MacNeil was taken aback. ‘Died of it?’
‘Impossible to tell. But she’d either had it and recovered, or she was suffering from it when she died.’
MacNeil thought about it. He had no idea, either, if there was any significance in it.
Then Amy said, ‘What’s weird about it, though, is that it wasn’t the H5N1 human variant that’s killing everyone else.’
MacNeil frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It was another variation on the H5N1 bird flu virus. A man-made one.’
Chapter Seventeen
I
Amy hung up and stared at the head gazing back at her in the dim lamplight of the attic sitting room. Her eye was drawn again to the cleft lip. It was as if the child had been caught on a fisherman’s hook and then thrown back, permanently disfigured, into an ocean in which she would always find herself swimming against the tide.
It could just as easily have been Amy. Some tiny glitch in the genetic code determining the course of a life, separating the smart from the stupid, the beautiful from the ugly. Amy was both smart and beautiful. It wasn’t a genetic glitch which had determined the course of her life, it was a drunk behind the wheel of a car, and five seconds of madness.
They had other things in common, though — Amy and Lyn. A racial inheritance, perhaps even a cultural one. A girl born into poverty in China had little chance. Amy knew it only too well. She had been born in England, not China. She had been born into relative affluence, not poverty. But thousands of years of cultural preference for a son, rather than a daughter, had been hard for her parents to shake off. She had been the first born, but it was her younger brother, when he arrived, who had taken pride of place.
Had she been born in impoverished rural China, she may well have ended up in an orphanage, like millions of her peers. Abandoned by her family on the doorstep of a police station somewhere, so that they might try again for a son. The Chinese government policy of one child per family meant there were no second chances — unless you lived in the city, had money and knew how to buy your way around the system.
For as long as anyone could remember, in Chinese society, when the son married he brought his wife to live with his parents. And when the parents grew old, it was the responsibility of the son and his wife to look after them. But if you had a daughter, she would leave to look after her husband’s parents, and you would have to fend for yourself in your old age. So it was little wonder that boys were prized and girls despised.
Amy wondered if it had been Lyn’s fate to end up in an orphanage somewhere, unloved, unwanted, even by childless Western couples desperate to adopt — her deformity always working against her. And yet, here she was — or had been — living in London, this bastion of Western affluence and privilege. But only to meet a fate worse than any orphanage, murdered and hacked up and dumped in a hole in the ground.
A wwwooo-oop sound turned Amy’s head towards her computer. The window of her most recent conversation with Sam was still up on the screen. And now Sam had sent a new message. Amy manoeuvred her wheelchair over to the desk to see what Sam was saying.
— Amy, are you still around?
The cursor blinked with endless patience, awaiting Amy’s response.
— Hi, Sam. Yeah, I’m still up. It’s late.
— I couldn’t sleep for thinking about your little girl.
— Me neither. She keeps staring at me.
— It’s a terrible thing when you can put a face to someone, but not a name, or a history. I wish I could see her, too.
— I could take a photo of the head and email it to you.
— Maybe in the morning. The cursor blinked for a bit. Then — How is Jack holding up?
— I don’t know. He sounded pretty weird when I spoke to him last. I think he’s throwing himself into this investigation just to stop himself thinking.
— What do you mean, weird?
— I don’t know. Just a bit... spaced, I guess.
— How is the investigation going?
— He seems to be making progress. He thinks he knows where she was killed.
The cursor blinked again for a long time.
— How on earth does he know that?
— I’ve no idea.
— Where does he think it happened?
— He said something about a house out near Wandsworth Common.
— That’s not too specific.
— He wasn’t being very specific.
Their conversation lapsed. More blinking. This time two minutes, maybe three, passed without any further exchange. Amy found her eyes wandering across the room to the child’s head once more. The girl was watching her, almost reproachful in her silence. Why couldn’t Amy do more? How difficult could it be to find her killer?
Then wwwooo-oop.
— Amy, did you ask for a DNA sample in the end?
— Yes, Sam. Might be a day or two, though.
— I wouldn’t get your hopes up for finding a match.
— I’m not. And then Amy remembered about Zoe. — I did ask for a PCR test, though, to see if she’d had the flu.
Another long wait.
— Why did you do that?
— You always tell me every little detail helps when you’re trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle.
The cursor blinked some more.
— So did you get a result?
— Yeah. We’ve got a post-grad molecular genetics student training at the lab. Zoe. She’s a bit of a ladette. But really clever. She’ll be good when she grows up. Stupid girl took so long over the test that she missed the curfew, so she’s stuck at the lab all night. Tom’ll be pleased. He can’t stand her!
— What did she find?
— The little girl did have the flu.
There was a short, cursor-blinking hiatus before Sam replied.
— Which doesn’t really help with anything, does it?
— I suppose not. But here’s something strange — Zoe said it wasn’t H5N1. At least, not the version that’s caused the pandemic.
— How does she know that?
— She said she’d recovered the virus, and the RNA coding. It’s all a bit beyond me, Sam. Something to do with restriction sites and code words that shouldn’t be there. Anyway, she said this virus was genetically engineered.
Their conversation lapsed for so long, Amy began to think that Sam had gone.
— Hello, Sam, are you still there?
— I’m still here, Amy.
— So what do you think? Amy watched the hypnotic blinking of the cursor.
— I think that changes everything.
II
Pinkie watched the drab rows of mustard-harled council flats drift by. It was fun driving about in the deserted city. No traffic, no lights. So much easier to get around. And he hadn’t been stopped once. It was sufficient for him to slow to walking pace as he approached the army checkpoints. Their cameras fed his number into the computer in seconds and they waved him on. VIP. No contact required. Everyone was happy.