‘Did she survive?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ There was a pause. ‘She was a poor soul, though.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘She had a terrible facial deformity, Inspector MacNeil. The ugliest harelip I’ve ever seen.’
Chapter Eighteen
I
Pinkie walked quickly between towering warehouses, narrow metal footbridges running at odd angles overhead, cobbles underfoot. Past Maggie Blake’s Cause on his left, and a row of fancy-goods shops all boarded up on his right. The wealthy, in their warehouse conversions, slept safe and sound behind barred windows, no more than gilded cages in this pandemic-stricken city. Once plague-carrying rats had streamed off the boats that docked here. Now the narrow canyon that was Shad Thames was utterly deserted, and deathly quiet, emptied by a different kind of plague.
Pinkie followed it around past Java Wharf until he found the address he was looking for. Butlers and Colonial. He climbed easily up over the electronic gate, straddling the spikes along the top and jumping down into the courtyard beyond. Lights were set in the heads of low posts that led him around into the rear square, and he saw the ramp leading up to Amy’s door. He smiled to himself. It had taken him no time at all to find it.
Amy was restless. It was nearly two in the morning, and she didn’t feel the least bit sleepy. She was tired, yes. But she could not have slept. Sam’s final words had left her strangely uneasy. I think that changes everything. What had Sam meant? Try as she might, Amy had been unable to get any further response from her mentor. The window of their conversation remained on her screen, the cursor blinking beyond the end of several failed attempts to re-establish communication. Sam, are you still there? Hello? Sam? Talk to me! Nothing. Clearly Sam was no longer at the computer. Gone to bed, maybe. But why such an abrupt and enigmatic conclusion to their conversation?
Amy had finished the bottle of red wine and felt a little drunk. She had spent nearly half an hour talking to Lyn, telling her all about her brother. Telling her how Lee had resented her success. Her academic prowess and the prizes she had won at school. Acceptance then to med school, graduating top of her year. Her hugely successful practice in forensic odontology, her engagement to David. After a childhood of parental indulgence in which every sacrifice had been made for Lee, and Amy had been forced to fend for herself, it came as a huge blow to his ego that his big sister should be such a success while he was not. He had never had good grades at school, dropping out before A-levels, and ended up working as a sous-chef chopping vegetables in a restaurant in Chinatown. Every little gift Amy’s success had enabled her to buy her parents he had viewed with jealousy and resentment.
And so he had positively glowed in the aftermath of Amy’s accident. Full of kind words and ersatz sympathy. But Amy had sensed his glee. Big sister chopped down to size, confined to a wheelchair. Now he would be the one to take care of the family, buy the gifts, take his rightful place at the head of the table next to his father.
But he had not counted on Amy’s determination to rise above her disability, and when she won her million in damages, he had felt that he deserved a share. That they all did. After all, hadn’t Amy’s success really been down to the sacrifices of her family?
For once in her life Amy had stood up to him. She needed that money to get herself back on her feet, metaphorically if not literally. Did he have the least idea how much it cost a disabled person to try to lead a normal life?
It had created a rift in the family, and Amy had moved away from the Chinese community, to the splendid isolation of her old spice warehouse in Bermondsey. They had been to visit once, the whole family, resentment in everything they saw burning in envious eyes. And they never came again. And so Amy’s splendid isolation had turned into a not-so-splendid loneliness — until Jack MacNeil came into her life.
Poor Jack. She thought of him, out there somewhere in the night, fixated on a murder he was unlikely to solve, trying hard not to think about the son whose affection he had neglected. Something he had realised too late to change, and now never could.
She arched her back to flex muscles and try to change her position in the chair. She had been in it too long. Pressure points had become painful. She needed to lie in her bed and give her body a rest. But she couldn’t face the thought of it while MacNeil was still out there. She wanted to be here for him if he needed her, and around when he clocked off for the very last time at seven. Perhaps a shower, she thought, would relieve some of the pressure and ease the pain. At the very least it would help her stay awake and alert.
Pinkie heard the stair lift before he saw her. He had already searched her bedroom, confident that he would have plenty of warning if the stair lift started up. He had heard her voice drifting down from the attic, and at first thought she had company. But as he listened, unable to pick out the words, he came to realise there was only one voice. Perhaps she was speaking to someone on the telephone. He could not have known that she was talking to the little girl whose flesh he had seen stripped from its bones by Mr Smith.
Now, from his vantage point in the coat closet, face pressed against the crack in the door, he had a clear sight of her for the first time. And she almost took his breath away. She was beautiful. Small and delicate, and so vulnerable with her useless, wasted legs. She sat sideways on the stair lift with her eyes closed, hands folded in her lap. There was something in her serenity that drew Pinkie, that forced an ache into his heart. In a quite bizarre way she reminded him of his mother. Her serenity had been her enduring quality. An almost zen fatalism that allowed her to accept all the brickbats that life had tossed her way. And he remembered, too, that night, locked in the cupboard under the stairs, that he heard her scream for the first time. And with the memory came the familiar trembling. And the darkness and claustrophobia of this coat closet started choking him. He had to fight to control his breathing or else Amy would hear him. And he didn’t want to kill her. Not just yet.
He watched her transfer herself to the wheelchair at the foot of the stairs, and listened to the whine of its electric motor as it propelled her towards the bathroom.
It was his mother’s third or fourth scream that had finally induced the panic that gave him the strength to force the door. Just ten years old, and not a particularly big boy. They were in the kitchen. His mother on her back on the floor, the man on top, his hands around her neck, cursing and telling her to shut up. He punched her, two or three times, splitting her lip, and she had grimaced with pain, white teeth streaked with blood. Her clothes were ripped, her belly exposed, one breast torn free of its bra. Pinkie had no clear idea what was happening, except that this man was hurting his mother. There was no premeditation in what happened next. He reacted instinctively, jumping on the man’s back, tugging wildly at his hair, screaming at him to let his mother go.
The man had been shocked, turning in astonishment to knock the boy from his back. It had come as a surprise to him that they were not alone. Pinkie had fallen, striking his head on the edge of the door, momentarily stunned, bright lights flashing in his eyes. He had heard his mother screaming, frantic now. And the man bellowing and choking off her screams. He saw her legs kicking wildly as she fought for breath, the soles of her naked feet slamming on the floor. And somehow he had got back to his feet, dragging himself up by the worktop. Which is when he’d seen the knife block. Every waking minute since, he’d regretted not acting sooner. That he had not picked himself off the floor thirty seconds earlier. His mother might still have been alive. As it was, by the time he plunged the bread knife deep between the man’s shoulder blades, she was already gone, and his own life was changed irrevocably.