Control

by John Macken

  ‘A lot can happen in thirty minutes.’

  The sound of a crying child in the background. A clawing resonance in the gentle sobbing. Something painfully familiar in the voice.

  ‘Who are you?’ Reuben repeated.

  A second’s pause. A rasping breath through the receiver.

  ‘The man who is in the papers, the one you are hunting.’

  ‘Which man?’

  ‘The one who takes fingers.’

  ‘Where’s my ex-wife?’

  ‘Looking for your child. But she won’t find him because I have him.’

  The ticking of the Command Room clock. The room quietening down, staff waiting for the meeting to resume. A deafening throb beginning to beat through Reuben’s temples. This couldn’t be right. He checked his watch. Half an hour, forty minutes at the most.

  ‘Listen to me. I am the wrong sort of person to prank-call. Entirely the wrong sort of person.’

  ‘This is no prank, Dr Maitland. And in a second I will prove it. I have your son, and you’d better get your head around that now.’

  A coldness surged in Reuben’s chest, a tightening in his stomach. Panic started to set in, implications stabbing home, a hammer blow of understanding arriving late.

  ‘What do you want?’ Reuben asked, as calmly as he could.

  ‘That you don’t try and find me.’

  Reuben glanced over his shoulder. Some of the fifteen faces were monitoring him with a variety of expressions. Boredom. Indifference. Mild curiosity. A couple of Forensics were chatting to each other. A CID officer studied one of the sheets from Reuben’s file. Another had walked over to stare at the image of a mutilated hand. Two support staff were tapping into laptops. He saw Sarah glance impatiently at her watch. But time had utterly stopped for Reuben.

  The voice in his ear continued. ‘You can speak to him. Ten seconds, that’s all.’

  There was a scraping noise – the phone obviously being moved. Reuben heard the sound of his son’s distress intensify.

  ‘Joshua, this is Daddy. Are you OK, little fella? Where’s Mummy?’

  Joshua said the word ‘Daddy’ and started crying louder, unmistakable and unique sounds hardwired into Reuben’s recognition centres.

  ‘Don’t cry. Mummy will be there soon. Mummy and Daddy love you very much.’

  Joshua’s crying became more irregular, interrupted by jagged breaths, deep intakes of air. Reuben bunched the fist of his other hand, fingernails digging hard into his palm. Any lingering disbelief had just evaporated. Joshua was with this man, crying and scared.

  More scraping noises told him the phone was moving back again.

  ‘Spell out exactly what you want,’ Reuben said evenly.

  ‘Just this, Dr Maitland. Do nothing to catch me. Say nothing to anyone. If your team makes any progress towards finding me, your son will die.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I need one more person, and then I will stop for good. This one deserves to die, just like the other two. He has committed an atrocity against society and will commit others. This is natural justice. The sort you secretly approve of. You are not to interfere, or your son will die. And you’ve seen what I’m capable of.’

  Reuben pictured Joshua’s tiny hand and its delicate fingers. He looked over at the door. He wanted to be out in the corridor shouting at this fucker, telling him that he was going to find him and make him pay. But he was stuck at the far end of the room, trying to sound as normal as he possibly could as his heart and stomach and head felt crushed and sick and horrified.

  ‘And if I don’t?’ Reuben said quietly.

  ‘I will know. I’ve set you a trap, Dr Maitland. A big messy horrible trap. If you track me down, or I even sense that you’re trying, Joshua will die instantly.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to believe that?’

  ‘Believe what you want. But a life for a life, that’s what I’m offering you. You let me kill one more person, someone who deserves to die, and I’ll disappear for ever.’

  In the background, Joshua’s sobs were sounding more and more broken and uneven. Reuben closed his eyes, drawn into the distress of his son, feeling it burrow deep into his soul, tugging at his composure. The sound of your only child, scared, alone, trapped with a stranger.

  ‘If you do anything,’ Reuben said quietly, his teeth clenched together, ‘anything at all, I will—’

  ‘You’ll do nothing. I’m in control, not you. And don’t make the mistake of letting this get personal, Dr Maitland. This isn’t about you or your family. This is about me.’

  ‘How the fuck is it not personal?’ Reuben hissed. ‘You have my only son.’

  ‘Like I say, this is just business. A trade. A swap. An agreement. A bargaining position.’

  ‘You sick fucking—’

  The line went dead. A nothingness in his ear. Joshua cut off, isolated from him, taken away.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Reuben sensed Sarah giving him disapproving looks. A couple of others were raising their eyebrows, their curiosity ebbing. This had just been Daddy Talk, Reuben talking to his son at work.

  He slowly placed the phone back in his pocket, his mind racing. The killer of two men holding his son. Was he telling the truth? How had he got Joshua? How had he known about his son?

  He walked back to his chair and sat down, his head filling with images and questions, plans and strategies. Tell no one, the killer had said. Stop the investigation dead. I am in control. Reuben needed to buy some time, talk to Lucy, see what the real situation was. He took his phone out again.

  Someone cleared their throat. The team was waiting. Fifteen bright and impatient minds looking from Reuben to the screen and back again. Legs shuffling under the narrow desk. Feet almost touching, grinding into the carpet with nervous energy, a killer to catch. A paralysing moment of indecision. The air conditioning kicking in for a few seconds, blowing its cooled and filtered air around the room and then resting again. And Sarah, staring at him.

  ‘Dr Maitland?’

  ‘Right,’ Reuben muttered. ‘Where were we?’

  ‘How do you cut someone’s fingers off without tying them up,’ Mina Ali prompted.

  Reuben cleared his throat. He stared into the keypad of his phone for a second, memorizing the numbers. ‘Any ideas yet?’ he said. As he waited for an answer, he typed the number from memory: 2255#63#669. A code, like the triplet code of DNA. Translated by predictive text into Call Me Now.

  Simon Jankowski spoke first. ‘He knocks the man out elsewhere, then takes him to the kitchen and kills him there.’

  ‘And why would he do that?’ Reuben asked as he entered Lucy’s eleven-digit number and pressed send.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Simon bit into the inside of his cheek. ‘From what I’ve read, it doesn’t look like the same MO as the other death.’

  The other death. Reuben put down his phone and reached for the remote control. Two bodies so far, one more promised, and then he would stop. That was what he had said. Everything now personal, related to Joshua, small significances looming large.

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ Reuben muttered. He flicked through several other slides of Carl Everitt. Then the backgrounds changed – a different house, rich interior wall colours, lots of wood. A solid dining table, looking down on it. Reuben pictured a police photographer balancing on a chair to get the angle right. A man tied to it, rope digging into one wrist, passing under the sturdy table and wrapping around the other wrist. The man on his back. Reuben scanned a piece of paper on his desk but couldn’t find what he was looking for.

  ‘Dr Ian Gillick,’ Sarah prompted.

  Reuben glanced quickly at her then turned back to the screen, taking it all in, mining it for fresh information, anything that might pertain to his son. Ian Gillick was on his back. His fingertips were missing. Pools of dark redness had seeped over the edge of the table, most of it dripping heavily on to the wooden floor, some of it running along the ropes that bound his wrists. A plastic cage with metal bar
s sat near Gillick’s head. A different cage to the last one, smaller, scruffier.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Reuben monitored his phone, willing it to ring, Lucy saying there’s obviously been some sort of mistake, Joshua’s here with me, safe and well. The phone sat silent and still, a lump of plastic and glass, inert and unmoved by human emotion.

  ‘You’re right, Simon,’ Reuben said. ‘This one is different. He looks to have been incapacitated and then bound.’ Reuben pointed the remote control at the screen. ‘Blood sprays on the CD rack there to the left. His fingertips were removed here. But again, how do you remove someone’s fingers without them moving their hands? He’s only tied at the wrist. Why didn’t he ball his fists up?’

  The phone remained lifeless. Reuben tried to slow his breathing.

  ‘Could they pass out with the pain of having one fingertip removed?’ Simon asked. ‘And then the others are easy?’

  Reuben shook his head, almost absently, barely hearing the response for the hundreds of thoughts and scenarios bouncing around his skull, smashing into one another. A few seconds of telephone conversation that threatened to change everything. Mere words that felt real and not real at the same time. ‘I don’t think so.’ Joshua alone with the man who had done this. A two-year-old boy with a fully grown psychopath. ‘You might black out for a bit, but surely you’d come round again.’ A cold ache was beginning to burrow inwards from each temple, grinding through his frontal lobes.

  Reuben looked up at the man across the table from him. ‘Chris, you’re the closest thing we have to a real doctor. You care to comment?’

  Dr Chris Stevens stopped doodling in his pad. ‘Pathologists are real doctors,’ he said. ‘It’s just that our patients complain less.’

  While Dr Stevens outlined the intense nervous system of the fingers, and the concentration of pain receptors near the tips, Reuben focused on the words the killer had spoken to him, and the noises his son had made. He stared at his phone again, increasingly sensing that this was no mistake, that Lucy failing to return his text was an ominous sign.

  7

  Reuben checked the reception on his mobile. One bar, cutting in and out, flashing as the phone signal wafted back and forth. A frail electronic waveform struggling to penetrate a solid room with thick walls and a concrete floor. Still nothing from Lucy. Nearly an hour since his text, and absolute silence. Lucy always carried her phone, always had it switched on, always had it charged and ready. It was her home, her work, her social circle. Almost everything in Lucy’s life was filtered through that small chunk of plastic. She had called him earlier so she clearly had it with her. Yet she was silent now.

  They had filed out of the Command Room, along the stretched corridors of GeneCrime, back down concrete stairs and into the depths of the building where the morgue lay. Reuben watched Dr Chris Stevens pull open an elongated steel drawer, which glided out in deferential silence. He dialled Lucy’s number. Nothing, the phone flashing the words ‘no signal’. Dr Stevens rolled back a blue plastic sheet to reveal Ian Gillick’s face. An expression of horror remained, clinging to the corners of his open mouth and the glazed whites of his eyes. Reuben dialled again, picturing Dr Gillick’s journey. Being untied from his dining table. Lifted on to a stretcher and straight into a body bag. Being carried out of his house. A black unmarked Ford Transit transporting him across London. Slipping through the traffic, no external indication of what was inside. Stopping at red lights and pedestrian crossings, the diesel engine idling, living people standing inches away from the dead. The phone showed a symbol that suggested it was trying to connect. After a few more seconds, it cut out. Dr Stevens walked over and pulled on the handle of another brushed-steel drawer.

  Reuben cast his eyes over the forensic scientists and CID officers staring silently at the corpse. He reflected on the power he now had. It hadn’t felt like power before today. If anything, it was an inconvenience, a responsibility, a set of behaviours to adopt and a book of regulations to uphold. Being in charge rarely felt like control or authority. Rather, Reuben believed that managing teams of people was like opening the door to a fuck of a lot of problems that threatened to wash you away on a daily basis. Of course there were small perks, but these were set against the huge and overwhelming fucker of having to manage a disparate group of human beings. And in GeneCrime, that meant the bright and the fragile, the gifted and the unpredictable.

  He tried Lucy’s number again, gritting his teeth as he dialled.

  Reuben was well aware that he had stumbled into authority rather than sought it out. And here he was, back in charge of GeneCrime Forensics. But he saw now that his power had one important perk: it could keep his son alive. Delay the investigation, push things in the wrong direction, make poor strategic choices. All of these could placate the killer for a while, protect Joshua from harm, if that’s what needed to be done.

  The pathologist pulled back the blue plastic sheet that hid Carl Everitt from view. Reuben wondered momentarily why all GeneCrime bodies were covered in sheets, despite being buried deep in a metal racking system. Everitt looked similarly shocked, an aftertaste of horror remaining in his doughy features.

  The phone had given up on dialling and was displaying its usual photographic image: Joshua on the first official day of remission, staring directly into the camera, smiling, small gaps between each tooth, gaps that spoke of future growth. The cold ache between Reuben’s temples was getting sharper and more intense, pushing and squeezing his frontal lobes. He clenched his fist and opened it slowly. Several of the cactus holes were bleeding, as if the pressure in his skull was forcing the blood out of him.

  Act naturally, he told himself. Don’t panic. Don’t do anything until you’ve spoken with Lucy.

  He tried again. This time, from somewhere in the ether, two bars of reception appeared. Dr Chris Stevens looked like he was ready to speak. Reuben turned away, jamming the phone hard against his ear. After four rings the call went through to Lucy’s messaging system. Reuben cursed. When it was finally ready for him, he whispered his message: ‘Luce, it’s Reuben. Ring me the second you get this. If I don’t answer, keep ringing. I have to speak to you.’

  He replaced the phone in his pocket, his mind still racing. Lucy not answering the text, her phone going through to messages. He thought about running out of the morgue, out of GeneCrime, into his car, speeding round to Lucy’s house. But he had no idea if she was there. All he knew was that his son was missing, and now his ex-wife. Maybe they were together. Maybe they had both been snatched. He shook his head quickly, almost a twitch, and rubbed his face. Despite the cold still air of the morgue, Reuben was sweating.

  ‘Getting squeamish in your old age, Dr Maitland?’ Chris Stevens asked. ‘You look awfully pale.’

  Reuben managed something approaching a smile. ‘I’m not that badly out of practice.’ In the absence of any clear notion of what to do, he had to learn as much about the killer as possible. ‘So, what can you tell us?’

  ‘OK.’ Chris was standing between the bodies, both still on their trays, staring blindly into the strip lighting, arms by their sides, feet inside the rack. Ian Gillick was to the left of Dr Stevens, Carl Everitt to the right. The pathologist grabbed Ian’s left hand and Carl’s right. ‘First thing to note is that there are serrations on the second and third phalanges of both victims. These weren’t clean cuts. The saw slipped a few times before digging into bone and getting started. This could suggest some amount of struggle on behalf of the victim, or else a fairly reckless bout of sawing.’

  Reuben watched the GeneCrime pathologist pull two clear plastic tubes out of his lab coat pocket. They rattled together as he screwed their white lids open. He up-ended them one at a time. Reuben strained for a better look.

  ‘These are a couple of fingertips we retrieved from the cages. One from each victim. As far as I have been able to see, neither of them has sustained substantial rodent damage.’ Dr Stevens lined up one short stubby fingertip with a finger on Gillick’s
hand. Reuben noted that it was only a couple of centimetres long, half of it made up of nail, the rest a sick shade of off-white flesh. ‘If you look closely, you’ll notice that the tissue of the amputated phalange is also jagged. I have dissected a couple of the others, and the bone is pretty smooth. Now, this confirms that the implement used was definitely a saw.’

  ‘As opposed to what?’ Sarah asked sharply.

  ‘Bolt cutters. A cigar chopper. A sword. Whatever else might relieve someone of the tips of their fingers. Cutting, as opposed to sawing, inevitably results in fragmentation and compression, splinters of bone detaching themselves. And another thing to note: most of the joints are intact. The killer hasn’t tried to saw between the ligaments which bind the phalanges.’

  ‘What else?’ Reuben asked. ‘Anybody?’

  Mina Ali cleared her throat, the noise bouncing sharply off the low ceiling. ‘What do you think about fingerprinting the fingertips?’

  ‘Lifting a fingerprint off a fingerprint?’

  Mina nodded slowly. ‘I know it sounds weird, but the killer could have left imprints on the amputated digits.’

  ‘Not sure that would work,’ Reuben said. ‘But you’re right, we should swab for DNA in case the killer wasn’t wearing gloves.’ Immediately, a rush of other ideas came to Reuben, things they could try, unconventional approaches that might work. But he kept them to himself.

  ‘But won’t the fingers be contaminated with rat DNA?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Probably,’ Mina answered. ‘We should be able to differentiate rat DNA from human, though.’

  A low rumble of discussion followed, which Dr Stevens cut into. ‘I think what we’re really missing here is something important, something I haven’t made my mind up about yet.’

  ‘What?’ Reuben asked.

  ‘The actual cause of death. Would you lose enough blood through your fingertips to bleed to death, or is the blood supply insufficient? I mean, we’re hardly talking about arteries here.’