by John Macken
The thought of Lucy’s spare room suddenly felt appealing, and he put his foot down, carving through the sparse traffic. As he drove, he dialled the number he had been given. There was no ringing sound, no answer service, nothing. Just a full stop, a continuous tone. He was less than surprised. The killer was hardly going to give Reuben an easy means of tracking him. Still, he had felt compelled to try.
Reuben parked close to Lucy’s house. Inside, he crept silently upstairs in his socks. Lucy’s bedroom door was wide open. Reuben hesitated on the landing. This was the room they used to share, the room in which he had discovered the forensic evidence that had sparked everything off. He listened for a second before peering inside. The curtains were open, the bed not slept in.
A sudden thought hit him. First Joshua. And now Lucy.
She wasn’t downstairs and she wasn’t in bed. Reuben headed along the landing. The spare room was empty too. In a panic, he checked the bathroom. Nothing. He ran downstairs, no longer worried about being quiet, and threw the living-room door open. Cups of coffee littered the table and floor; he’d half expected Veno’s team still to be there. He walked through to his old study at the back of the house. Its walls were bare now, his pictures gone, a dark square computer squatting silently on the desk. Lucy hadn’t redecorated the room. In a way, he hoped she never did. He closed the study door and headed for the kitchen. The washing-up had been done, the pan she had cooked the pasta in lying upside down on the draining board.
He stopped to think, a sense of unreality flashing through his fatigued brain. No police liaison officer, no Lucy. Surely if there had been a development, someone would have called him. His mobile had been on through the night. It didn’t make sense.
Reuben ran back up the stairs and switched on the light. Three bedrooms and one bathroom. A classic English semi-detached layout. Soft carpet under his socks. He checked the spare room and Lucy’s room again. And then he stopped. In front of him was a sky-blue door with animal letters on it spelling out J-O-S-H-U-A. He pushed the door open. Light from the hallway seeped past him and into the room. A scaled-down wardrobe. A chest of drawers with a changing mat on top. A small cot with wooden bars that Joshua had slept in from the day he had left their bedroom. A chair that Lucy had breast-fed him in until he was six months old. The one room in the house that Reuben hadn’t wanted to go into since Joshua had been taken, the literal evidence that his son was sleeping somewhere else. And there on the floor, nuzzled next to the cot, Joshua’s favourite blue bunny in her arms, Lucy was fast asleep.
Reuben stood in the doorway, breathing hard. He watched his wife, her own respiration slow and deep. He realized he had almost never seen her like this when they’d been together. Peaceful and still and oblivious. Somewhere in the midst of parenting and long hours at crime scenes, the habit of observation had been lost. They had stopped watching each other and watched their son instead.
Reuben suddenly felt drained. He turned to go. Lucy stirred, rubbing her face.
‘That you?’ she asked drowsily.
‘Yep,’ Reuben answered. ‘If you mean your estranged husband.’
‘Hmm.’ Lucy yawned, her eyes staying closed. ‘Do me a favour?’
‘What?’
‘Come and lie down on the floor with me.’
Reuben hesitated. Being in Joshua’s room felt wrong, like an intrusion or a trespass. And lying next to Lucy raised a whole different set of issues. He was suddenly awkward and unsure.
‘Maybe I ought to go . . .’
‘Don’t get any ideas,’ Lucy said through another yawn. ‘I just need some company.’
‘Anyone’s company?’
‘The father of my missing son’s company.’
Reuben stayed where he was.
‘Don’t make me beg,’ Lucy said, ‘but without some platonic help I’m not sure I’m going to make it through what remains of the night.’
Reuben struggled out of his jacket. The carpet, which had felt soft through his socks, was rough against his cheek as he lay down. Lucy pulled his arm around her. Reuben lay in the half light, next to the empty cot, close to his wife. Rest, he told himself. Drift off to sleep. Recharge yourself, ready for the battle ahead. Console your ex-wife in her moment of need. Grab a couple of hours of peace before the mayhem starts.
But it was difficult to settle, to switch off. In his pocket, he knew he probably had the DNA profile of the man holding Joshua. He worked through the next step. Attempting to match the nine cigarette profiles to samples from the two fingertip murders. He would have to get access to the crime-scene specimens, somehow smuggle them out of GeneCrime, see whether anything corresponded. And then if something did, the cigarette butt was almost certainly dropped by the killer, and Reuben could—
‘You always were a fidget,’ Lucy muttered, interrupting his line of thought.
‘Sorry.’
‘Is there any chance at all of you keeping still?’
‘I’m trying.’
Lucy pulled his arm tighter around her, holding it just below the line of her breasts. Reuben forced himself to remain motionless. The thought of Lucy’s body so close to his started to swamp his thoughts. This was as close to her as he had been in eighteen months. He realized that despite everything they had been through, he wanted her. A pure, physical longing. Naked, on the floor, in the nursery. As crazy as it could be, the human sexual urge cutting through everything in its path, overriding logic and decorum—
‘I told you not to get any ideas,’ she said.
Reuben checked himself. He had been pushing against her. He scratched his scalp and clenched his teeth. Then he forced his mind to switch back to the man who had killed twice and taken his son.
18
‘So, what have we got?’ Reuben asked. He leaned back in his office chair, tilting it on two legs, hands flat on the desk in front of him. With six extra people in it, his subterranean office felt squashed; there was a damp claustrophobia about its low ceiling and diluted greys and browns. The cactus sat staring back at him, resolute and unyielding, refusing to lie down and die like the other plants of GeneCrime.
Bernie Harrison was the first to answer. ‘Since yesterday morning in the morgue we’ve been analysing samples from the two crime scenes. Mainly DNA, but some fibre work, fingerprints, shoe patterns, et cetera. We sent bloods and urines to Toxicology—’
‘How did you get the urines?’
‘With a long needle and a patient pathologist.’
‘And what are you screening for?’
‘It’s the question you posed from the start. How did the killer control his victims?’
‘So, specifically, you’re looking for drugs, sedatives, whatever?’
‘Yep. We also took scrapes from under the nails of the fingertips, and we had a bash at Mina’s idea of fingerprinting the fingerprints.’
‘And?’
Bernie rummaged around in his thick untidy beard. ‘No direct matches as yet, but we’ve swabbed extensively, taken everything we can think of. Sarah has requested thoroughness over speed.’
‘OK, well I’m requesting speed first.’
‘But Sarah—’
‘DCI Hirst isn’t running this investigation. I am. And I want us flat out on it. We can go back and test our controls when we’ve got positives, not before.’
Mina Ali squinted at him through her square glasses. ‘What Bernie means is that in your absence yesterday we came to the general agreement that we would play it safe, be methodical, do first things first. This is high profile. Newspapers, TV, everything. We can’t afford to screw it up. Judging from the time frame of the two deaths, we’ve probably got a few days before the next killing, if there actually is one.’
Reuben tipped forward in his chair, all four legs digging deep into the thin carpet. ‘I don’t think we have.’
‘Why not?’ Mina asked.
Reuben wiped a sharp fragment of sleep from the corner of his eye. Because the fucker is holding a two-year-old boy captive
. Because no one would do that longer than they had to. Because he already knows who he is going to kill next. Because he wants this finished with as quickly as I do. ‘I just don’t. We can’t assume anything. When a man has killed successfully for the first time, there’s often a gap. A period of reflection, an interval until the urge returns. Maybe it never will. When he’s killed twice, though, carried out well-planned executions, all bets are off. This isn’t a rampage, but it also isn’t necessarily a drawn-out game of cat and mouse.’
‘So what are you proposing?’
I want double shifts. I want you sleeping at your benches. I want every conceivable test running until we’ve nailed the fucker who has my boy. Again, Reuben restrained himself, edited his answer, watered down its meaning. ‘We need to move quicker. I’d like to see the profiles run through the National DNA Database as they emerge. Cross-reference between the two scenes second. I want someone to coordinate gross forensics with the DNA.’ Reuben cast his eyes around his office. Mina Ali, his deputy, dark and petite; Bernie Harrison, Paul Mackay, Helen Alders, Leigh Harding; and Chris Stevens, dogged pathologist, bald and intense. Behind them on either side, lab-coated scientists visible through the internal windows. ‘Paul,’ he said, ‘can you do that?’
‘Sure,’ Paul answered, barely glancing up from his notebook.
‘Right. Leigh, what about CID?’
Detective Leigh Harding cleared his throat. Reuben didn’t know him well. He had been recruited just before Reuben’s dismissal. He looked like he belonged in the forces, his face bony and hard. ‘The sales executive, Carl Everitt, worked for a Swiss pharmaceutical company, and the scientist, Dr Ian Gillick, worked at the Royal Holloway.’
‘As in the medical school?’ Bernie asked.
‘Yep. And the Swiss company is Roche.’
‘A link?’ Reuben asked.
‘Nothing obvious. Pharmaceutical companies and universities sometimes have overlaps, of course, but we’ve found no direct personal association between Mr Everitt and UCL. He doesn’t appear to have been a frequent visitor. In fact, no one at University HR, or the three research departments we visited, recognized his picture.’
‘And Roche?’
‘Everitt had been with them two and a half years, recruited from another drug company. Apparently he was a pharma sales exec who spent the majority of his time in the London office.’
‘What about the company he came from before that?’ Reuben asked.
Detective Harding chewed his lip. ‘We’re looking into it.’
‘Right.’
Reuben rubbed his eyes, which felt heavy and tired and dry. He was having to hold himself back. Instinctively, all he wanted to do was catch the sick bastard who had sawn the fingertips off two men in a week. This was what he lived for, what he succeeded at, what GeneCrime had taken him back to do. He felt frustrated by the dearth of progress, by the lack of a connection between the two victims, by Sarah’s insistence on slow, methodical progress. But he had to keep reminding himself. All of this was good. All of this kept his son alive. The more samples Forensics examined, the more people CID interviewed, the longer it took to bring everything together, the more hope he would have. Still, it didn’t sit right.
Running his eyes around the members of his team patiently waiting for him to say something, Reuben wondered whether he had it in him to actively lead them astray, to subvert the investigation they were throwing themselves into. Could he mislead the very people he had helped to train? Could he lie to colleagues to whom he had taught the truth? The time, he knew, would come soon. At the beginning of an investigation, no one knows anything. It isn’t until separate lines of evidence begin to snag, until small insignificant fragments start to reinforce one another, that identities and motives emerge. They weren’t quite there yet, but they soon would be.
‘OK. Has anyone else got anything useful?’
Reuben saw something flick between the faces in front of him.
‘What?’ he asked.
Mina reached her hand forward and placed it on his. He glanced down at her slender fingers, the smattering of black hairs where the hand narrowed at the wrist, the smooth region of empty pores above it, where the repeated pulling on and off of lab gloves prevented any hairs from growing. ‘Boss, we’re all aware that Joshua has been taken, and if there’s anything we can possibly do for you . . .’ Mina searched the faces of her colleagues for support. ‘If there’s anything you need . . .’ Mina withdrew her hand, and shrugged at Reuben. ‘We just thought, you know . . .’
Reuben flashed her a sad smile. At that moment, caught in Mina’s dark eyes, he felt more conflicted than he could ever recall. Nine DNA profiles on the USB stick in his pocket. A total of three or four hours’ sleep. Years of training and police procedures crashing into the overwhelming intensity of parental instinct. Simon Jankowski through the window extracting DNA from the cigarette butts, a few hours behind him but quickly catching up. And Mina, loyal Mina, holding his eye, making him feel like a fucking fraud.
Reuben focused intently on the spines of the cactus on his desk. ‘Look, I just want to say one thing. I don’t want any sympathy. I don’t mean to be ungrateful about it, Mina, really I don’t, but my personal life stays personal. In the meantime, we get on with the job at hand. We have an active and dangerous killer to catch. OK?’
There was a muted nod of agreement around the group. Reuben stood up to signify that the meeting was over. As his team filed out and made their way into the adjacent labs, he checked his watch and cursed. 10.13. He was late. They would be waiting for him in the café around the corner. He left the office and strode down the corridor.
19
Judith Meadows had her back to Reuben as he entered the café. On the round steel table in front of her sat a blue car seat, Fraser Meadows lying inside it, sleeping the comatose sleep of a newborn. Reuben leaned over for a better look. Fraser had a shock of black hair, puffy pink eyes, red lips, a small snub of a nose. The table was littered with nappy sacks, a pack of wet-wipes, a couple of dummies, a grey tub of Sudocrem, a bottle of milk and an upturned lid.
‘So this is what maternity leave looks like,’ he said.
Judith craned her neck round to him. ‘It may look awful, but it feels great.’
‘How is the little fella?’
‘Perfect. Especially when he’s asleep.’
Across the table, Moray Carnock was sitting a pace back. He looked uncomfortable, as if worried the baby might be sick over him. Judging from Moray’s clothes, it would be difficult to tell. He was wearing a bulky overcoat which had faded to a nondescript grey-brown, a pair of battered shoes, and jeans which had probably never been in fashion.
‘Not one for babies, I guess,’ Reuben said to Moray.
‘Like Judith said, great concept while they’re asleep,’ Moray answered in his Aberdonian drawl. ‘The rest of the time a bloody nightmare. Just as long as no one asks me to change a nappy.’
‘You’re fairly safe,’ Judith said.
Reuben pulled out a chair. He hadn’t seen Judith or Moray for nearly four weeks, and it was good to be with them again. He was well aware that they had been the only constancy of his last two years.
‘Missing GeneCrime?’ Reuben asked Judith.
The building was only a few streets away, and Judith glanced out of the window, as if looking for it. ‘Not so much. Going to pop in to show Fraser off some time this week. You missing your freedom?’
‘I’ve only been back two days.’
‘You didn’t answer the question.’
Reuben smiled. His senior technician never let anything go that easily. ‘We’ll come to that.’
He inspected the specials board behind Moray. Ordinarily, a snack and a cup of tea would have kept his restless metabolism going until lunch. But he wasn’t hungry. His stomach seemed to have shrunk over the last few hours. He wanted to sit back and catch up with his friends, but there were more pressing issues. He had asked them to meet him for a reason, kno
wing that if anyone could help him they could.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a few serious things to say. I need your help. Any remaining favours I’ve got, I want to use up. Cash them in here and now. This is life and death.’
Moray shuffled closer to the table. Judith regarded him intently.
‘You’d better just spit it out,’ Moray said.
Reuben told them what had happened. The kidnapping, the killings, the phone call, the deal he had been offered. A life for a life. Judith’s eyes flicked momentarily to her sleeping baby when Reuben described the abduction of Joshua. And her eyes sparkled when he mentioned the cigarette butts. Neither of them had seen him on the news, Judith absorbed in her baby, Moray stuck on a long-haul flight. Reuben was glad.
‘So what do you need, big man?’ Moray asked.
‘Simply this,’ Reuben said. ‘I need to set the lab up again.’
‘Where?’
‘My old garage.’
‘Is that where you moved all the stuff?’
‘Yeah.’
Reuben pictured the equipment. A sequencer that had seen better days. A couple of small freezers. A battered microfuge that vibrated like hell when it spun. Two storage boxes full of reagents. A PCR machine. A cardboard box full of Gilsons, Eppendorfs and plastic tips. A box full of glassware that had rattled and clanked as he carried it into the garage a month earlier. Sarah Hirst had made it a condition of his re-employment that Reuben’s private lab ceased to exist. But now, Reuben could see a lot of sense in resurrecting it.
‘Is there room?’
‘Not much, Judith, but it’ll have to do.’
‘What else?’
‘There’s water and electrics, good lighting, and it’s hidden from view. I can run an internet connection in as well. It’s too risky to do anything at GeneCrime. I need to do some independent forensics, examine potential DNA left behind at the two murders, compare it with the DNA from the cigarette butts.’