CHAPTER TWO

 

 

IT TOOK LONGER than Helen expected to get to the station.

She’d factored in a stop off at a pharmacy, but what she hadn’t counted on was Silver Street being closed off. Fortunately her police issue satnav warned her early and sent her down a side street. She caught a glimpse of the closed road as she drove past. The roadblock had been hastily erected: two patrol cars angled nose to nose. She saw blue lights in the distance. Ambulances, presumably.

Her satnav didn’t go into details about the incident, which suggested it was routine. Amazing how the horrendous could become familiar and mundane. Not for the first time she was reminded of those who lived in warzones, who went about their daily business despite the explosions and gunfire, whether it was Baghdad, Brasilia or a small English university city.

Despite the heads-up, she still ended up crawling along crowded side roads. Silver Street was the main thoroughfare through the city centre, so once news spread plenty of drivers started planning alternative routes.

She had, at least, bought a bottle of water in the pharmacy and taken her tablets immediately, so by the time she finally swung into the station carpark, and squeezed her car into a space that wasn’t strictly speaking a space, the painful throbbing of her gums had faded to a dull ache.

As she walked into the chief super’s office the pain flared up again.

Her boss wasn’t alone, but she wasn’t surprised. If the mystery of why she’d been despatched to the scene of Trinity Brown’s murder had rung alarm bells, the text message she’d received from the super sent them into overdrive.

Don’t talk to anyone on your way in. Need to know only. Devonshire.

Detective Chief Superintendent Malcom Devonshire had been a rugby player in his youth, had represented England at amateur level, and it showed. He had cauliflower ears and a nose that was almost flat to his face, yet he was attractive enough, in a gruff sort of way. Famously terse, he had an open, expressive face, and no matter how monosyllabic he got it wasn’t hard to tell what he was really thinking. On the upside, you knew if you’d done well without him having to say a word, but on the downside, he could tear you a new one just by saying “hello.”

Right now his face was telling her he was genuinely worried, and genuinely pissed off.

She guessed this something to do with the man pacing in front of his desk.

Devonshire was sat behind that desk. As usual he’d worn a three-piece-suit to work, and as usual the jacket was now on a hanger dangling from the hat stand in the corner of the room. His suit was grey, his shirt white, the only spot of colour his tie, a deep claret that was almost black.

He’d lost his wife seven years ago, just one of thousands of wives and husbands, sons and daughters lost in those fraught few weeks. Helen couldn’t recall the last time she’d seen his wedding ring, but the pale band of skin that stood out against his dark skin suggested he wore it at home. He might remove his jacket, but he never took his waistcoat off, and every few minutes he’d pat one of the pockets.

The second man turned to face her. She suspected the slender Asian man wasn’t quite the open book her boss was, but he wasn’t as circumspect as he imagined he was either. For a moment before he smiled, she saw his eyes roll.

“Sorry I’m late. Silver Street was blocked off.”

“Just shut the door and come in,” said Devonshire.

She closed the door carefully; it was old, and the pebbled glass had a tendency to wobble if you slammed it.

“This is Vikram Desai.” Typical Devonshire, no time or inclination for preamble.

She and Desai moved towards one another. When he extended his hand she took it, taking the opportunity for a closer look.

He was no more than fifty, and he too wore a three-piece-suit; she was starting to feel underdressed. Unlike Devonshire’s tailored suit, Desai’s looked off the peg, ill fitting, but expensive. His shirt was well pressed, powder blue, and the blue-and-red tie he wore looked like it belonged to an old school.

“Inspector Ogilvy, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” His voice carried no trace of an accent, and no trace of genuine pleasure either. His cool detachment, the firmness of his handshake, and the NHS pin at his lapel suggested he was a doctor.

“Mr Desai,” she said. Maybe he was a doctor but she wasn’t going to make assumptions. He didn’t correct her. “Department of Health, I presume.”

He nodded.

She glanced past him towards Devonshire. “News travels fast.”

Her boss shrugged.

“A corpse that doesn’t rise as a zombie raises a very specific, but very discreet, alarm,” said Desai. “I probably knew Trinity Brown hadn’t come back from the dead before you even knew she was dead.”

He caught her off guard, very deliberately using the Z-word. The Department generally preferred ‘resurrected’ or ‘reanimated.’ Helen Ogilvy didn’t like people who went out of their way to obfuscate their intentions, and she’d decided that Desai was playing with her. She wondered if that was even his real name.

“There are certain high-level triggers,” said Devonshire. “Obviously they’re only on a need-to-know basis.”

“And now I know.”

“One of them,” said Desai. There was a twinkle to the comment, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“Why are we keeping this hush-hush?” She very pointedly directed the comment at the Chief Super. “It isn’t exactly bad news.”

Devonshire glanced at Desai.

“Inspector,” he began. “We live in unique times. Seven years ago the world faced the very real possibility of its end but, unlike all the lurid films and TV shows, when the dead actually began to rise we handled it like we would handle any other public health crisis. There were casualties, but we made rational choices—difficult choices, yes, but we managed the emergency.”

He was making it sound like what happened back then, what had been happening every day since, had been a blip; nothing more serious than swine flu. The reality had been so much darker.

Which didn’t mean she didn’t get the point. “You’re worried about people getting complacent.”

“Exactly. Take HIV as an example: so much money spent on education and public awareness, and when instances of infection dropped, people stopped caring about the threat and infection rates rose.”

“You’re talking about decades of complacency, though. This is one body.” She lifted a finger. “Obviously we don’t know for sure that Trinity Brown didn’t suffer some kind of catastrophic brain injury when she fell, and I don’t see how us being cloak-and-dagger about it stops rumours getting out.” She grinned at her boss. “You know ambulance crews, they love to gossip.”

Devonshire scowled. “The ambulance crew have been sequestered. They’ll spend a couple of days in a nice hotel getting bored out of their minds, but they’ll have no contact with anyone.”

“But the officers who attended the scene; Rita; the witnesses...”

“There were no witnesses, no eyewitnesses anyway, and as far as the attending officers are concerned Trinity Brown did suffer major head trauma. As for Dr McDonald, she’s on the same page as us.” Her boss’s grim countenance cracked and he smiled. “As will you be, I hope.”

“I’ll do my job, you know that.” She glanced at Desai. “It just seems a little extreme.”

“I do appreciate your candour, Inspector, but you must be aware that there’s been a steady rise in the numbers of people covering up deaths, people foolishly trying to manage newly risen family members as if they hadn’t become unpredictable homicidal threats, but had instead just developed an illness like dementia. And of course there’s this disturbing trend amongst the young—what do the papers call them? Zombarchists.”

“Some papers.”

“My point is that even the inference that a body hasn’t returned as a zombie could affect how people think.”

A metaphorical lightbulb popped into life above her head. “Of course. The Pulse Amendment. You’re scared this will affect the vote on Thursday, aren’t you?”

His head moved, just a fraction, and he blinked a little faster.

“The Department of Health feel that the release of information which may be, for all we know, highly inaccurate, would not be conducive to the public good at this time.”

She looked at her boss. She wanted to ask if he thought it would be conducive to the public good, but thought better of it. He was a good copper, but nobody rose to his rank without sometimes playing politics.

Desai had recovered from his little wobble. “Inspector, it is not our intention that Trinity Brown’s non-resurrection be withheld from the public indefinitely. We just don’t want to put inaccurate information into the public domain. If this is a paradigm shift in our dealings with zombies, then it is something that will have to be managed with great care. It would be truly wonderful news, but even cures must be administered correctly or they become useless.”

Helen couldn’t resist smirking. “Ensure you take the entire course of antibiotics, something like that?”

He gave a tiny nod. “If you insist, but whatever your views of the zombie outbreak, it is hard not to see the huge benefits that have arisen...”—he smiled—“pardon the pun, out of what was potentially a disaster. Just as in war, medical science progresses, so the NHS has come on in leaps and bounds in the last seven years.”

He looked almost expectant, as if he was waiting for her to question his assessment so he could trot out some well-practiced statistics. It wasn’t necessary; few weeks went past without at least one newspaper lauding a new record.

There’d been less than twenty thousand ambulance crewmembers before the dead started coming back; now the number was close to seventy thousand. There’d been three hundred thousand nurses before, and now the number exceeded half a million. And NHS funding kept climbing.

She stared into Desai’s murky brown eyes. “But if the dead don’t rise, the NHS in its current form becomes unnecessary. Maybe not right away, might take a few parliaments, but little by little it’ll be cut back to pre-outbreak levels.” She shrugged. “I’m guessing a lot of managers will lose their jobs if that happens.”

Desai just stared at her. Once again it was Devonshire who interjected.

“The Pulse Amendment is important; we of all people should know that. For every Trinity Brown who dies in an instant there’s some old duffer with a dickey ticker whose death was probably detectable minutes, hours before it happened. The more paramedics we have on scene before someone dies, the fewer resurrected we have raising merry hell.”

“And,” said Desai with another fake smile, “how many of those people with underlying health conditions will we actually save from the Grim Reaper? Really there is no downside to the amendment. Fewer rogue zombies, more sick people helped.”

Helen responded with a lopsided grin. “I can think of a few civil liberties groups that would disagree.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Devonshire shift in his seat. She raised a hand before he could speak. “But I’m not exactly a fan of their work. I’ve seen first-hand how much trouble they’ve caused us. Doesn’t necessarily mean I’m happy with the government knowing where I am at all times.”

“Not the government,” said Desai. “The NHS.” His tone had softened, and for the first time she saw some emotion in his eyes.

She might have bought it if she hadn’t spent years observing consultants affecting a caring bedside manner that vanished the moment they left a patient.

She changed tack. “So why’d you send me out there? There were plenty of other detectives who could have taken the call while I was at the dentist.” As she said the D-word her gums throbbed.

Devonshire finally scraped his chair back and came out from behind his barricade. He thrust his hands into his pocket and leaned against his desk. “Just because we’re keeping this on the down low, it doesn’t mean we’re sweeping it under the carpet. We need to know why Trinity Brown didn’t come back, and we also need to know who killed her in the first place, because it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine there’s a connection.”

Desai smiled. “As for why we have chosen you, the chief superintendent advises that you are one of his best investigators.”

“I told you not to tell her I said that.” Devonshire was grinning. “Also one of my most annoying investigators. Dogged doesn’t begin to do you justice.”

“And of course, your medical training may be useful during your investigations. You were just a few months short of completing your training when the outbreak began,” Desai said. “Most people flocked to the medical professions in the months and years afterwards, you must be one of the few people who went the other way. Can I ask why?”

Her right hand twitched, but she was able to stop herself before she began rubbing at her left forearm. Instead she flicked her jacket back and hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans. “I guess when the dead started coming back, being a doctor seemed a little redundant.” The lie was so well practiced that sometimes she almost believed it.

Desai nodded. “Chief Superintendent Devonshire advises me that a lid can be kept on the situation for the next two days; the Department agrees. If it is the case that, for once, a corpse didn’t come back, then an announcement will need to be made, but if there is a reasonable explanation, well...”

“Then Trinity Brown gets buried on page seven, right?”

Desai ignored her cold words. “Dr McDonald will conduct the initial autopsy on the unfortunate—or should that be fortunate—Miss Brown. You have two days to investigate her death.”

“Minimal resources, I’m afraid,” chimed in her boss. “Anyone you involve has to be on a need-to-know basis.”

Helen laughed. “So I’ve got to solve a murder, and a non-resurrection, with one hand tied behind my back and one eye closed, and I’ve only got two days to do it?”

Devonshire grinned. “No pressure.”