DS Rufus Dawson slapped a Post-it on the screen in front of MacNeil. He was a big red-haired Irishman with a strange hybrid accent which owed as much to his upbringing in New Zealand as his Irish heritage. An inveterate joker, always with a ready one-liner and an infectious laugh, he had been uncharacteristically subdued in recent weeks. There wasn’t much he could find to laugh about these days. ‘Phil called from Lambeth Road with a name and address. A match for the print they found on the Underground ticket. He said he was going to fax more info.’ He was about to go again, but something in MacNeil’s demeanour stopped him. He gave him a long look. ‘You alright, mate?’
‘Yeah, fine, Ruf, thanks.’
He peeled the Post-it off the computer and looked at Rufus’s scrawl. Ronald Kazinski, was the name on the piece of paper. There was an address in South Lambeth. He got up and went to see if Phil’s fax had come in. It was sitting in the in-tray.
Kazinski was thirty-one. He had dark, thinning hair in the smudged mugshot that accompanied his details. High cheekbones and wide-set eyes. He had been an undertaker’s assistant at a south-side crematorium for the last two and a half years. Shortly after the start of the emergency he had been pressed into government service at the official body disposal centre set up south of the river in the derelict Battersea Power Station. His fingerprints were in the AFIS computer because he had a police record for reset. Now instead of handling stolen goods, he was disposing of dead bodies. MacNeil wondered if he had also been responsible for disposing of the bones of the little Chinese girl in Archbishop’s Park. It was an odd coincidence that his print should have been found on an old Underground ticket picked up near where the bones had been dumped. And coincidences, odd or otherwise, were not something in which MacNeil was inclined to believe.
He pulled on his coat and called over to Dawson, ‘If Laing’s looking for me, you can tell him I’ve gone to talk to Kazinski.’
II
In the Middle Ages, the site of Battersea Power Station was known as Battersea Fields, an area frequented by vagabonds and undesirables. In the 1800s it was used for pigeon shooting and county fairs. The Duke of Wellington and Lord Winchelsea were alleged to have fought a duel here, from which both walked away unscathed. The power station, with its four iconic chimneys, was built in the 1930s and belched thick, black smoke into the air above the city for half a century before being shut down in the 1980s. They took off the roof to remove the giant turbines, and for nearly thirty years the building had been exposed to the elements. Ambitious plans by a private consortium to convert the site into a leisure, retail and hotel complex, while retaining the power station’s distinctive outer shell, had been temporarily shelved by the government. A makeshift roof had been raised over the main hall, and the four chimneys were once again belching smoke into the skies over London. But it was not coal ferried up the river on barges that they were burning. It was human bodies. Victims of the pandemic. The smoke, however, was just as black, and hung over the south side of the river in a ghostly pall.
MacNeil drove past hoardings which hid the site from prying eyes. Hoardings raised by developers in more optimistic times. They created a bizarre screen of painted green fields and trees beneath a clear blue sky. Above them the red-brick towers of the power station pushed up into the real sky, dark and angry, and pierced on each corner by the tall white chimneys that bled off the fumes from the furnaces below. To the south-west, tall cranes stood idle over unfinished apartment blocks. To the north-east, the new Covent Garden Market — which described itself as The Larder of London — was deserted. And all along Chelsea Park Road, giant posters shouted slogans at empty streets — The Industrial Revolution is Over; The Information Age Has Ended; and I Think, Therefore I Can. Welcome to the Ideas Generation. MacNeil glanced up at the smoke hanging overhead and thought, welcome to hell.
He turned into Kirtling Street and drove up to the gatehouse, drawing up outside blue-painted metal gates. Opposite the gate was an army jeep with a machine gun mounted in the back. Two soldiers sat smoking through cotton masks. A security man in green uniform appeared on the other side of the gate. He too wore a white cotton mask, and kept his distance. MacNeil got out of his car and stood looking at him through the bars of the gate. ‘You got papers?’ the man called.
MacNeil held up his warrant card. ‘Police,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to one of your employees. A Ronald Kazinski.’
‘Hold on,’ the security man said. He went back into the gatehouse, and MacNeil saw, beyond the gate, a low building of odd angular-shaped white plastic and glass. It housed a model of the developer’s plans for the complex. But they had never imagined this. On the grass next to it were two larger-than-life bronze statues. A man, and a woman holding a baby, both with their hands raised in salute. To what, was anyone’s guess. To life, maybe, MacNeil thought. In which case there was something more than ironic about it. But they did seem to complement the sloganising posters he had seen earlier. There was something almost Stalinesque about them.
An electronic lock released the gate and it started swinging slowly open. The security man called from the door of the gatehouse, ‘Drive straight up to the administration block and ask for Mr Hartson. He’s in charge.’
MacNeil drove past the saluting statues and through another gate to a brick-built office block that rose halfway up the outer wall of the power station. Across a wasteland of crumbling asphalt, diggers and cranes stood motionless, like so many dinosaurs frozen in time. A line of unmarked black vans queued at the gates of a huge opening into the main hall, waiting to deliver their macabre cargo, before heading back to any of a dozen hospitals to reload and return. Latter-day ferrymen plying their trade back and forth across the River Styx.
He parked outside the office block and pushed open double doors into the entrance hall. A woman at a desk looked up from behind her mask. He waved his warrant card at her. ‘DI MacNeil for Mr Hartson. He’s expecting me.’
Hartson’s office was at the top of the building. A huge glass partition along one side of it looked down into the main hall of the former power station. Hartson was a man of about sixty, tall, lean and bald, and he had about him the obsequious air of an undertaker. MacNeil was drawn to the glass. The scene below was one he could barely have imagined. Thousands of naked bodies laid out three deep on wooden pallets stretching as far as you could see, cast in their piles like so many mannequins in a doll factory, arms and legs intertwined, strangely luminous, barely human. Fumigating mists obscured the detail, like the fog that would lie along the Thames on an autumn morning. Ghoulish figures in blue bio-suits, faceless behind tinted plastic visors, moved amongst the wisps and tendrils of it in slow motion, like astronauts on the moon, removing bodies from the trucks to pile on yet more pallets. One of the furnaces seemed designated for clothes and bedding. Bodies were slid into the other three, still on their pallets, by giant forklifts. In those few moments when the furnace doors remained open, the fires within cast a vaporous orange light through the fumigating mists, before giant cast-iron doors slammed shut again, their vibration felt throughout the building like seismic tremors.