Lockdown

I

MacNeil pulled his Ford Focus into the bus stop opposite the accident and emergency department in Lambeth Palace Road, confident in the knowledge that none of the four buses which used to traverse this route would be inconvenienced.

The gates and railings at the entrance to Archbishop’s Park had been torn down to create access for the heavy equipment brought in by the contractors. He recognised the unmarked vans of the Scenes of Crime officers from the FSS laboratories, although they might have been quicker on foot, since the lab was just a short walk away along a narrow path at the south end of the park.

The Forensic Science Service had been forced to draw its resources into one central facility following the lockdown of the Capital, and had established the former Metropolitan Police Forensic Science laboratory in Lambeth Road as the centre for most of the medical and scientific services required by the police. Right now, the officers they had sent were standing around waiting for MacNeil.

MacNeil surveyed the wreck of the park, monstrous machinery standing idle amongst the ripped-up remains of what had once been a tiny oasis of green in a sea of concrete and glass. Hundreds of workers in their distinctive orange jumpsuits stood around in groups, talking and smoking. In the misty early morning light, a group of ghostly figures in white Tyvek suits and masks clustered around a hole in the ground which should by now have been filled with cement. A man in a suit, wearing a calf-length camel coat and a white hard hat, picked his way delicately through the mud as MacNeil approached. He wore a standard-issue white cotton mask, as did MacNeil, but stopped well short of him. ‘DI MacNeil?’

MacNeil kept his distance and eyed him cautiously. ‘Aye. Who’s asking?’

‘Derek James. I’m from the office of the Deputy Prime Minister. You’ll understand if I don’t shake your hand.’

‘What do you want?’ MacNeil had never been slow in getting to the point.

‘I want,’ said James, with a certain edge, ‘to get this site back to work.’

‘Then the sooner we stop talking about it, the sooner I’ll do what I have to do and get out of your hair.’ MacNeil walked past him towards the gathering of ghosts.

James went after him, still concerned to keep his shoes mud-free. ‘I don’t think you understand, Mr MacNeil. This work is being carried out under an emergency decree of Parliament. Millions of pounds are being poured into this project. There is a strict timetable. A delay could cost lives.’

‘Someone’s already dead, Mr James.’

‘Which means they’re beyond help. Others are not.’

MacNeil stopped in his tracks and turned to face the man from the ministry who immediately recoiled, as if afraid MacNeil might breathe on him. ‘Look. Everyone in this country’s entitled to justice. Alive or dead. That’s my job. To see that justice is done. And when I’ve done it, you can do yours. Until then, stay out of my face.’ He turned again and trudged through the mud to the men in Tyvek. ‘What’s the score here?’

‘Bag of bones, Jack,’ one of them said, his voice muffled by his mask. ‘They only excavated yesterday. Someone must have dumped it overnight.’ He glanced around the hundreds of faces that watched them from a distance. ‘And these guys want us out of here toot sweet.’

‘All in good time.’

Another of the Tyvek suits handed MacNeil a pair of plastic shoe covers. ‘Here, you better put these on, mate.’

MacNeil pulled on the plastic and peered into the hole. There was a figure crouched in the bottom of it. ‘Who’s down there?’

‘Your old pal.’

MacNeil rolled his eyes. ‘Aw, shit,’ he said under his breath. ‘Tom Bennet!’

The forensics man grinned behind his mask, stretching it tight across his face.

MacNeil snapped on latex gloves and reached out a hand. ‘Help me down.’

It was an expensive sports holdall with a PUMA logo on the side. Tom was holding it open with gloved hands and looked up as MacNeil dropped down beside him. ‘Don’t come too close to me,’ he said. ‘You never know what you might catch.’

MacNeil ignored him. ‘What’s in it?’ he asked.

‘The bones of a child.’

MacNeil leaned over to peer in. The bones looked very white, as if they’d been left out in the sun, a sad collection of the bits and pieces of what had once been a human being. He recoiled from a stink like meat left in the refrigerator a month past its sell-by. ‘What the hell’s that smell?’

‘The bones.’ A crinkle around the young pathologist’s eyes betrayed his amusement at MacNeil’s disgust.

‘I didn’t know bones smelled.’

‘Oh, yeah. Two, even three months after death.’

‘So this kid was alive quite recently?’

‘Very recently, I’d say, from how much they stink.’

‘So what’s happened to the flesh?’

‘Someone’s stripped it off the bones. Using some pretty sharp cutting gear.’ Tom lifted out a long shanked bone, laying it delicately across both hands. ‘The femur. Thigh bone to you. You can see the scores left in the bone by the knife, or whatever it was he used. They’re quite deep, and broad, so it was a heavy instrument.’

MacNeil looked at the cuts and grooves in the bone, most running parallel, and cut in at an angle, as if from a repeated sideways chopping motion. ‘Not an expert, then?’

‘I don’t know who I’d describe as an expert in cutting flesh from bone, but it’s a pretty crude job.’ Tom ran a long, delicate finger around the bulb of the joint. ‘You can see the hash they’ve made of the disarticulation, and these dried-out remnants of tissue and ligament that they couldn’t get off.’

MacNeil looked into the bag again and carefully lifted out what looked like the curve of a small rib. He cocked his head and looked at it curiously, running his fingers along the smooth white bow of it. ‘How did they manage to get the bones so clean?’

Tom shrugged. ‘Washed them, likely. I’ve done it myself from time to time, when I’ve wanted to clean up a skull. Boiled it up with a little bleach and laundry detergent.’

‘Wouldn’t that kill the smell?’

Tom crinkled with amusement again. ‘The marrow’s still going to rot, whether you’ve cooked it or not.’

MacNeil slipped the rib back into the bag and stood. He peered up at the faces leaning over to try to catch their conversation, then looked down at Tom. ‘Can you tell what sex?’

‘Not right now. But I’d put the age at somewhere between nine and eleven.’

MacNeil nodded thoughtfully, and wondered how you performed an autopsy on a disarticulated skeleton.

Almost as if he’d read his thoughts, Tom stood up beside him and said, ‘Naturally, I can’t do any kind of real autopsy. All I can do is lay out the bones and look for clues.’ A stray strand of blond hair was caught in the elastic of his plastic shower cap, and his corn-blue eyes held MacNeil in a gaze so direct that the older man had to look away. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’m not much of an expert on what goes where. I can sort out the ribs, but not in the correct order. I can separate the finger bones, but not necessarily which goes to which hand. We really need an anthropologist for that.’

MacNeil forced himself to meet the pathologist’s eye. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘She’s sick.’

‘Oh.’

‘But I can make a general assessment, spot any major bone injuries and missing parts, recover tissue from the marrow and order up some toxicology.’ He paused. ‘I’d suggest we get Amy in. She’s good with skulls, and she’s done a lot of work on human ID.’

MacNeil felt his heart skip a beat at the mention of her name, and he wondered if it showed in his face. A slight blush, perhaps. He sensed Tom watching him closely, as if looking for some sign, but if he was it did not betray itself in his eyes. ‘Sure, if that’s what you think,’ MacNeil said. He turned and reached up a hand to be helped out.

‘Careful,’ Tom said quickly. ‘Some people think it’s dangerous to turn their back on me.’

MacNeil turned his head slowly to look at him. It was a dark, dangerous look that needed no words.

Tom smiled. ‘You’re so butch.’

Silence hung over the site, like a low-lying fog. It was extraordinary, really, here in the very heart of the Capital. No traffic noise, no voices raised in casual communication or amusement, no overhead roar of jet engines as planes circled towards Gatwick or Heathrow. Just the plaintive cries of the seagulls which had flown up the estuary to escape the stormy weather in the North Sea, fragments of white wheeling overhead, for all the world like vultures waiting for death.

Death had already come, but there was nothing left on the bones to pick.

MacNeil was aware of all the faces watching him. The man from the ministry stood off, arms folded across his chest. ‘Well?’

‘I want everyone off the site,’ MacNeil said. ‘We’re going to seal it off and make a search.’

The man from the ministry tilted his head to one side. Only his eyes betrayed his anger. ‘There’ll be trouble,’ he said.

‘There’ll be trouble if anyone doesn’t do as they’re told.’ MacNeil raised his voice so that everyone on the site could hear him. ‘This is a murder scene.’

II

‘What the fuck did you say to him?’

‘I told him it was a murder scene and we were going to search the site.’

Laing looked at him sceptically. ‘Well, whatever you said, he’s pretty pissed off. You any idea what kind of shite’s coming down on me right now?’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Can you?’ Laing glanced at his watch, then picked up the remote to turn on the TV on the filing cabinet. ‘You know, when I came down to the Met from Glasgow thirty years ago, I thought I’d left cowboys like you behind. People are better mannered down here, know what I mean?’

‘Yeah, they threaten you more politely.’

Laing glared at him. ‘I never imagined for a minute I’d be haunted by some Highland hard case just as I’m looking forward to retirement.’ He turned up the sound on the television. They were reporting again on the death of the Prime Minister, and Laing clearly wanted to hear it.

MacNeil glanced at the framed photograph of the DCI and his wife which sat on the bookcase behind his desk. They were an odd couple. Laing came from the old school of working-class Glasgow cop. He swore, he made crude jokes, he was physically aggressive. He wore Brylcreem in his hair, and slapped Old Spice freely on to shiny, shaved, drink-veined cheeks. You smelled him before you saw him. His wife, on the other hand, was a genteel lady, a doctor’s daughter from Chelsea who liked opera and theatre and lectured in English and drama at the Queen Mary University of London. They lived somewhere out west, in a large, terraced town house. Laing was a different man in her company. MacNeil had no idea what she saw in him, but whatever it was, she brought out the best in him. Some people did that to you. MacNeil reflected that while Martha might not have brought out the worst in him, she certainly hadn’t brought out the best. He envied Laing his relationship.

He glanced through the open door into the detectives’ room. There were only a couple of DCs on duty, and a handful of uniform and administrative staff. The pandemic had taken its toll here, too.

Something on the news caught his attention, and he turned to see a line-up of dark-suited men sitting at a table groaning with microphones. They all wore masks, as did the journalists firing the questions. Centre table was a man whose face had become familiar during these last few months, even behind the mask. He had large, dark eyes, beneath thick black eyebrows that contrasted with blond, crew-cut hair, and wore distinctive silver-rimmed oval spectacles. He had a creamy, smooth voice which spoke English with just the hint of a foreign accent whose origin was impossible to define. His name was Roger Blume, and he was the doctor in charge of Stein-Francks’ FluKill Pandemic Task Force.

‘Fucking leeches!’ Laing’s expletive echoed MacNeil’s unspoken thought. ‘I see their share price is up again.’

Stein-Francks was the French-based pharmaceutical company whose antivirus drug, FluKill, had been singled out by the World Health Organisation during the run-up to the pandemic as the remedy most likely to be effective against the bird flu, should it ever become transmissible from human to human. The WHO had also warned that such an eventuality was inevitable. As a result, those countries around the world who could afford it had placed more than three-and-a-half billion euros’ worth of orders. Britain alone had bought nearly fifteen million courses of the drug to treat a quarter of the population. Health and law enforcement workers were to be the first in line to receive it. Not that it was a cure. The best that could be hoped for was an amelioration of symptoms, and a shortening of the course of the flu, making survival more likely. And with a mortality rate of nearly eighty per cent, anything that could improve your odds was in huge demand.

The Stein-Francks press conference was to announce a further stepping up of FluKill production to meet the increased requirements. A cynical journalist amongst the press pack asked Dr Blume if the increase in production might have anything to do with the announcement by several developing countries that they intended to produce their own generic form of the drug. Blume easily shrugged off the clear implication that his company was only interested in maintaining its monopoly.

‘We have a brand-new facility in France, custom-made to produce FluKill,’ he said. ‘It comes on-line next week. It has been a long time in the planning. So this is no rush move to fight off the competition. We can produce the drug faster and more efficiently than anyone else. And we have all the quality controls in place to ensure its effectiveness.’

‘Your vaccine didn’t prove very effective.’ The journalist’s tone reflected the general feeling of resentment around the country that anyone should profit from the disaster.

‘A matter of great regret,’ said Blume. ‘Not for any crass, commercial reason, but because of the lives it might have saved.’

‘And why didn’t it work?’ Another voice fired off its accusation.

‘Because we guessed wrong,’ Blume said simply. ‘Bird flu has been around for a long time, but it was only in 1997 that we confirmed the first human case of it. On that occasion, the virus was transmitted from bird to human. But from that moment on, it was only a matter of time before the bird virus combined with a human flu virus, making it transmissible from human to human. We knew when that happened, the human race would be in big trouble. A pandemic was inevitable, and would almost certainly be worse than the Spanish Flu of 1918. That killed fifty million people. So the race was on to find a way of beating it this time before it began.’ He ran a hand back across his bristly skull. ‘We, along with many others, tried to create in the laboratory something that would look to the immune system like a humanly transmissible avian flu. And so create a vaccine. That involved mixing and matching genes from the H5N1 bird flu virus with a common human flu virus. For that purpose we chose the H3N2 strain, which has been behind most recent human flu outbreaks.’ The doctor shook his head. ‘The goal was to substitute the eight genes of each virus, one by one, with the eight genes from the other, to see which combinations would create versions easily spread amongst humans. The trouble was, that with more than two hundred and fifty possible combinations, hitting on the right one was a bit like winning the lottery.’

‘But you thought you’d done it.’

‘Yes. Because when the real virus actually emerged, we found we had created something almost identical. The trouble was, it was just different enough that the immune system wasn’t fooled, and we knew it was going to take anything up to six months to put that right.’

‘So has anyone at Stein-Francks come up with a reasonable explanation of why the pandemic started in London rather than Asia?’

‘That’s not our job,’ said Blume smoothly. If he detected the hostility coming from his questioners, he was ignoring it. ‘It’s something you’ll need to ask the Health Protection Agency.’ He paused. ‘But you don’t have to be very smart to figure that it only takes one infected individual from Vietnam, or Thailand, or Cambodia, to fly into London, New York or Paris, and you’ve sown the seed. In this modern age of air travel, we really do live in a global village. And we’ve created the perfect incubators for breeding and passing on infection, in the buses and planes and underground trains we travel on. We were a human disaster waiting to happen.’

The newscast cut back to the studio and breaking news of a development in the race to fill the power vacuum left by the death of the PM. But by now Laing had lost interest and turned it off. He swivelled in his chair and looked speculatively at MacNeil. ‘You’re a fucking idiot, man. Quitting now. You’re a good cop...’ He hesitated. The compliment had been grudging. Something he was loathe to admit. ‘You could have been sitting in my seat in a few years.’

‘By which time Sean would nearly have finished school.’ MacNeil shook his head. ‘There’s no second chances with kids. You can’t turn the clock back on childhood.’ He looked beyond Laing, out of the window to Kennington Road below. The shops and restaurants opposite the police station. Trafalgar Lock and Key, Perdoni’s Restaurant, Peter’s Gents Hair Stylist, the Imperial Tandoori. All more familiar to him than his own son. He’d spent more time in the company of Laing, for God’s sake!

Laing said, ‘I’ll need to ask for your FluKill back before you clock off tomorrow.’ MacNeil looked at him. ‘I’m sorry, Jack. You’re no longer on the front line. Or at least, you won’t be.’

‘Fine.’

Laing slapped his palms on his desk. ‘You’ve got two hours to get that site searched before I send the diggers back in.’