MacNeil let his eyes drift over the piles of discarded humanity below him, and wondered if Sean was down there somewhere, the seed of his loins awaiting cremation with all the others. It was not a thought he could bear to dwell on, and he turned back into the office.
‘Sobering vision, isn’t it,’ said Hartson. ‘There, but for the grace of God, go you and I.’ He wandered past MacNeil to the window, and MacNeil saw his mask catch a momentary flicker of orange as one of the furnace doors opened to receive more dead. ‘I used to be devout,’ he said. ‘A good Catholic.’ He turned back to MacNeil. ‘Now I wonder.’ But then he dismissed his cosmic reflections in an instant. ‘What do you want with Ronnie?’
‘Just a word. You know him personally?’
‘I know every man here. Death has a way of bringing the living together. We’re all very close.’
‘Then you know he has a criminal record?’
‘Oh, yes. His file was made available to me when we were recruiting for the facility. But it’s in his past, I think. His experience in dealing with death took precedence. He’s an affable young man. Hardworking, conscientious.’
‘You won’t mind if I borrow him for half an hour?’
‘I wouldn’t mind in the slightest, Detective Inspector. But he’s not due on until midnight.’ Hartson’s smile bore the gravitas of a man used to being the bearer of bad news. ‘We work around the clock here. Twenty-four-seven, as our American friends would say.’
MacNeil glanced back down into the halls of Hades below, and for just a moment thought he saw Sean’s small body amongst all the others, tiny and twisted, sandwiched between a large, fat woman and an old man. And then the image was gone, vanished forever in a swirl of white smoke.
III
Kazinski lived with his mother in a 1960s council estate on the southern edge of Lambeth. High- and low-rise apartment blocks built to pluck people from the slums of 19th-century industrial London, and deliver them to a better life in a brave new world. The architects who designed them might have been emissaries of the devil, because they had instead removed the impoverished working classes from real communities, and brought them to a place which now resembled something worse than the hell from which they were supposed to have escaped.
At least half of the flats were boarded up, windows broken, others burned out. Crumbling concrete cladding bore the black streaks of insurance fires that for many had been the only way out. Tarmac concourses were strewn with broken glass and empty beer cans, a landscape punctuated by burned-out vehicles, like the carcasses of so many dead animals. The detritus of abandoned households — old mattresses, discarded clothing, broken furniture — was washed up against the ramps and walkways, like seaweed on a beach after a storm. Streetlamps had been smashed, many of them torn down. It would be a no-go area after nightfall, dark and dangerous. This was the brave new world.
MacNeil parked on the street and stood looking through the open gates of the estate. It was hard to believe that anyone still lived here. And yet, he could see, along the covered walkways on each floor, freshly painted doors, and windows with clean, white net curtains. Like the occasional good tooth in a mouth full of decay. Across the road, a multi-storey block had been abandoned. Every window boarded up, rolls of barbed wire dragged around its perimeter.
Glass crunched underfoot as he walked across a children’s play area, where doubtless architect’s drawings would have depicted a happy gathering of multicultural kids kicking a ball about. Even had that ever been a reality, it was long gone.
MacNeil had a strange sense of foreboding as he entered Kazinski’s block. There had not been a solitary sign of life. The world felt like a vessel whose captain had given the order to abandon ship, but nobody had told MacNeil.
The stairwell smelled of urine and stale beer, and something else he couldn’t quite identify. The walls were almost obscured by graffiti. He heard his own footsteps echoing all the way up to the sixth floor. On the second, he turned into the open walkway that ran along the outside of the block, leading to the individual flats. Every second doorway was boarded up. Others had been daubed with red paint, crude crosses warning that this home had been visited by the flu, a strange, frightening throwback to the days of the Plague. What misery, MacNeil wondered, lurked behind these doors?
Kazinski’s flat was number twenty-three. The door had been newly painted. Pillar-box red. To cover up the mark of the flu? Or to guard against it? MacNeil had no way of knowing. There was a polished brass knocker at head height, and he banged it three times. After a moment, he saw the lace curtain twitch in the window to his left.
‘What do you want?’ A woman’s voice came muffled from behind the glass.
‘Police, Mrs Kazinski. I want to talk to your son.’
‘Let me see your card.’ This was a woman used to dealing with cops.
MacNeil took out his warrant card and pressed it against the window. The curtain was dragged to one side, and by the daylight it let in, MacNeil saw the pale, pasty face of a woman in her fifties, features sharp and pinched, the genetic inheritance of generations of poverty. The curtain fell back into place.
‘He’s not here.’
‘Don’t tell me stories, Mrs Kazinski.’ He knew she would not open the door to him, and it would take too long to get a warrant and officers to break it down.
‘He left for work this morning.’
‘He doesn’t start work till midnight.’
‘No, he started at midday. He told me.’
‘Then he lied to you, Mrs Kazinski. I’ve just come from Battersea.’
‘No. He’s a good boy, my Ronnie.’
‘Was he at home last night, Mrs Kazinski, or was he at work?’
She hesitated, clearly not knowing which was the right answer to give.
‘What time did he get in from work this morning, Mrs Kazinski?’
‘I don’t know, it was late. I mean early. Five, maybe six. I was asleep. He was on the five o’clock shift last night. They work twelve hours.’
‘It was his day off yesterday. They told me at the power station.’
‘No!’ He heard the confusion in her denial. The hurt in her voice. Why had her son been lying to her? MacNeil believed now that she was telling the truth. That Kazinski really wasn’t there, and that she didn’t know where he’d gone if it wasn’t to work. ‘What’s he done?’
‘I don’t know that he’s done anything, Mrs Kazinski. I just want to talk to him, that’s all.’
‘You people never just want to talk.’ She was transferring her anger and hurt at her son’s lies and directing them at MacNeil. It was something he was familiar with. It was always the fault of the police when the people you loved got into trouble.
‘You can tell him I was looking for him.’ MacNeil folded his warrant card into an inside pocket. ‘And you might like to ask him what it was he was doing last night when he told you he was at work.’ He thrust his hands in his pockets and headed back along the stairwell, Mrs Kazinski’s imprecations following him along the walkway. But still, she wasn’t going to open her door under any circumstance. Even to abuse him to his back.
A few paces from the stairs, he heard a scuffle of feet, a voice whispering in the darkness beyond, and he stopped in his tracks. ‘Who’s there?’
A skinny youth stepped out into the walkway. His hair was gelled into spikes, and the triangle of a red and blue bandana covered his nose and mouth. His forehead above it was peppered with acne. He wore a hooded sweatshirt that looked two sizes too big for him, and a pair of khaki cargo trousers with the crotch almost at the knees. From a hand crudely tattooed with letters on each knuckle, a scarred baseball bat dangled to the ground. Three other youths, one of them black, stepped out behind him. They all wore bandanas and carried baseball bats or crowbars.