‘It’s all locked down and safe as houses. Honest.’ She paused, nursing her silent resentment at Amy’s anger. ‘So I suppose you won’t want to know what else I found, then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Hah. Got your interest now, haven’t I?’
‘Zoe...’ Amy’s voice carried its own warning.
‘It’s not real.’
Amy heard the words, but she didn’t understand them. ‘What do you mean it’s not real?’
‘The flu virus. It’s not the H5N1 mutant that’s killing everyone. It’s been genetically engineered.’
Amy was having difficulty taking on board the implications of what Zoe was saying. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Well, it’s all just code, right? When you boil it right down to basics, any virus is just a series of letters — code words. And somebody left some words in the code that shouldn’t be there. I mean, for example, you would find the words Stu I AGGCCT and Sma CCCGGG in synthetic polio. And you know these create a restriction site that is easily recognised by treating the DNA copy of the virus RNA with a battery of restriction enzymes that cut the DNA at that site.’
‘Woah! Jesus, Zoe, hold on! Speak English.’
‘I thought I was.’
‘Okay, think molecular genetics for idiots.’
She heard Zoe sighing at the other end of the phone. ‘People have been collecting library sequence banks for the flu virus for years. I’ve got them all on file. Took only a few minutes on my laptop to compare the RNA of the virus we got from the girl with the sequence banks on the hard drive. The introduced restriction sites stood out like a sore thumb. I’m telling you, that kid didn’t just have any old garden-variety flu. She had a twenty-four carat, genetically engineered humdinger.’
Amy sat for a moment replaying what Zoe had just told her. None of it made any sense. ‘Is that what killed her?’ she asked. ‘This man-made flu?’
Zoe blew air through her lips three miles away across town. ‘I haven’t got the first idea.’
Chapter Sixteen
I
MacNeil turned past the deserted South Kensington tube station into Old Brompton Road. The Lamborghini London franchise had been cleaned out long ago. The showroom windows were smashed; the floor space beyond, which had once been graced by some of the most expensive cars in the world, was empty and exposed to the elements. The Royal Bank of Scotland next door was all boarded up, its vaults cleared out by the bank itself and transferred to more secure premises. There was no point in the looters trying to break in, and so they had taken out their frustrations in a multicoloured display of graffiti comprising even more colourful language.
The bench in the tiny triangle of parkland at the road junction was normally inhabited by two or more drunks congregating to share their misery, to drink from cans in paper bags and fill the air with their cigarette smoke and hollow laughter. To MacNeil’s shame, he had almost always heard a Scots voice amongst them. But they were long gone. The soup kitchens were closed, and men raddled by years of drink were easy prey for H5N1.
There was less damage here than in the city centre, less evidence of looting. Old Brompton Road was largely residential with small shops at street level. Pizza Organic, Mail Boxes Etc., Waterstones. Poor pickings compared to the big stores downtown. And no self-respecting looter was going to be seen dead breaking into a bookshop. Still, most of the shops were boarded up, and there were few lights on in the windows of the flats and offices above.
MacNeil dropped down to second gear and cruised slowly along the street checking the numbers. He found Flight’s gallery on the corner of Cranley Place, next door to the steel-shuttered Café Lazeez. The windows of the gallery had been boarded up, and then pasted over with layer upon layer of peeling bill posters advertising everything from mail-order art to underground concerts in unnamed locations. There was some sort of crest above the door on the corner, and in Cranley Place itself, an entrance to the apartments above the gallery.
MacNeil turned into Cranley Place and found a spot to park. Rows of pristine, white-painted terraced town houses stretched off into the night, black wrought-iron balconies supported on pillared doorways. There were a few hotels and guest houses here, empty of course, but mostly these were private homes, great rambling houses divided and subdivided into luxury apartments. Prime real estate, light years removed from the scruffy two-bedroomed lower terrace that MacNeil had been able to afford in Forest Hill. On the far side of the street, on the shuttered windows of Knightsbridge Pianos, beneath a large sign which read BILL POSTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, some graffiti artist with a sense of humour had sprayed BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT!
Steel grilles protected the glass in Flight’s door beneath a red and green decorative lintel. There were two bell-pushes on the electronic entry system. One marked STUDIO, the other marked FLIGHT. MacNeil stood back and looked up. Lights were on in the first floor studio. The apartment above it was in darkness. He stepped forward and pressed the STUDIO bell. After a few moments, a rasping electronic hum accompanied a man’s voice issuing from a speaker set into the wall. ‘Yes?’
‘Mr Flight?’
A moment’s pause, and then a voice laden with suspicion. ‘Who wants to know?’
‘Detective Inspector Jack MacNeil, Mr Flight. I’m investigating a murder in Soho tonight.’
‘I’ve been here all evening, Inspector,’ Flight said quickly.
‘Yes, I don’t doubt that, sir. I know you didn’t kill him, but you might have known him. Can I come up?’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Kazinski, Mr Flight,’ MacNeil said. ‘Ronald Kazinski.’ There was another long silence, which MacNeil broke. ‘Can I come up, sir?’ he repeated.
‘Have you had the flu?’
‘No, sir. But I’m protected,’ MacNeil lied.
‘Put a mask on, if you have one. If you haven’t, I’ll give you one. And please wear gloves. I don’t want you touching anything in my studio.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The buzzer went, and MacNeil pushed the door open. A carpeted stairway led up to a first floor landing and a door marked STUDIO. There was a window in it, and Flight appeared on the other side of it, his face almost obscured by a double mask. Even from his side of the door, MacNeil could see that Flight was tall. He had a strangely cadaverous head covered with a steel grey stubble. Blue eyes blinked suspiciously at him through the glass. ‘Let me see your hands,’ Flight said, and MacNeil held up his latex-gloved hands. ‘And your ID.’ Patiently, MacNeil took out his warrant card and opened it up to the glass. Flight scrutinised it carefully, before unlocking the door and stepping away from it. ‘You can’t be too careful these days,’ he said. ‘And please keep your distance.’
MacNeil walked into Flight’s studio. What had once been a polished wooden floor was stained and scarred and littered with the debris of an untidy artistic temperament. It was a large, well-lit space that covered just about the entire area of the gallery below. A dozen works in various stages of completion sat on the floor or on work benches. A grotesquely deformed head, intertwined arms, a mangled torso with breasts and a penis. The walls were covered with sketches. There was a potter’s wheel, and tall cabinets with half-open drawers full of art materials — paints, inks, dyes, sculpting tools, tracing paper. Centre stage was Flight’s work table, and the piece he was currently sculpting. An arm raised on its fingertips, partially fleshed, partially stripped down to the tendons and bone, half a head growing out of the armpit, an exposed brain sectioned through its centre revealing all its folds and colours and interior textures. MacNeil wondered how it remained standing, until he saw the support spike that passed through the upper arm. For all its unnatural distortion, there was an unpleasantly lifelike quality about it. Which was true of all of Flight’s works.