular little legs, in order to straddle the spikes and get a foothold on the other side. ‘No peeking,’ she said.

She dropped down to safety and MacNeil handed the torch through the bars. He pulled himself up and swung himself easily over the top of the spikes to jump down beside her and take back the torch. A white, tiled wall led away to their right, towards the doors of the lift which stood silent and dark behind its glass-panelled shaft. To their left, steel-studded steps spiralled down into blackness. The beam of the torch barely penetrated the thick, damp air, moisture hanging in it like smoke.

A smell of damp earth and rust rose to greet them as they made their way down, the staircase curving around the exterior of the lift shaft. It felt like a very long descent. The air got colder as they went, their breath billowing in white clouds in front of them. Finally, at the foot of the stairs, they turned left into the tunnel itself, reinforced as it dipped beneath the river by huge bolted sections of curved steel. The tunnel stretched away into impenetrable darkness, yellowed white tiles arching around and above them to the rusted trunking that ran overhead carrying power cables for lights that had been extinguished weeks ago.

They could feel the gentle downward slope of the tunnel underfoot as it tilted below the riverbed. Water dripped from the roof and lay in puddles all along the concrete floor. Their footsteps and their breath echoed back at them like the spirits of all those who had gone this way before. The cold was intense now, and the sense of claustrophobia almost unbearable.

‘Jeez,’ Dr Castelli whispered, ‘it wasn’t like this when we did it with the tour guide.’

MacNeil barely heard her. Something about the dark and the cold, and the sense of the river bearing down on them from above, increased his sense of frustration. Somehow everything had got out of control. He was no long running an investigation. He was being swept along by events. Events he could neither predict nor manage. And his sense of frustration increased his sense of urgency. He broke into a run.

‘What are you doing?’ the doctor called after him.

‘I can’t afford the time to walk,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘If you can’t keep up, go back.’

‘I’ll never get out on my own,’ she shouted, and he heard her sensible shoes clatter across the concrete as she chased after him. The fact that he still had her torch was probably an added incentive.

By the time he reached the lift shaft at the far end of the tunnel, he was breathing heavily. Dr Castelli had fallen a good bit behind, but he could hear her still running after him in the dark, and he didn’t have the heart to leave her. Her face swam into the beam of the torch, pink and perspiring, something close to distress in her darting little coal-black eyes.

‘You’re trying to lose me, aren’t you?’ she gasped. She leaned over, her hands on her knees.

‘Not doing a very good job of it, am I?’ He started up the stairs. ‘Come on.’ He heard her groan as she straightened up and drew breath to chase wearily after him.

As they neared the top of the stairs, light from streetlamps along the perimeter of Island Gardens park bled through the gate and down into the dark. MacNeil approached it cautiously and peered out into the park. Twenty yards away across the grass, there was a light in the Island Gardens Café. It was a tiny little brick building next to the fence. In the summer, patrons would sit out on its terrace and sip coffee and cold drinks and gaze out across the Thames towards the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich. Now the terrace was deserted, and through the window MacNeil could see the figure of a man slumped in a chair. The blue light of a television screen flickered in the dark. He could see the barrel of a rifle pointed towards the ceiling, the weapon wedged through the arm of the man’s seat. Clearly, he was there to guard the entrance to the foot tunnel. And he must have thought it a sinecure. For who would want to try to get on to the island through the tunnel? And why? MacNeil put his finger to his lips to warn the doctor to silence, and he watched for several minutes. The man wasn’t moving. There was a good chance he was asleep, but there was no way of telling until they climbed the gate and moved into the open. By which time it would be too late. But MacNeil couldn’t see any alternative, and he tried to gauge how quickly he could cover the distance between the rotunda and the café if the guard became alerted to their presence. Not fast enough, he thought. But if the guard really was sleeping, then he would be groggy, and the few seconds it took him to become fully alert might just be enough to allow MacNeil to reach him. Only one way to find out. He slipped the torch in his pocket and climbed quickly up and over the gate. He dropped down silently on the far side and pressed himself into the shadows, looking anxiously towards the café. Still no sign of movement. He nodded to Dr Castelli, and she struggled to pull herself up to the spikes. There she hesitated.

‘I don’t know if I can make it,’ she whispered.

He sighed and looked to the heavens. Why on earth had he let her talk him into bringing her along? He moved into the lamplight and reached up towards her. ‘Come on, grab my hand.’

She grasped it, and he winced from the pressure on his burns. She used his strength to steady herself as she straddled the spikes, and then she lost her balance, toppling forward, the sound of her skirt tearing behind her. She cried out as MacNeil caught her and cushioned her fall. It was a small sound she made, little more than a gasp. But it seemed to ring around the silence of the park. MacNeil let go of her, and she sprawled on her knees. He spun around in time to see the guard getting to his feet.

‘Shit!’ No time to think. Nowhere to run. MacNeil sprinted towards the café as fast as his legs would carry him, fists punching the air like pistons. He could see the startled look on the man’s face, bleary and not fully awake, as MacNeil came hurtling towards him. There was incomprehension there, too. And those moments of confusion were enough to allow MacNeil to cover the distance. He stepped sideways to smash through the door and propel himself, full weight, into the bewildered guard. Both men crashed to the floor. The portable television went spinning away across the room in a splintering of glass, and sound and vision went dead.

He heard the man grunt as he landed on top of him, all the air expelled from his lungs in a single, debilitating breath. His rifle clattered to the floor beside them. MacNeil grabbed his collar and turned him on to his back and punched him twice, big fists like Belfast hams. The first one split the man’s lip. The second one rendered him unconscious.

MacNeil remained crouching over the prone figure, fighting to recapture his breath, hands hurting almost as badly as when he had first burned them. He looked around as he heard Dr Castelli approach. She stood in the broken doorway looking at him.

‘Ruined my goddamned skirt,’ she said. He glared at her, and she added, ‘You certainly seem to make a habit of sitting on people, Mr MacNeil.’

They pulled off the guard’s shirt and trousers and tore them into lengths to bind and gag him. MacNeil lifted his rifle, and they set off across the park into Saunders Ness Road. The street was deserted, overlooked by semi-detached houses and blocks of flats, and MacNeil felt very exposed out here in the full glare of the street lights. But there was no movement anywhere, no light in any of the houses. He wondered if the people who lived here slept better knowing that men with guns were out there keeping them safe from the flu.

At the end of the street they passed the Poplar Rowing Club and turned into Ferry Street.

III

From St. Davids Square, they could see back across the river from where they had come. The masts and rigging of the Cutty Sark, the Old Royal Naval College, the cranes lined up along the opposite shore brought in to build new luxury apartments, but idle since the declaration of the emergency. On the mud banks below the quay, the carcasses of three bicycles lay rusting, half-buried in the sludge.

They found Consort House at the south-east corner of the square and took the stairs to the top floor. Just as Pinkie had done nearly twenty-four hours before, they found number 42A at the end of the corridor, next to a window looking out over the river. Her name was on the door plate. Dr Samantha Looker. MacNeil tested the door with his fingertips, and it swung open. Someone had left it on the latch. The hall beyond was in darkness. MacNeil indicated to Dr Castelli that she should remain where she was. He held the rifle across his chest and moved cautiously into the apartment. He had been good on the ranges, consistently hitting the target as often as nineteen times out of twenty. But he had never fired a weapon in anger, and never pointed one at another human being. Ahead, he could see street lights laying the shape of windows across the carpet of the living room. He passed an open door to a bedroom. He looked in. The bed was empty. It hadn’t been slept in. On his left, the bathroom door, and then a door to the kitchen. The apartment was warm, but there was no sense of occupation. He did not, by now, expect to find anyone in the living room at the end of the hall. But still, he proceeded with caution.

As he stepped into the room, something moved under his feet, and a screeching filled the air.

‘Jesus!’ he said, and he jumped back and saw the fleeting shape of something small and black streaking away across the carpet. He fumbled for the light switch, and as cold yellow light flooded the room, he turned quickly into it swinging his rifle through a ninety-degree arc.

Dr Samantha Looker lay face first in her own blood, where Pinkie had left her. Her computer was still on, its screen saver taking it on an endlessly repeating journey to the planets of the solar system. A small black cat with white bib and socks glared at MacNeil from across the room. He had stood on its tail or its paw, and it was watching him warily.

He turned sharply as Dr Castelli came into the room. ‘Oh, good God,’ she said when she saw the body on the floor, and she immediately knelt at Sam’s side to feel for a pulse. She looked up and shook her head. ‘Stone cold.’ She felt the muscles of the arms. ‘Rigor mortis is fully developed. So she’s been dead at least twelve hours.’ She looked back down at the corpse. MacNeil supposed there was probably not a great age difference between the two doctors. They were similar, too, in build, and both had short-cut grey hair. Perhaps all of those things gave Dr Castelli a greater sense of her own mortality. She seemed shaken. For once there were no wisecracks. ‘I suppose this is Sam,’ she said.

‘I suppose it must be.’

‘So who was Amy talking to all day?’

But MacNeil just shook his head. It could have been anyone. Text on a screen. How could you ever know? He stepped over the body and moved the computer mouse to clear away the screen saver. And there, on the screen, was the same dialogue box he had seen on Amy’s computer. Dr Castelli got to her feet and looked at it.

‘It must have been like a three-way chat,’ she said. ‘A conference call. Only, Amy never knew there was a third party.’ She took the mouse from MacNeil and clicked to see the participants. ‘It only shows Sam and Amy. So the other person must also have been logged in as Sam, from another computer somewhere else. Amy had no idea she wasn’t talking to her mentor.’

The cursor was blinking steadily at the end of Amy’s last message. Sam, are you still there? Hello? Sam? Talk to me!

It was a dead end. Literally. ‘So there’s no way of ever knowing for sure who it was she was talking to,’ MacNeil said.

‘Unless he’s still there.’

He looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, the chat’s still open. Maybe our phantom “Sam” is still online.’

‘How can we tell?’

‘Ask him.’ The doctor looked at MacNeil, one eyebrow raised, and he realised what she meant. He pulled up the chair and sat down at the keyboard, and then realised that his banana fingers were never going to type anything very accurately.

‘Here, you’d better do it,’ he said, and stood up to let her in.

‘What’ll I say?’

MacNeil thought about it. Who had Amy been talking to? Logic said it could only have been Smith. And they knew now that Smith was Roger Blume. ‘Hello, Dr Blume,’ he said.

Dr Castelli looked at him, and then nodded, understanding why. Her fingers rattled across the keyboard.

— Hello, Dr Blume.

The cursor blinked silently for a long time. ‘He’s not there,’ MacNeil said. Then a wwwooo-oop sound alerted them to an incoming message.

— Mr MacNeil, I presume.

MacNeil carefully peeled off his gloves and nudged the doctor aside. He needed direct contact, no matter how painful. He typed carefully.

— Yes.

— What took you so long?

— You’re not an easy man to find.

— And now that you’ve found me?

— Where’s Amy?

— Ah, straight to the point.

— It’s over, Blume.

— Not until the fat lady sings.

— We have blood from the house in Routh Road. We have a photograph of you from a reflection in Choy’s glasses in one of her passport pics. We know that Stein-Francks owns the house. And you have been identified by one of your neighbours.

— And I have everything else, Mr MacNeil. The bones, the head, the marrow, all the samples and tests. Without which you have nothing.

MacNeil sat staring at the screen. If that was true, then Blume was right. They did have nothing. With no body, there was no murder. No way to prove anything. And any evidence they did have had been obtained illegally.

‘Smug bastard!’ Dr Castelli muttered at the computer.

— What’s wrong, MacNeil? Cat got your tongue?

MacNeil looked at the cat still watching them from across the room. Had they been face to face, he might have found words to throw back at Blume. But the keyboard defeated him.

— Oh, and one other thing. I also have Tom. And Amy. So perhaps we can trade.

— Trade what?

— Whatever residual evidence you might have, in exchange for your girlfriend.

‘Don’t believe a word of it,’ Dr Castelli said. ‘He’s a lying little shit.’

MacNeil thought for a moment before typing.

— Where and when?

— The London Eye. But you’d better be quick, Mr MacNeil. It’s after five, and it would be best to have business completed before the curfew is lifted, and you become just another private citizen.