He swung right at Bank Street, and ahead of him saw the span of the blue-painted metal bridge carrying the Docklands Light Railway over the water between Canary Wharf and Heron Quays. There was no evidence here of the vandalism that blighted the city centre. Nothing was boarded up. Shops and restaurants were shut, but exposed to the world. The Slug and Lettuce. Jubilee Place Mall. Anyone who did not belong here, anyone who might be a carrier of the virus, would be shot on sight. So nobody ventured out, even the residents, because questions were only asked afterwards — by which time it would be too late.
Pinkie caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. A white golf buggy, driven by a man in blue uniform, a rifle sticking up at his side. It was just a flash of white and blue, and then it was gone, turning quickly into a darkened loading bay. Many of the original security men here had joined the vigilantes and commandeered the buggies. The big mystery was where they had got the guns. But wealthy and powerful people lived here. And where money and lives were at stake, anything was possible.
First stop was an underground car park on the south side of the square. Pinkie turned down the ramp and into a gloomy, deserted parking area that covered the entire footprint of the building. A low roof supported on metal beams. There were a handful of vehicles here, but no sign of life. Of course, he knew there must be someone watching. He pulled up and left his engine idling, and jumped down to throw open the doors at the back of the truck. The next half hour was spent loading boxes on to the pneumatic ramp, then lowering it to the ground and unloading them on to the concrete. Pinkie was fit, but it was hard work, and by the end of it he was sweating profusely. There was nothing on the boxes to indicate what was inside, but he was pretty certain it was tinned food. As many as twenty vehicles a day made the circuit, trucking in supplies for the nearly twenty-five thousand people who lived on the island.
As he shifted the final box, a bare arm fell out from behind a stack right at the back. Charlie’s hand was locked in a position which gave the impression he had been clutching a cricket ball that someone had just removed. There were specks of blood on his forearm. Pinkie kicked it quickly out of sight and glanced around to see if anyone watching might have seen it. But still, he saw no one. He moved some boxes to ensure that Charlie made no more unwelcome appearances, and jumped down to swing the heavy doors shut again, locking the corpse away from prying eyes.
It was hot and uncomfortable inside his mask. Sweat was running into his eyes. He heaved himself back up into his cab. This was going to be a long couple of hours.
III
Amy lay on her back gazing up at the ceiling. Her right leg was raised and propped on MacNeil’s shoulder. He knelt in front of her and his big hands worked down the muscles of her calf, strong flat thumbs kneading giving flesh. He worked around her knee, and then down her thigh, in long sweeping strokes. She wished she could feel it. It was the strangest thing, knowing she was being touched, and yet having no sensation. She doubted if she would ever get used to it.
Occasionally she thought she had the faintest impression of pins and needles in her feet, and hope would flood back. Maybe one day life would return to these useless appendages. Maybe one day she really would walk again. The doctors said no. But on optimistic days she would tell herself that doctors could be wrong. And then on pessimistic days she feared that the pins and needles were only a figment of her imagination. Just wishful thinking.
But for MacNeil there was no question. Of course she would walk again. And she must keep the muscles supple and strong. It would be an awful thing to let them wither. And so he spent hours working her legs, exercising the muscles in groups, bending her legs at knee and ankle. Back and forth, back and forth. He had endless patience, it seemed. They never spoke during these sessions. He worked in silence, and she enjoyed a tranquillity she had never known before. Sometimes she closed her eyes and just drifted, her mind empty of all thoughts. At other times she would let it range over things that troubled her, problems at work, the estrangement of her brother. And often she would find answers, or partial solutions, or comfort in thoughts which had not occurred to her before.
Today she broke their unspoken code of silence. ‘I’ve brought her home,’ she said.
‘Who?’ MacNeil frowned and paused in mid-stroke.
‘Lyn.’
‘Who the hell’s Lyn?’
‘The little girl with the cleft palate.’
MacNeil leaned forward to look at her. ‘What are you talking about, Amy?’
‘That’s what I’m calling her. Lyn. She’s got to have a name, and I’ve always liked Lyn. I had a cousin called Lyn in Hong Kong, and I used to always wish my parents had called me that.’
‘I like Amy,’ MacNeil said. He started working her leg again. ‘What do you mean you’ve brought her home?’
‘I’m going to do her head. A reconstruction. It would help to know what she looks like, wouldn’t it? She’ll be very distinctive with that disfigured upper lip. Easily recognisable, I’d think.’
‘You mean you’ve got the skull with you here?’
Amy nodded.
‘Won’t it stink?’
‘A bit. But I’ll work at the French windows upstairs. You know, where there’s a little balcony overlooking the garden. As long as it’s dry, I’ll keep the windows open and it should be okay.’ She drew herself up on to her elbows. ‘Take me up and I’ll show you.’
MacNeil liked the space at the top of the house. There was room to breathe here, and the sense of elevation helped. It couldn’t have been more different from his claustrophobic little bedsit in Islington. He helped Amy set up a table at the French windows and gather together the materials she kept in a large cupboard against the back wall. He had never seen her working on a skull before, and had been quite taken aback by the row of heads that stood along the shelf in the middle of the cupboard. A bald man, a young woman, a boy, two older women, an unfinished man with a serious head injury.
She gathered her books and charts and dowels and cakes of plasticine around her, and MacNeil watched, fascinated, as she set up the skull on a pedestal, manoeuvring her wheelchair into the best position for working on it. The smell wasn’t too bad with the windows open.
‘You’re going to build a face over the skull itself?’
‘No, I’m going to make a plaster cast of the cranium, then cast the mandible in a cold-cure resin. We don’t want to damage what might be evidence.’
He watched, fascinated, as she began her preparations. ‘How do you know what the face looked like just from the skull? I mean, they all look the same, don’t they?’
Amy grinned. ‘Just like the Chinese?’
MacNeil felt his face colouring. ‘You know what I mean.’
She nodded and smiled and said, ‘I’m going to bore small holes at thirty-four reference points around the skull, and then glue little wooden dowels into them, just two-point-five millimetres in diameter. The dowels are marked at average soft tissue depths, according to a scale determined by a man called Helmer, who calculated them from ultrasound measurements made on living people. So they’re pretty accurate. Then I’ll sculpt the face, using what they call the American method. It’s a scientific rather than an artistic process. You join the average tissue depths with strips of plasticine about five millimetres wide, effectively building up the layers of muscle beneath the skin. The teeth and the jaw will determine the shape of the mouth, and in particular the cleft lip. The shape of the nasal bridge is decided by the dimensions of the nasal bones. There are charts and measurements to shape the line of the eyelids, and of course race will play a part in that.’