‘I suppose it must be.’
‘So who was Amy talking to all day?’
But MacNeil just shook his head. It could have been anyone. Text on a screen. How could you ever know? He stepped over the body and moved the computer mouse to clear away the screen saver. And there, on the screen, was the same dialogue box he had seen on Amy’s computer. Dr Castelli got to her feet and looked at it.
‘It must have been like a three-way chat,’ she said. ‘A conference call. Only, Amy never knew there was a third party.’ She took the mouse from MacNeil and clicked to see the participants. ‘It only shows Sam and Amy. So the other person must also have been logged in as Sam, from another computer somewhere else. Amy had no idea she wasn’t talking to her mentor.’
The cursor was blinking steadily at the end of Amy’s last message. Sam, are you still there? Hello? Sam? Talk to me!
It was a dead end. Literally. ‘So there’s no way of ever knowing for sure who it was she was talking to,’ MacNeil said.
‘Unless he’s still there.’
He looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, the chat’s still open. Maybe our phantom “Sam” is still online.’
‘How can we tell?’
‘Ask him.’ The doctor looked at MacNeil, one eyebrow raised, and he realised what she meant. He pulled up the chair and sat down at the keyboard, and then realised that his banana fingers were never going to type anything very accurately.
‘Here, you’d better do it,’ he said, and stood up to let her in.
‘What’ll I say?’
MacNeil thought about it. Who had Amy been talking to? Logic said it could only have been Smith. And they knew now that Smith was Roger Blume. ‘Hello, Dr Blume,’ he said.
Dr Castelli looked at him, and then nodded, understanding why. Her fingers rattled across the keyboard.
— Hello, Dr Blume.
The cursor blinked silently for a long time. ‘He’s not there,’ MacNeil said. Then a wwwooo-oop sound alerted them to an incoming message.
— Mr MacNeil, I presume.
MacNeil carefully peeled off his gloves and nudged the doctor aside. He needed direct contact, no matter how painful. He typed carefully.
— Yes.
— What took you so long?
— You’re not an easy man to find.
— And now that you’ve found me?
— Where’s Amy?
— Ah, straight to the point.
— It’s over, Blume.
— Not until the fat lady sings.
— We have blood from the house in Routh Road. We have a photograph of you from a reflection in Choy’s glasses in one of her passport pics. We know that Stein-Francks owns the house. And you have been identified by one of your neighbours.
— And I have everything else, Mr MacNeil. The bones, the head, the marrow, all the samples and tests. Without which you have nothing.
MacNeil sat staring at the screen. If that was true, then Blume was right. They did have nothing. With no body, there was no murder. No way to prove anything. And any evidence they did have had been obtained illegally.
‘Smug bastard!’ Dr Castelli muttered at the computer.
— What’s wrong, MacNeil? Cat got your tongue?
MacNeil looked at the cat still watching them from across the room. Had they been face to face, he might have found words to throw back at Blume. But the keyboard defeated him.
— Oh, and one other thing. I also have Tom. And Amy. So perhaps we can trade.
— Trade what?
— Whatever residual evidence you might have, in exchange for your girlfriend.
‘Don’t believe a word of it,’ Dr Castelli said. ‘He’s a lying little shit.’
MacNeil thought for a moment before typing.
— Where and when?
— The London Eye. But you’d better be quick, Mr MacNeil. It’s after five, and it would be best to have business completed before the curfew is lifted, and you become just another private citizen.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I
The London Eye was a Ferris wheel for grown-ups on the South Bank of the Thames. Like the wheel of a giant’s bicycle, it stood one hundred and thirty-five metres high, comprising seventeen thousand tonnes of steel and cable, and had been built in an age of optimism to celebrate the millennium. More than thirty glass capsules turned around its outside edge on circular mounting rings as it revolved. The unrestricted views of London from its highest point were unparalleled. Before the emergency, fifteen thousand tourists a day flocked to fill its capsules. But since the arrival of the flu, it had stood silent and still, a constant daily reminder to the people of London that things had changed. Perhaps irrevocably.
Pinkie sat in the wooden control hut, amongst the broken glass, and surveyed the command panel with its green and red push lights. It was all quite simple, really. No great mystique. It was the sort of thing you dreamt of as a child, to have that kind of power at your fingertips. Press this button to make it go, press that button to make it stop. This one opens the door, this one locks it again, each pod individually controlled.
He looked across the landing and departure deck and saw Tom and Amy locked away in their glass pod. He had made Tom carry her in and prop her up on the slatted oval bench at its centre. Now it was a prison without bars. Just glass. Could there be any worse kind of prison than one from which you could always see out? One from which freedom was ever visible, a constant reminder of your own lack of it?
Pinkie knew he could not have survived in prison. Of course, they had never charged him. He had killed a man to protect his mother, and the authorities had deemed in any case that he was too young to accept any legal responsibility for his actions. But later, when he had started doing it for pleasure, and money, he knew that should he ever be caught he would have to take his own life, too. He could never be shut away in a confined space like that for days, weeks, years, the door locked — as it always had been in the cupboard under the stairs. The breathlessness would have crushed him.
He wasn’t feeling so good now. Fluid was gathering around him on the floor. He felt nauseous and weak. His muscles were seizing up. He knew that the computer screen was casting light on his face, and that if he turned to his right he would see his reflection in the window which looked out on to the queuing area. But he did not want to see what he looked like. He wanted to remember himself as he had been the last time he looked in the mirror. He knew he wasn’t handsome — he had never harboured such illusions — but he’d had good, strong features. He couldn’t bear to see himself as he was now.
The gurgling in his chest was getting worse. It was becoming harder to breathe. Where was Mr Smith? He should have been here long ago as arranged in their exchange of texts on the dead soldier’s phone. Pinkie looked out of the window. All the floodlit towers and spires of the Houses of Parliament pierced the black sky on the far side of the river, reflecting in the slow, steady flow of black water. A noise to his left made him turn, and there was Mr Smith, finally, standing in the doorway looking at him open-mouthed, eyes wide with horror. And Pinkie was reminded again of how he looked to others.