by John Macken
The idea for Predictive Phenotyping had come to Reuben two years previously. Now, he almost wished it hadn’t.
It was beautifully simple, the obvious extrapolation of what everybody knew already. As he walked around the lab assembling the materials he would need, Reuben tried to pinpoint the exact second within his thirty-eight years during which the notion had crystallized. He closed his eyes and allowed his mind to wander. He was in the back room of a dingy South London nightclub in early 2005, surrounded by police and forensic scientists. On the floor lay a man, face down, arms out, as if he were about to skydive through the sticky carpet. Reuben was dressed in a white hooded suit. He was examining blood samples and hairs distributed widely around the man. From what the Scenes-of-Crime Officers had divined, the man had been stabbed after a struggle. No one had seen the assailant. No one knew what he looked like or how dangerous he was. And there, collecting DNA specimens, the exact second of inspiration finally arrived. Of course Reuben knew who the killer was. He had left his entire identity in the very room with them.
Reuben realized that forty thousand genes, give or take, encode a human being, and that several hundred, directly or indirectly, affect our ‘phenotype’ – that is, who we are and what we look like. He knew that these included genes for height, weight, hair and eye colour, skin colour, nose length and width, ear shape, dental attributes, shoe size, lip form, chin cleft, body hair and everything else the retina could perceive. And that it also followed that several hundred more controlled our individual patterns of behaviour.
Conveniently, the attacker had just scattered all his characteristics around the scene of his crime. All Reuben had to do was to develop a system which analysed not just the sequence of a criminal’s DNA, but also the levels of expression of their individual genes. And hey presto: forensics would become prospective rather than retrospective. You would know who you were hunting, what they looked like and how they were liable to act. Genetic profiling would no longer be a barcode. It would be a crystal ball.
Reuben pipetted a small amount of clear fluid into the tube and watched the hairs relax and loosen. The trouble with a crystal ball, he appreciated, is that it is only as good as the person who interprets it. And in the wrong hands, predicting the future can cause a lot of problems. However, there are times when the means are justified. Like when suspicions just won’t go away. Like when people above and around you are taking liberties with your ideas. Like when an entire Forensics Unit needs to be shown just how dangerous technology can be. Reuben stared grimly at a plastic membrane. On it, barely visible, were almost two thousand individual spots. He turned his laptop on. The moment had come.
3
The loft was slowly cooling, the day’s sun, which had been trapped between fibreglass insulation and clay roof tiles, gradually escaping into the night. Traffic noise from the street permeated the tiles, which seemed infested with gaps, and barely able to stop a shower. From within, the roof appeared inherently porous, and yet Reuben well knew that no rain ever made it through. He shrugged. Up close, what was safe didn’t always seem so.
The rafters, as he made his way across, unnerved him. One misjudged step and his foot would be through the ceiling. It was like walking a wooden tightrope. He placed the sealed plastic bag he was carrying on a small boarded area, which resembled an island in a sea of timbered waves. Similar transparent bags, all packed with tightly wrapped case notes, Reuben’s personal archive of investigations, sat slowly gathering dust and decaying. He ran his fingers over the stack, sensing the fine, gritty soot on the smooth glossy plastic. Within, so many ideas, so much work, such limitless concentration from his team. He felt suddenly humbled by their dedication and awed by their loyalty. Reuben was about to balance his way back to the loft opening when he spotted an old shoe box, with the single Biroed word ‘Photos’ staring forlornly out. He hesitated, the rumble of traffic in his ears. Then he stooped down and picked it up.
Inside were wallets and wallets of pictures. He chose one at random. Reuben and Lucy in the early days. They looked like different people. Without the weight of responsibility. With the potential for anything. Grinning insanely in front of a variety of backdrops. Reuben opened another set of photos; they were stuck slightly together, but still sharp and brilliant.
Mostly, they were holiday shots, each set of thirty-six exposures chronicling two weeks in the sun. But what they were also recording, Reuben noted sadly, were the short snatches of time between all the carnage, a flickerbook of one man’s journey through the heart of atrocity. As he held each picture up to the unshielded light, names of cases came to him, like the gaps between the roof tiles. A holiday in Crete. The South Shields murders, 2001. Driving through the Rockies. The Tannahill brothers, 2004. Camping in Northern France. Bethany and Megan Gillick, 2002. Restless beach holiday in Spain. The Greening rapes, 2000. Reuben wondered whether he could see an extra wrinkle for every murderer he had put away.
Lucy called up through the hatch, bringing him round. ‘You want to pass anything back down, darling?’
‘No,’ he said, glancing at a photo of his wife in her late twenties, temporarily blonde, looking magnificent. ‘Just sorting a couple of things.’
‘I’m going to have a bath. You’ll be OK to climb down?’
One day, Reuben told himself, he was going to fit the loft ladder he had bought the previous year. He peered across the beams at it, still in its folded wrapping, sitting uselessly by the opening. Getting in and out was an act of scrabbling, climbing and jumping, and not for the faint-hearted. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he answered.
He heard his wife pad along the landing, and a door open and shut beneath him. In the picture – Portugal, he guessed – they had lazy summer arms around each other’s waists, fresh quick tans with red outlines, a happy Mediterranean torpor about them. He wondered momentarily who had taken the picture, whether they had stopped someone and asked them to record for posterity that single moment of happiness, which would then sit in the breezy loft of their house. This was the opposite of Dorian Gray. While their faces were ageing and showing battle scars from the elements, there remained in the attic faultless pictures of their unlined visages.
The hot-water tank began to murmur and complain as Lucy drained it to run her bath. While Reuben opened the next wallet of prints, he pictured his Predictive Phenotyping grinding through the night. In the morning, with a little editing and manipulation, he would have his answer. Finally. He examined himself in a pair of swimming shorts, looking relaxed, tanned, lean as he always was. The eyes, hidden behind sunglasses, yet to see so much, a full decade of crime scenes, of mopping up other people’s spills, of detecting the brutal misdemeanours of the few. Again, there was Lucy, before they were married, grinning obliviously, a glistening bathing suit, hair wet and shimmering, the photo saying, This is what happiness is; remember this moment.
And then there, at the back of the thirty-six exposures, out of place, slightly smaller, a different photo. A lonely desolate hill rising out of the surrounding flatland. The words Sedge Knoll came to him. Reuben leant his head slightly forwards and held the image against his closed eyes. He was still for a second, lost in its memories, until the amphetamine invaded, pushing snapshots of the day through his brain.
Reuben knew she had detected the speediness of his demeanour since he returned from work. Still holding the picture to his face, he resolved to cut down. But it wasn’t that simple. Nothing was. At the moment, it was purely a matter of survival. And that was something he couldn’t talk to Lucy about.
Reuben’s phone rang, and he reached for it, his movements automatic and jerky. He listened to the recorded message, packing photos back in the shoe box as he did so. Then he edged towards the loft opening and lowered himself down, his chemically strengthened muscles making it easy. He walked to the bathroom and stood outside, his forehead against the cold white surface of the door.
‘Luce? I’ve got to go. Work. Something nasty.’
His wife’s vo
ice came back through the wood, dulled by the barrier, but her sigh still audible and clear. ‘What, now?’
‘Afraid so.’
‘You’ve only just got home.’
Reuben glanced at his watch. It was nearly nine, when most normal people would be settling in for the evening. But Reuben knew that even if he didn’t attend the scene, he wouldn’t be able to relax. Questions and scenarios would eat away at him, chewing up his composure, making him unrecognizable to the version of himself languishing in the box in the loft. He ground his shoe into the carpet. That so many smiles could now make him feel so desolate. ‘I know. It’s a bugger, but until murderers learn to keep better hours . . .’
‘Fine.’
Reuben loitered a second, the only sound the slosh of a full bath. He pushed his forehead hard into the veneer of the door. Lucy inside, lowering herself into the warm water. Lucy in photographs smiling for the camera. Lucy . . . Reuben stood upright again. Then he turned and walked downstairs, out into the night, into his car, back into the thick of whatever horror lay waiting for him.
4
Just two things distinguished the flat from any of the other residences squatting on shops facing Ealing Broadway. First, the carpet was saturated, so much so that the record store below had noticed wet plaster dropping from the ceiling in time to the beat. Second, and more unsettling, there was a man nailed to one of its walls.
Lost in an anti-contamination suit, Reuben examined a length of hose which led into the deceased’s bloody mouth. It was plumbed on to the cold tap of the kitchen sink, which had still been running when the first officer arrived. The man’s clothing was shredded, revealing a multitude of cuts, grazes and shallow stab wounds infecting his skin like a rash. Very little of him had escaped the assault, and that which had shone out as virgin areas of white dotted around his nipples and navel.
Reuben had been at the scene for an hour and a half since the call had dragged him from his loft. A small plastic rack sat beside him, holding variously coloured specimen tubes, many of which were already labelled and sealed. The afternoon’s amphetamine, which had enhanced his concentration and dulled his unease, was ebbing and flowing in fits and starts. And while he worked, he couldn’t stop picturing his laptop buzzing and grinding its way through the first ever Predictive Phenotyping assay.
Tracing a gloved finger along the line of the hose, he gently parted the victim’s lips. Several teeth were shattered, the pipe pushed through a hole where upper and lower incisors used to meet. The molars had been superglued permanently together. On the carpet was a hammer. Reuben frowned, resisting the urge to scratch his forehead. He withdrew the hose, which trespassed almost half a metre down the dead man’s oesophagus, and examined the upper and lower jaws. Reuben was distracted, imagining the face his laptop would show him, so understanding was uncharacteristically slow. Superglue. Hammer. Hose. Water. He looked up suddenly from the notes he was making. The man had been drowned in his own front room without even getting his clothes wet.
Reuben studied a pair of shoes which entered his peripheral vision, walking over the sodden carpet to stand next to the body, and concluded that they belonged to DCI Sarah Hirst.
The footwear didn’t lie. Reuben had always liked the way Sarah dressed, but he tried not to let it show. ‘So let me make some presumptions,’ he said.
‘Go on.’
‘Senior CID here at, what? Eleven p.m.? Dressed as if you’re about to go out for the evening. So . . .’
‘Yes?’ Sarah Hirst asked.
‘This isn’t a routine murder.’
‘Take a good look at the victim, Dr Maitland. Does that look like a routine murder to you?’
‘The point I’m making, Sarah, is that there’s an agenda here. I’m half expecting Phil Kemp to show up any minute.’
‘He’s on his way.’ DCI Sarah Hirst sighed and ran a finger along the smooth line of an eyebrow. Her cheeks were pale, her eyes contrastingly brilliant. She was a year younger than Reuben, and it vexed him that her stellar rise through a blur of police titles had failed to tarnish her features. ‘Heard you on the radio last week,’ she said.
‘And?’
‘Thought you sounded tired.’
‘Maybe I’m not getting enough sleep.’
‘Why? What are you doing all night?’
Reuben checked himself. DCI Sarah Hirst had a way of opening the door to flirtation and allowing you to step in, for as long as it served her purpose. ‘Working,’ he answered.
‘All work and no play makes Reuben a dull boy.’
‘And what’s so exciting about you?’
Sarah smiled. ‘Great legs, good figure, exhilarating company.’
Reuben studied her for a second, lining her up against his wife. The thought of Lucy tugged at him momentarily before Sarah’s voice brought him round. ‘So, you got any good DNA?’ she asked, her smile fading, the door closing.
‘Difficult to say until we’ve excluded Mr Hose.’ Reuben ran his tongue around the dry insides of his mouth. ‘So who did it?’
‘You’re forensics. You tell me.’
‘I refer you to my earlier point. If this is important enough to keep you and Phil from your gin and tonics, you already know something I don’t.’
‘This was Jonathan Machicaran, former informant and crack addict. Another sad case whose life was ruined by drugs.’
Reuben felt a pleasing rush of energy flex his muscles and stimulate his brain. ‘That’s terrible.’
‘He’d recently given us enough on Mark Gelson to – Hi, Phil, you OK? – to start reeling him in.’
‘Reuben. Sarah,’ muttered DCI Phil Kemp.
‘And does torturing and drowning a man in his own living room reek of Gelson?’
‘Possibly. Mark Gelson runs a much-feared crack and smack operation which we’ve been infiltrating. But his whereabouts are unknown.’
‘No witnesses. We don’t have anything to put him here. And we don’t have DNA for him,’ Phil Kemp added.
‘Aha. Here it comes. Now I see why you two are off your sofas.’
‘Come on, Reuben,’ Phil said encouragingly, ‘we could be looking at his face in a few hours. We wouldn’t need to have him in custody. We’d know if it was Gelson or not. And all of this if you’d only—’
‘So where do you draw the line? Say Predictive Phenotyping suggests future psychotic behaviour in someone tested only for elimination. Then what? You’d just let him go?’
‘Well, we’d . . .’ Sarah Hirst stared down at her shoes, which were slowly getting wet.
‘Look, I’ve been in the meetings, heard the rumours. As I told Phil earlier, I just don’t think CID understands the implications of this.’
‘Let me explain something to you,’ Phil began, turning up the heat, as if this were an interrogation. ‘Out there’ – he pointed through the flat window, but because it was dark saw only himself pointing back – ‘are eight million lives, banging and crashing into each other, running themselves into walls. It’s hard enough if you’re normal. But let’s say you’re not. Let’s say you’ve been born with a predisposition to rape, to kill, to abuse. How difficult is it then? And when do we ever get involved with people like this?’
‘Tell me.’
‘When they’ve already raped, killed and abused. And usually not till they’ve done it again and again.’
‘It’s like medicine,’ Sarah interjected. ‘Prevention and cure. We need to be there at the beginning, before everything kicks off. We have to be interventionist.’ Reuben pictured Sarah learning this word at a PR workshop. ‘The days of waiting for criminals to do what we knew they would anyway must end.’
‘It needs to be tested.’
‘Then test it, for Christ’s sake.’
‘You don’t understand. Proper trials take months – years, even.’ Reuben yawned. Holes were beginning to poke their way through the speed. ‘And you want to use the thing now.’
‘Then why not test it as we go along?’
Phil and Sarah shrugged, almost as one, padded shoulders doing a Mexican wave.
‘Look, it’s good, possibly the most powerful thing we’ve ever come up with. But it needs to be handled carefully. I know what you think about me. I can sense your exasperation.’ Reuben swivelled back to look straight at them. ‘Give me a bit more time. I’ll make it foolproof. We won’t make mistakes.’ He poured the victim’s broken teeth into a plastic vial. They sounded like dice being shaken. ‘Until then, there’s no way I’m sanctioning it. Especially if it’s rushed out to meet crime targets, or win the PR war, or further careers. Because in the wrong hands, this stuff is fucking lethal.’
Sarah Hirst turned and strode out of the room, high heels skewering the wet carpet, poking small square drainage holes through it. Phil remained, studying Reuben’s features. His eyes were dull and opaque, his face jowled. A dark matt of stubble was trying to ooze out of his pallid skin. He was shorter than Reuben, and stared slightly up at him. Reuben sensed for the first time that their respective roles were pushing them apart; they were now closer to being colleagues than friends. ‘I’m going to say this once, Reuben.’
‘You have secret feelings for me?’
‘Don’t isolate yourself from CID. Play with us, not against us.’
‘I suppose, just for the sake of convention, I should ask whether you’re threatening me?’
Phil’s expression softened. ‘Jesus, no. We’re all on the same side. Sarah’s got her pressures, just like you’ve got yours and I’ve got mine.’ He reached forwards to place a hand on Reuben’s shoulder. ‘Just try to compromise on this one. Look at it from our side. We use your technique, take a big step forward, we all look good.’ Phil tapped him twice on the cheek. ‘And then the Met promotes from within. Sarah or me, hopefully me, ends up Unit Commander, you get the budget and resources you need, and we’ll all get back to being happy campers again.’