by John Macken
‘In what way involved?’
‘Forensic testing of his wife’s lover.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Yeah.’
The image had stayed with him. A petite blonde with a large exit wound in her scalp.
‘The tabloids had a field-day with the fact she had a boyfriend. You know, Footballers’ Wives and all that. And you were in on it?’
Reuben took another drag and passed the joint back to his brother. A warm tiredness began to wash through him, and he sensed a sudden weight to his skull.
‘It’s not something I want to talk about,’ he said. ‘People died in nasty circumstances, indirectly related to my activities.’
‘Shit. That’s scary stuff.’
‘That’s not the half of it. I needed to get away for a bit, and someone was very interested in a prisoner in Pentonville. Twenty-five grand interested. Only things didn’t go as smoothly as I’d anticipated.’
‘How?’
‘I got myself in a very bad situation, isolated in Pentonville, people knowing my background.’
‘And now you’re on the run.’
‘I guess so.’
Reuben swigged from a can of beer and massaged his aching neck. Generally, he preferred stimulants. Dope slowed you down, made you sluggish and unfocused. Alcohol didn’t help either. But for some reason the two depressants mixed together seemed to warm him up and melt the tension that had been squeezing his insides for several days.
‘And you?’ he asked, moving the conversation on.
‘Same old,’ Aaron answered.
‘No girlfriend?’
‘Women aren’t exactly my strong point.’
Aaron handed the joint to Reuben again.
‘But what are you up to?’
Aaron flashed his half joking, half serious expression. Reuben knew it well. He had an almost identical one. ‘That depends whether you’re going to arrest me.’
Reuben sighed through a long, smoky exhalation. ‘As I’m growing tired of explaining lately, I’m no longer a copper. So?’
‘The odd car here and there. Spot of five-fingered discount. Small-time stuff.’
Casting his eyes around the squat, Reuben was suddenly struck by the realization that Aaron was thirty-eight, and still living outside the bounds of normal society. Squatting was, he believed, something you eventually grew out of, like spinning your wheels or doing handbrake turns.
‘Hell, Aaron,’ he said, handing the joint back, ‘what happened to you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, look at this squat. Look at you. Where did everything go wrong?’
Aaron dragged deep into the joint, his brow furrowed. ‘You’re the geneticist. You tell me.’
‘You can’t blame Dad for everything.’
‘OK, let’s start with genes and environment.’ Aaron sucked back some beer and pulled on the remnant of the joint before poking it through the hole of the can, triggering a loud and angry hiss. ‘Nature and nurture. What other blame is there? Either way, Dad’s fucked.’
‘But you’re thirty-eight—’
‘Exactly the same age as you. And where’s your cosy life, suburban house, cushy job and faithful wife?’
Reuben glanced down at the carpet, with its small army of burn holes, noting how they were clustered towards one end of the sofa. He remained silent, biting his tongue.
‘I may be a loser, Reuben, but I’m one by choice.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘That you, on the other hand, have fucked everything up without even trying.’
Aaron let his words do their damage, monitoring his brother keenly, antagonism and resentment burning bright across his features. Reuben stared into the pale green eyes of the face on the opposite sofa. The mirror image that belied a lifetime of perplexing differences. The same, but not the same.
‘And now you come to me with the fucking police on your trail. Glass houses, brother.’
Reuben stood up, stinging and angry, the sedation evaporating. Pacing into the kitchen, fists clenched. Old scores unsettled. Rivalries resurfacing. Stitched-up wounds tearing themselves back open. Knowing that no one can cut you more precisely than your brother. Knowing that twin brothers are even more adept at it than normal siblings. And knowing that Aaron was right.
4
The usual bony hardness of Judith’s hug was missing. Today, she was softer somehow, more gentle, less vigorous. Reuben wondered momentarily whether something was wrong, whether she was having second thoughts about working for him. He wouldn’t blame her. A critical member of the GeneCrime forensics squad, his former loyal deputy, she was in an impossible position most of the time. But as she stepped back, he could see in her eyes that she was genuinely pleased to see him again, and this gave him some hope.
Judith walked over to sit on the sofa, and Reuben perched on a lab stool.
‘So, the prisoner returns,’ she said.
Reuben frowned. ‘Something like that.’
When he had first entered the lab, he had been amazed at how little damage there was. The only visible signs were a front door that didn’t close quite as well, and a faint smell of spilled chemicals. Judith and Moray had obviously been busy, sweeping up Eppendorfs, replacing boxes, tidying everything to its usual state of uncontaminated efficiency. If Reuben was a gambling man, he would have bet that this was more down to Judith’s efforts than Moray’s.
‘You think the police know about this place?’ Reuben asked.
‘Only Sarah. And she’s OK.’
‘No one at GeneCrime has mentioned its whereabouts?’
Reuben watched Judith intently. Not because he didn’t trust her, just for any sign of hesitation or uncertainty. He needed to know that she was one hundred per cent convinced.
‘Not to me.’
‘You’re sure you’ve never been followed?’
‘As sure as I can be. You ride a scooter, you keep a very close eye on the cars around you.’
‘I guess so.’
‘Colm reckons it’s a death-trap.’
‘But a very pretty one.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Judith treated him to one of her distant half smiles. Reuben chose to overlook the fact that the dreamy look gave her an enigmatic beauty, an unknowable and demure distance. ‘I guess you shouldn’t spend too much time here if you can help it,’ she said.
‘Just a few hours, that’s all. But you’re right, we’d both better only be here for the minimum time we can. Even between procedures, we should bail out. I’ve made myself – what did Abner say a few days back?’
‘Vulnerable.’
‘That’s the fella. Made myself vulnerable. Half the city’s police hunting me down. Violent escape from custody. They’re going to be coming for me, Judith. And we can’t ignore the possibility that someone in the force knows where the lab is.’
‘As well as Sarah.’
‘You trust her, though?’
‘You know what she’s like. You’ve observed what she’s capable of at work. It’s not that she’s dishonest . . .’
‘What?’
‘Well, to make something her own. To solve a case. To advance her career. We’ve both seen it. Trampling on people, messing them around, not being entirely open and honest.’
Reuben was silent. Beneath her occasional dreaminess, he knew that Judith’s cogs turned with remarkable speed and accuracy. Sarah had been involved in all the events of the last week. Was it possible, Reuben wondered, that he was somehow serving Sarah’s needs? Why the sudden offer to help with Michael Brawn? How did she gain such quick access to his arrest details, not to mention his DNA specimens? How had she managed to insert Reuben into Pentonville so easily, and then be so apparently powerless to pull him out again? What did Sarah have to gain, especially in the middle of a large manhunt? Reuben turned these thoughts over in his mind for a few moments. Sarah and Michael Brawn. How could she have stood to profit from Reuben’s involvement? He scratched his face irritably, knowing that he w
as wasting time, and sensing once again that the longer he spent in the lab the more exposed he was.
Glancing around again at the tidied surfaces, he felt once more a rush of relief that Judith had understood his cryptic instructions, as she’d confirmed earlier on the phone.
‘You got the sample?’ he asked.
Judith patted her handbag. ‘In here.’
‘Smart girl. What about the rest?’
‘Systematically ruined. Thawed and destroyed.’
Judith ran her eyes around the floor of the lab, as if pointing out to Reuben the last resting places of the thousands of DNA specimens which had died in the heat. Reuben saw the wasted hours of work, the irreplaceable samples of psychopaths and sociopaths, the meticulously labelled and inventoried investigations leaking away on a laboratory floor. Of course, some of them were just aliquots of specimens that were safely housed in the temperature-controlled store rooms of GeneCrime. But others, ones that Judith had taken in a rush, were all that remained. That was the obvious risk of taking fragile items out of their laboratories and into the wider world. And you could have all the back-ups and security doors you wanted, but if someone truly wanted to destroy something then that’s what would happen. Reuben found it suddenly perverse that DNA was happy at body temperature for a whole lifetime, yet extracted and placed at room temperature it fell apart in hours.
‘Fuckers,’ he said, mainly to himself.
Judith pulled Reuben’s letter, still bearing the Pentonville postmark, out of her bag. It was sealed in clingfilm inside a clear plastic freezer bag, surrounded by frozen peas which were showing signs of thawing.
‘This wasn’t a bunch of kids breaking in,’ she said. ‘Most of the equipment was left untouched. But the samples . . .’
‘What did Moray have to say?’
‘He had a theory that the intruders may have left the very thing they were after. Letting it thaw out with the rest. Undetectable.’
‘Well I have another theory.’ Reuben took the freezer bag from Judith. ‘They didn’t find what they were looking for. Because this is it here, hidden among these few words.’
‘Short and sweet. Who says the art of letter writing is dead?’
Reuben opened the bag, extracted the letter and held it up to the light, which was bright and blinding, the halogen bulbs of the industrial fittings almost piercing the thin prison writing paper.
‘It all depends on the message you’re trying to put across,’ he muttered. ‘And how good the recipient is at understanding.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
Reuben pushed his fingers into a pair of vinyl gloves and cut the corners of the letter into a tube, pipetting a series of fluids on top.
‘Let’s give these a while to soak,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll begin.’ He turned to Judith. ‘We should get out of here. See you back here in three hours?’
Judith picked up her gloves and helmet, and Reuben followed her out, locking the damaged front door and making sure that no one was watching them.
5
‘Look, just because you’re on one side and I’m on the other, doesn’t mean it has to be like this.’
‘And what side are you on?’
Reuben shrugged, looking down at his empty hands. The conversation had been slow and awkward, with long, tense gaps. The question surprised him. Aaron saw the law as an arbitrary concept, a logical fallacy used to repress the timid and the weak. A discussion of its boundaries suggested he might finally be taking the idea seriously.
Reuben opened a fresh can of beer, pausing to think. The last week had reminded him that the law wasn’t something you could just cross for fun. Every time you passed from one side to the other, you left a little piece of yourself. You ended up blurred. Bits of you abandoned on either side for ever. That’s how Reuben felt, sitting in Aaron’s squat – blurred, distributed, diluted, two identities, neither of which he was particularly comfortable with. And seated next to his brother, their elbows almost touching, tickly arm hairs occasionally meeting, Reuben sensed that Aaron saw it as well. But Michael Jeremy Brawn had had something that Reuben needed. His blood, his skin, his hair, anything would have done. Small fragments of a psychopath that Reuben had stolen and mailed back to his lab. Crossing from the legal to the illegal and back again.
‘It’s complicated,’ he answered.
‘Only this Jeremy Accoutey thing disturbs me.’
‘Probably not as much as it does me.’
‘I mean, what you did was illegal, right? Taking DNA from a woman without her knowledge, testing it, and then giving her husband the results. Not to mention stealing a sample from the team physio in a public place.’
Reuben shrugged.
‘And those actions precipitate a murder. Then you enter prison under a false identity, before crashing your way out. So I ask you again, brother, what side of the law are you actually on?’
Reuben rubbed his face. He flashed through the undercover missions he had carried out during his career and after it. Pretending to be bad when he was good, lying to superior police officers to get jobs done, feeding criminals small truths to gain bigger ones. Reuben sensed his brother – sitting on the same tatty sofa, facing the same direction, avoiding direct eye contact – waiting for an answer.
‘Difficult to tell these days,’ he replied quietly. ‘But the aim is always good.’
‘Helping footballers kill their wives?’
‘Channelling money into investigations that no one else carries out. Abuses of power. Misuse of technology. Tracking criminals the police can’t touch. I mean, we put a CID officer away last year who had tampered with the DNA evidence of four nationwide manhunts. Cases collapsed, the real perpetrators remained at large, the victims were denied justice. A police officer taking short-cuts to manipulate convictions. It’s murky, at times, but what we’re trying to do . . .’
Reuben petered out, ill at ease, appreciating that things had become complicated. The TV was off, but he found himself staring at it, as if it would spring to life at any moment and save them from each other’s company.
‘OK. What you do these days is up to you. It’s past events that really fuck me off.’
‘Like what?’ Reuben asked, suddenly angry and defensive and trying to hide it.
‘Dad.’
‘What?’
‘When he went down the final time, you virtually cut him off.’
Reuben scratched his hair, fingernails finding skin through the crew-cut. ‘What could I do? I pleaded with him to clean his act up. For his sake, for Mum’s sake, for everyone’s sake. I was a copper, catching the bad guys. And there’s my own father, a career criminal, in and out of prison.’ Saying the words out loud made his actions sound harsh and predetermined. Trading his father for his career. But it hadn’t been like that. ‘It was beginning to undermine me. The implications, the scenarios. “Squad, let me introduce you to Dr Reuben Maitland, lead forensics officer, section head of GeneCrime. Oh yeah, and son of a crook.”’
Aaron sniffed. ‘Didn’t mean you had to abandon him.’
‘I didn’t. I just . . . stepped back a bit.’
‘And let me pick up the pieces.’
‘You make it sound like I wanted that.’
Aaron lit up, and pointedly kept the joint to himself.
‘You’re saying you didn’t?’
‘Of course not, Aaron. It just happened. Like families do. Things falling apart, people moving away, circumstances changing.’ Reuben drank from his can, hoping the cold lager could extinguish the searing frustration. ‘And I’ve more than served my debt to you, brother. You remember?’
Aaron blew a long stream of smoke into the living-room air. ‘Yeah,’ he answered eventually. ‘Whatever.’
A fidgety silence closed in on them, oppressive and uncomfortable. Arm hairs touched again briefly, sending shivers through Reuben’s body.
‘Look, I’ve got to get back to the lab.’
‘And then what?’
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‘It’ll all die down as soon as I’ve run the lab test. Then I’ll sort Joshua out, which is all that really matters at this moment. After that, I’ll go back to my life, and you . . . well, you’ve got my number.’
Reuben stood up, draining his can and finding an empty surface to stack it. He double-checked his watch. Moray would be waiting, an anonymous car, a couple of streets away, the engine running.
‘I guess this is it.’
Aaron got up slowly, his eyes narrow, his brow furrowed. For a second their eyes met, pale green to pale green, the same but different, staring at each other across a divide Reuben knew would never be bridged. He felt like hugging his brother, grabbing his arms and wrapping them around him, the twins reunited at last after years of sporadic contact and icy bitterness. Instead he turned and walked towards the door.
Aaron’s voice stopped him. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take this with you. See what they’re saying about you out there.’
He handed his brother a copy of the London Evening Standard. Reuben took it, the final contact between them.
‘Bye,’ Reuben muttered.
‘You made page three,’ Aaron said.
Reuben opened and closed the front door without looking back. The documentaries, the articles, the all-pervasive notions of society assailed him as he walked. Identical twins and spooky coincidences, being separated at birth and then discovering they had identical lives with identical partners and identical children. Twins who still lived together in their mid-eighties. Mirror-image brothers and sisters who dressed alike and finished each other’s sentences. Pairs even their parents couldn’t tell apart. Having the same thoughts, the same tastes, the same wants and needs. Being the other half of something which looked and felt exactly the way you did. And then there was Aaron. Perplexing, diffident, too clever for his own good, itching powder on Reuben’s conscience. The closest person to him genetically, but seemingly the furthest away from him.
Reuben opened the paper at page three, annoyed and depressed in equal measure, Aaron once again having climbed under his skin, delved into the past and found conflict. Moray, a hundred metres away, flashed the lights of a car Reuben didn’t recognize. But Reuben had seen something. Below the quarter-page article headlined MURDER SUSPECT FLEES SCENE OF CRASH. Underneath the byline proclaiming ‘Former leading forensic scientist is hunted by police’. A smaller sister-article, bold font, just two short columns. The headline, PENTONVILLE INMATE FOUND HANGED.