by John Macken
Reuben checked his mobile phone display. A much stronger signal than in the morgue, with its lining of metal racks. He ran his fingers over a panel of switches, guessing as he went. Numbers had been written in neat biro next to each switch. They could be office numbers, zones of the building, coded power sockets, anything. He took the plunge and flicked one. Nothing happened. Reuben counted a slow thirty, waited a moment longer, then reset it before trying another one.
He checked his phone. Adequate signal. No incoming call.
He tried to decipher the codes but quickly realized it was impossible. The numbers above each switch probably related to an electrical master-plan for the building. He chose another random switch, wondering where the plan might be stored. He guessed the contractors who tested the fire alarms, air conditioning and general building systems probably kept copies. Again there was no response, so he chose a different switch. After a long count to thirty, he moved it back and chose another one. He tried to picture the chaos breaking out above him but failed. He couldn’t hear anything. For all he knew, he was doing nothing more than denying power momentarily to a series of empty rooms.
Impatiently, he rubbed the screen of his phone. Two bars, flashing in and out. Enough.
Reuben chose again and again but to no avail. He had just returned another small grey trip switch to its original position when his phone vibrated. He checked the display. Mina. Bingo.
Reuben answered it. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Boss, you still around? We’ve got problems. The lab power just went out.’
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s back on now, but it was down for what felt like the best part of a minute.’
Reuben reached for the same switch and turned it off again. ‘What about the freezers?’
‘Exactly,’ Mina said. ‘Shit. It’s off again. We need access to the back-up minus-eighties in the freezer room. Where are you?’
In the background, Reuben could hear the asynchronous alarms of a whole laboratory full of freezers. Their tones were distinct, different models with different warning sounds, battery packs powering their electronic screams. Deprive a lab freezer of power and it instantly let you know about it. ‘I’m on my way,’ he said. He paused to turn the switch back on, then left the room and headed back to the lab.
When he got there, most of the team were stationary, staring at pieces of equipment, watching them re-boot.
Mina approached him. ‘The power’s running, but I don’t like the look of it. If it goes again we’re going to start losing samples.’
Reuben didn’t meet Mina’s eye. ‘Let’s ship the precious stuff out to the back-ups,’ he said.
‘Right.’
A sudden thought hit him. The profiling of the eighty-three samples. If that had been ruined by the power out, they would need to start again. They would have to take the eighty-three DNAs he wanted and begin the process from scratch. He spun round to examine the sequencer. On its screen lay a multitude of brightly coloured bar codes on a black background. It was still running. And then he remembered.
‘It’s OK,’ Mina said, reading his thoughts, ‘the sequencers are on isolated power supplies. It’s really just the freezers we need to worry about for now.’
Reuben followed Mina to the end of the lab. ‘I’ll take this one,’ he said, opening Freezer 4. ‘You get Three.’
As Mina opened the next freezer, the huge white door looming between them, Reuben reached for the box marked ‘09/#4701-4745: Ian Gillick’. He took a second identical plastic box from the shelf below it, marked ‘08/#1338-1383: Run Yu’. The name made him stop for a second. Although it carried memories of a previous case, he knew the samples were no longer important. Reuben switched the lids of the two containers, then pulled out six more boxes, stacking them between his straight arms.
Mina closed her freezer and carried a similar number of sample boxes out of the lab and into the adjacent freezer room. Reuben helped her insert them into the freezer marked Emergency Back-Up. They returned to the lab and repeated the process. This time Reuben targeted Freezer 7, again swapping lids with an older set of specimens marked ‘08/#1552-1597: Jez Heatherington Andrews’. Mina propped the Emergency Back-Up open while Reuben stacked another twelve boxes inside it. He stopped on the last two.
‘No room,’ he said.
‘Rats,’ Mina answered.
Reuben breathed in and out, the noise lost in the hum of multiple compressors. He forced himself to say the words, feeling like a bad actor, all the time cursing the fact that he was lying to someone so close and so trusted. ‘How about these two?’ he asked, holding out two containers for Mina to inspect. ‘They look old.’
‘Let’s have a look. Run Yu and Jez Heatherington Andrews. That takes me back. But, yeah, they can be returned with the rest in the lab. If the power dies again, it won’t be the end of the world.’
Reuben turned away from Mina and walked back towards the lab. He knew Mina would be scrawling the locations of the shifted samples into the inventory book. He kept going, past the lab and into his office, where he put on his jacket, zipping up inside it the two boxes marked Run Yu and Jez Heatherington Andrews, which contained the DNA of Carl Everitt and Dr Ian Gillick. Then he paced along corridors, through doors and up stairs to the exit of GeneCrime, no record of his deception anywhere in his wake. The cold boxes stuck to the fibres of his shirt. He signed a car out at the security desk and walked into the freezing air.
22
Reuben held the cold white boxes close to his body, a hand inside his jacket pocket keeping them in place. With his spare hand he pressed the key as he approached the row of pool cars. In fact, as he looked at it, the term ‘key’ was inaccurate. It was a fob. No metal, just a wedge of plastic that emitted radio waves. A large silver Volvo S60 flashed at him, one of three vehicles reserved for senior staff attending crime scenes in a hurry.
He climbed in and inspected it. The large Volvo was well spec-ed. As Reuben reversed, the electronic tone of the parking assist became shorter and more jumpy. After a second, it flat-lined, as Reuben nudged into a concrete pillar. The sound of death, a continuous tone of desolation. He pulled forward, tyres complaining, and made his way round the car park. He knew that sensors were checking road adhesion, varying the power to each wheel, modulating braking forces, finessing fuel ratios, damping the suspension, controlling temperatures and pressures and firing times. As Reuben descended the long concrete ramp which linked GeneCrime with the outside world, he wondered whether he was really in control of the car. He had run entire investigations on less computer power than the Volvo had. But all of this progress had one good thing going for it. He nudged the air conditioning to max and slotted the DNA samples into the glove box. Chilled storage area. Now that was a step forward, particularly for a forensic scientist.
He drove quickly through the early-afternoon traffic. The glove box would help, but wouldn’t stop the DNAs thawing completely. He knew these specimens were as precious as any forensic samples anywhere in the world. They were his son, and they were a killer. He also knew he had to return them to GeneCrime unscathed. If they got spoiled, the unit wouldn’t be able to perform corroborative testing on them. And that could ruin a conviction. He had to be quick.
He searched the dash for anything else that could help. He pressed a button and something red flashed up on the display, the letter S lit up bright. The large car hunkered down, dropping closer to the road. Bumps in the London tarmac suddenly became jarring shocks through his spine. The engine note changed, a lower growl which roared as he pressed the accelerator deep into the carpeted floor. Reuben suppressed a smile as he flew past three lanes of slower city traffic. Over-engineered, pointless, environmental lunacy. But when you needed to get somewhere in a big hurry, modern cars were fantastic machines.
A few streets from Lucy’s house, Reuben flicked the sport button off again. He felt the car relax and urged his heart and stomach to calm. He was tense, off balance, operating on fast forward. He ne
eded to think clearly, to act efficiently, to process the DNA samples in his glove box correctly. And then, if it worked, if profiles matched and police records were available, he was just hours from finding Joshua.
He turned into the long road of Georgian terraces. A grand old street lined with trees, properties out of the range of public-sector forensic scientists, even a senior one who had once been married to a successful solicitor. London money. Where it came from, how people got hold of it, how they managed to live in such opulence – these were, Reuben felt, unsolvable mysteries.
At the end of the street, Reuben checked his mirrors before turning. And that was when he saw it again. The Audi that had followed him the previous night. Turning in behind him from a side street. He stared at it, filling in the gaps. In broad daylight it was dark blue, rather than black. And it was definitely an A6, not an A4. But Reuben knew it was the same car. The driver’s side headlight was cracked. It was being driven by a thick-set Caucasian man.
He strained to see. The car was ten metres back, not gaining, but not going away either. Reuben pulled across the junction. The dark Audi followed. He swerved down a side street. The car came after him. Again the thought came to Reuben, as it had done before. Is this the killer? Is he watching me, seeing where I go and what I do? Making sure I’m keeping my end of the bargain? Does he have my son in the back?
Reuben stared in the mirror, barely looking where he was going, his mind racing. And then he made a spontaneous human decision. He slammed the brakes on. The computer instantly detected that the vehicle was slewing across the road. It shot warnings to all four wheels, wrested control of the discs and callipers from Reuben, shifted the distribution towards those tyres with the greatest grip. Thousands of calculations undertaken and acted upon in the two seconds it took Reuben to screech to a halt.
Reuben pressed his seatbelt button and threw the door open in one move. He was out of the car and sprinting up the road towards the Audi, pumping his fists as he ran, his eyes fixed on the driver. The driver turned away from him, looking towards the rear seat. Reuben was five metres away. The engine note changed, a harsh revving, angry power that was about to be released. Reuben flailed forward. The Audi was spinning its wheels. He slammed both hands down on the bonnet. Tried to grip. Desperate to get at the driver. But the surface pulled away from him. The car recoiled, grinding rubber into the tarmac. Accelerating in reverse, straight between layers of parked cars. Reuben stared at the driver, but his head was still swivelled back, watching the road. Reuben changed the angle of his focus. The registration plate. Letters and numbers scanned, repeated under his breath. The Audi was now pulling a sharp turn at the junction. There was another screech of tyres and it pulled away at speed. Reuben couldn’t see into the back of the car. He stood and watched it for a couple of seconds, repeating the registration number to himself.
As he walked back to his car, the smell of burning in his nose, he wondered what this meant. Being followed again, but by someone who didn’t want to confront him. Was this the act of a killer? he asked himself.
When he arrived at Lucy’s house, Reuben grabbed the boxes and walked quickly through the front door. Inside the garage, Judith was leaning against the sequencer, flicking through an instruction manual.
‘You look bored.’
Her eyes came to rest on the two boxes. ‘Not any more.’
‘Can you do me a favour?’
‘Another one?’
Reuben scribbled the Audi’s registration number on to a piece of paper. ‘Ask a friend to run this for me. I’d do it myself, but some things are best done quietly.’
Judith took the piece of paper. ‘I know a man who can,’ she said. ‘But you’ll have to give me a bit of time. Right, how many samples are there?’
Reuben tried to slow his breathing, to get back to normality. ‘Eighty-three.’
‘Better get cracking then.’
‘Have you found everything we need?’
‘Yep. Plus some of the reagents are thawing in the fridge.’
‘Which one?’ Reuben asked, checking out the makeshift laboratory.
‘In the kitchen. The freezers in here need time to reach temperature.’
‘How about Veno and his team – they still here?’
‘Just gone.’
‘And everyone else?’
‘Fraser has been fed and is asleep. Lucy is keeping an eye on him. Moray picked up some Big Dye Terminator from your mate at the FSS.’
‘Nice one.’
‘Although he seemed a bit disappointed. I guess Big Dye Terminator does sound a bit more promising than what it actually is – a Small Box of Sequencing Reagent.’
‘Where is our fat friend now?’
‘Making a second trip to the tip. Seems to be quite enjoying himself.’
‘That’s men and tips for you.’ Reuben paused, scanning the area, making mental lists of what needed doing. Sequencing eighty-three samples would take an hour to set up if they worked together, and just under three hours to run. ‘You ready?’ he asked.
‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ Judith answered, raising her dark eyebrows and frowning briefly. ‘Shall we?’
Reuben and Judith began the work as they had done so many times before in GeneCrime, Reuben taking the lead, Judith anticipating each step of the protocol before he got there, ready and waiting with the heat block, the labelling for the tubes, the preparation of buffers and solutions, the timing of microfuge spins. Reuben noted that Judith had improvised while he was gone. Ice cubes from the freezer in an empty tupperware box; the Big Dye Terminator kit slowly thawing in the fridge; an empty tin of paint for spent pipette tips. It felt like crude and desperate science. Tense and concentrated, making do with what came to hand; an upturned door wrapped in clingfilm for a bench, a cramped domestic garage for a laboratory. But there was no other option. This was all they had, and it had to work.
When the eighty-three DNA samples had been added to their sequencing reactions, Reuben walked the two precious GeneCrime boxes through to the kitchen and slotted them in the top section of the freezer. Lucy was in the living room, staring silently out of the window. At her feet, Fraser Meadows slept motionless in his car seat. Reuben hesitated for a moment, wanting to say something but not knowing what to say. Then he turned and walked back to the garage. There was no time for anything else.
Judith began to load the samples into the tiny vertical wells of the sequencer, minute blue volumes falling into invisible slots, forming an elongated series of U-shapes. Reuben watched her, praying she wouldn’t make a mistake or lose a sample. Every profile could be vital, the one match that would yield the killer’s identity.
There was a noise outside. The unmistakably heavy footsteps of uniformed officers.
‘You OK from here on in?’ Reuben whispered to Judith.
‘Sure,’ she whispered back. ‘Ready to run in about ten minutes.’
‘Great.’
The doorbell rang. Reuben wondered whether Lucy would even hear it.
‘Looks like Veno’s team are back,’ he said. The computer screen of the sequencer read 15:24. ‘So the samples will be off by, what, just after seven?’
‘Exactly. Once they’re running, I’ll take Fraser home.’
The doorbell sounded again. Reuben straightened. He was suddenly nervous. Veno could be bringing bad news. ‘I’ll catch you back here then.’ He walked out into the corridor and down to the front door, a restless blur of black uniform visible through the spy-hole.
23
Detective Paul Veno’s office was even worse than Reuben’s. It felt sterile, cold, brutal. Even an unwanted cactus, Reuben sensed, would have added warmth.
Lucy hadn’t spoken in the car. She had simply gazed through the window, her eyes looking outwards, the rest of her retreating inwards. Reuben wondered how he would feel if he didn’t have the hunt for the man holding his son. In that moment, he realized that the pursuit of evil was what kept him sane. To be doing something, to be breaking
rules and tearing forward, profiling samples and gathering momentum towards the killer, all of this stopped him thinking through the awful realities of the situation. Where Joshua was, how distressed he was, how utterly petrified and alone.
Veno replaced the grubby receiver of his phone. ‘That was media liaison,’ he said. ‘We’re going with the police angle.’
Lucy reached sideways under the desk and placed her hand on top of Reuben’s. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
Detective Veno made a show of sighing and rubbing his jowls. ‘There have been no fresh sightings of your son, Mrs Maitland. The TV appearance yesterday generated a lot of publicity, not all of it positive. A few leads came to the fore, but they all turned out to be useless or wrong. We got decent coverage on the six o’clocks, and even better exposure on the ten o’clocks, thanks to Reuben’s little fit.’
Reuben met Veno’s eyes but didn’t react.
‘The newspapers were all over it this morning.’ Detective Veno lifted a pile of papers off his desk and lowered them again. ‘You seen them?’
‘No,’ Reuben answered. ‘And I don’t want to. What matters is Joshua.’
‘Exactly. So we need to keep it fresh. The focus has got to shift to you now, not your child.’
‘Why?’ Lucy asked. Her tone was flat, as if she knew the answer already but just needed it confirming.
‘Ordinarily, it would be the grieving parents, the public pain . . . you know.’
Lucy stared back, deadpan.
‘But we’ve got the added angle of Reuben’s performance last night.’
‘Meaning?’
Reuben answered before Veno got the chance. ‘Half the population thinks I had something to do with it.’
‘At a conservative estimate,’ Veno muttered, pushing his arms back behind his head, his stomach protruding forward.
Reuben examined his face. Weary indifference, fatigue, a cold detachment from the actual events. He wondered whether Veno had kids. He knew that coppers hated child cases. Most were parents, and it was difficult not to feel part of the human tragedy of child murder and abduction. But Veno was different. He seemed isolated and drained, as if it was all merely an inconvenience.