by John Macken
‘An early trip to the loo. Just like the old times,’ he said.
‘Not at all like the old times,’ Lucy answered. ‘Not in any way at all.’
‘I just meant, you know, ordering for you, you heading for the toilet . . .’
‘I know what you meant. And they were good times, Reuben.’ Lucy stood up. ‘What I wouldn’t do to get them back.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not angry. It was a nice sentiment. It’s just different.’ Lucy shrugged sadly. ‘Awful and terrible and different.’
Lucy set off for the rear of the restaurant and Reuben returned to the quiet contemplation of other people’s noises. Clinks of metal on porcelain, scrapes and groans of chairs on the wooden floor, male and female voices duetting in quiet conversation. He felt alert to it all, sucking it in, the way that amphetamines at crime scenes had helped him absorb every detail of an investigation, hour after hour.
His phone buzzed, the vibration travelling through his fingers. He pressed the button and held it to his ear.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘I’ve got a taste for this now.’
The same voice. Deadened somehow, like the life was being flattened out of it.
Reuben sat bolt upright at the table, shielding the mouthpiece with his hand. ‘A taste for what?’ he asked.
‘A taste for killing. You presumably know there’s been another one?’
Reuben grunted. ‘Another innocent person has been savagely murdered, yes.’
‘Not innocent. Anything but innocent. He deserved to die.’
‘That’s what you said on Monday. One more person who deserves to die. But now you’ve killed two more.’
‘Like I said, Dr Maitland, all bets are off. You broke our agreement. This is down to you.’
‘No it’s not, it’s down to you. And let me ask you nicely. Don’t kill anyone else.’
The man laughed. And then it struck Reuben for the first time: I know this man, and he knows me. He is speaking in subdued tones. He thinks I could recognize his voice. He appreciates there is a chance I can track him down purely from the way he talks.
And then Reuben’s speeding mind cut to the real issue. ‘Where the fuck is my son?’
‘Alive. Just.’
Another notion rushed into Reuben’s brain. The timing. Lucy had been gone for a matter of seconds before his phone rang. He stared wildly around the restaurant. Couples mainly, the odd family. No one on their phone. Did he know that Lucy had just stood up and walked off? Was he watching?
‘Where are you?’ he demanded.
‘That would be telling.’
‘And where the fuck is my son?’ Reuben repeated. Out of the corner of his eye, he sensed people beginning to stare. He tried to calm down. ‘Give me my son and I won’t hurt you,’ Reuben said more quietly.
‘Hollow threats are so easy to make, aren’t they, Dr Maitland? But so hard to act on. The terrible thing is, you already know the stats, don’t you? On what happens in child abductions, on how long the child usually stays alive, on what your chances have shrunk to already. Come on, give me a number.’
‘Fuck off,’ Reuben whispered.
‘By now, I’d say one in fifty, maybe even one in a hundred. Once the first few hours pass, the odds narrow considerably. You ever worked any abduction cases?’
Reuben remained silent, refusing to answer.
‘Seeing it from the other side now, I bet. And I’ll tell you something else you are already well aware of: the parents usually split up afterwards if the child dies.’
‘We’re hardly together in the first place,’ Reuben muttered.
The man on the end of the line was enjoying himself. Reuben let him, all the time listening acutely, gauging what he could, trying to place the voice, desperately hoping to hear the background sounds that would convince him Joshua was still alive. The longer the killer talked, the greater the chance he would compromise himself. Reuben tried to string him along. At least while he was conversing, he couldn’t be hurting anyone.
‘I don’t get your point,’ he said.
‘I guess it’s just that every time you see your partner you’re reminded about it. The event. The loss of a child.’
‘Well, we don’t exactly see each other often now. And let’s not talk as if this is a foregone conclusion. It’s not.’
‘Oh it is, Dr Maitland. It very much is.’
Reuben glanced over towards the back of the room. Lucy had just emerged from the toilets. He pushed the phone hard against his ear, still trying to wring every piece of information out of the sounds it transmitted. All he could hear was the magnified and distorted sounds of respiration, a siren in the background which quickly faded, a scrape of the receiver against skin.
‘Do you want to know who’s next?’ the man asked.
‘Surprise me,’ Reuben said, peering up at Lucy.
‘I will.’
The line was cut.
Reuben stared at the phone display. No caller ID. Just the length of the call – one minute and thirty-seven seconds. It had felt much longer. Every second absorbed and assessed. Reuben knew he had to catch this man. Not in days or weeks but in hours. Or other people would start dying.
‘What is it?’ Lucy asked, sitting down.
Reuben checked around. The speed wasn’t making him paranoid, he told himself, just careful. ‘The man holding Joshua.’
‘And?’
‘And things are about to get a hell of a lot worse.’
14
Reuben washed his face in the toilet sink. He dried himself on a roll of white towel, which hung out of a metal box bolted to the wall. The towel smelled clean and dirty at the same time, scents that had been boiled in, impregnated, unable to escape. He examined himself in the mirror. A night of no sleep and his skin looked grey, a matt of stubble beginning to poke its way through the surface, making it appear dead under the strip lights. He scratched his chin, feeling the roughness against his fingers. He wondered how women put up with kissing a man, having that sharpness pressing into them, scratching and grating. He’d pecked Lucy on the cheek after the Chinese. From his side it had been female softness. From hers, however, he wondered if all she had felt was bristly discomfort.
After he had dropped Lucy back home, he had driven straight to GeneCrime. Hour after hour hunting through evidence files, checking profiles against database entries, looking through lab books detailing the work carried out by the forensics team. He read and re-read the emails from Simon, from Paul, from Bernie, from Mina. From each of their fragments of truths, a sequence of events was emerging. Always they were working backwards, trying to construct beginnings from ends, motives from outcomes. Predicting a killer’s next move from his last, the knowledge of what had already happened allowing them to calculate what was going to happen next. Fractured timelines, with Reuben standing in the middle, amphetamines ebbing and flowing, time stuttering and rushing.
He rubbed his face again, frowning in the mirror. The speed had gone now, leaving nothing but fatigue and a nervous coldness in the pit of his stomach. Reuben took a small wrap of amphetamine out of his trouser pocket. Soon, the building would fill again with scientists, CID and support staff who would buzz around the place like angry wasps, desperate to catch a man who was on the rampage. He dabbed his index finger into the bitter crystal, rubbing it into his gums. Just small amounts, enough to keep him going, not enough to get him galloping. A clear head, a sharp focus, a mental energy sufficient to absorb the information from a whole team of scientists and CID, who needed strategies and lines of attack drawn up instantaneously.
After he had washed his hands, Reuben left the GeneCrime toilets and headed back to his office. It was just before eight. As he walked, he waited for the speed to prick through the fatigue. It would take half an hour or so for the full effect to kick in, but small jabs of intent would make themselves known before then. They couldn’t come soon enough. Reuben felt slightly sick, the discomfort that came
from a lack of sleep and an excess of knowledge.
He reached his office and closed the door, slumping in his seat. The cactus stared back at him, remote and inaccessible. Reuben had a sudden urge to grab it again, to wrap his fingers round its spines and squeeze. But he didn’t. His energy levels were too low. Instead, he turned to his computer and emailed his group. My office when you get in. He sat back and waited.
Within fifteen minutes, the same group of scientists and CID were seated around him, flushed from their journeys, tired from late finishes, excited about the possibilities. The amphetamine was beginning to bring Reuben round again, opening his eyes, humming through his frontal lobes. He cleared his throat and opened his hard-bound book of notes, scrawls he had made through the night, reasoning and ideas, tentative conclusions. As he inspected them now, they looked wild and unruly, black-ink scribbles written fast and gouged deep.
‘So, let’s get started,’ he said. ‘Thanks for all your correspondence last night, and thanks for visiting the scene of the fourth victim, Martin Faulkner. I know things have been moving incredibly quickly, but I think we now have enough insight to start acting. Mina, where are Forensics up to?’
Mina glanced back at him. He saw it in her magnified eyes, a look of concern and sympathy. Silently, he urged her not to mention Joshua. What he needed above everything else now was focus.
‘You’re sure everything’s OK, boss? You know . . .’
‘I’m sure. Now, same question.’
Mina flicked her eyes from Reuben to a couple of members of the team and back again. ‘Well, we’re running slightly behind. We have the first three scenes covered, and the fourth is churning through. But if bodies continue to come in this quickly there’s a chance we’ll be swamped.’
‘OK, so what have we got?’
‘Nothing new. On the DNA side, we have multiple samples, some matching the deceased, some not. Nothing is lighting up the NDNAD. We’re cross-referencing between the four scenes, looking for matches.’
‘And?’
‘We think we have one. Picked up from a hair at murder scene one, and a saliva sample at murder scene two. We didn’t get anything from the third scene, and we don’t know if we can detect it from Martin Faulkner’s residence yet.’
‘So we’ve got the killer’s DNA, but there’s no match on the national database. Are you looking for sibs and parents?’
‘We’re just starting. But hunting through partial matches takes time. If anyone on the database is related to our killer then we need to do some serious leg work and cross-referencing.’
‘How about gross forensics?’
Paul Mackay took his glasses off, folding them on to the pad of paper in front of him. ‘No progress on the footprint database. Birmingham don’t have any of the pairs of shoes used on record. Fibres and hairs are taking time, and are compounded by the fact that the last victim had short brown hair and a cat of similar persuasion. Differentiating between feline fur and human hair isn’t always as easy as I had imagined.’
Reuben felt a pleasing twitch through the muscles of his arms. He appreciated that if it wasn’t for the uneasy depression and creeping paranoia which always hunted him down afterwards, speed was one hell of a drug when you needed to get things done. ‘Right, so Forensics is struggling to keep up. How about our information gathering?’ Reuben raised his eyebrows at Simon Jankowski. ‘Any further progress?’
Simon ran a finger along a feint line in his open notebook. ‘What we’ve been able to confirm is that Vasoprellin was a novel vaso-inhibitor manufactured by BioNovia, the company Carl Everitt worked for.’
‘We know this already, don’t we?’ Reuben said.
‘But what we’ve now got are a lot more of the details, and they make interesting reading. Ten healthy young men and women were on the drug trial. Three received a placebo, the other seven the drug treatment. Two died. Five survived, but were left with permanent damage and long-term health issues.’
‘So it’s classic revenge,’ Bernie said. ‘One of the victims hunts down the people who set the trial up. The medic, the scientist, the drug exec, and now the hospital administrator. So our job is easy. We simply protect anyone else associated with the trial. Most of them will probably come forward for help anyway. In the meantime, we churn through the forensics, chase him through family members or any other evidence that comes to light.’
Reuben stroked the hair at the base of his neck, a warm sensation travelling up from the top of his spine. The trouble with amphetamine was that it was so easy to talk without thinking. Reuben closed his eyes, thinking it through. The killer had taken a hostage. The trial had happened four years ago. Victims were being massacred, not executed. Rats were transported to each scene. Initially, the killer had only wanted three men, now he had killed four. There had to be more to it.
‘Why didn’t last night’s victim put up a struggle?’ Reuben asked.
‘As you know, we’ve been running bloods and urines from the victims,’ Mina answered. ‘But toxicology takes time if you don’t know what you’re looking for.’
‘And what do you think we might be looking for?’
‘We still think some kind of sedative. That’s our best guess.’
‘What about the classics? Chloroform or ether?’ Reuben nodded at a lab window. ‘Stuff we have litres of on our own benches and shelves?’
‘We’re talking to the Tox people. Apparently, inhaled hydrocarbons are tricky to detect in blood, and not secreted in great quantities in the urine.’
‘Well, keep trying. I agree with you – there has to be something. How long till Toxicology come up with an answer?’
‘They reckon another twenty-four to forty-eight hours.’
‘The other angle here,’ Bernie interjected, ‘is that CID found an unpacked suitcase in Faulkner’s flat and were able to ascertain he had been out of the country for over a week at a conference. He mustn’t have heard that three previous work colleagues had been slaughtered.’
‘So his defences wouldn’t have been up. OK, what about the drug trial people who are still alive? Who are they?’
Helen Alders reeled off a list of names. ‘Syed Sanghera, Michael Adebyo, Daniel Riefield, Amerdeep Hughes, Dion Morgan, Cathy Reynolds and Ann Hillyard. We’re chasing them up, getting background, finding addresses.’
Reuben cut to an image of Riefield. Unhinged, living alone, the tips of his fingers missing. ‘How many of the survivors have damaged fingers?’ he asked.
‘We don’t know. CID are having a major effort this morning to contact them all. We’ll find out then.’
‘I think we’re beginning to see where this all fits. A vaso-inhibitor which goes wrong, shutting off blood supply.’ Reuben thought back to countless lectures on biology and anatomy, information he had amassed during his training and beyond. ‘The peripheral vasculature are acutely sensitive to blood flow. Cold fingers and toes in winter. I’ll bet you anything our man doesn’t exactly need nail scissors. And I also bet he won’t be leaving us any fingerprints.’ The amphetamine sent a rapid flash of images through Reuben’s brain: the killer, his mutilated hands, the basis of his motivations. ‘And the rats. Lab rats. A classic message to the dying men he attacks. Lab rats in a cage, watching their fingers being consumed. This man has thought hard about this. He still has some mental faculty. But no women. There must have been nurses on this trial, or female medics. So far he only attacks the males. What does that mean? What does that say about the killer?’
No one answered. Reuben continued to flick through scenarios and ideas, silent and on fire, his concentration utter and absolute.
‘Can we consider them all suspects at this point?’ Bernie asked after a few moments of silence. ‘Get swabs, match them to the DNA we have on record?’
‘Apart from Amanda Skeen, Mica Bell and Martin Randle, who died,’ Simon answered.
Reuben shook himself round. ‘And we can rule out the placebos. What about their families? Anything shake out from the cl
ose relations of the two deceased? Fathers or brothers with a history of violence, wanting payback?’
‘Still working on it, boss,’ Helen answered.
‘But yes, Bernie,’ Reuben continued, ‘I think you’re right. The killer is one of the trialists, or someone close to them. Who else would have anything to gain?’ His racing brain made a small leap which he couldn’t share with his team. The killer knew Reuben’s team would come knocking. But with forensic immunity he was safe. One of a group of people all with the same motive. Very little chance of being singled out and prosecuted. In a crowd he was protected.
But on his own, it was a matter of time until he was tracked down and his life taken to pieces.
15
The long slender Command Room table was smothered with a white layer of papers and print-outs. Among the sheets, colour photographs of the four victims lay like islands of horror and atrocity. Full-length shots taken in the morgue, close-ups from each scene, pale anaemic flesh and vivid red damage. CID had raced through PNC checks, employment details, hospital records and personnel files from the Royal Free. The skeletal information that had only been pieced together the previous night was already being fleshed out into something tangible and solid.
Reuben had spent the hour and a half since the meeting meticulously going through all the DNA evidence with Mina and Bernie. Meanwhile, a team of seven CID officers and a handful of support staff had been gathering every scrap of information they could. Reuben peered over to the far side of the room where Sarah Hirst was sitting. He had heard that CID were already making progress. Generally, Reuben appreciated, forensic information was much slower and harder to come by than the data that lifting a phone or tapping a keyboard could provide. He rubbed his face, forced himself to focus again. His brain had been jumping in every direction, trying to take everything in, attempting to assimilate all the facts it could. Occasionally, images of his son forced their way in, crashing him down again. He needed to get things moving, to find some comfort and consistency in the progress of the investigation.