In the distance, an ambulance siren pierced the cold January air. Another victim. Another bed required. Every hospital in the city was full, but at least the high mortality rate meant that beds were constantly becoming available. Illness had reduced staffing by nearly thirty per cent. Health workers were at greatest risk, and suffering the highest casualties. In spite of FluKill. Nobody went to work any more. Only a handful of shops were open for a few hours a day. There was no public transport. The airports had been closed indefinitely. The economy of the capital was in free fall, and the rest of the world was ready to do anything it could to help the city contain its sickness. Primarily by banning all traffic in and out of the UK. It was, of course, only a matter of time before the virus swept the world. But if it could be contained long enough to produce a vaccine...
MacNeil sighed and felt the first spots of rain on his face as he turned it up towards the bruised blue and black of the low cloud overhead.
‘Jack.’
He turned his head towards a Tyvek figure trudging across tyre tracks cut deep in the mud.
‘That’s us done.’
MacNeil checked the time. They’d taken less than the allotted two hours. ‘Find anything?’
The forensics man held up a clear plastic bag, and MacNeil saw a scrap of something faintly pink in it. ‘Might be something. Might be nothing.’
‘What is it?’
The officer handed it to him. ‘Remains of an Underground ticket. Off-peak, one-day pass. Can’t read the date on it, but we might just be able to retrieve something from the magnetic strip.’
MacNeil took the bag and held it up to the light. The printing on the ticket was blurred and smudged by the rain and all but obliterated by mud. One corner of it was torn away. It was nearly eight weeks since they’d closed the Underground. If this was all they had to go on, they weren’t going to get very far. He handed it back to the forensics man and jumped down from his wheely bin. He turned to the foreman. ‘Go build your hospital.’
III
Amy ran her hand back over the smooth surface of the skull and felt a peculiar empathy for this little girl. There was no sign of damage. Except for the trauma inflicted by Nature on the maxilla. There was no way to determine cause of death, unless the tissue recovered by Tom revealed poison of some kind. Amy suspected that was unlikely. Why would you poison a child? A tiny, frail-boned creature like this? She would have been utterly vulnerable to the strength of an adult, defenceless against it.
That someone had killed her was beyond doubt. Why else would they have gone to the trouble of stripping all the flesh from her bones and removing the evidence? And yet, to have gone to all that bother, and then simply dumped the bones on a building site, was strangely careless. But that was for others to worry about. All of Amy’s focus and expertise would go into trying to identify her. To bring her back to life in a way that might lead them to her killer.
She looked at the empty eye sockets and knew that once they had held dark, liquid brown eyes. She knew that once this scalp had grown thick, blue-black hair. What length it might have been was impossible now to know. Amy ran her fingers along the high line of the left cheek and down to the jaw, distinguished by its deformity and the disfigured smile which would once have characterised it.
She was aware of Tom stooping down beside her. His face close to hers. ‘Don’t look now, but here comes the ape man.’
Amy raised her eyes and saw MacNeil making his way across the lab. She looked at him dispassionately, and wondered how she might view him if she didn’t know him. He was very tall — his most distinguishing feature. But not skinny. He was built in proportion. Which made him a big man. He certainly wasn’t conventionally good-looking, but there was extraordinary warmth in his green eyes flecked with orange. He didn’t suit his hair cut so short, but there was something distinguished in the touch of grey at either temple. His suit was too tight, and his coat too big, and there was a generally dishevelled air about him. One of his shoelaces was undone, she noticed. And then saw that his shoes were covered in dirt, and that he was leaving a little trail of dried mud in his wake. The ape man, Tom called him. Of course, Tom didn’t like him because he thought MacNeil was homophobic.
Amy couldn’t remember the first time she’d laid eyes on MacNeil, so it was impossible now for her to imagine that first impression. There were still odd little gaps in her memory from before the accident. Little things that frustrated her, sometimes to the point of tears. Though only when she was on her own. Tom would have no truck with self pity. But he stood beside her now, arms folded across his chest, like her guardian protector, jaw thrust towards the approaching MacNeil, almost daring him to be rude to his poor, crippled little friend. After all, it was he who had got her the work here after she had been unable to carry on as before.
MacNeil stopped in front of the table, ignoring him, and looked at the child’s skeleton. Then he looked at Amy and made a vague nod of acknowledgement. ‘So what can you tell me?’
‘Quite a lot, actually.’ Amy focused her attention on the child again. She ran the backs of her fingers across the forehead, almost as if she were still alive. ‘She was a poor soul, really.’
‘How do you know it’s a she?’
‘How do I know she is a she,’ Amy corrected him, as if the child might be offended by being described as it. ‘There is no single, conclusive factor,’ she said. ‘Rather, an accumulation of pointers, and a little instinct.’
‘Let’s leave your instinct out of it,’ MacNeil said, ‘and stick to the facts.’
Amy was unruffled. ‘Okay. The facts. Females generally have smaller, less developed muscle attachments than the male.’ She ran a fingertip along one femur. ‘You can quite clearly see the ridges here which provided attachments for the muscles and tendons.’ She moved up to the pelvic area. ‘The female pelvis is constructed to meet the needs of childbearing and has several features which distinguish it from the male. Notably wider hips.’
MacNeil allowed a tiny smile of recollection to stretch his lips. He remembered his mother describing the girl next door — when contemplating her as a possible future wife for her son — as having good childbearing hips.
Amy glanced up and caught the shadow of his smile. ‘Do you find this amusing, DI MacNeil?’
‘No, Miss Wu.’
She gave him a long look before returning to the bones on the table. ‘Apart from general appearance, a number of measurements can be made of the pelvic bones to help establish sex. Primarily the difference in ratio between the lengths of the pubis and ischium, commonly known as the ischium-pubis index.’
‘Of course, you’ll be familiar with the ischium-pubis index,’ Tom said, an irritating little smile turning up the corners of his mask.
‘Of course,’ MacNeil said. And to Amy, ‘And you took those measurements?’
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘In themselves, not conclusive. She is just a child, after all, and at her age, sexual characteristics have not yet fully developed. But the index does tend to suggest female rather than male.’ She picked up the child’s head and cupped it gently in her palms. ‘The skull is often a better indicator. For a start, it’s smaller than you would expect of a male. The mastoid processes and orbital ridges are less prominent in the female, and the eye sockets and forehead are more rounded.’ She traced those curvatures to illustrate her point. Then she looked MacNeil square in the eye. ‘I’m around ninety-five per cent certain this is a female.’