‘You’re on now, boy. Double shift. I figured since it’s your last day you could hack it. I’m another two men down.’
‘Shit.’
‘Shit’s right. Someone’s dumped in our backyard and I’ve got no one else to send.’
MacNeil tipped his head back and looked blearily at the great clock in the sky. He had no idea how else he would have filled the next twelve hours anyway. He could never sleep when it was light. ‘What’s the deal?’
‘Bones. Bunch of workmen on the site at Archbishop’s Park found them at the bottom of a hole.’
‘Sounds like they need an archaeologist, not a cop.’
‘They were in a leather holdall, and they weren’t there yesterday.’
‘Ah.’
‘Better go straight down. The ministry’s shouting blue fucking murder because they’ve had to stop work. Wrap it up fast, eh? I don’t need this shit.’
MacNeil winced as the phone crackled in his ear. Laing had hung up.
In the bathroom across the landing, MacNeil stared back at his vacant reflection as he brushed his teeth. Other people’s brushes crowded together in a cloudy tooth mug. He kept all his things in his room, and touched nothing in the bathroom. He even sprayed and washed the taps before touching them. He needed a shave. And a few more hours of sleep might have helped ameliorate the penumbrous shadows beneath his eyes. Nothing, however, was going to undo the damage of the last few months. The mask that stress had etched on a face not yet forty. It was not an image he cared to dwell on.
He scraped his razor across dark stubble and heard someone stirring in the room next door. The car salesman. When MacNeil had first taken a room here, the landlord, who still lived on the ground floor, had taken him through a roll-call of his fellow inmates. A divorced doctor, barred from practice, who could usually rustle up a medication for most ills. A handy person to have around the house, especially these days. The car salesman. Gay, the landlord thought, but not ready to accept it. There were two officials of the railworkers’ union, only it wasn’t called that any more and he couldn’t remember what they called it now. One was from Manchester, another from Leeds, and they were serving their time on the union’s executive committee in London. The union had a long-standing arrangement in Baalbec Road. There was only one woman in the house. She smelled a bit, and looked like death, and the landlord was sure she was on drugs. But she paid like clockwork, so who was he to judge her.
It was a strange collection of misplaced humanity, living on the edge of society, in a kind of twilight zone where you neither lived nor died. Just existed. When he had first moved in — was it really only five months ago? — MacNeil had felt like an outsider. Someone looking in. An observer. He didn’t belong, and he wouldn’t be staying. But they must all have thought that once. And now, like them, he couldn’t see a way out. He was no longer on the outside looking in, but on the inside looking out.
He had chosen this area because he felt it was somewhere he could bring Sean. It was no slum. There existed here, still, a sense of faded gentility. Highbury Field was at the end of the road. Somewhere he and Sean could kick a ball, walk a dog — if they’d had one. Some of the street names, too, had a ring of home about them. Aberdeen, Kelvin, Seaforth, Fergus. There was something familiar, and comforting, in the echoes of a Scotland he had left long ago. There was a swimming pool just up from Highbury Corner. The landlord told him it had once been open to the elements. But a less hardy generation had built walls around it and put a roof on top. Somewhere else he and Sean could spend — what was it they called it? — quality time. And MacNeil figured he would get them season tickets to go and see the Gunners at the Emirates Stadium.
But Sean’s mother had refused to let him cross the city to Islington. It was too dangerous, she said. Maybe when the emergency was over.
MacNeil pulled on his coat and turned up the collar. His suit needed pressing, and his white shirt was fraying just a little around the top of the collar. The top button was missing, and his tie was tied tight to hide it. He pulled on his gloves and hurried down the stairs to the narrow hallway at the bottom. There was a time, even just a month ago, when the landlord would have poked his head around the door to say good morning. But now none of them spoke. They were all too afraid.
III
As he pulled the door shut, he could hear his phone ringing at the top of the house. He didn’t want to speak to Laing again, and so he quickly fished his mobile from his pocket and turned it off.
The air in his car was icy cold as he slipped behind the wheel. There had been no frost, but condensation clouded the windscreen. He set the blowers going and turned down Calabria Road. The radio was playing a selection of hits from last year. No one had released anything new in the last two months. The music segued from one song to another, and MacNeil was glad of the absence of the mindless, prattling DJs who used to fill the early morning airwaves. He had missed the seven-thirty newscast.
As always, his route into the city was determined by the army checkpoints. Certain areas were simply off-limits, even to him. There were demarcation lines that would require special permission to cross. He drove south to Pentonville, turning west along Pentonville Road into Euston Road. It was nearly seven forty-five, and the air was suffused with a grey light that forced its way through low pewtery cloud that seemed to graze the tops of distant skyscrapers. In another life, taxis and buses and commuter traffic would have choked the city’s arteries, like cholesterol. MacNeil still could not get used to the empty streets. There was a chilling quiet in this early morning light. He passed the occasional troop carrier, soldiers with gas masks and goggles staring from beneath khaki canvas covers, like faceless troopers from a Star Wars movie, nursing rifles they had been forced all too frequently to use.
Now that there was daylight, there was a limited traffic of private and commercial vehicles with the requisite clearance to move around designated areas of the city, tracked by cameras and satellite. Controls were most stringent around the city centre, where much of the looting had taken place. The government had used the old congestion charging infrastructure to monitor and control all vehicles moving in and out of the area. MacNeil cruised along its northern limit, passing a deserted Euston Station, before turning south into Tottenham Court Road, where a camera recorded his number plate and fed it directly into the central computer. Without clearance he could expect to be stopped within minutes.
The city’s shopping streets were like a battlefield. Those shops which hadn’t already had their windows smashed had boarded them up. The burned-out carcasses of stolen vehicles smouldered at the roadside, the debris and detritus of a once civilised society scattered across ruined streets. The wreckage of another night of violence. The Dominion Theatre, opposite the Tottenham Court Road Underground station, was a blackened, burned-out shell. Every time it rained, the air still filled up with the charred smell from The Death of a Salesman — the last piece to be performed there. McDonald’s too, in Oxford Street, had been gutted. Flame-grilled burgers overcooked. The Harmony Sex Shop had been broken into so many times, the owners no longer bothered to board it up, and a scantily clad siren in black leather pouted defiantly at MacNeil as he drove past.
Further south, The MouseTrap had finally ended its record-breaking run, and St. Martin’s Theatre, with all its neon lights smashed and ripped from the walls, looked sad and neglected.
He was stopped at an army checkpoint at Cambridge Circus. He should have been used to it by now, but he could never feel comfortable with half a dozen semi-automatic rifles pointed at his head. A sullen soldier glowered at him from behind his mask, keeping his distance and reaching for his papers with latex-gloved hands. He handed them back quickly, anxious to be rid of them, as if somehow they might be contaminated — which well they might.