Lockdown

I

It was all depressingly familiar — the place they had bought together with the money he had saved, and Martha’s inheritance. Even so, there was a crippling mortgage which he was still paying. It was a modest, two-bedroomed ground floor flat, the lower half of a modern terraced house in the leafy south London suburb of Forest Hill. At least there was a garden at the back for Sean, and MacNeil had been able to drive to Lambeth in twenty minutes outside of rush hour.

They had arrived here, mother, father, newborn baby, with such high hopes. But eight years on, this street was now just a painful reminder of how all their dreams had come to naught. A place haunted by failure.

It had never been a marriage made in heaven. He had only been twenty-seven when he first arrived in London, fresh-faced and naive from a job in rural Inverness-shire. The Met was a challenge, the Big Smoke an adventure. He met Martha in his first month. At a police party. She had been going out with a DC at the time, but it was a relationship nearing its end. She and MacNeil had been instantly attracted to each other. Sex was the driving force behind their relationship. They did it every chance they got, anywhere they could. They rented a little studio apartment in Lewisham, and spent most of his days off in bed eating ice cream, having sex and getting drunk. It was a crazy roller coaster existence, free from any responsibility, devoid of any thought of the future.

And then one day she told him she was pregnant, and their life changed.

Neither of them knew how it was possible. They had taken precautions. But there it was. Martha was torn. She desperately wanted children. But not just yet. She raised the subject of abortion, but MacNeil wouldn’t hear of it. He had no religious convictions himself, but his parents had been lifelong members of the Free Church of Scotland, and while he didn’t believe in their God, their morality had been seared into his soul. In the end, she was glad he had talked her out of it. Especially the day that Sean was born, and she held him in her arms and couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down her face. And through them had seen that her big, tough Scottish husband was crying, too.

MacNeil pulled up his car at the foot of the path and locked it. What had once been a single arched doorway was divided now into two — one maroon door, one white. MacNeil climbed the steps, his heart frozen by fear. Two words is all it had taken to blow the remnants of his life out of the water. Sean’s sick.

Martha opened the door before he got to it. He was shocked by her appearance. Her face was a bloodless white, deep shadows smudged beneath tired eyes. She seemed so much older than when he had last seen her, strained and tense. Was it really only a week ago? There had been no hint, then, that there was anything wrong with Sean. The schools were shut, and they’d had little or no contact with anyone. How in God’s name had he got infected? It was all he could think to ask her. And there was more than a hint of accusation in it.

‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head, and he heard the desperation in her voice. They went inside. ‘Maybe it was you. We haven’t been anywhere. Maybe you brought it in with you.’

MacNeil tipped his jaw and held his peace, containing the anger that rose in him like bile. ‘Where is he?’

‘The Dome. I called the doctor last night. By four this morning he was coughing up fluid. I can’t believe how fast it’s been. The ambulance came at first light.’ She glared at him accusingly. ‘Why didn’t you answer the phone?’

‘You don’t give me many reasons to want to talk to you these days.’ He looked around the living room. It was chaotic. Sean’s Arsenal football strip was hanging up to dry on the clothes horse. His games console was lying next to the TV. MacNeil relented. ‘I was working.’

‘Of course you were.’ Martha was unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘Aren’t you always?’

He looked at her and felt that familiar guilt. He knew she had cause. After the baby she hadn’t been interested in sex any more. And somehow they didn’t have much to say to each other. What little time off he had he spent with Sean, and she seemed to resent that. She grew more and more remote. He spent more and more time at work. The atmosphere in the house was awful. He just wanted to be out of it, to be anywhere else but here. Marry in haste, repent at leisure, they said. ‘I’m sorry.’ MacNeil shrugged. ‘It must have been terrible for you, on your own.’ He moved towards her, intending to take her in his arms, a belated offer of comfort.

She held out a hand. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘If Sean’s got it, I might too.’

He immediately delved into his jacket pocket and pulled out the small bottle of tablets he had been issued at the start of the emergency. The one they wanted back in the morning. He held it out. ‘Here, take these.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a course of FluKill. They get handed out to all the cops.’

‘What if you need them?’

‘I don’t care. Please, I want you to have them. Take them now.’

‘You’re only supposed to take them if you get it.’

‘Well, if you’ve got it, the sooner you take it the better. Here.’ He thrust them at her.

She took the bottle and looked at the label, and then at MacNeil. ‘A pity you weren’t around when Sean needed them.’

That stung. Not least because it was so unfair. ‘You’re the one who wanted me to leave.’

She put the bottle in her pocket. ‘Maybe I’ll take them later.’ She paused. ‘Will you take me to the Dome? I don’t have clearance to drive around the city. And there aren’t any taxis.’

He nodded. ‘What did they say?’

‘About what?’

‘His chances.’

She looked at him. ‘They didn’t say anything. They don’t have to. Everyone knows what the survival rate is.’ Her eyes filled and she pulled in her lower lip, biting down on it until it bled.

MacNeil couldn’t meet her gaze. He stared at the carpet, and remembered how he and the boy would rough and tumble on it. When Sean had been about three, they had watched an old Clint Eastwood movie together on the TV. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. You never imagine what lines will stick in a kid’s head. Eli Wallach had called Eastwood a ‘double-crossing bastard’. And as MacNeil and Sean had mock-fought the next day, the boy had suddenly shouted at him, ‘You cross double bustard!’ And MacNeil and Martha had spent the next half hour in hysterics.

‘We’d better go, then.’

It seemed almost bright in the street, although the light was still misty, and colder even than it had been first thing. But the house had been so gloomy and depressing, it felt almost cheerful outside.

MacNeil saw curtains twitching as he held the passenger door open for Martha. The neighbours would all have seen the ambulance come to take Sean away. The MacNeils would be pariahs now, latter-day lepers. No one would come near them.

II

They drove under the southern approach to the Blackwall Tunnel and turned off the roundabout on to Millennium Way. Ahead of them they could see the tent-like dome suspended from its superstructure of outward-leaning steel columns dominating the wasteland that was North Greenwich. The dual carriageway took them up through a derelict industrial landscape to a parking area next to the tube and bus station. There had been no tube trains or buses running for weeks, but the car park was full to overflowing. Masked soldiers at the entrance waved them on, and MacNeil drove past lines of ambulances to the blue hoardings erected around the Dome — this billion-pound millennium folly for which, beyond its short life as a concert venue, they had finally found a use. They were filling it with the sick and the dying. Its vast floor area had been honeycombed by partitions, and thousands of beds wheeled in to ease the pressure on city hospitals. A fleet of ambulances and medical supply vehicles lined up along the piers of the bus station.

MacNeil pulled his car up on to the central reservation before the roundabout at the end of the road, and they hurried up a ramp and through an access gate in the hoardings. The red asphalt which circled the Dome was littered with vehicles and masked medical staff coming and going. It was chaos. There were no notices to guide visitors, because visitors were not expected. Martha and MacNeil had no idea what door to go in, or who to ask for. There was no security, and no one gave them a second look as they walked into the vast, cavernous space enclosed by white plasticised canvas.

The din that filled the air was extraordinary. The roar of the space heaters overhead. The thousands of voices raised above the sounds of the sick. The sneezing and coughing and groaning and retching. A bed was wheeled past by pale-looking orderlies in white pyjamas. The young man on it was dead, barely covered by his blood-and-vomit-stained sheet, open eyes staring into the void. MacNeil wanted to be sick. His son was here somewhere. In this hell. If he was going to die, then he’d rather take him home to die there. He grabbed a nurse by the arm and she wheeled around. ‘What is it?’ He could see the dog weariness in the shadows of her face, eyes clouded like cataracts. She was suffering from death fatigue, and a lack of patience with the living.

‘My son’s here somewhere. He was brought in this morning.’

A fleeting moment of humanity cut through her tiredness. ‘Go outside and follow the road round to Gate C. That’s where the new arrivals are brought in.’ And she was gone again, off into the honeycomb.

MacNeil took Martha’s hand, and they escaped for a few brief moments into the fresh air, and relief from the sounds of the dying. They ran around the perimeter of the Dome pushing and bumping their way through groups of workers who called after them in anger. But there was something compelling now about the need to find their son. Double doors stood wide open at Gate C and they ran in to find a temporary reception desk, where a record of the patients being brought in was being made on a computer. An older nurse seated on the other side of the desk looked at them warily from behind her mask. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Our son was brought in this morning,’ MacNeil said. ‘Sean MacNeil. He’s eight years old.’

‘We have no facilities for visitors here. I’m sorry.’ But she didn’t sound it. ‘We have an emergency number. The switchboard is manned twenty-four-seven.’

There was a clipboard on the desk beside her, with a floor plan and names written in pencil. It didn’t occur to MacNeil immediately that the reason they pencilled in the names was because it would be easy to rub out and replace them. If he’d thought about it, he’d have realised it made sense, given the turnover. Instead, he instinctively reached over and grabbed it.

‘Hey!’ The nurse tried to snatch it back, but MacNeil held it out of her reach. ‘I’ll call the police,’ she said, a hint of hysteria creeping into her voice.

‘I am the police,’ MacNeil said. He ran his eye quickly down the floor plan. There were more names than he could absorb. The floor had been divided into sections, and there were half a dozen pages beneath the top one on the clipboard. ‘I can’t see him,’ he said to Martha, a hint of panic now in his voice. He flipped through the pages.

The nurse sighed deeply and ran her fingers lightly over her computer keyboard, then she reached over and took the clipboard back from MacNeil. She found Sean on page three. ‘Section 7B,’ she said. ‘Follow the arrows painted on the floor. Seven is yellow.’

Sean was in a subdivision of section seven with three other children. He and two of the others were on drips. There were patches of high colour on his cheeks, but otherwise he was deathly pale. His bed sheets were soaking and twisted around his tortured body. He was only semi-conscious and seemed delirious, racked by occasional bouts of uncontrollable coughing. They could hear the liquid rattling in his lungs and throat. A masked medic in white overcoat and gloves stopped them from getting any closer. ‘What the hell are you people doing here?’

‘That’s our son,’ Martha said, her voice barely a whisper, so that she had to clear her throat and say it again, more loudly.

The medic glanced wearily at Sean and shrugged. ‘I’m sorry.’ Everyone was sorry.

‘What are you doing for him?’ MacNeil asked.

The medic unhooked the clipboard from the foot of Sean’s bed and scanned the chart. He sighed. ‘We’ve put him on steroids. He’s following the usual pattern. He’s developed ARDS.’

‘What does that mean?’ Martha clutched the arm of her estranged husband.

But MacNeil knew what it meant. Early in the emergency, all police officers had been briefed on symptoms and the course that the flu almost invariably took. It would start, like any other flu, with body aches, fever, sore throat, a cough. And then degenerate quickly into a progressive and irreversible respiratory decline that was called Adult, or Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome — ARDS. It started like pneumonia, but wouldn’t respond to antibiotics or antivirals. He knew that steroids were a last resort, but even they were unlikely to stop the progressive inflammation, leading to protein leakage, fibrosis and finally death.

‘It means it’s all down to how strong your kid is,’ the medic said. ‘How effective his immune system is at fighting it.’

MacNeil looked at the tormented little boy in the bed. He seemed so small and vulnerable. Grown men were dying from this flu. Big, strong, tough men cut down like straw in the wind. What hope did a child have? He closed his eyes, overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness. He was the boy’s father, for God’s sake! He was supposed to protect him, to keep him safe, to see him grow into adulthood. MacNeil opened his eyes again as he heard his son convulsed by a relentless, retching cough, and he felt tears filling them. ‘How long?’

The medic shrugged. He was just as powerless to do anything about it as the boy’s father. ‘If he makes it through the next hour,’ he said, ‘then maybe he has a chance.’

III

Outside, MacNeil pulled his mask aside and drew the cold January air deep into his lungs. He put his arm around Martha’s shoulder and felt her whole body shaking from the sobs she was trying to contain. They walked in a trance through the comings and goings, oblivious to the world around them. Back out through the gate and down on to Millennium Way. There were more hoardings on the far side of the road, and they passed through an opening, a hand-painted sign pointing them towards the Motel Millennium where accommodation and food was available at two hundred metres. But all they found was dereliction. Crumbling brick houses boarded up. A vacant lot strewn with debris, weeds and grass poking up through cracks in the tarmac. A rusted lamp post leaned at an impossible angle. Great mounds of excavated earth were piled up along the perimeter of the old Ordnance Wharf. This, then, was the great millennium dream. Bleak, derelict, bankrupt. A sad reflection of their own lives. A marriage in tatters, a child hovering in that impossible place between life and death.

The skyscrapers of Canary Wharf pushed up through the mist on the other side of the mirrored loop in the river. Harbingers, or so their architects had hoped, of a new age of prosperity and regeneration. But, in fact, as soulless as the people who had built them, deserted now, stalked by fear.

A sound like crackling came from across the water, echoing over its slow, sullen ebb. Martha lifted her head, like an animal sniffing the air. Instinct, rather than interest, provoked her question. She had no real interest in the answer. It was just something to say. ‘What’s that?’

‘Probably gunfire.’

She frowned. ‘Who’s shooting?’

MacNeil’s response was mechanical. Like Martha, he felt the need to speak, to find words to fill an empty void in which they would otherwise drown in unwanted thoughts. ‘The Isle of Dogs has been sealed off. There’s no flu on the island, and a bunch of people with guns and some big financial backing are making sure that no one brings it on.’

‘Can they do that?’ Martha was incredulous. For just a moment she forgot why they were here.

‘Apparently. You can leave if you want, but you can’t go back. There’s a stand-off with the army, and the government seems to have backed down from confrontation. Occasionally there’s an exchange of fire. But I think it’s just posturing. If anyone got shot for real, then I guess they would send in the troops.’

There was another bout of crackling, and then silence. The slow chug of a tugboat pulling rafts of yellow containers downriver was the only sound to break it.

They walked slowly without speaking for several minutes. Then MacNeil said, ‘This is my last day.’

He felt her face turn up towards him, but he didn’t want to meet her eye. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I gave in my notice. I finish at seven tomorrow morning.’

‘I don’t understand.’ He heard the confusion in her voice.

‘What’s not to understand? I quit my job.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you had custody of Sean. Because I knew if I didn’t make the time to see him now I never would.’

She didn’t speak for a long time. And then she said, ‘It’s a pity you didn’t think of doing it sooner.’

‘Don’t start.’ He let his arm slide from her shoulder, and felt the same old anger again. It was always like this when they argued. ‘I don’t want to do this now. Sean’s the only thing that matters.’

She slipped her arm through his and squeezed it. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. Maybe if we’d both thought more about Sean and less about ourselves, things would have been different.’

Different for Sean, certainly, he thought. But he doubted if either he or Martha would have been any happier. If it hadn’t been for Sean’s unexpected arrival, their relationship would have burned itself out and they would both have moved on. How many couples, he wondered, were trapped in loveless marriages because of a child conceived in carelessness? And how unfair was that on the kid? All Sean had ever asked of them was their love. And while they had given it, it had never been unconditional. And now he lay dying, and all they had left were their regrets and their guilt. Each as culpable as the other.

‘What are you going to do?’ Martha asked. ‘For a living.’

MacNeil shook his head. It was something he’d been avoiding. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Maybe,’ she said suddenly, ‘maybe if Sean — if he pulls through — maybe we should think about giving it another go. For his sake.’

MacNeil gazed bleakly through the chill winter haze, and had a sensation of falling weightlessly into space. ‘Maybe we should,’ he said, without conviction.

IV

Amy ran her cursor over the drop-down menu on her computer screen and selected SEND INSTANT MESSAGE. She had already chosen Sam from her list of messaging buddies. She typed quickly.

— Sam, I’m thinking of asking for them to try to get a DNA sample from the tissue Tom recovered from the bone marrow. What do you think?

She hit the return key and sent the message. It went off with a wwwooo-oop sound. She waited, watching the window on her screen for Sam’s reply. She had chosen a headshot of herself as her avatar which would appear on Sam’s screen with her message. Sam, for some reason, had picked a colourful picture of a parrot. Amy had always meant to ask the significance of it, but then forgotten in the course of conversation — if text messages could be called conversation. They were more instant than emailing, but not as tying as a phone call. You could just leave the window open and return to it to pick up a conversation when you wanted. She had already had numerous conversations with Sam that day, providing the retired anthropologist with a briefing on the bones.

Another wwwooo-oop alerted her to Sam’s reply.

— Why? was the response.

— Why the DNA, or why am I asking you?

— The DNA.

Their exchanges were often characterised by an almost childish flippancy, the only real way they had of expressing the mutual affection of two people who had only ever met in the ether. But Sam seemed grumpy today. Amy’s fingers rattled over the keyboard.

— There’s an outside chance she might be on the DNA database.

— If she’s from a developing country like you think, that’s unlikely.

— True, but we’d kick ourselves if she was. Never overlook the obvious, you always tell me.

— The yield from the marrow will probably be pretty low.

— We could take pulp from one of her teeth.

— I thought you had the skull there.

— Oops, so I do. Bone, then. I could ask Tom to cut a wedge from the femur. In fact, he’s probably already done that to get to the marrow.

There was a long pause. Amy watched the cursor blinking blankly at her from the screen. Then,

— Worth a try, I suppose. Another pause. — What other tests has Tom ordered up?

— I don’t know. Toxicology, probably.

— That won’t yield much. Qualitative rather than quantitative results. If there are drugs present, it’ll only be a trace. No way to tell how much.

Amy nodded at the screen, as if Sam might be able to see her. She knew that Sam was right. And it was frustrating. Somehow, you felt you ought to be able to tell more about a person from their bones.

— Okay, thanks, Sam. Talk later.

Amy looked across the room at her cast of Lyn’s skull. Even without the flesh to give it emphasis, the cleft in the maxilla was a substantial disfigurement, displacing the teeth it was supposed to hold in a straight, even line. She grabbed the lever on the right arm of her wheelchair and propelled it smoothly across the floor to the table by the window. She had drilled the holes and glued the dowels in place. And now that the glue had set she could start to build the layers of ‘muscle’ that would give definition and personality to the face. She started preparing the strips of plasticine, but her sense of frustration had not gone away.

It was the emotion she felt most frequently, and it often led to depression. It came from her inability to do her job, the thing she had been trained for, the work she had grown to love. While her brain was still sharp and clear, and her fingers had lost none of their skills, her limited mobility meant she could no longer fully function as the forensic odontologist she had been. There were things she simply could not do from a wheelchair. She got lecturing work, of course, but that was not something she had ever enjoyed. She hated the sympathy she saw in people’s eyes. It diminished, somehow, the value of what she had to say.

She had written some papers, and published some research. She provided a consultancy and advice service for the FSS, and her opinion had been sought more than once by investigating officers from forces outside of the Met. She had even started specialising in pattern bruising, on both the living and the dead. Tool marks, they called them — marks left by a ring in a murder case, belt buckle bruises in a rape, stabbing and incisive injuries inflicted during a fight. The principles of analysis were identical to bite mark analysis, which had always been one of her specialities, and it was possible to do it from a wheelchair. Still, her limitations were frustrating.

But she had always tried not to give in to self pity. That would have been just too easy. And so she shrugged off her frustration and lay the first strip in place across the cheekbone of the skull. Which is when the thought first came to her, and she wondered why it hadn’t occurred to her before.

She reached for the phone and pulled Tom’s home number from its memory, then listened as it rang at the other end.

‘What!’ Tom didn’t sound happy.

‘Tom?’

‘Jesus, Amy, I’d just dropped off. It’s been a long shift, and I’m on again at seven tonight.’

‘Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Can you talk?’

Tom put his hand over the phone and there was a muffled exchange between him and another male voice. Then the hand was removed. ‘This isn’t a good time.’

‘I’ll call later.’

But he relented. ‘Was it important?’

‘It can wait.’

She heard him sigh deeply. ‘Aw, shit, Amy, I’m awake now. You might as well tell me.’ His voice went ambient and he said, ‘I’m still listening. I’m just going to make a cup of tea. How’s it going with the skull?’

‘It’s going well.’

‘Given her a face yet?’

‘Hey, come on, I’m not that fast. It’ll be a few hours.’ She paused. ‘Tom, what tests did you order up on the bone marrow?’

He cursed as he dropped some piece of crockery. ‘Shit!’ Another muffled exchange, then, ‘You know, in the end I didn’t think it would be worth it, Amy. I mean, anything we get from toxicology is going to be really inconclusive.’

‘That’s what Sam thought.’

‘You’ve been discussing it with Sam?’

‘Yeah. Is that alright?’

‘I guess.’

‘We thought maybe we could get a DNA sample from the marrow.’

‘It’s possible. I’m not sure how useful it would be though, unless we had something to compare it with.’

‘And I had another thought,’ Amy said. ‘We could run a virology test. PCR. See if she’d had the flu.’

‘Half the bloody city’s got the flu!’ Tom didn’t sound particularly impressed by her thought.

‘Yeah, but that might be what killed her.’

‘So why would anyone try to cover that up?’

Amy shrugged to herself. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It just seemed like something we should know. I mean, the information we’re going to get from a skeleton is limited enough. We might as well find out everything we can.’

She heard him sigh again. Then a pause. ‘Tell you what. Why don’t you call Zoe and ask her to do it? It’ll give the little bitch something to do, rather than stand smoking on the steps all day.’

V

The wind had stiffened, picking up cold, damp air from the estuary and carrying it upriver into the heart of the city.

MacNeil and Martha made their way back around the perimeter of the Dome. It had been a long hour, and then MacNeil had made them wait another fifteen minutes. There was no point in going back too soon. But in truth, it was just a way of putting off the news they didn’t want to hear. Ignorance was hope.

A group of soldiers, rifles pressed across their chests, trotted past them at the double, young boys with frightened eyes behind army-issue gas masks designed for a biological war in Iraq which had never materialised following the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. A little further around the curve of the Dome, several gates beyond theirs, they could see the unmarked black vans lined up to take the dead to the official disposal centres. The council-run crematoriums throughout the city had been overwhelmed by numbers, and the government had set up emergency facilities to dispose of the growing backlog of bodies. There were literally thousands awaiting disposal daily, and nowhere to keep them. It was considered a health risk for bodies not to be burned within twenty-four hours. Family funerals were impossible. Even commemorative religious services were banned because of the risks of spreading infection at public gatherings. The government had promised memorial services at a later date. And so the process of grieving remained unfulfilled, and the distress amongst relatives was almost unbearable.

The double doors at Gate C still stood open. There was a different nurse behind the desk, but she was engaged in earnest conversation with a group of orderlies, and did not look in their direction as they walked past. MacNeil led Martha through the maze, following the yellow arrows until they reached section 7B. The beds were still occupied. Four children. But Sean wasn’t one of them.

Martha clutched MacNeil’s arm. ‘Where is he?’

MacNeil saw a medic beyond the next partition. He was re-attaching a drip to a young girl’s arm. It was not the young man they had spoken to earlier. MacNeil grabbed him. ‘The boy who was in the right-hand bed in 7B, where is he?’

The medic pulled his arm free, irritated by MacNeil’s aggression. He glanced back along the passage between the partitions. ‘The dark-haired kid?’

‘Yes.’

‘He died.’