by John Macken
‘Shhh. It gets better. They’ve done a biog on you.’
‘Sounds painful.’
‘“Dr Maitland formerly headed the Forensics section of GeneCrime before his dismissal. He was a regular contributor to the general media, writing articles for this newspaper as well as several others, and appearing occasionally on television and radio—”’
‘What paper is this?’
‘The Independent. Will you shut up?’
Sarah was enjoying herself. Reuben walked on in silence. Ten metres ahead of them a large wood-effect door was marked Command Room. He felt his stomach tighten involuntarily.
‘“Inside the force, Dr Maitland has a reputation as a maverick scientist, a fierce obsessive who has pioneered several forensic breakthroughs.”’ Sarah stopped in front of the Command Room door and lowered the paper. ‘I could go on. Maybe I should have walked slower. So, Mr Fierce Obsessive, with the improper conduct record, are you ready to join the big time again?’
Reuben grabbed the paper and quickly scanned what was left. He saw his son Joshua’s name, the term ‘acute lymphocytic leukaemia’, the hospital he had been treated in, the wonderful word ‘remission’, his wife’s name and the not-so-wonderful word ‘estranged’. They had been thorough. The press as detectives. Digging, enquiring, speculating. It would be an interesting experiment to get a good reporter on to a serious crime, see if they dug up the truth quicker than CID or Forensics.
‘How do the press get all this?’ he said, almost to himself.
‘Maybe because we brief them every single bloody day.’
‘There used to be a time when the force’s movements were not for public consumption.’
There was a moment of silence, Reuben’s words hanging in the artificial light. He examined Sarah out of the corner of his eye. As pretty and hassled as ever, blonde hair restrained, mouth slightly pursed, a frown breaking like a slow wave across her forehead.
‘Shall we?’ she asked.
Reuben handed back the paper. At the top, the headline proclaimed ‘Police Link Deaths of Two Fingerless Men’.
A cold nervousness continued to burrow into his stomach. His mobile phone started vibrating inside his pocket. Two plainclothes CID officers hesitated, then entered the room ahead of them. Sarah passed him one of her files, and gripped the door handle.
‘Let’s catch some killers,’ she said.
4
In her right hand Lucy Maitland held on to the training reins that kept her two-year-old son tethered within a few feet of her. The reins were a new weapon in the battle to keep Joshua from running off as fast as his short little legs would carry him. All morning Lucy had felt like the centre point of a circle, the reins a radius, Joshua orbiting around her in a tight circumference. On the bus it was different, however, his progress hampered by seats and passengers. She stared at him while she waited for Reuben to answer. He was straining against her, wanting to explore the full length of the aisle, occasionally wailing in frustration as his progress was halted. In a couple of minutes Lucy would harness him in an altogether more defeating fashion. She would strap him back in his buggy, with its double belts that crossed at the shoulder and hip, a system of binding that would require some bribery.
Lucy’s call was finally answered by the single word ‘yes’.
‘Reuben,’ she said. ‘It’s Lucy.’
Her ex-husband cleared his throat. ‘I’m just about to enter the Command Room.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You weren’t to know.’
This is what it has become, Lucy thought with a sigh, holding the weight of Joshua in check. Brief sentences, a brusque politeness, functional communication.
Reuben seemed to soften. ‘Look, I was going to call you in an hour or so anyway. How did it go?’
Lucy hesitated, savouring the moment. Good news shouldn’t be rushed, particularly when it had been in such short supply recently. ‘He’s been passed over to the long-term medical team, who have reviewed his progress.’
‘And?’
‘The new team are extremely happy with Joshua’s progress. Blood counts good, all traces of anaemia finally gone, clean bill of health since the last check-up. Dr Khiara, he’s the oncologist, and Dr Morgan, the haematologist, reckon we’re very probably out of the woods.’
Lucy heard her ex-husband breathe out. It was slow and measured, an exhalation of relief.
‘Fantastic,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’
‘On the way back. Going to drop him at nursery and then head into the office.’
‘I would have been there. If, you know . . .’
‘I know. Anyway, I just thought I’d let you know what they had to say.’
Reuben was quiet again. Lucy heard a door open and close a couple of times in the background and tried to picture him back at work, serious, focused, reverting to his former self. She appreciated that Joshua’s three-month check-up had come on a difficult day.
‘You still there?’ she asked. ‘The reception isn’t great.’
‘I’m still here,’ he answered. ‘And that really is fantastic news. Thank you.’
From the tone of his voice, Lucy knew he was ending the conversation.
‘I’ll maybe talk to you later,’ she said.
‘Yeah. Sorry, got to get things moving here.’ Above his voice, a door scraped open and banged shut again. ‘But thanks, Luce. Bye.’
‘Bye.’
Lucy slotted her phone into the depths of her handbag, and pulled out a yoghurt drink. She showed it to Joshua, feeling a fresh wave of relief wash through her. A clean bill of health. It didn’t get much better than that. Joshua scampered towards her, unsteady on his feet as the elongated London bus took a corner, the reins that had held him back now keeping him upright. He reached for the drink with both hands, a toothy smile on his face, a dimple on his right side, just like his father, his pale cheeks rosy after his constrained efforts to explore the bus.
‘Dink, dink, dink!’ he squealed.
Lucy held it just out of reach. ‘Not till you’re in your buggy,’ she said.
Bribery and coercion. The two cornerstones of parenting, Lucy told herself. It was no wonder so many people turned out so bad.
She lifted Joshua up and kissed his cheek. Then she stood and shuffled towards the doors, grabbing Joshua’s buggy and unfolding it in one practised movement. She strapped her son in and finally handed him the yoghurt drink.
The bus slowed, and Lucy pushed forward, closer to the doors. She checked her son. He had managed to tip most of the yoghurt down his front. Lucy cursed silently. She had forgotten the wet-wipes. The euphoria of Joshua’s remission was already fading as she left the bus. Parenting was difficult enough with two of you. With just one it was nearly impossible – something she had recently been telling Reuben with increasing frequency.
5
The Command Room was long and thin, almost an extension of one of GeneCrime’s many corridors. A table ran nearly the whole length, its occupants facing one another, their legs close to touching beneath the wooden surface. Reuben shuffled to the far end of the room, while Sarah remained closest to the door. They pulled their chairs out in unison, and the background chatter of the fifteen or so staff ceased.
DCI Sarah Hirst sat forward in her chair. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘let’s get cracking. Those of you lucky enough not to have been stuck here over the weekend will doubtless have seen the papers, who seem to know more about ongoing crime than we do. Two men missing the tips of their fingers, cause of death not confirmed at the moment.’ Sarah took in a sweep of the assembled CID officers, forensic scientists and support staff. ‘You will be thrilled to know that GeneCrime have been tasked with investigating. The Met have asked us as a matter of urgency to identify the killer or killers. It’s what we do quickly, and it’s what we do well.’
Sarah smiled at Reuben, and he took a deep breath, his reservations dissipating in an instant. The hardest part had been waiting, being away, having the time to think about ever
ything. But now, back in the fold, at the very start of a new investigation, that was the thrill which overcame all the doubts. He realized that he was born for this, the hunt for the truth, the search for people who killed and raped and maimed.
‘And of course,’ Sarah continued, ‘today marks the return to GeneCrime of Dr Maitland, who is going to lead this investigation. Be nice to him. He might be slightly rusty after forgetting which side of the law is the right one for so long.’
There were a couple of low noises halfway between laughs and grunted acknowledgements of the truth. Three or four of the Forensics team nodded and smiled. Reuben scanned the room, naming names, reacquainting himself with faces. Bernie Harrison, bearded and scruffy. Mina Ali, bony and slightly gaunt. Simon Jankowski, pale skin, loud shirt. Paul Mackay, cropped hair, unusually smart for a scientist. A couple of CID made reassuring faces: Helen Alders, slim and boyish, and Leigh Harding, broad and fair. The support staff and IT largely ignored him. Chris Stevens from Pathology doodled in a notebook. It was as good a welcome as he was going to get.
‘Dr Maitland?’ Sarah said, raising her eyebrows. ‘Would you care to say a few words?’
Reuben nudged his chair back across the carpet and stood up slowly. ‘OK. No speeches, but it’s good to be back, and it’s nice to see some familiar faces.’ He opened the cardboard folder that Sarah had given him and slid its contents on to the table. ‘Now, as DCI Hirst said, over the weekend CID have officially linked two shocking and unusual murders. A sales executive was killed a week or so ago. The killing on Friday of a scientist shows striking similarities. Both victims had the tips of all their fingers removed, possibly with a saw of some sort. Worse, the fingertips were left inside a cage housing a couple of rats. The symbolism of this feels a little clumsy, but there may be more to it than we think at this stage. We shall see. Either way, we are about to embark upon an intense and high-profile investigation.’
Reuben forced himself to slow down, to suppress his eagerness to get started. People have died in horrible ways, he told himself. You have to coordinate a thorough and methodical search for their killer. Don’t ever make the mistake of enjoying this.
He glanced across at one of the IT support team. ‘Do we have visuals?’
A thin, nervous male slid a remote control towards him. ‘Just press the left button to flick through.’
Reuben turned to face a flatscreen monitor behind him. ‘Those of you who’ve just had breakfast might want to look away.’ Whatever was on the screen was going to be nasty. Despite his impatience to get the investigation started, he knew he would feel the same mild nausea he always felt when confronted with the violent loss of a human life, the ending of one person’s hopes and dreams. At least he hadn’t eaten. He hadn’t felt like it.
He pointed the remote and clicked the button. The image of a man lying on a kitchen floor filled the screen. It was bad, but not enough to make him pause for more than a couple of seconds.
‘I’m guessing this is in situ, at the victim’s house?’
Reuben began to run his eyes rapidly across the image, mining it for information. It was the first time he had seen it, but several things struck him simultaneously. Nice floor tiles. Expensive units. The rat cage. Signs of a struggle: two spoons on the floor, a broken mug in the corner of the shot. A lot of blood. Enough, in fact, to suggest the victim had still been alive when most of the blood loss took place. Small sprays of red on the fridge and a cabinet confirmed that the body hadn’t been moved, and that this was where the murder had taken place. He flicked to the next picture. The same image but with evidence tags, bright yellow plastic markers with black numbers at their centre. The rat cage was number 4, the broken mug number 7. He forwarded again. A close-up of the victim’s right hand. Congealed stumps lacking fingernails and final phalanges, crudely squared off, oozing thick clotted redness. He peered into the screen. A series of parallel scratches were visible close to the cage. Reuben realized suddenly that the killer wanted his victim to see the rats, to watch what they did.
‘The rats were for him,’ he said, ‘not for us.’
‘What do you mean?’ Sarah asked.
‘It’s a fairly spooky thing to do, and a difficult one as well. Taking live animals in a cage to the house of someone you want to kill. Not the sort of thing a spontaneous killer does. This takes planning. Therefore it must be important. Now the question is, important to whom? To the victim, to the police, to the public at large, or a message to the next victim? Plenty of killers leave us things, miscellaneous stuff to throw us off the scent, bizarre items their mental illness persuades them would be a good idea.’
‘But you think the rats are for the deceased?’ Sarah said. She glanced down at her own cardboard folder. ‘A Mr Carl Everitt?’
‘Look at the position of the cage. It’s close to the victim’s head, eye level almost. The killer was making Mr Everitt watch what happened to his fingertips. He didn’t shove them between the bars, even though he could have reached, and the bars are just wide enough. This wasn’t about live rats chewing his fingers down. It was about what happened after they were removed.’
‘I don’t know about anyone else, but this is giving me the creeps.’ Dr Bernie Harrison scratched his beard for a couple of seconds. ‘It reminds me of Winston Smith in 1984.’
‘Why, what did he do?’ Detective Leigh Harding asked. ‘Is he still banged up?’
Reuben watched closely as Bernie’s smile got lost somewhere in the thick brown hair that covered his face. Literate Forensics versus less literate CID.
‘As in the book 1984,’ Bernie answered. ‘Orwell’s hero threatened with a cage of rats gnawing into his face.’
‘I thought—’
‘We all know what you thought, Detective Harding,’ Sarah interjected, ‘but can we get back to the current year’s events, and not those of a fictionalized future now set in the past?’
Detective Harding remained silent, a pained coldness about his clean-shaven face. Reuben sensed the gulf between the two sides of the narrow table, just as wide as it had ever been. CID officers who had shown exceptional aptitude on other cases headhunted for GeneCrime. Talented forensic scientists and bio-statisticians recruited from industry and academia. All bright people with sharp minds, but very different personalities and backgrounds. An uneasy mix, but a gifted one nonetheless.
‘I think there’s one other significant thing here,’ Reuben said, turning back to the screen. ‘The patterns on the slate floor tiles near the fingers. Difficult to spot from a distance, but there are red striations on the tiles that lie almost exactly perpendicular to the sprays of blood on some of the kitchen units. The fingers have been removed here, the killer pushing downwards, through skin, flesh, bone and out again the other side, before scratching into the stone surface.’ Reuben turned back to the occupants of the room. ‘So what does this tell us?’
‘He’s strong,’ Detective Helen Alders answered, her boyish face frowning. ‘Or this was done in a frenzied hurry.’
‘A frenzy, no,’ Reuben said. ‘You don’t carefully place a cage of rats near the victim’s head and then set about removing his fingers all in a frenzy. But strong I would agree with. There’s no obvious evidence of restraint.’
‘What you’re saying,’ Mina Ali interjected, ‘is that you don’t just hold a fully grown man down and saw his phalanges off.’
‘Not unless you’ve married him first,’ Reuben muttered under his breath. ‘But no.’
Reuben smiled at Mina and she grinned back, a lopsided toothy grin, her eyes wrinkling behind her glasses. His new deputy, the senior forensic scientist who was going to make his life a hell of a lot more bearable than it had been before he left.
‘So how did he do it?’
‘This is what I want everyone to think about.’ Reuben peered down at his notes to check the name. ‘Carl Everitt was five eleven. Looking at him, he probably weighed in at twelve stone or so. How do you control someone like that for long enough to do
what you’ve got to do?’
Reuben ran his eyes around the group. No one wanted to say anything. The room was silent except for the ever-present hum of the air conditioning. Somewhere in and around that lurked the buzz of the neon strip lights. The question floated unanswered in the windowless atmosphere.
‘OK,’ Reuben said finally, ‘let’s get some coffees in here. Someone grab me a tea. Let’s drink and think.’
6
Reuben spent half an hour flicking through photos, reading lab reports, checking times and dates, writing lists of questions and studying inventories of crime-scene objects. From time to time he sipped at the tea in his old GeneCrime mug. It had been with him from the start. Originally it was silver in colour, but this had long since perished, leaving a mottled grey and black covering. In all his time in the unit, no one had ever asked to borrow it, and no one had attempted to steal it when they lost their own mug. It reminded him for a second of the cactus, an object that survived simply because it was unappealing to the touch. Reuben took another sip, the tea now almost cold.
In the background, Forensics and CID combed through their own notes, cross-checking with each other, exchanging ideas. The hum of conversation was getting louder and Reuben knew it was time to get the meeting going again.
His mobile vibrated, and he flicked back to the conversation he had had with Lucy, the relief in her voice, the implication that the dark days were behind them. He thought briefly of his son, and the fact that he was on the mend. He checked the screen of his phone, which registered an unknown caller. Reuben hesitated, then pressed answer.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Dr Maitland?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have your son.’
‘What?’
‘Your two-year-old son Joshua. I have him here.’
Reuben got out of his chair and walked unsteadily over to the window.
‘Who is this?’
‘Someone I hope you will never meet.’
‘Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s with my ex-wife. I spoke to her half an hour ago.’
