Jensen was just turning to go back to the car when he thought he saw a movement inside the supermarket. He stopped, stood still and waited. A few seconds later he saw it again, and shortly afterwards a figure climbed out through the hole smashed in the window.
The individual in question was a child. A small child, clad in a bright yellow mackintosh, blue trousers and red wellingtons. The distance was too great for him to make out whether
it was a boy or a girl. The child had something in its hand, and zigzagged at a run towards the tower block nearest the rise and the edge of the wood.
Jensen moved swiftly down to the windowless end of the block, arriving while the child was still between the car park and the building. He peered round the corner and saw a little boy trotting along the footpath. The item in his hand was a cellophane bag of brightly coloured sweets. The boy was pigeon-toed, and far too busy gazing at his sweets to concentrate on walking properly. A couple of times he appeared almost to trip over his own feet.
The boy looked about four years old, five at most. He went into the last block, only five metres from the corner. He was so small that he had to lean all his weight against the heavy front door to get it open.
Jensen moved rapidly along the wall and went in after him. He could hear the child’s footsteps on the stairs above him.
For a few seconds, Inspector Jensen stood motionless outside the door to the flat. Not a sound was to be heard from inside. But he knew the boy with the bag of sweets had entered a minute or so before. He also knew that someone had been standing at the door, which had presumably been just slightly open, and had pulled the boy into the hall. That someone had whispered several reprimands. The voice had sounded hoarse and tense.
Jensen had been half a flight of stairs below. He had moved with care and presumed he had not been seen or heard.
He tapped lightly on the panel of the door with the knuckles of his right hand. The reaction was instantaneous. Short, quick steps thudded across the floor. Then the letterbox was opened from the inside. Through the slit, about three centimetres wide, Jensen could see a pair of surprised, greeny-blue eyes shaded by thick eyelashes, long and blond. The little boy was kneeling on the other side of the door, peeping out at him through the flap of the letterbox.
‘It’s a man,’ the boy said in a clear voice.
‘Get away from that door, now. This minute.’
It was a woman’s voice.
‘It’s a man,’ the boy said again. ‘He’s standing out there.’
‘Come here. Come here, for God’s sake,’ the woman said desperately.
Jensen knocked once more, considerably harder this time. The letterbox flap fell shut with a bang. Someone dragged the child away from the door.
‘Open up,’ said Jensen.
After a long silence, the woman spoke again.
‘Who is it?’
‘Police. Open up.’
Another silence. Finally the woman said:
‘What do you want?’
‘I saw the child stealing goods from the shop. Open up.’
Jensen knocked on the door one last time. Nobody answered.
‘If you don’t open the door voluntarily I shall come in anyway.’
He heard the people inside changing position and moving away, as fast and soundlessly as they could.
Jensen got out his keys. The lock was of standard construction and he selected one of the skeleton keys without hesitation, inserted it in the lock and turned it. A faint metallic click announced that the door was no longer locked. He gave it a gentle push and it swung inwards with a faint squeak of the hinges. The curtains were closed, but still let in enough light to allow him to make out the essential details. The flat was the same as his own and equipped with roughly the same standard furniture. The woman was standing in the middle of the floor, almost as if paralysed. The boy was beside her. She was holding him firmly by the hand. The child stared at Jensen but appeared largely untroubled.
Jensen stood motionless, looking into the flat. Through the patter of the rain outside he could make out the sound of someone holding their breath, just to his right.
‘You there,’ he said. ‘Step away from the door and go over to the others.’
The woman looked even more terrified. Her grip on the boy’s hand tightened. Jensen took out his ID badge.
‘Step away from the door and go and stand with the others,’ he said. ‘That’s an order and I won’t say it again.’
Almost immediately there was a deep sigh of resignation and a man who had been pressed to the wall beside the door stepped out into the room. He went to the other side of the boy, turned round and regarded Jensen dejectedly. The man was short in stature. He was in his stockinged feet, and dressed in trousers and an unbuttoned shirt. He had a hammer in his hand.
Jensen held up his ID badge.
‘Inspector Jensen,’ he said, ‘Sixteenth District. I’m engaged in an investigation and want to talk to you.’
‘Police,’ the man said mistrustfully. ‘Investigation?’
‘He doesn’t understand,’ the woman said quickly, on a rising note of despair. ‘He’s so little. Only four. He doesn’t understand.’
‘Put the hammer down,’ said Jensen.
Without taking his eyes off Jensen, the man bent down and laid the tool on the floor very carefully, as if not wanting to make any undue noise. His look was one more of apathy and fear than of resolution or hatred.
‘He can get dressed by himself and he’s learnt how to open the door,’ the woman said. ‘He’s used to running out to play whenever he likes. Today he slipped out while I was in the kitchen, and we didn’t have time to stop him.’
She stopped and looked at Jensen in alarm.
‘He’s only little,’ she repeated.
‘Are you his parents?’
‘Yes.’
‘Parents are responsible for supervising young children.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘Why didn’t you go after the child and bring him back?’
The man looked at Jensen in astonishment.
‘We didn’t dare.’
Jensen stepped over the threshold and closed the door after him.
‘He’s alone,’ the man said to himself under his breath. ‘I should’ve killed him.’
The flat stank of urine, refuse and excrement. The people inside did not seem to be aware of it.
‘The air’s very bad in here,’ Jensen remarked.
‘Well nothing works, does it?’ said the woman. ‘No water, no light, no way of flushing the toilet. And we daren’t open the windows, of course.’
Jensen got out his pen and notepad.
‘Why not?’
‘How can you ask that,’ said the man. ‘Don’t you know what’s happened?’ Jensen did not reply.
‘The sickness. Haven’t you heard about it?’
‘Have you or anyone in your family gone down with this sickness?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know anyone who has caught it?’
‘Yes. Some people who lived round here. Not that we knew them.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘They went to hospital, of course. Well, one of them died before the ambulance got here. He was a policeman, as a matter of fact.’
‘And it’s the risk of infection that means you daren’t go out?’
The man looked uncertainly at Jensen.
‘I think so,’ said the woman.
‘You think so?’
‘We’re not allowed to go out,’ she said. ‘It’s not permitted.’
‘But people aren’t prohibited from opening their doors?’
‘No,’ the man said hesitantly. But …’
‘But what?’
‘I didn’t think you were from the police. I …’
He stopped. The little boy piped up instead:
‘Are you a Mister Policeman?’
‘Yes,’ said Jensen gravely. ‘I’m a policeman.’
‘We haven’t seen any police for weeks,’ said the woman. ‘We didn’t think there were any left.’
Jensen turned back to the man.
‘Where do you work?’
‘The public cleansing department. At the central refuse tip. Until all this started.’
‘What?’
‘First it was a load of rumours about this awful disease. Then there was an announcement that the risk of infection was too serious for people to carry on going to work, except for the vital services. Why are you asking me all this?’
‘Because I don’t know,’ said Jensen. ‘I’ve been away.’
‘Oh, I see,’ the man said sceptically.
‘How did you get the announcements?’
‘On a printed leaflet that everyone got through their door. It was on TV, too. The TV was still working then, at least ours was. That was the fifteenth of last month.’
‘What happened after that?’
‘We carried on working as usual. Public cleansing was one of the exceptions.’
‘And the epidemic? What was there to see?’
‘I heard rumours that thousands and thousands of people were in hospital. That people were dying like flies. And they needed blood donors. And so …’
‘And so?’
‘Well, a week or so after the first announcement, the TV and radio went off the air and we were ordered to stop work. And then we got this other notice. There was no danger any longer, they said, but we were to lay in supplies of food and water and stay at home. And they needed blood donors.’
‘Did you volunteer?’
‘To give blood? No. I heard of some people who did, but …’
‘But what?’
‘They never came back.’
‘Have you been out since then?’
‘Oh yes. They only brought in the total curfew a week ago, last Wednesday. The day before that, the water was cut off. The electricity had gone a few days before that, on the Saturday.’
‘How did you receive all these communications?’
‘Leaflets were delivered.’
‘Who delivered them?’
‘Soldiers and nursing staff. And then they went round in loudspeaker vans shouting nobody was to go out and blood donors were urgently needed, and to only take orders from doctors and medical professionals.’
‘Did the buses go on running?’
‘No, no. The buses stopped long before that. At the same time as they gave up publishing the newspapers.’
‘How many people are there left here?’
‘Don’t know. A few.’
‘Where are the rest?’
The man gave Jensen a long stare. Eventually he said:
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No. Where are they?’
‘I’ve no idea. No idea at all.’
‘When did they move out?’
‘They didn’t move out,’ said the woman. ‘They were taken.’
‘Taken?’
‘It’s odd that you don’t know. We thought it must be the same all over the city.’
‘Were they all taken at the same time?’
‘First it was the children. That was the evening before the state of emergency and curfew came in. A bus turned up outside here. I saw it from the window.’
‘What sort of bus?’
‘An ordinary red, public service bus. There were four of them in it. Two men and two women. They went from door to door and took all the children under twelve. There weren’t very many round here.’
‘Didn’t you open the door?’
‘Oh yes. It was the last time we opened the door to anybody. One of the women, it was. She wanted to take him with her.’
The man gestured towards the boy.
‘But we refused. Then she got angry and said that if she’d been able to, she’d have taken him from us by force. She even tried it, but I kicked her out.’
‘Why did she want the child?’
‘She said it was in his own best interests. She said we didn’t fully appreciate the situation. She said that if they’d been allowed to, they’d have taken us, too.’
‘Who was this woman?’
‘Don’t know. We’d never seen her before. Some sort of nurse, I think. She didn’t say. But she had some kind of uniform on. Green overalls.’
‘Where were they going to take the children?’
‘To a safe place,’ she said. ‘When I asked where, she said she didn’t know. We didn’t dare let him go.’
‘What about the others round here?’
‘Lots of them went. I saw them putting them on to the bus and driving away.’
‘How many children were there?’
‘Twenty-five, maybe thirty.’
Jensen did a rapid calculation. That would have been virtually all the children in a district like this.
‘Poor parents,’ said the woman. ‘What monsters, taking the children.’
‘And you don’t know who these people were?’
‘No.’
‘Did they have armbands?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘Were any of the children ill?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘And what happened after that?’
‘The next day they brought in the curfew. The state of emergency. The children had gone by then.’
‘But other than that, people were still here in their flats?’
‘Yes, but nobody went out. The next morning, it was the Thursday of last week, three ambulances and four buses came charging in to the car park down there with sirens and the whole works.’
‘What kind of buses?’
‘Army ones, I think. There were several doctors or healthcare
workers with white coats, and then there must have been a dozen sanitation soldiers. I recognised the uniforms. I was in the medical corps when I did my military service.’
‘No police?’
‘We didn’t see any, but we were only peering out of the window, trying not to be seen. Oh, you asked about armbands. Well this lot had blue armbands. All of them. A woman doctor or nurse in a white coat shouted through a megaphone that everybody who wasn’t sick had to be evacuated because of the epidemic. We were going to a place where there wasn’t such risk of infection. She said we didn’t need to take anything with us, because we’d soon be back and everything we needed would be provided where we were going. We just had to get down there quickly, and leave the doors of our flats open so they could be sprayed with disinfectant. And then we’d be vaccinated. She said it was on the orders of some chief or other.’
‘The chief medical officer?’
‘That’s right. Loads of people went down voluntarily and got on the buses.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘No … we’d been petrified ever since what happened to the children. We stayed here.’
‘Did anything else happen?’
The man looked at his wife, not sure how to go on.
‘It was horrible,’ she said. ‘When people stopped coming out, no matter how much they shouted, the doctors and sanitation soldiers went up the staircases …’