Control

by John Macken

  ‘Reuben, think about it. No one has to give you any reason. It’s not the way you work in your job, or how Detective Veno works in his. We don’t give reasons. If we did, criminals would destroy the evidence before we got a chance to examine it.’

  ‘And is that what we are now? Criminals?’

  Sarah stared harshly back, her cheeks rouged, her eyes wide. For a second, Reuben wanted to confess everything to her. His duplicity, his dishonesty, his crossing of the line. But he couldn’t. As Lucy had suggested, he had come too far, dug himself in too deep. His son’s life was in utter danger. If CID got involved, Reuben would be sacked, Veno would go ballistic, and the police would close ranks. The chances of rescuing his son would dramatically worsen. The only option was to do what he did best. Track the killer down.

  ‘I resent that implication,’ Sarah said. ‘And I don’t like the way this is heading. Do yourself a favour, Reuben, let Detective Veno do his job.’

  Lucy seemed to be staring at Sarah. They had met once, years ago, before Reuben was married, at the start of his relationship with Lucy. A police function, a celebration after a successful case. Lucy had turned up, stayed for a couple of drinks, gone home early. And then, two or three good years, marriage, a failing relationship, Lucy’s infidelity, and one more broken home in the capital.

  ‘Or maybe I should be asking Lucy. It’s your house, Mrs Maitland. What’s it to be? The nice way or the nasty way?’

  Reuben studied both women. Auburn versus blonde, solicitor versus officer, former wife versus current boss.

  ‘There is no nice way,’ Lucy enunciated, still focusing on Sarah. ‘And if Reuben says you aren’t coming in then you’re not coming in.’ With that, she stepped back past Reuben and slammed the door.

  Reuben stood facing Lucy in the half light of the hallway. He pictured the faces of the police officers outside. This was suicidal. They would be back, and they would tear the place apart. But it was the only course of action they could have taken.

  ‘Drink?’ Lucy asked.

  Reuben shook his head. ‘I’ve got one hell of a problem in the garage. A laboratory, DNA samples I shouldn’t have, profiles which have been run through the National DNA Database.’ Reuben started walking, past Lucy, past the kitchen and towards the garage. ‘Lock the front door,’ he said. ‘And don’t let anyone in. If they understand what I’ve been doing, we’re absolutely fucked.’

  8

  In the construction of the garage twenty-four hours earlier there had been optimism. In its disassembly there was only regret. Reuben thought about calling Judith and Moray to help, but knew that Veno and his squad would be back before they arrived. So Reuben worked feverishly, unplugging equipment, boxing up solutions and reagents, tearing the clingfilm from his makeshift lab bench. He set about the computer, deleting files, profile logs, records of database searches. He knew exactly what a police search team would be looking for. Reuben hesitated for a second, then decided to format the hard drive. Better utterly paranoid than just partially so.

  While the PC systematically erased its past he walked the printer back into his old study and hid the pipettes and tips in an empty can of paint. He opened the small freezer and let it thaw, removing the two boxes of DNA from Ian Gillick and Carl Everitt’s crime scenes. He took them through into the kitchen where he poured the Eppendorfs into a large bag of mixed sweetcorn and peas. Lucy was sitting there in silence, both hands wrapped around a mug of something warm. She raised her eyebrows at him as he shoved the bag to the rear of the freezer. Reuben knew that even if they found the tubes, and their discovery compromised him, this was vital DNA evidence that mustn’t be discarded. Getting sacked was one thing. Letting a killer off was quite another.

  Reuben returned to the garage and continued to shift small pieces of lab equipment. It was desperate stuff. He was fucked, and he knew it. There was no way out that he could see. He decided at that moment his career was effectively over. His reinstatement as GeneCrime Head of Forensics, controversial as it had been anyway, had lasted a mere three days. He had compromised innocent members of the public. He had misled GeneCrime. He had subverted a missing child hunt. As he lifted the spare door that had served as his lab bench, he tried to console himself that the three deaths so far had been unrelated to his actions. All of them would have died regardless. Philip Gower was doomed, even before Reuben received the phone call.

  At the time, he had quickly squared the moral black hole of the killer’s blunt proposal. A life for a life. A two-year-old boy with seventy-plus years of love and happiness ahead of him against the existence of a grown man who had already experienced several decades on the planet. Not perfect, but when it was your own son, your only child, against a total stranger . . . Reuben paused, appreciating that in the cold light of day, beneath the harsh neon tubes of the garage ceiling, it didn’t sit as comfortably as he might have hoped. He had been offered an impossible choice, and he had made an imperfect decision. But if the killer struck again, Reuben knew that decision would haunt him for ever.

  He shuffled the heavy upright door to the back of the garage and leaned it gently against the hottest part of the central heating boiler. Any evidence clinging to it would soon be destroyed. Standing still for a moment, breathing heavily from the exertion, he dragged his brain back to the case. What linked the men who had died? A scientist, a pharmaceutical sales executive and a trials coordinator? Why had they been targeted, and why had their fingertips been systematically removed? What was the involvement of Riefield, who was clearly psychologically damaged, and was also missing his fingertips? Reuben had barely had time to think it all through. He realized belatedly that the third man held the clue. He was the final victim the killer had mentioned, the one he was going to end on, the one he said deserved to die. Three men, forensic immunity, and that was it.

  Reuben cursed himself. He had been unusually slow. It hadn’t been an investigation so far, just a blur of police stations, rushed conversations, endless tearing around the capital in anonymous cars. In the chaos, he had barely once sat down and tried to pull it all together. Three men, murdered one by one, no concrete links between them, just the vague notion that Philip Gower was what had really mattered.

  The meeting at six at GeneCrime would start the process moving. Initial forensic analyses, background checks on Philip Gower, the story finally starting to emerge from the turmoil of three deaths in quick succession. That was how it worked. At the start, an overwhelming mass of seemingly unconnected data. And then, from amid the disorder, patterns and strands, dots joining up, loose associations becoming tightly bound certainties.

  Reuben cast his eyes over the garage one last time. The sequencer was back on the floor, where it had sat until the previous day. The smaller items – the microfuge, the PCR machine, the dry block – were boxed up out of sight. The miscellaneous plastic ware – the Eppendorfs and pipette tips – were secreted in various nooks and crannies. The PC was standing silent, its screen blank. Nothing was hidden so it couldn’t be found, just so that it looked like it hadn’t been used recently. It was the best he could do in the time it would take Veno to rush through a warrant from the duty judge.

  There was a hammering on the front door, and Reuben sighed. When he had first begun his career in CID, a warrant took twelve hours at the bare minimum. He flicked off the garage lights and walked back through the house. Veno would have phoned ahead as he drove, texted the details through, had an assistant use a pro forma, then email it to the relevant authority for clearance and an electronic signature. He checked his watch. It had taken an hour and a half, including travel time. The door shook again as it was banged. Reuben sensed anger and irritation in the fist making the noise. He waited a second, daring them to pound the wooden surface again. And then, a coldness in the pit of his stomach, he pulled it open.

  Veno looked severely pissed off. He was brandishing a piece of paper which appeared to have been faxed. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’m now asking you to step the hell out of
my way, Maitland.’

  Reuben didn’t bother to read the document. He looked at Sarah, who also appeared angry. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Come on in. Do your worst.’

  While Veno’s team took a room each, Lucy sat silently in the study at the back of the house, staring out of the window. Veno had requested they remain out of visual contact, so Reuben sat by himself in the kitchen. He finally made himself a coffee, revelling in its bitter warmth.

  After a few minutes, Sarah entered and joined him. She declined the offer of a coffee, which Reuben saw as a bad sign. In the corner, the large metal-effect freezer hummed quietly, eighty-three GeneCrime Eppendorfs lurking among its bags of frozen vegetables.

  ‘I’ve just been in the garage,’ Sarah said, her light blue eyes fixed on Reuben.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Some sort of point you’re building up to, Sarah?’

  ‘The equipment from your old lab seems to be in there. I saw a sequencer and a freezer, and I’ll bet my backside there’s a whole lot of other stuff secreted around if I could be bothered to look hard enough.’

  Reuben stared back. It was only a matter of time before one of Veno’s team started poking around in the kitchen. ‘I’m not denying that I own some lab equipment.’

  ‘Fine. But would you say it was usual for scientists to set up laboratories in their homes?’

  ‘It’s not my home.’

  ‘Either way—’

  ‘Don’t you take any work back to your flat?’

  ‘It’s a bit different reading a few papers or typing some emails to sequencing genes and profiling DNA. Besides, what can you possibly do here that you can’t do at GeneCrime?’

  Reuben declined to answer.

  Sarah stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at him. ‘You know your problem, Reuben?’

  ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘We’ll compare notes.’

  ‘You’re failing to see this like Detective Veno sees it. You’re taking everything so bloody personally.’

  ‘It is personal. My son is missing and Veno’s pulling my ex-wife’s house apart. How much more personal could it be?’

  ‘Look at your recent history, Reuben, and tell me you would be any different from Veno. Infidelity, a marriage melt-down, your sacking, a child with a history of serious illness, rumours about your consumption of drugs—’

  ‘You’ve seen my file as well?’ he said, dismayed.

  ‘How do you think it appears? Veno’s just a bloodhound doing what he’s got to do.’

  ‘While all the time trying to fuck me over.’

  Sarah peered up towards the ceiling. A heavy bang suggested the search was becoming more thorough. ‘Look, Reuben, I’m not happy. It took a lot of effort to get you back. Commander Thorner and his cronies needed some serious convincing. It was not a popular appointment across the Met. I mean, Veno’s not exactly the only one with a grudge.’ Sarah left her words hanging. Their sharp tones ricocheted off the flat polished surfaces of the kitchen. Reuben felt sick and uncomfortable, wanting to be straight with Sarah, and knowing that he couldn’t be. ‘I stuck my neck out for you, Reuben.’

  ‘I know,’ Reuben answered quietly. There was another ominous thud from the floor above. ‘And I can’t tell you how much I owe you.’

  Sarah shrugged off the sentiment. ‘From now on, everything is above board, Reuben. Or else.’

  ‘Or else what?’

  Sarah fixed him squarely in the eye again. ‘I shouldn’t need to finish that sentence, and you shouldn’t need to ask.’

  9

  Reuben basked in the radiated warmth of his team. They surrounded him, a human layer of protection from all the external troubles of his life. He felt truly comfortable for the first time in days. Reuben ran his eyes around the group, most of whom he had recruited and trained himself. Bernie, Mina, Simon, Paul, Birgit, Chris, Leigh, Helen. He had missed them all. He had particularly missed the sparring of bright minds, the razor-sharp insight his team of forensic scientists had developed, the intellectual leaps they made that solved cases and defeated killers.

  To look at, they were nothing special. In Reuben’s experience, some of the brightest minds he had ever encountered were housed in some of the dullest bodies. The popular concept of the nerd was a misleading one, he thought. Sure, some narrow avenues of academic research attracted males and females of a plainness rivalled only by young Christians. Forensics, on the other hand, which spanned biology, anatomy, chemistry and psychology, tended to reflect as much human variation as it sought to investigate. Inspecting the group crammed into his office, Reuben appreciated that there was no archetypal forensic scientist. There was instead a wealth of character, each individual bringing his or her own unique perspective.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘who’ll start us off?’

  No one in the arc of seats that enclosed his desk said anything.

  ‘No one? I feel chronically out of touch with the case for obvious reasons, and I need bringing up to speed. Someone help me out here.’

  Bernie ran a quick hand through his beard. ‘We think this is probably the work of one man.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re starting to get footprint analysis through. Kitchen floors, shoes treading in fine sprays of blood, partial imprints outside the environs of each murder.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We don’t have any consistent patterns that would indicate different pairs of footwear. When we subtract shoe patterns from the wardrobes of the deceased, we’re only left with a single footwear profile at each scene.’

  ‘Is the killer wearing the same pair of shoes to each scene?’

  ‘No. Three different pairs.’

  ‘And from that you’re inferring just one man?’

  ‘We’ve been able to match each pair via the Footwear Intelligence Agency at the FSS.’

  ‘I love those guys over at Birmingham,’ Chris Stevens muttered. ‘They set up a shoe database and make it sound like they’re the CI-fucking-A.’

  ‘Either way, it works,’ Bernie continued. ‘They’ve been able to identify shoe make and model, and confirm they’re all the same size. And our man has large feet. Size twelve and a half. It’s extremely unlikely that there are two killers wearing the same size and type of shoes.’

  ‘You might want to talk to my twin brother about that,’ Reuben said. ‘But no, you’re probably correct, Bernie. Anyone else?’

  Mina straightened in her chair. ‘Our man in the twelve and a halfs is obviously careful.’

  ‘Based on what?’

  ‘The lack of useable samples we actually have. Aside from footwear, which only get used once, we don’t have fingerprints, or saliva, or hairs. Someone is able to enter a residence, restrain a grown man and remove his fingertips, all without leaving us a present. And that’s not to mention the rats. That can’t be easy.’

  ‘It’s the lack of forced entry on the first two that disturbs me,’ Detective Leigh Harding said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Leigh scratched at his thinning blond hair. ‘Well, why did he have to break into Philip Gower’s flat but not into the residences of Ian Gillick or Carl Everitt?’ He sucked in his cheeks for a second. ‘What changed?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what changed,’ Reuben answered. ‘The news. Carl Everitt gets hit out of the blue. Nothing he could do to see it coming. Same for Ian Gillick. Even if he read somewhere that Everitt had been hacked up, he had no way of knowing he was next. Just a coincidence that he knew someone who died. But Gower, and this is why I think he is key to all this, Gower had an inkling. Maybe he saw the news, recognized the names of the two victims, wondered whether he should be careful.’

  ‘Why didn’t he go to the cops?’

  ‘Perhaps he has something to be ashamed of.’ Reuben thought back to the killer’s words. This one deserves to die. ‘Perhaps he couldn’t go to the cops.’

  ‘What makes you think he had an idea something might happen?’

  Reub
en edited the words in his head before he said them out loud. He had to remind himself of what he knew, and what he actually should know. ‘Gower’s flat was locked and chained from the inside. His new partner, a nurse, was on a night-shift, due to return in the early hours. That would mean waking Gower up when she got back, which is less than ideal. I mean, I don’t know about you guys, but when a case spills into the early hours, I’m sure your significant others don’t lock you out of your own house.’

  ‘Depends how late I am,’ Bernie grumbled.

  ‘And besides, the neighbour below reported a lot of banging and crashing about. I get the feeling this wasn’t as smooth as the first two, and maybe part of this is because Gower was on his guard.’

  ‘So this implies the three victims knew one another,’ Mina said. ‘Can we make that assumption yet?’

  Simon Jankowski, who had been silent so far, opened his notebook. ‘I’ve got some news,’ he said.

  Everyone in the room turned to him.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re finally coming out,’ Paul Mackay muttered.

  ‘I think you fulfil that quota,’ Simon smiled back.

  ‘Better out and proud,’ Paul answered, ‘than in and ashamed.’

  ‘Well, are you planning on sharing it with us, Simon?’ Reuben asked. ‘If you two don’t mind too much, we’ve got a psychopath to catch.’

  ‘OK,’ Simon said. He ran a finger along a line in his book, silently checking his facts. Then he stood up and walked over to the whiteboard in the corner of Reuben’s office. ‘Do you mind, boss?’ he asked.

  Reuben shook his head, excited. Words were easy. If you wrote something on the whiteboard, it mattered.

  ‘Leigh and I have been doing some background checks, ascertaining identities, making sure the samples we have match the right punters.’ Simon used a red marker pen to scratch the words ‘Royal’ and ‘Free’ in large capitals. Above them, he wrote the names of the three victims in blue, the squeak of the pen the only sound in the room. ‘Now, we have a scientist from the Royal Holloway, a pharmaceutical sales exec based at a couple of sites in the capital, and a clinical trials coordinator working at the Hammersmith Hospital. And what unites them all is this: the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.’