by John Macken
CONTROL
John Macken
BANTAM PRESS
LONDON • TORONTO • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND • JOHANNESBURG
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
About the Author
Also by John Macken
ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
TWO
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
THREE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
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First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © John Macken 2010
John Macken has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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ISBN 9780593061459
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John Macken works as a scientist in a large windowless building. He is the author of three previous books featuring Reuben Maitland – Dirty Little Lies, Trial by Blood and Breaking Point.
Also by John Macken
DIRTY LITTLE LIES
TRIAL BY BLOOD
BREAKING POINT
ONE
1
‘Hacksaw – that’s a great word, don’t you think?’
Dr Ian Gillick stared up at the man above him, listening to every nuance, observing every movement. He watched him pick the slender implement off the table, and imagined the cold metal handle warming to the man’s touch.
‘Not just sawing, but hacking as well. Two for the price of one.’
Dr Gillick didn’t answer. His mouth was sealed shut with thick black gaffer tape. He could taste the adhesive on his tongue, and smell the plastic in his nostrils.
‘Sawing sounds nice and neat and precise. Straight lines, measured progress, a clear objective. But hacking? That’s just butchery, don’t you think?’
Gillick stared past the man looking down at him, past his sickening stubble, the deep black pores of his skin, the red capillaries of his eyes. He focused on the ceiling, telling himself his only hope was not to react.
‘I don’t know where it came from or who invented it, but I like it.’ Dr Gillick watched as the man ran his eyes along the thin serrated blade. ‘I like it a lot.’
The man moved the hacksaw in front of Gillick’s face, allowing him to inspect it in even greater detail. Hiding in the crevices were specks of red. An attempt had been made to clean it, fibres of cloth snagging, water creeping into the teeth, particles of rust beginning to brown the surface. Dr Gillick fought a sudden nausea. He bucked against the ties clamping him firmly in place.
‘Words. Where they come from, what they mean. But then, as a scientist, you should understand all that.’
Gillick focused through the blade, its sharpness becoming blurred, its jagged profile blunt.
‘The first one, he couldn’t see the beauty either. But that’s OK. We had different aims. His aim was to survive at any cost. Mine was to make him understand.’
The man raised his eyebrows, inviting the question, which didn’t come, Gillick breathing hard through his nose, flexing against the ties, fighting to stay calm.
‘You do understand why I’m here, don’t you?’
Gillick grunted. It was as much noise as he had made for the past five minutes. He understood all right. At first it had been unreal, a different lifetime, events he had moved on from. But now it was as real as anything had ever been in his thirty-six years of existence.
‘And you do understand how much this will hurt, Dr Gillick? How much real, actual human pain you are about to feel? Sickening levels that will make you want to pass out, to die, anything but experience any more. And I want you to also understand that I will be doing everything I can to keep you alive and awake, so you can feel every tooth of the saw, every hack of the blade. And that I need you to watch carefully what I do with your fingertips after I’ve removed them. Exactly where I put them, and exactly how I do it.’
Gillick began to struggle more violently. The legs of the dining table he was tied to creaked and shook. But it was too wide and too heavy to move far. He had bought it four years ago from a shop specializing in reclaimed teak. It had needed three men to lift it into his flat. A couple of books and CDs dropped to the carpeted floor. Gillick began screaming into his sealed-off mouth, flailing his restrained limbs, sensing he was utterly trapped, panic overwhelming the calm.
The man standing above Dr Ian Gillick cast his eyes aroun
d the room, pausing for a second, taking it all in. Not bad, and a hell of a lot better than the place he was used to inhabiting these days. Deep wall colours, pale flooring, leather furniture, lots of wood. Not rich or luxurious, just plain and honest good taste.
He bent down and picked the cage off the floor. The smell infested his nostrils, sharp and piercing. ‘Rattus norvegicus,’ he said. ‘The common rat. Hungry little fuckers as well. But that really needn’t concern you.’
Gillick had ceased his futile attempts at escape. He was sucking air in through his nose, his cheeks red, his eyes wild and staring. The message was finally getting through.
‘At least not yet.’
The man gripped the metal handle of the hacksaw tight in his right hand. With his left, he clenched Gillick’s down-turned wrist, and pushed it hard into the table. ‘Although now I think about the word, about the whole job it has to do, I can see some sense in it,’ he added. ‘First the hack, then the saw. Hacking through the flesh, sawing through the bone.’ He lowered the blade. ‘I’d never really thought about it before, but now there’s a strange sort of beauty to it.’
The blade made contact with the three middle fingers. He rested it there, judging the line. Straight across and he could take the fingertips without touching the little finger or the thumb. Then he could do the little finger separately, and finally the thumb. Same for the right hand after that. Ten fingers with six main bouts of cutting.
Gillick’s legs were shaking uncontrollably. His face was so pale that a thick blue vein was bulging down the centre of his forehead. His eyes were barely blinking, just fixed open in panic and horror.
A deep cleansing breath. First the hack, then the saw. The rats were frantically scratching the plastic side of their cage, gnawing into the metal bars, climbing over each other to get out. He pulled the blade back, snagging through hairs and skin. And then he began slowly and methodically to work his way down to the bone.
2
Dr Reuben Maitland ran his long thin fingers over the spikes of the cactus plant. It stood on his new desk in a shallow brown saucer, tiny white stones covering the soil. A fine dust from the stones encircled the pot, just under its rim. Judging by the cleanness of the rest of the desk, the plant had been there some time, polished around by whoever came in and tidied the office each day.
Reuben examined it in more detail. The cactus was remote, the lush fruit of its body sitting serenely behind a barbed-wire exoskeleton. Protection radiating in all directions, fending off all-comers. The body was six inches high and tubular, the spines an inch long in every direction. Reuben had no idea what it was called in English, Latin or any other language. Botany was not his thing. He had clearly inherited the plant along with the office, the only piece of greenery among the browns, whites and greys. Probably, he guessed, it had been left over from the previous occupant, too sharp to carry home or dispose of easily. He glanced around the bare room. There was of course another option: it could be a small token to say hello, to welcome him back to GeneCrime. But if it was a welcome present, he told himself, it was one hell of an unfriendly one.
Reuben wrapped his right hand round the cactus. He started to squeeze slowly, long second after long second. Multiple points of contact between human and plant. He glanced up at the two internal windows on adjacent walls which opened into separate laboratories. Through the one-way glass he watched forensic scientists chatting, leaning on benches, shrugging themselves into lab coats, ambling around, calling across to each other or staring into computer screens. Reuben gripped harder, the spikes making tiny white pricks, bloodless indentations, in his skin. The left window opened into the Gross Debris lab, the right into the DNA lab. He flashed through the hours he had spent in each, the scientists he had trained and become friends with, the ones who had died, the ones who had survived.
The phone rang. One long trill followed by silence. An internal call. He looked down at his hand. A couple of spikes had broken through, droplets of blood appearing. The phone continued to sound. One second on, one second off. He let it ring another ten times. Then he glanced at his watch and sighed. He used his left hand to lift the receiver.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Reuben? It’s Sarah. You ready?’
Reuben glanced down at his right hand. Slowly, he let go of the plant. ‘Yeah,’ he grunted.
‘You sure?’
‘I guess I am.’
‘They’re in the Command Room. Meet you in the corridor. Two minutes.’
The call ended, and Reuben replaced the receiver. He sucked the blood from his palm, sensing the sweet iron taste of haemoglobin. The Command Room. He sighed. Here we go again.
He paced towards the door, pausing to get a good look through the adjacent windows. Gross Debris handling hairs, footprints, fibres. A more casual attitude clearly visible from his vantage point. A couple of forensic technicians slowly and methodically picking hairs from sections of Sellotape, matching fibres under a dual-light microscope. The DNA lab, by contrast, looked more precise and pressured. Scientists scanning elongated lists of sequences, pipetting minute volumes of liquids into tiny tubes. Different levels of detection with the same end point. And both of them about to get busy.
Reuben had a final scope of the office. A different room in the same building. Subterranean, no daylight, cooled air pumped in on a loop. Back again, he told himself. A year and a half away, and now a jumble of feelings he hadn’t experienced for a long time. Excitement. Unease. Impatience. Ambition. The possibilities and the pitfalls. The pressure, the thrill of working in a team. The long troughs of endeavour, the short peaks of success. Everything came flooding back at once.
He took a second to compose himself, examining the army of small indentations in his palm, a few of them red, the rest white. ‘Here we go,’ he said quietly to himself, soft words that just escaped being sighed.
And then he opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.
3
Sarah Hirst had beaten him to it. She was standing at the end of the corridor, one leg bent at the knee, her foot resting against the wall. In her arms she had a couple of A4 files which she was pressing to her chest. She looked oddly like a schoolgirl loitering in a hallway, waiting impatiently for something better to happen. Reuben shook the idea from his head. DCI Hirst as anything but the unit commander was now unimaginable.
As Reuben approached, she said, ‘Dr Maitland.’
‘DCI Hirst,’ he answered.
Sarah began walking. ‘Just like the bad old days, eh? How does it feel to be back?’
‘Scary.’
‘Scared? You?’
‘It’s been a long time.’
‘It’s only been a year.’
‘Eighteen months.’
‘So what’s your point? Ten years here and only eighteen months away. Blink of an eye.’
‘Blink of a slow and painful eye that still feels bruised and swollen.’
They turned into another long walkway, thin blue carpet underfoot, the walls white, neon strips lighting the way. Standard civilian police decor.
‘How’s the office?’ Sarah asked.
‘What happened to my old one?’
‘It’s mine now. And before you say anything, finders keepers.’
‘There’s some sort of cactus on the desk.’
‘Count yourself lucky.’
‘Whose was it originally?’
‘No idea. But like I said, finders keepers.’
They reached a set of concrete stairs and climbed three flights, Sarah quickly jogging up one at a time, Reuben taking two steps per stride. A thick double door led to another of GeneCrime’s long straight corridors. The building was a five-storey box. Reuben wondered whether the architect had ever drawn anything without a ruler.
Sarah slowed. ‘Here,’ she said, unfolding a broadsheet newspaper from a cardboard file. ‘Have a listen to this.’
Reuben suspected that Sarah spent a lot of her free time running, or in the gym, or doing
whatever cardiac exercise came to hand. She was slim and fit, her movements nimble and quick. As she spoke, her breathing was barely any different, despite having just jogged up three flights of stairs.
‘“Police have officially linked the second death, of scientist Dr Ian Gillick, thirty-six, to the murder of a man found at his home last week in” blah blah blah.’ She turned to Reuben and a mischievous grin lit up her features. ‘Here’s the interesting bit. “Police sources revealed that the case is being handed over to GeneCrime, the elite but controversial Forensics division based in Euston. Tellingly, Dr Reuben Maitland, thirty-nine, recently reinstated to GeneCrime, will be overseeing the investigation.” New paragraph.’ Sarah grinned again. ‘You ready for some more?’
Reuben raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m thirty-eight,’ he said.
‘Either way, here we go.’ They pushed through another set of off-white double doors, Sarah scanning the paper. ‘They’ve gone to town on you big time. “Dr Maitland was implicated in a previous incident of serious misconduct and dismissed from the Forensic Science Service eighteen months ago. That case involved the use of pioneering forensic techniques by Dr Maitland to profile the lover of his now former wife Lucy Maitland, and resulted in the arrest of Shaun Graves, a junior partner in the corporate law firm of Bostock and Tuson.”’
Reuben noted that Sarah could barely keep the glee out of her voice. He walked on, appreciating that this was a long way from how he had imagined the start of his first day back.
‘“Mr Graves, thirty-six, subsequently received a five-figure settlement from the Metropolitan Police for false imprisonment and arrest. The reinstatement of Dr Maitland is bound to be seen in some quarters of the Met as inappropriate, so soon after a charge of serious misconduct and the ensuing legal fallout.”’
‘I wish they’d get their facts right,’ Reuben said dourly. ‘It wasn’t serious misconduct.’
‘No?’
‘No. It was improper conduct.’
