by John Macken
‘What do you want?’ Valdek asked.
Reuben said, ‘Is your boss in?’
Valdek frowned, his jaw locking. ‘He’s busy.’
Reuben had met Valdek a handful of times and had failed to warm to him. He had an Eastern European look which verged on the Slavic, his nose blunt, his face square, his hair receding and lank, longer on the sides and back than was truly fashionable, as if compensating for its retreat. His neck was thick and firmly set, his ears, under his hair, big and bold. Reuben saw the iron bar, clenched fists and leather boots. He pictured muscles swelling and contracting. He imagined flesh bruising, blood leaking, bones cracking.
‘How long for?’
‘You got an appointment?’
Valdek’s English was perfect, despite his roots. He spoke in a low rumbling monotone, verging on the hoarse at times, a canine growl you instinctively didn’t want to get on the wrong side of. Reuben wondered whether the steroids he undoubtedly took were fucking with his voice box.
‘Yeah,’ Reuben answered, stepping over to lean against the bare brick wall.
Valdek followed him. ‘Well, while you’re not doing anything . . .’
‘What?’
‘I want to know about it. Forensics.’
‘In what way?’
‘How long do DNA samples last?’
Reuben squinted at him. ‘Depends. Minutes, hours, days, years.’
‘Where are people’s DNA samples kept?’
‘What do you want to know for?’
‘And what information do the police keep?’
‘Anything else?’
‘How do you know if you’ve been DNA tested? I want to hear all of it.’ He glanced around the empty warehouse. ‘Here. Now. You and me. Man to man.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m asking you and you’re standing here.’
Reuben shrugged. ‘Not a good enough answer,’ he said.
Valdek appeared to swell. Maybe he just changed his posture, pushed his chest out or lifted his shoulders. But beneath his World Gym sweatshirt there was a standing to attention of muscles, an urgent readiness for action that Reuben knew he was supposed to notice. The guy was on a very short fuse.
‘What kind of fucking answer do you want?’ Valdek asked, stepping closer.
The air had changed. Menace. Straining at the leash. A finger trembling on a hair trigger. Valdek glared down at him. Reuben met his eyes head on. Blazing, full beam, wide pupils.
‘Something better than that,’ he answered.
Valdek stood toe to toe with Reuben. ‘You arrogant cunt,’ he spat, drops of moisture spattering Reuben’s face. ‘What’s your problem?’
Reuben refused to be intimidated. ‘My problem is that I don’t want to talk to you about forensics.’
‘You got an issue with me?’
‘I’ve got an issue with your attitude.’
A door opened ten metres away. Out of the corner of his eye, Reuben recognized Kieran’s other minder Nathan strolling over.
‘What’s going on?’ Nathan asked.
‘We’ll come back to this,’ Valdek whispered, scowling, his teeth bared.
Nathan approached and Reuben knew that Valdek had had his moment. Valdek stepped away, keeping his distance, brooding, the low ceiling holding the intensity tight.
‘Hey, doc,’ Nathan said, ‘how’re you doing?’
Reuben glanced back at Valdek, who avoided his eye. He made a mental note not to antagonize him again. Witnessing the aftermath of a Kosonovski beating had been shocking, but seeing Valdek up close and on edge had surprised him. How quickly things could escalate from nothing, how little provocation was needed. Reuben suspected that Valdek wouldn’t have hurt him. Kieran had him on a tight leash. And it had been too tempting not to push him, to see what it took to get him angry. Reuben sensed that one day in the near future, when Kieran had no use for him any more, Sarah Hirst might be getting an anonymous tip-off about Valdek Kosonovski.
‘Fine, thanks,’ Reuben said.
Nathan was mid-thirties, a serious weight-lifter like Valdek, just as wide but slightly taller. He was the friendly face of Kieran’s ever-present minders. Nathan seemed to grin almost permanently, as if he was practising the look for a bodybuilder competition.
‘What were you talking about?’ Nathan asked. ‘I bet it was what you do, wasn’t it? Forensics and all that?’
Reuben nodded.
‘My missus loves all those shows. With those shiny labs and the way they outsmart the bad guys. Can’t get enough of it.’ Nathan had the kind of chirpy cockney accent that almost seemed to have died out in the capital. ‘That how it is in real life?’
Reuben glanced around himself, at the factory interior, the two minders, the scrubbed floor, the grubby stench of crime. ‘Just like it,’ he answered.
‘Great. Well, he should be ready for you now,’ Nathan said. ‘Go on up.’
Reuben pushed through the green door. He thumped up the stairs and paced along a plushly carpeted corridor. At the end, Kieran’s office door was open. Reuben found Kieran sitting upright in his leather chair, leaning slightly forward, his blond eyelashes flickering in the bright sunlight like butterfly wings.
Reuben sat down opposite him and said, ‘You should keep your boys under control.’
Kieran grinned, a flash of teeth to go with the glint of Rolex and the bling of jewellery. ‘They’re OK, aren’t they? So one of them’s a bit, what? Excitable. Nothing wrong with that in my business. Sends out the right message to the right people.’
‘And everyone else?’
‘You get a bit of rough treatment?’
‘Something like that.’
Kieran leaned forward and opened a drawer. ‘I’m sorry, Reuben. I’ll have words. Here, maybe this will help.’ He pulled out a thick wad of pristine twenty-pound notes, and slid them across the empty desk.
Reuben hesitated, rubbing his face and sighing.
‘What’s up?’ Kieran asked.
‘I’m not proud of what I do for you.’
Kieran puffed his cheeks. ‘I’m hurt.’
‘Let me tell you a story, Kieran.’ Reuben frowned at the bundle of notes, as if they were in some way repellent. ‘When I started out in forensics, you were exactly the kind of villain I was after. In fact, I actually spent time on a case involving one of your many syndicates.’
‘And then?’
‘And then I came to see that what’s good and what’s bad isn’t necessarily so clear cut. I saw coppers beating people up, innocent people. I saw criminals helping others in times of need. And then I started to see something worse.’
‘What?’
Reuben moved his eyes away from the money and stared out of the window, looking at the flat, soiled roofs of two-storey shops. ‘Around the time I left GeneCrime, a copper began using forensics to put people away. He reasoned that forensics is the one thing juries don’t question, the one infallible truth among the chaos of evidence. And it was easy. As long as you had access to the databases and the specimens, you could do what you wanted. Identities could be traded, samples could be inserted or deleted, matches could be found. Science is just people. And people are a mixed lot.’
‘There’s always been bent coppers,’ Kieran shrugged. ‘Here, I’ll write you a fucking list.’
‘But now they’re smarter. A new breed using new tools to get what they want.’
‘Forensics, you mean?’
‘Sometimes. And as a result, innocent punters languish in jail to further careers, or to substantiate hunches, or to punish suspects in unsolvable crimes.’
‘Can’t be that widespread though.’
‘Not necessarily. But it’s out there. And I’m worried it might be happening again. Single coppers rarely act alone.’
Kieran Hobbs caressed the smooth skin of his cheeks, feeling for the meaning of Reuben’s words. ‘So, basically, if I’ve got this right – and tell me if I haven’t – you waste your time running round t
rying to solve crimes that have already been solved?’
Reuben made a sound halfway between a grunt and a laugh. ‘Something like that. Because no one else does. No one else seems to care about the fact that science can be used and abused. No one else seems to care about the truth any more. Just arresting punters and putting them away.’
‘So things change, move on. It’s life. This place for example.’ Kieran waved his arm around the office. ‘Nowadays, most of the capital’s fish comes already gutted and prepared, a lot of it even flown in from all over the world. Friend of mine runs an import business. It’s how I found this place. Nice and quiet and out of the way. And it don’t even smell too bad!’ Kieran chortled to himself, his smile fading over three or four seconds. ‘So new circumstances get exploited by new men. Why you though? What do you care?’
Reuben sighed, blinking away the sunlight. ‘Because occasionally things happen that change the way you think. You either ignore it, or you do something about it.’
‘Oh fuck. An ex-copper with principles.’
‘The rest is only a sideline to finance the big stuff. Paternity suits, industrial espionage’ – Reuben took a piece of paper out of his jacket – ‘tracking the identities of assassins . . . I mean, no offence, Kieran, but it’s small potatoes.’
‘It ain’t small potatoes when someone comes to kill you.’
‘Thought that was just an occupational hazard.’
‘So who was he then?’
Reuben squinted, recalling the warehouse below and rubbing his cottonwool bud slowly over the open eyes of the pulped man lying on the floor. ‘Ethan de Groot. Dutch in origin, but lived here for some time. There’s his last known address and phone number. Thirty-two, single, one previous conviction for possession of cocaine, two for ABH and another for intent. Nice guy.’
‘I’ve seen worse.’ Kieran casually scanned the piece of paper, before slotting it into his shirt pocket. ‘What I don’t get is who sent this Dutch cunt after me. Who is it wants me finished that badly?’
Reuben stared balefully out of the window. ‘I’ll write you a fucking list,’ he whispered to himself.
9
Sarah Hirst loitered in the doorway of the flat, a metal cylinder marked ‘Cryo-Store’ in her hands. From it, a heavy white vapour leaked slowly down towards her stockinged legs and over her leather shoes. Reuben watched her for a second as she walked past him and into the room, vaporized nitrogen swirling behind her like a cloak. There was a fluid loveliness in the way she moved, as if she’d been poured out of a bottle, viscous and honeyed, which the gas exaggerated, like the vapour trails of a banking aircraft. ‘Professional and personal,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Professional and personal.’ He locked the metal door and turned to face her.
‘What you got?’ he asked, pointing with his eyes at the cylinder she was holding.
‘I thought you might be asleep.’
‘So why did you come?’
Her eyes widened. ‘Because what I’ve got here is good enough to wake you up.’
Sarah paced over to the lab bench. She placed the Cryo-Store carefully down and opened it. Reuben took a pair of elongated forceps from a shelf and retrieved a frozen and preserved Eppendorf tube from the volatile liquid.
‘And this is?’
‘A DNA sample from none other than Mr Michael Brawn, Pentonville’s finest felon.’
‘How the hell did you sanction that?’
‘Sanction? You don’t sanction the removal of a classified forensic sample into the wider community.’ Sarah propped herself against a stool, half leaning, half sitting. ‘Thought you might have a dabble with your wonder technique of predictive phenotyping. You never know what it might find.’
Reuben ran his eyes quickly around the lab, over its busy shelves, its blank surfaces, its humming freezers, its anonymous equipment. ‘Sure. It’s that or get a good night’s sleep.’
‘Anyway, I’ve got to shoot. We’ve just had reports of a potential victim, dredged fresh out of the Thames.’
‘Like Tamasine Ashcroft?’
‘Got to go and oversee the prelims.’ Sarah glanced directly at Reuben. ‘But, yes, could be another.’
‘What have you got so far?’
‘Not a fat lot. Except there may be more than one man involved.’
‘How so?’
Sarah straightened, the stool complaining as it scuffed the vinyl floor. ‘Sorry, Dr M. Need to know basis.’ She tugged at the sleeves of her black jacket and smoothed her dark skirt. ‘Gotta dash, otherwise the FSS will have already started bitching about GeneCrime taking over. Good luck with the predictive phenotyping.’
‘If I decide to do it.’
‘Oh, you will.’
Sarah unlocked the door and left the lab with a sad smile which seemed to linger in the room after her. Reuben paused a few seconds, thinking, wondering, trying to decide what made Sarah tick, and what she truly wanted from him. As he slowly inserted himself into the stiff restraint of his lab coat, he whispered, ‘I know I should trust her, but . . .’ And then he grunted, taking in the empty space around himself. Whispering to yourself. That was one step closer to lunacy than talking to yourself.
The idea behind predictive phenotyping was a simple and brilliant one which had done much to ruin Reuben’s career and personal life. The science was good, unexpectedly robust and unerringly accurate. What hurt with predictive phenotyping was the potential for misuse. The ability to determine what a stranger looked like from a microscopic sample of their blood, or hair, or saliva even, brought with it a number of temptations Reuben had been unable to resist. For when your wife is having an affair with an unknown person who leaves hairs behind in your bed . . . Reuben shuddered for a second, revisiting the events of the previous year which had precipitated his sacking from GeneCrime. Sarah’s words tracked him down a final time. When the personal and professional get mixed up in a sticky tangle, that’s when you know you’re in trouble.
As Reuben popped open the tube and extracted a small sample of its contents with a pipette, he felt the spark of the technique’s possibility ignite once more. He knew he wouldn’t sleep, and that he would work through the night. It wasn’t that Michael Brawn interested him per se – a single piece of paper with a few words on it was only a minor red rag – but that the excuse to delve, to probe, to use the technology that only he had access to, bit into him like a snare. Besides, the purity of doing something for the sake of its methodology appealed to him after the grubby, filthy commercial cases he was pursuing. As he flicked a sequencer on, he once again recalled Commander Abner’s words, his assertion that predictive phenotyping could be the answer to his problems.
The hours began to get soaked up in an enveloping series of activities and actions: tapping information into a laptop; lying horizontal on a sofa reading a book; taking down the vial marked ‘Oblivion’ from a shelf; flicking tubes with his index finger; using the same finger to rub amphetamine into his gums; slotting the tubes into a machine; chewing his teeth; reading data off a screen; pipetting coloured fluid on to a DNA chip; staring into screens of numbers; mapping facial coordinates . . .
Reuben pulled his head back from the glow of his laptop. A clock in the corner of the screen read 13:27. He’d worked solidly into the next day. He hesitated, savouring the pause, and then pressed the return key. Slowly, on the screen, a 3D face began to come to life.
Reuben watched, fascinated. Textures and colours, contours and coordinates, depth and tone, pushing and receding, narrowing and widening, lightening and darkening, shaping and defining. He stretched, amphetamine muscles relishing the chance to extend and unfurl. The computer stood still, its result illuminated on the screen. The face was that of an Afro-Caribbean male, mid-forties, mildly obese. In a text box in the corner was printed ‘Psycho-Fit of Michael Jeremy Brawn: moderate intellect; schizophrenia negative; likely benign’. Reuben squinted at the 3D image, rotating it with his mouse so that it seemed to be shaking its head.
&n
bsp; ‘So, Mr Brawn,’ he frowned, ‘nice to meet you at last.’
10
Twelve faces glanced up at Prison Guard Tony Paulers with a dozen expressions ranging from expectation to hatred. Among the negligible middle ground were irritation, apathy, disdain and guilt. Tony Paulers had become adept in his twenty-one years of prison service at simultaneously noting and ignoring what he saw staring back at him from the inmates of Pentonville. Those who beamed were generally up to something, those who growled and snarled either weren’t or didn’t care who knew it. Either way, he had been spat at and sworn at and kicked so many times in the last two decades that it had become a matter of survival simply to avoid confronting what he saw in the eyes of his inmates.
The TV room was half full, prisoners slumped on plastic chairs, absorbing the daytime trivialities of a world they were locked away from. Tony would be happy if they watched television all day. The lulling, soporific immersion in home improvement and cookery programmes seemed to dampen their spirits. Tony had never been assaulted in the TV room.
He allowed himself a moment to examine the assembled ranks in front of him, naming them in his head, being quietly vigilant, seeing who was where. Hardened cons, care-in-the-community cases, lads who were only months too old for borstal. Tony appreciated that status in here was not a winning smile, or a professional job, or a beautiful wife, or a platinum credit card, or anything else you might strive for on the outside. No, status here was simple and brutal. It was in the twinkling of a bicep, the girth of a chest, the length of a charge sheet. And as he focused on the prisoner he had come to fetch, he realized that this one was different. This one was outside the normal rules of categorization. This one was the exception that proved the rule.