Trial by Blood

by John Macken

  Her husband entered the kitchen and Judith stood up. She gave him a stiff hug, and let him pat her belly. No signs as yet, nothing to show, but minute and invisible things were happening. Two parallel lines on a plastic stick the previous day had told them that. Inside, a switch had been flicked, a timer telling Judith that things were about to change. She swallowed the sick queasiness that was climbing her throat, and flicked the kettle on.

  ‘How’s today looking?’ Colm asked.

  ‘Not good. Plus I had a text request for another double shift tomorrow.’

  ‘Really?’

  Her husband, she noted out of the corner of her eye, gave her an unpractised look of concern. Two blue lines and his behaviour was already changing. The murmur of the kettle quickly became a roar, and Judith made him a cup of tea, her gloves still on.

  ‘The extra cash will come in handy.’

  ‘I don’t want you working yourself to death. Not any more.’

  ‘So it was OK before?’

  Colm smiled in defeat. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I’m not doing overtime for the sake of it. There’s a killer on the loose.’

  ‘There’s always a killer on the loose. That’s London. Eight million people; some of them will be psychopaths. Pure statistics.’

  ‘Yeah, well. The difference is I get poorly paid in order to help catch killers. And when someone’s actively murdering women—’

  ‘Something sexual?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Colm lifted the mug of tea to his lips and blew across its grey surface. ‘In what way sexual?’

  ‘He rapes them after death.’

  ‘Is that really rape?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘If you’re dead, you can’t say no.’

  Colm was never interested in her cases, and Judith seldom divulged the details. It was against the rules to talk about them anyway, even with loved ones. She found Colm’s curiosity unusual.

  ‘Why are you so concerned?’

  ‘I’m not,’ Colm answered, risking a sip of his drink. ‘I just thought I should take more interest in what you do. You know, now you’re . . .’ He tilted his mug in the direction of Judith’s belly.

  ‘Pregnant.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, it’s early days. And for the record, rape is rape, whether before death, during death or after it.’

  Colm leaned against the counter, one foot on the bottom rung of a stool. He was silent except for an occasional slurp. Judith continued to watch him, wondering what the hell pregnancy did to the male mind. Those thoughts fought for space with the short sentences of Reuben’s letter, which still rebounded around inside her head. If it was important enough to write down and send to her, it had to mean something.

  Presently, Colm walked over to the dusty sink and placed his mug in it. ‘Gotta dash,’ he said. ‘Good luck with the builders.’ He pecked Judith briefly on the cheek, gently patted her stomach again and made for the front door.

  After he’d gone, Judith opened the letter again and read it out loud. ‘I am safe, if a little cold. Put me out of sight.’ Safe. Cold. Out of sight. At last, she understood.

  Judith folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope. She took a transparent plastic bag out of a drawer and slid the letter in. Then she opened the freezer compartment of her fridge. She widened the opening of a box of fish fingers and slotted the envelope carefully into it, closing it again and pushing it to the very back.

  19

  Narc’s first few words of the day had been prophetic. When Reuben returned to his cell after a night in the hospital wing, Narc had announced gleefully, ‘So, rumour has it you’re a bizzie.’

  ‘Ex-bizzie,’ Reuben had muttered.

  ‘Oh, you’re in the wrong place,’ Narc grinned. ‘You are so in the wrong place.’

  Reuben had shrugged, not wanting to give his cellmate the satisfaction.

  ‘They’re going to fucking eat you alive.’

  Reuben had then examined himself in the steel mirror. His face was battered, his left eye half closed, the bridge of his nose swollen. Five uneven dark red stitches zipped two lips of cheek-flesh together. He touched the straight nylon thread poking out of the end of the wound. It was sharp and unbending, at odds with the soft numbness of the tissue it held together. The sutures had been administered by an unsympathetic male nurse without anaesthetic. Reuben grimaced. The whole hospital wing had reeked of desperation. Three prisoners who had hurt themselves just to be locked away where other inmates couldn’t get to them. A failed suicide case having his wrists sewn back up. Two men who didn’t speak English, weak with something viral. A butch female nurse ignoring a request for pain relief until she had finished her tea break. Reuben had almost been glad to be back in his cell. That is until he encountered Narc.

  The rest of the day had been just as difficult. He had hobbled in to join the breakfast queue, and watched prisoners move away from him. The food server had dolloped a large spoonful of scrambled egg on his tray, half of which ended up on Reuben’s shirt. When he tried to find somewhere to sit, it had been as difficult as it was on his first day. And when he did eventually pull out a chair to sit down, the two prisoners there had stood up and walked to a different table.

  The TV lounge hadn’t proved any better. Reuben had been spat at from behind, an obvious, hawked-up ball of phlegm landing on his shoulder. When he turned round, a trio of prisoners were sneering at him. And when he swivelled back, more spit began to fly in his direction. Reuben had stayed as long as he could bear. Don’t let them see that any of this matters, he told himself. But still, with his shirt festooned with phlegm, he had been forced to leave eventually.

  Reuben appreciated that most of the prison would very quickly know who he was. Word had spread almost instantaneously from Officer Simms to Michael Brawn, whether directly or indirectly, and wouldn’t stop there. The presence of ex-CID among the ranks, especially a forensics officer, was bound to cause a stir. Reuben realized that he had obviously been pointed out; relatively few people had known his name or what he looked like yesterday. Today, however, that had changed. It was there in the eyes of men he passed in the corridor, inmates he had no recollection of seeing before. Even the guards seemed to view him with a mix of pity and amusement.

  What Reuben needed quickly were friends and information. He had to find Damian and Cormack, and had to talk to Sarah, to find out what the hell was going on. Every extra day was going to feel like a lifetime.

  As Reuben turned into the telephone corridor and passed through a barred gate, he finally spotted Kieran Hobbs’ men. He approached them, feeling the bruises beginning to freeze up, his walk almost mechanical, but optimism nonetheless in his stride.

  ‘Look, about yesterday,’ he said when he reached them, attempting to smile. ‘Thanks for bringing the cavalry.’

  ‘Forget it,’ Cormack answered.

  ‘I mean, if you hadn’t—’

  ‘I said, forget it.’

  ‘Kieran said you’d help me, and he wasn’t wrong.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’

  ‘I thought Brawn was going to kill me in there.’

  Cormack’s tone was harder than before. ‘That’s what you get when you overstep the line.’

  ‘There wasn’t a lot I could do.’

  Damian turned directly to Reuben. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘you stay the fuck away from us.’

  Cormack angled his head back. ‘Kieran never told us you were an ex-copper. There’s no fucking way we’d have agreed to baby-sit you.’

  Reuben examined the graze on one of his knuckles, smelled the sour male odours of tobacco and sweat that pervaded the prison.

  ‘Look, I used to be a copper, then I moved over to forensics.’

  ‘Same fucking thing,’ Damian answered.

  ‘See, we keep hanging round with you, what’s everyone gonna think?’ Cormack’s eyes were wide and angry. ‘That we’re giving you info, grassing them up. You think we�
��re going to risk our lives for you?’

  ‘Not a fucking hope. I got eight weeks left in this shit-hole. And I’ll tell you this, Damian Nightley ain’t going out in a fucking box.’

  ‘So from now on, stay the fuck away. Whoever you are.’

  Damian and Cormack pushed past Reuben, one on either side, their shoulders barging into him, reigniting the pain of his bruises. Reuben watched them go, sensing the anger in the stiffness of their walks, the betrayal in their refusal to look back. He ran his fingers over the angry wound on his cheek. Now he was truly alone. And there were other issues to take care of.

  He limped on to the huddle of corridor phones, and waited his turn. An image returned to him, awoken by the blankness of the walls. Eighteen years old, sitting on the cold leather seat of an ageing Renault 12, the car parked outside huge blank gates of steel. Rain cascading down the windows, distorting the view of the prison. The passenger-side door swinging open, his father climbing in. Surveying his dad, who was resting his face against the steamed-up side window, silent and distant, water dripping from his short hair and sliding down his face, another in a long line of custodial sentences coming to an anti-climactic end.

  Reuben saying, freedom. So how does it feel?

  His father replying, it doesn’t feel anything.

  Jesus, what did they do to you in there?

  George Maitland continuing to stare out of the windscreen, his head leaning against the glass of the side window.

  Reuben finding a gear in the notchy gearbox and pulling off in silence.

  The queue shuffled forward. After a couple more minutes it was Reuben’s turn. He dialled a number from memory, and drummed his fingers on the metal hood. When it was answered, he asked, ‘How much longer?’

  Rapid keyboard taps punctured the short silence, then Sarah said, ‘There’s been a hitch.’

  ‘What do you mean, a hitch?’

  ‘We kept this quiet.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Maybe too quiet.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Look, sit tight. I’ll sort it, but it’s going to take a few days to get official clearance.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I have to get out now.’

  ‘It’s not that easy. We’ve put someone in jail who shouldn’t be there. The Prison Service will go ballistic if we don’t handle this carefully.’

  ‘I’m not particularly worried about upsetting the Prison Service. Sarah, my son is ill and I need to see him.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Reuben, and I understand. But see it from my side.’

  ‘Your side? There is no your side. Sarah, they know I’m an ex-copper. Twelve hundred fucking inmates know that one of their number is ex-force. Maybe even helped put some of them away. Michael Brawn almost killed me, and he’s still roaming around free. So the only sides I’m interested in are me against the whole of Pentonville. You’ve got to sort this, and do it now.’

  ‘OK.’ Sarah breathed heavily down the line. ‘I’m doing what I can. But I have to warn you again, it’s not going to happen quick. Abner doesn’t know you’re there. In fact, I told him I had no idea where you were. If I go to him now and request special assistance—’

  ‘I’m not bothered about whether you’ve compromised yourself. I’m worried about getting out of here alive and seeing my son. Do something. Now.’

  ‘Like I said—’

  Reuben slammed the receiver down. He knew what she was going to say. Covert operations couldn’t just be undone. There were toes that shouldn’t be stamped on, torn-up protocols that had to be stitched back together. He wondered momentarily whether Sarah was dragging her stiletto-ed feet deliberately. Whether she was happy Reuben was isolated and cut off. She had done worse things before to win cases and further her causes. He dismissed the notion, knowing he was angry, sensing a burrowing desperation deep in his stomach. A few days might be too long.

  He headed back to his cell, to the steel door and the thick walls, a prison within a prison.

  20

  Moray Carnock ran his foot through the sea of white Eppendorf tubes washed up on the floor. They made the sound of a brittle plastic shale. As he peered closer, he saw that each one was labelled with a letter or a number in fine black marker pen. Some were bar-coded, a short, thin strip of adhesive paper running down one side. Moray was no scientist, but he could tell that the tubes had been there for at least a few hours. Small, receding pools of water were dotted about, the Eppendorfs mainly dry to the touch. He turned to Judith.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.

  ‘Half an hour,’ she answered. ‘I called you straight away.’

  ‘Bit of a mess.’

  Judith was perched half on and half off a lab stool. Behind her, three freezer doors gaped open, their drawers pulled out, their compressors desperately buzzing, trying to cool the yawning air. Thousands of tubes were scattered across the floor. Solutions had been poured over benches, leaving them dripping and hazardous. Bottles lay empty on their sides, on shelves or on the work surfaces. The place stank of antiseptics, solvents and alcohols, as if a succession of pub optics had been poured into a bucket with a litre of toilet cleaner. It was, Moray determined, a scene of methodical carnage. He closed the front door carefully, and slumped down on the sofa.

  ‘How are we going to tell Reuben?’ Judith asked.

  ‘Guess we’ll have to wait for him to ring.’

  ‘He’s going to be distraught.’

  ‘Aye,’ Moray agreed sadly. ‘He is that.’

  ‘And there’s another thing. The photo that Kieran Hobbs gave us, and the exclusion samples.’

  ‘Thawed as well? Are they going to be any use?’

  ‘Almost certainly no.’

  ‘You going to tell Kieran?’

  ‘No point till Reuben’s had a chance to take a proper look. And even then it might take a bit of time. I guess we keep this quiet for now.’ Judith glanced at the door, which had been open when she’d arrived. ‘We’ve got more important issues. Who do you think got in here?’

  ‘Fuck knows. But they came equipped.’ On his way in, Moray had admired the use of subtle force which had breached the entrance. There were scratches around the hinges and a dent where a crowbar had been used. Other than that, there was remarkably little to see, and not enough damage to prevent it closing again. ‘You don’t get through anti-squatter doors with a screwdriver and a pen-knife.’

  ‘So it’s not kids roaming the estate?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have thought so. Besides, this place seems virtually deserted. How many other people have you ever seen on your way here?’

  ‘A few. I think there’s a couple of families on the second floor. But they seem to want to keep themselves to themselves, like they know they shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Squatters. Just like our good selves. So where does that leave us in terms of suspects?’

  Judith shrugged, a brief movement of her shoulders through her thin and stylish leather jacket. Moray suspected that when she had decided a scooter required protective leathers, she had interpreted the idea fairly broadly.

  ‘Look, one thing’s for sure. Whoever got in is used to breaking and entering. This wasn’t the work of opportunist amateurs or bored youths.’ Moray stood up, scratching his chin. ‘But there is a more important question.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why did they break in? It wasn’t to steal anything. The PCs are still here. So it’s clearly about the lab, and its samples.’ Moray paced around the floor, displacing ripple after ripple of white tubes. The soles of his shoes squeaked in the wetness. ‘So they were looking for something. Now, the point is this. Did they find it and take it?’

  ‘We should be able to work that out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘All the samples are inventoried. Some of them are bar-coded. If you’re feeling energetic . . .’

  ‘Unusually, no.’

  ‘We could pick all the tubes up and tick them off. See wh
at’s gone.’

  ‘Or, option B, and the point I’m getting to, was simply destroying what they were looking for enough for them?’

  Judith gently poked a low-heeled shoe into the carnage. ‘Well, all the samples are ruined.’

  ‘Is it definitely a quick process?’ Moray asked.

  ‘If you thaw them out, they die reasonably soon, yes.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Depends what they are. But a standard DNA in water, a few hours at most.’

  ‘So what I’m saying is that even if we catalogue all the specimens, we may well be wasting our time. Somewhere in all this might be the samples they were after. And if they were smart, they’d just have left them, among thousands of others, to quietly rot and become unusable.’ Moray snorted, his bushy eyebrows flicking upwards. ‘Perfect and undetectable.’

  ‘Maybe you should inhale more solvents, Mr Carnock. It obviously suits your brain.’

  ‘I’ll bear it in what’s left of my mind.’

  Moray continued to pace around. Now that Judith had mentioned it, he did feel light-headed and a little dizzy. Maybe he would give the pub a miss on his way home.

  ‘Just about the only thing they left,’ he said, inspecting one of the shelves, ‘was this cylinder.’

  Moray reached forward to open a large metal container sitting imperiously on a widened shelf.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ Judith shouted.

  Moray froze. ‘What?’ he asked, arm still outstretched.

  ‘Liquid nitrogen. Minus one hundred and eighty degrees. Best not opened if you value your fingers.’

  Moray withdrew his hand. ‘Thanks. Now, remind me again what we’ve actually lost?’

  ‘Most of the archived cases Reuben was pursuing. A lot of GeneCrime samples, things he shouldn’t have had anyway. FSS specimens from eleven or twelve full investigations. All of them irreplaceable.’

  ‘Surely they’re just small portions of larger banked samples?’

  Judith sighed. This really wasn’t good, whichever way she looked at it. ‘For some of the investigations, yes. I took a few microlitres of all the DNAs, labelled an identical batch of tubes, and passed them on to Reuben. No harm done. But for a proportion of the others, what you see dead on the floor is all that remains.’