Lockdown

I

The London Eye was a Ferris wheel for grown-ups on the South Bank of the Thames. Like the wheel of a giant’s bicycle, it stood one hundred and thirty-five metres high, comprising seventeen thousand tonnes of steel and cable, and had been built in an age of optimism to celebrate the millennium. More than thirty glass capsules turned around its outside edge on circular mounting rings as it revolved. The unrestricted views of London from its highest point were unparalleled. Before the emergency, fifteen thousand tourists a day flocked to fill its capsules. But since the arrival of the flu, it had stood silent and still, a constant daily reminder to the people of London that things had changed. Perhaps irrevocably.

Pinkie sat in the wooden control hut, amongst the broken glass, and surveyed the command panel with its green and red push lights. It was all quite simple, really. No great mystique. It was the sort of thing you dreamt of as a child, to have that kind of power at your fingertips. Press this button to make it go, press that button to make it stop. This one opens the door, this one locks it again, each pod individually controlled.

He looked across the landing and departure deck and saw Tom and Amy locked away in their glass pod. He had made Tom carry her in and prop her up on the slatted oval bench at its centre. Now it was a prison without bars. Just glass. Could there be any worse kind of prison than one from which you could always see out? One from which freedom was ever visible, a constant reminder of your own lack of it?

Pinkie knew he could not have survived in prison. Of course, they had never charged him. He had killed a man to protect his mother, and the authorities had deemed in any case that he was too young to accept any legal responsibility for his actions. But later, when he had started doing it for pleasure, and money, he knew that should he ever be caught he would have to take his own life, too. He could never be shut away in a confined space like that for days, weeks, years, the door locked — as it always had been in the cupboard under the stairs. The breathlessness would have crushed him.

He wasn’t feeling so good now. Fluid was gathering around him on the floor. He felt nauseous and weak. His muscles were seizing up. He knew that the computer screen was casting light on his face, and that if he turned to his right he would see his reflection in the window which looked out on to the queuing area. But he did not want to see what he looked like. He wanted to remember himself as he had been the last time he looked in the mirror. He knew he wasn’t handsome — he had never harboured such illusions — but he’d had good, strong features. He couldn’t bear to see himself as he was now.

The gurgling in his chest was getting worse. It was becoming harder to breathe. Where was Mr Smith? He should have been here long ago as arranged in their exchange of texts on the dead soldier’s phone. Pinkie looked out of the window. All the floodlit towers and spires of the Houses of Parliament pierced the black sky on the far side of the river, reflecting in the slow, steady flow of black water. A noise to his left made him turn, and there was Mr Smith, finally, standing in the doorway looking at him open-mouthed, eyes wide with horror. And Pinkie was reminded again of how he looked to others.

‘Who... who the hell are you?’ Mr Smith said uncertainly.

Pinkie tried very hard to make what was left of his mouth form his name. ‘Sssphhh... phinkie,’ he said.

Mr Smith gaped at him in disbelief. ‘Pinkie?’ Pinkie nodded. ‘Holy Mother of God,’ Mr Smith whispered. ‘What happened?’

‘Chhh... car crash.’

‘Jesus!’

Pinkie could see in his eyes that Mr Smith knew he was going to die. But he was here, wasn’t he? He was going to finish the job. He had never started anything he couldn’t finish. He reached over to swing the black bin bag across the control room to his employer, and Mr Smith looked inside. Pinkie saw him flinch from the smell. The bones were still ripe.

‘Is that everything?’ Mr Smith asked.

Pinkie nodded.

‘Good. Can you still walk?’

Pinkie nodded again.

‘I want you to go with the girl up to the top. MacNeil is on his way. As long as she is up there out of his reach, I’ve got something to bargain with. Are you up to it?’

Amy sat silently on the slatted wooden bench, staring bleakly out at the Thames. It was hard to believe that the burned man was still alive. She knew that he could not survive for very much longer. He was losing so much fluid it was amazing he could still stand. She wondered what could possibly drive him to do what he was doing. Surely he knew that he was going to die?

A tense silence had settled between her and Tom. He had made that phone call to her knowing full well that she was being lured into a trap. Trust me, he had said. And she had. Only to be rewarded with deceit and betrayal.

‘I had no choice,’ he’d told her. ‘It was you or Harry.’

‘So you chose me.’

He’d turned away then, guilt in the very way he held himself. And there had been nothing more to say.

There was a phssss of pneumatic pistons, and the end of the pod split open as the doors at the landing stage side disengaged and slid apart. Tom stood up. ‘There’s two of them now,’ he said.

Amy could see the silhouettes of two men approaching the pod. The burned man could barely walk, but he was still carrying his SA80. He stepped up into the pod, followed by a man who looked vaguely familiar. He wasn’t tall. He had cropped fair hair and unusually dark eyebrows. Silver-rimmed oval glasses. His face looked drained of blood, and he was clearly tense.

‘What’s going on?’ Tom asked, and Amy could hear fear crack his voice.

The man with the glasses ignored him. He looked at Amy, and then turned to the burned man. ‘Where’s the other one?’

‘Yes,’ Tom said. ‘Where’s Harry? You promised he would be safe.’

If Pinkie could have smiled, he would. ‘Dead,’ he said, and he didn’t need lips to form the word. It came out of his mouth as clear as day.

There was just a moment of silence before a dreadful, feral howl escaped Tom’s lips. He lunged across the pod at Pinkie. A short, deafening burst of fire from the semi-automatic rifle spat half a dozen bullets deep into the pathologist’s chest, nearly lifting him off his feet. Blood spattered all over the glass, and Tom hit the floor with a shuddering finality. Amy screamed. She could not believe what she was seeing. He might have betrayed her, but she still loved him. You didn’t just wipe out twelve years with a single phone call. And yet suddenly he was dead. There was no going back. No saying sorry. No fixing things. The burned man had killed him in a moment. He was gone forever. Life might be hard. But death was so frighteningly easy.

The man with the glasses held his head in his hands, fingers pressed to his temples.

‘For God’s sake, Pinkie! You nearly burst my ear drums!’ And then he glanced anxiously across the Thames, wondering perhaps if the gunfire had been audible at any of the checkpoints on the north bank. But most of the sound of it had been contained within the capsule.

‘What do you want?’ Amy screamed at him.

The man turned towards her. ‘I want you to shut up,’ he said tersely. ‘Pinkie’s going to take you up top. I need you as a bargaining chip in my discussions with Mr MacNeil. And I want you well out of his reach. Any trouble, and Pinkie will push you out.’

Amy closed her eyes. The nightmare had just got worse. If that was possible. She would be trapped in this pod 443 feet above London with a horribly burned psychopath whose remit was to push her out if negotiations on the ground went badly. And there was nothing she could do about it. The only faint ray of hope was that MacNeil knew she was here, and that he was on his way.

She said to the man, ‘What are you going to trade me for?’

‘Any remaining evidence that might implicate me in the death of little Choy.’

It was the first time that Amy had heard her name. She had got so used to thinking of her as Lyn, it came as a shock to hear her real name. ‘Choy,’ she said. ‘You killed her?’ The man said nothing, and Amy said, ‘MacNeil will never agree.’

‘Then I’ll kill him, too.’

‘You wouldn’t have the guts to kill a serving police officer.’

‘If I can kill a ten-year-old child and strip the flesh from her bones, I can kill a policeman.’

Amy shook her head, trying to stop the tremor in her voice, trying to appear calm and defiant when fear had turned her insides to mush. ‘There’s one big difference.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Ten-year-old girls can’t fight back.’ She hoped she had managed to convey the contempt she felt.

He turned away, stepping over Tom’s body and out on to the landing stage. He paused, then, and turned back to Pinkie. ‘The green button on the right?’

Pinkie nodded, and the man walked away to the control hut. After a moment, there was a slight judder, and then slowly they began to move. Amy clutched the edge of her seat and looked up through the roof of the pod. She could see the huge spokes start to turn, and a strange sense of weightlessness as their capsule moved forward, lifting as it went, starting its long, gradual ascent to the top of the wheel.