Dirty Little Lies

by John Macken

  ‘This going to take long?’

  ‘Twelve hours, if I don’t sleep.’

  ‘Is that twelve hours solid? Or do you get time off for being a good boy?’

  ‘As soon as I’ve done the next step, I’m free for a while.’ Reuben pipetted a small volume from each tube into a fresh Eppendorf.

  ‘Only . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going to head off. See a man about a stolen dog.’

  ‘There was one thing,’ Reuben muttered, adding more clear fluid into the tubes.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Judith ran the tests from Xavier Trister, the nightclub owner with the bodyguards. You know – the one we tagged in the alley.’

  ‘And what does your voodoo magic show us?’

  ‘That Marie James is his biological daughter after all.’

  Moray’s eyes widened. ‘Money well spent. She must be in for a share of his considerable loot.’

  ‘I don’t think she ever really cared about that. But we shall see.’ Reuben glanced at his watch. It was 7 p.m., give or take, and he would work through the night. He removed the over-sized Dugena and rubbed his wrist. Judith had promised to help him finish the latter stages of the Predictive Phenotyping before her shift. Reuben took a longer look at his watch, licking his cracked lips. He flicked a thermal cycler on and began programming it. ‘We said we’d have her answer today. Why don’t we call round now, while this is running, and get it sorted?’

  ‘Drop me off and you’ve got a deal.’

  ‘You trust me with your car?’

  ‘I don’t trust anyone with my car. The heap of shit I’m renting at the moment though, do your worst.’

  Reuben double-checked that everything was cooking, and left the lab with Moray. They picked their way through the broken building above and climbed into the rental car parked beneath a covered archway. Thirty minutes later, they neared their destination in Fulham. Reuben pulled into a side road which fed the main carriageway. They scanned the gold numbers on a blur of tired white terraces. When they reached the right house, Reuben parked London-style, half on the pavement, half intruding into the road. He passed Moray the envelope.

  ‘Inside is everything you should need. The results are explained, there’s a photo of the screen images used to make the diagnosis, a picture of the profiles, a disk housing all the data, and the sequence of three variable regions of her father’s DNA.’

  ‘And what words should I use exactly?’

  ‘Tell her that, for court evidence, we’ve provided hard copies of all our analyses. The sequence of the variable regions is virtually unique for each person, and will prove beyond reasonable doubt that the DNA we used came from her father. That’s if he’s daft enough to dispute the findings. Inform her that, essentially, the chances of Xavier Trister not being her father are in the billions.’

  ‘As are his assets.’

  ‘And make sure she gives you the rest of the cash first.’

  Moray pulled a stupid face. ‘Do I look like an idiot?’

  Reuben smiled. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘don’t be too long. I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you’ve finished with Marie.’

  Moray hauled his frame out of the car and sauntered up to the front door, swinging the envelope between finger and thumb. Reuben watched him enter as the door opened. He drummed the steering wheel. Paternity. The single duplicity which gnawed at his fingernails and ground at his teeth.

  Of course, he had the very tools at his disposal. Reuben calculated that it would take roughly twenty-four hours to do. At any moment, he was only one day away from answering the biggest question in his life. An unequivocal resolution. Joshua: my son, or not my son. After all, he had a sample of Joshua’s DNA, which he carried with him, slotting into hotel safes when necessary. It would be easy. A simple match against his own genetic material. And bingo. Paternity or no paternity.

  But Reuben knew he couldn’t bring himself to do it yet. He had to hear the truth from Lucy first, before he sullied Joshua by prodding and poking at his DNA. Besides, the biggest question of his existence was also the biggest hope. In the not knowing lay a lifetime of dreams, desires and expectations. If he lost these, he lost everything. And he wasn’t ready to risk losing the final remnant of his optimism. For the time being, then, this was about more than simple parentage. This was about possibility. In short, he reasoned, swallowing the hypocrisy, sometimes the best solution to a problem was to ignore the science behind it. And although it ate away at him, Reuben resolved to keep his thoughts elsewhere, to lose himself in other people’s problems, in their endless streams of code, in screens of red, yellow, green and blue, in the hypnotic actions of human robotics.

  But the paternity of Xavier Trister had been too good to pass up. The thrill of the chase had been too great. From the second Marie James had made contact with Moray, through the instant he had fired his SkinPunch, to the final comparison of father and daughter DNA, he had been hooked, alive and excited. He realized that the hunt for other people’s truths had the welcome side effect of keeping him from his own reality.

  Reuben glanced through the window, watching a lorry scrape along the narrowed gap his parking had created. But there was a danger in this. He was getting sucked in. Helping Kieran Hobbs, whose eyes he had never quite seen into. He was swimming in murky water, underwater with the underworld. Reuben gripped the wheel tight. It’s OK, he told himself. I’m doing this for the right reasons. One criminal, that’s all. But even unsaid, the words were unconvincing. And as he continued to balance the pros and cons, an idea came to Reuben, a way to square his moral dilemma. He spent a number of minutes working through the potentials and the pitfalls, probing for weaknesses, calculating how he could carry it off. Slowly and gradually, smoothing his fingers over the polished dashboard, he came round to the unthinkable. That working for Kieran Hobbs could actually be a good thing.

  But presently, even this thin sliver of hope started to drown under the seeping aftermath of delayed, shocked flashes of Run Zhang, snapshots his retinas had taken when Run was still alive, going about his business with lugubrious good humour, waddling around the laboratory, adjusting to the culture and making it his own, short-cutting to answers before most of the group had considered the question. Reuben realized that, although he was sad and shaken about Sandra Bantam’s murder, he was hurting about Run. An accident would have been upsetting enough. A murder would have been terrible. But a protracted torture . . . To have a friend die in horrific pain, persecuted, slowly and methodically destroyed, his body systematically ripped apart, this began to inflict its own wounds on Reuben. The torture had left Run’s dying body and entered Reuben’s, digging in deeper as the hours passed, stabbing into his stomach, piercing his heart, hacking at his brain. Sarah Hirst’s spare descriptions ate away at his imagination, growing and multiplying until all he could see was a blood-red horror.

  Reuben tried to force his thoughts elsewhere. With the clawing notion of mortality, his mind jumped suddenly to the two minutes his life had almost ended the previous day. What troubled him most was not the fact that someone had wanted him killed, but that someone was willing to save him. Shaun Graves, he was well aware, didn’t owe him any favours. Why, he wondered again, had he intervened?

  Reuben chewed a fingernail, biting in too deep, taking some skin with it. He pictured the first of a series of machines running through its allotted task, heating and cooling the killer’s DNA over and over again. Then would come the labelling, the hybridization, the washing, the eluting, the expression mapping, the algorithms scurrying through the early hours. And finally, a picture on a screen. A face staring out at him. The cold features of a psychopath. The eyes which had absorbed the final moments of Sandra’s and Run’s lives. The lips which had curled up in satisfaction. The cheeks which had flushed with the thrill. Reuben tried to ready himself for the dawn, when he would meet the man who was killing his colle
agues.

  A movement outside brought him round. Moray was padding down the steps towards the car. Reuben straightened in his seat. It was going to be a long night.

  ‘Piece of cake,’ Moray said as he squeezed his inflated form into the passenger compartment.

  ‘How did she react?’

  ‘Like she knew already.’

  ‘And the money?’

  Moray patted his shabby jacket and grinned. Despite the heat of the summer, Reuben had never seen Moray dressed either smartly or with due regard to temperature. He seemed to have adopted a casual uniform of scruffy indifference at some point, and doggedly stuck to it. They pulled off the pavement and began to thread their way to Moray’s flat. Reuben didn’t know where Moray lived, but followed his instructions. He had the impression that he would never discover the exact address or location. As they became mired in traffic trying to funnel itself through a junction, he started to tell Moray about the events of the previous day. Something else was bugging him.

  ‘OK, so a man I’ve never seen points a gun at my head. But how could someone have tracked me down in the first place? I thought I was invisible. No bank accounts, no registered address, no car, no nothing. Anonymous hotels, everything paid in cash. This was the whole point. Underground and immune. Not even the force knows where I am. Or at least I didn’t think so.’

  Moray rubbed his double chin with weary indifference. ‘No one is invisible,’ he growled. ‘You got a mobile: you got a way of being pinpointed. Talk to the right people and they could track your progress down this very street even when you’re not using the phone. Besides, you were probably followed, maybe for several days. Which is not the exclusive domain of the cops.’

  ‘I guess. But who’s coming for me? I don’t remember having any enemies before.’

  ‘It seems like you have now. And it seems like it’s time for extra precautions.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Siege mentality.’ Moray shifted in his seat to face Reuben, his chubby knees scraping against the shiny plastic dashboard. ‘I had this guy once. The last surviving member of a family who manufactured a well-known fizzy drink. Had sole access to the recipe. An American super-fucking-conglomerate had been trying to take over the company for two years. Think they had some sort of master plan for shutting him down and taking his rather large slice of the UK market. You know, aggressive bastards. This guy was being followed and harassed, which is when he contacted me. Completely freaked out. Didn’t feel safe in his house, his car, anywhere. So we set him up with living quarters in the factory. Beefed up the security. Had a quiet word with the local constabulary. Sorted everything out for him.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He didn’t emerge for over four months. The Yanks were unable to track him without committing commercial trespass, at which point they could be arrested. They lost interest eventually and he got on with his life.’

  ‘You’re saying I should do the same?’

  ‘The point is this. Out here’ – Moray swept his arm in an arc which encompassed the windscreen and side windows – ‘you’re easy meat. You won’t know you’re being followed until it’s too late. And, while we’re on the subject, hanging around the house of your exwife’s boyfriend is fucking suicidal behaviour.’

  Reuben was silent for a second. A car tried to lever its way in from the right. He steered slightly towards it, forcing the driver to stop sharply. With the horn piercing his ears he muttered, ‘It’s all I have left. To look. To snoop. It’s all I’m allowed. They have a fucking exclusion order. I can’t even touch him, hold him, kiss him. He’s growing every day. Do you know how much an eleven-month-old grows every day?’

  Moray shrugged, uninterested.

  ‘One millimetre. If I don’t see him for a week he’s grown over half a centimetre. It eats me up. He’s growing and dividing and learning and smiling and all without me. When I last held him he was half as big. It’s like I’m stuck. For me, Joshua will always be that baby I fed and loved.’

  Moray glossed over Reuben’s outpouring. ‘I’m just saying stop staying in hotels. Lie low. Only come out when it’s safe. And in the meantime, I’ll have a nose around, see what I can dig up. Someone always knows something.’ Moray pointed through the screen at a bus stop. ‘You can drop me there. I’ll walk the rest.’

  Reuben pulled over, lost in his thoughts. Moray walked across the road and disappeared into a shopping centre. Reuben pointed the car back towards the laboratory that was about to become his home. He worked through the processes which would unite him with the face of the GeneCrime killer. He called Judith, who promised to help out from around 6 a.m. He pictured Lucy, readying Joshua for bed, playing games in the bath, smiling with his smiles, squealing with his squeals. He saw Shaun Graves, running his fingers over the bloody baseball bat. He cursed himself for once again opening up to Moray. He focused on the tarmac in front of him and the concrete all around him. Mostly, though, Reuben found himself wondering what the face would look like. And, as he reached the industrial estate, whether the killer was someone he already knew.

  9

  Blur, tweak, adjust. Calculations and comparisons. Remap and reassess. Almost two thousand genes scanned, corrected and quantified. Colours drifting back and forth across spectra. Fluid features flowing and hardening. Vast directories of data plundered and assimilated. A 3D face coming to pixel life. Eyebrows sprouting, hair by hair. Ears germinating and budding. Teeth multiplying behind reddening lips. Irises coming into focus. Cheeks narrowing and widening, as if sucking air in and out. Eyelashes proliferating, growing longer, lightening and darkening. Nose narrowing and widening, beginning to push out of the screen. Jaws squaring and jowling, pulling the cheeks back and forth. The forehead stretching and receding, frontal lobes curling and uncurling.

  Reuben glanced at Judith. She was mesmerized, the screen projecting its developing image across her pale features. The hard-drive of the computer flickered like a hummingbird, the algorithms smoothing and editing. The face started to become human, features sticking, adjustments increasingly subtle. Colours stabilized. The eyes, the hair, the chin. Reuben stared into the image, taking in the traits of the killer. In seconds, the picture would be complete.

  The only sound above the whizzing computer was Judith’s breathing. The face crystallized. It went past photo-fit and entered the realms of Pheno-Fit. The image was photographic, holographic even. A face with texture, depth and definition, which could almost be touched. The PC stood silent, happy with the work which illuminated its VDU. In the bottom left corner, the Psycho-Fit appeared, summarized in red by three key characteristics. Obsessive behaviour. Individualism. Fierce intelligence. The physical and behavioural intermingled. Reuben was unable to take it in. Here was the man who was killing GeneCrime. Judith broke the silence.

  ‘Fuck,’ she whispered. ‘You know what this means?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Reuben muttered. He stared and stared, absorbing the cold eyes of the face. ‘No idea at all.’ Reuben tapped his forehead against the screen, provoking an angry burst of static. ‘Except that things are much more fucked up than even I had imagined.’

  1

  Jimmy Dunst closed his pub till and scanned the floor. There, just in his line of view, was a baseball bat. He peered over at the man in the corner and changed his mind. He walked to a private ground-floor room at the rear of the pub, an unsettling sharpness of odours from the toilets mingling with his growing nervousness. Jimmy Dunst locked the door, paced over to the phone and pulled a betting slip out of his pocket. In the corner was a number, which he dialled hurriedly, punching the buttons with badly chewed fingers. As he listened to the ring tone, he watched the door. Even though he had locked himself in, Jimmy was careful to speak quietly.

  ‘Is that Detective Chief Inspector Kemp?’ he said as his call was answered. ‘This is Jimmy Dunst, landlord of the Lamb and Flag, Streatham. You asked me to ring. He’s here. Yes. I recognized him straightaway. No, I don’t think so. Long
black coat, brown shoes.’ The barman shuffled uneasily on his feet. ‘OK. I’ll look out for you.’

  The barman replaced the receiver and thought for a second. Twenty years of pub work had taught him not to rely on the police arriving at the right second. He reached behind a sofa which was lined up facing an oversized TV. Pulling out a First World War bayonet, Jimmy unsheathed it and examined the short, brutal blade. He saw his stubbled mouth reflected in its polished form, and noted the confidence the weapon inspired. The fucker had chosen the wrong pub to come back to. He would just have time before the police arrived. A life for a life. That was justice. And now he had the chance to do what he had wanted to do for almost a decade. The barman carefully tucked the small weapon into the belt at the back of his jeans, unlocked the door and returned to the lounge. The man was still sitting at the table, running his eyes around the room, coldly absorbing all of its features.

  ‘Another, is it?’ Jimmy said.

  The man turned his eyes on him. The stare was harsh and intimidating. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Another drink?’ Jimmy repeated.

  The man ignored him, and continued to scan the nicotine walls, the smudged windows and the sullied carpet. Jimmy Dunst pulled him a pint, seeing the atrocity which had happened in this pub nine years ago. This, he said to himself, as the glass filled with dark liquid, was the moment. He topped the pint off, checked the bayonet behind his back and headed towards the man. His breathing was rapid and shallow, his stomach as fluid as the drink. Through the window, there was no sign of the police. The room was empty, too early even for hardened regulars. The man didn’t look up as he put the glass down. Jimmy reached round for the knife and pulled it out in one movement.

  ‘So you thought you’d come back?’ he breathed, stabbing the blade forward, holding it millimetres from the man’s face.