‘Good man.’ MacNeil gave him the full address.
‘Jack...’ Dawson paused, something clearly on his mind. ‘About tonight...’
‘Rufus, I’m sorry.’ MacNeil pre-empted him.
‘No, I’m sorry, Jack. We all are. Bad enough what happened without...’ His voice tailed off. ‘Shit, we all feel really bad about it.’
‘Don’t. You didn’t know. And I appreciate the thought. I really do. Tell the guys thanks.’
He hung up and sat in the dark cocoon of his car, staring down the length of Trinity Road towards the prison. He’d heard that the flu had gone through the prisons like wildfire. Nature’s own form of capital punishment. Indiscriminate, all possibility of appeal denied. Nothing was moving out there. It was perfectly still. No sound. No cats, no barking dog. No traffic. He could almost have believed he was the last man alive. It felt like he was.
‘Scotland the Brave’ demolished the silence. He glanced at the screen on his mobile. A voicemail notification. There was a message for him. He hesitated for just a moment, then decided not to listen to it. Whatever it was could wait. He had more pressing business.
He walked back down Routh Road and stood gazing up at the house. It was where she had spent the last six months of her life. Very probably where she had died. She had walked these streets with a little satchel, to and from school every day. Eyes averted, perhaps, to avoid the stares of the people she would pass on the way. What kind of teasing and cruelty must she have suffered at school? Even the teachers would have found it difficult not to let their eyes be drawn. How sad that everything else about her — her personality, intelligence, character, temperament — would have been blighted by a single physical defect. How sad that so much is judged on appearance, rather than substance.
He went through the gate into Le Saux’s garden. He had warned Le Saux that it might be better to turn off his security lights, just for tonight, if he wanted to avoid being repeatedly disturbed. The blue door into the old bomb shelter opened into darkness. MacNeil felt his way through it, eyes adjusting to the little light that fell in from the street behind him. There were gardening tools, and watering cans and plant pots. It smelled earthy damp in here, and the chill cut right through his heavy outer coat. At the far end a door opened into the back garden. It was even darker here. No light made it through from the street out front. A high brick wall separated the two gardens. MacNeil felt along the top to see if there was glass set into the cement. But all he felt was soft spongy moss. He braced himself and jumped, pulling himself up, the toes of his shoes scraping for footholds, until he got one leg over, straddling the wall for a brief moment before dropping down on the other side, and into the garden of number thirty-three. He crouched in a short length of paved alleyway that ran along the side of a huge modern conservatory built out from the back of the house. And he listened to see if he had disturbed any of the neighbours. Le Saux had taken his advice. The security lights had stayed off, and there was no hint of activity in any of the neighbouring houses.
What he was about to do was illegal. But to get a warrant now, in the middle of the night, given all the circumstances, would have been next to impossible. It was unlikely he could even get a magistrate out of bed. If he found something in the house, then someone else could always come back with the proper paperwork and search the place legitimately. But MacNeil wasn’t prepared to wait. He was strangely driven. Not only by the fact that in just five hours he would no longer be a police officer. But by a compelling sense of urgency. A feeling that time was somehow of the essence. The murder of the two boys at the flats in Lambeth. The execution of Kazinski in Soho. The carefully arranged corpse of Jonathan Flight in South Kensington. Everywhere he went people were dying. People that someone was very anxious to keep quiet. The killer’s sense of urgency had transmitted itself to MacNeil, and he was determined to press on now, regardless of the niceties or the consequences.
Somewhere beyond the veil of clouds that masked the night sky, a nearly full moon was trying to force its way through. But only the merest trace of moonshine permeated the black folds of rain-laden nimbostratus. An icy wind rustled through the long, dead grass that choked the garden, rattling the leaves of evergreen shrubs left to grow ragged and wild.
MacNeil pressed his face against the glass of the conservatory and tried to see inside. But the dark was impenetrable. He skirted around its edge and caught his shin on a heavy marble planter and cursed violently under his breath.
Which was when he heard the movement in the grass. Bigger than any gust of wind might have made, more substantial than any domestic animal or urban fox. He stood motionless, listening. There was someone there. He could feel the presence, was almost certain he could hear the person breathing, staying very still, perhaps waiting for MacNeil to make the next move. Although he could not see the figure in the grass, whoever it was could probably see him. He decided to get pro-active. ‘Who’s there?’ he called, and thought how foolish it sounded. As if anyone was going to tell him!
But his words spurred a sudden movement off to his left in the shadow of the undergrowth. He heard the rapid whoosh-whoosh of dead grass against running legs as a figure darted towards the back fence. He could barely see the intruder, a light, shadowy figure, someone quite a bit smaller than himself. MacNeil went after him, throwing himself through the wilderness of the back garden, abandoning any attempt at stealth. Just short of the high wooden fence that ran along the back of the garden, he grabbed a handful of what felt like jaggy tweed, and both he and the intruder fell hard amongst a pile of discarded plastic plant pots next to a dilapidated potting shed. The plastic whined and cracked and snapped beneath their combined weight. Whoever he’d caught squirmed and wriggled below him, tiny squeals of panic issuing forth in the dark. And then a light suddenly exploded in his face, blinding him. A torch. He grabbed the hand that held it, and its beam skewed off into the night. Another hand scratched and clawed at his face until he grabbed it, too, and turned the torch on to the face of his attacker.
He was almost shocked to see the pale, frightened face of a middle-aged woman with short, silver-grey hair. But although there was fear in her dark eyes, there was determination there, too. She bucked one way then the other, desperately trying to free her wrists from MacNeil’s iron grasp. Her torch spun away into the grass, its beam pointing back at them, illuminating their struggle and casting its shadow against the fence.
‘I’ll scream!’ she said in a voice made so tiny by fear that it barely penetrated the dark.
MacNeil said breathlessly, ‘If you scream, then so will I.’
Something in his voice stopped her struggling. She lay on the ground below him, gasping for breath, a strange, wiry creature in a tweed jacket and skirt with a white blouse and pearl necklace. ‘Who the hell are you?’ she gasped.
‘Detective Inspector Jack MacNeil. Who the hell are you?’
He saw her panic recede. ‘My name’s Sara Castelli,’ she said in a voice that was unmistakably North American in origin. ‘I’m an investigator with the HPA.’
‘And what’s the HPA?’
‘The Health Protection Agency. I can show you my ID if you like?’
MacNeil let go of her wrists, but remained straddling her waist so that she was still pinned firmly to the ground. He reached to retrieve her torch and shone it on her.
‘Please don’t shine that in my face,’ she said sharply, and he averted the beam to follow her hand into an inside pocket from which she pulled out a laminated HPA identity card on a chain. It had her photograph on it. And her full name. Sara Elizabeth Castelli. It also had her date of birth, and MacNeil made a quick calculation. She was nearly sixty, and he suddenly felt guilty that he had manhandled her so roughly. He rolled to one side and got quickly to his feet, holding out a hand to help her to hers. But she ignored it and got up unaided, brushing pieces of broken plastic and mud and dead leaves from her jacket and skirt. ‘Ruined,’ she muttered. ‘You clearly have no idea how to treat a lady, Mr MacNeil.’