Control

by John Macken

  ‘So what else are you proposing?’

  ‘Death by trauma, or death by something we haven’t checked for yet.’

  ‘Like what?’ Reuben scanned the torsos of Ian Gillick and Carl Everitt. A few bruises here and there, but no significant wounds. Some redness around Everitt’s neck, and deep abrasions around Gillick’s wrists and ankles where he had been tied. But no major fatal wounding. He thought again about his son, his delicate white flesh, his chubby arms and legs, his small frail body.

  ‘They haven’t exactly been clubbed to death,’ Sarah said.

  ‘I know,’ Dr Stevens said, picking up both hands again, uniting the corpses as if they were forming a human chain. ‘I’ve only had a cursory look while Forensics have been doing the obvious testing. I need to examine airways, internal bleeding, all sorts of things we pathologists like to do.’

  There was a sudden vibration in Reuben’s pocket. His phone was ringing. He snatched it out. The display said ‘Lucy’. Reuben took a couple of quick paces away into the corner.

  ‘Luce?’

  ‘Reuben, I’ve got some terrible news. I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to tell you. It just happened completely out of the blue, a few minutes after I rang you. I don’t know . . .’ Lucy was sobbing, her usually measured voice spilling out thick and fast, as torn and ragged as Joshua’s. She took a deep breath. ‘Reuben, Joshua is missing. I’m with the police.’

  Reuben wondered how he should react. This was confirmation that the worst event in his life so far was true. But if he was going to keep his son alive, he had to be hearing this for the first time.

  ‘What do you mean “missing”?’ he asked.

  ‘Taken. Snatched. Disappeared . . .’

  ‘Fuck,’ Reuben said, a little too loudly. ‘I’ll come down.’

  ‘I’m heading back to the house.’

  ‘Right. I’ll see you there.’

  He ended the call and walked over to Sarah, who was staring intently at a mark on Ian Gillick’s neck. ‘Sarah, I’ve got to run. Something extremely serious has happened to Joshua. I’ll call.’ And with that, Reuben paced out of the morgue and into the corridor, speeding up, starting to run, tilting forward, crashing through double doors, past security and out into the car park, his worst fears assailing him, adrenalin surging through his body.

  8

  The unmarked Volvo S60 was white and squat, wedged between concrete pillars. Reuben jumped in. He smelled the seductive plastic scent of a nearly new car. Then he fired the engine and screeched off, circling down the multi-storey, heading rapidly towards the exit.

  The north London streets were quieter than when he had arrived at GeneCrime. The rush hour had been in full grinding swing, but now there were gaps to aim at, openings to lunge into, lanes to slew across. As he sped through the traffic, silent and focused, he let the past two hours of his life catch up with him. His first day back in charge. The start of a new case. Two bodies with horrific and unusual injuries. The killer calling him. His son’s distressed voice in the background. The deal: a life for a life. Forensic immunity on one more killing for his son back safe and well.

  Reuben took a roundabout at speed, barely checking his mirrors. His heart was racing, his pupils wide, his hands tight on the steering wheel. But the headache was clearing. And it was freeing up room for intense concentration. The question at the centre, as always, was why? Why kill three people and then promise to stop? Why go to the lengths of snatching a child? Why feel the need to subvert forensic evidence? Why not just be careful, wear gloves, leave nothing behind at the scene? Why target the head of the forensics team trying to catch you? The hows could come later. For now, as Reuben hurtled through junctions and intersections, he occupied himself with the whys.

  Reuben lowered his window, an icy blast of November air streaming in and slapping his face. He knew that he was under pressure from above to solve this crime quickly. Fingerless corpses made large headlines in newspapers. Sarah had fought for his reinstatement, against the wishes of powerful senior officers. Commander William Thorner had backed her up, and as usual she had got her own way. But big things were expected of him. Commander Thorner had called him over the weekend to say as much. Cases like this make and break careers, Reuben, he had said in his deep Essex drawl. Your reputation will be on the line at a time when your reappointment is already controversial. Get this killer quickly, and you will do yourself a power of good. Don’t catch him and, well, Reuben, you know the score.

  Reuben glanced in the rear-view. His face was ashen and haunted, reminiscent of the bodies in the morgue. His pale green eyes flicked quickly back and forth in silent agitation. Strands of silver sparked amid his light brown hair. His mouth looked suddenly tight, his lips drained of colour. ‘The fucker has compromised himself,’ he said out loud. ‘He has left something at one of the crime scenes.’ Reuben focused back on the road, screeching down a side alley barely wider than the car. The wing mirrors reached out, nearly touching the walls. ‘That has to be it,’ he whispered to himself. ‘The killer has made a mistake.’

  Reuben emerged on to a wide dual carriageway and floored it. The bonnet of the heavy car lifted in response, eager and willing to please. Two murders, and something has happened. Reuben squinted. No contact after the first death, so something had to have occurred when he killed the scientist Ian Gillick. Reuben realized his team at GeneCrime would not make the same deduction. They were a bright lot, but they didn’t know what he knew.

  As he changed down and took a tight left turn off the carriageway, Reuben began to see that things were going to get tricky. He couldn’t risk catching the killer. Worse, he appreciated that he might have to begin actively to mislead his team, at least for the time being. He thought back to the morgue, to the ideas he had suppressed, the testing strategies he had kept silent. He realized he would now have to act consistently as if he had never received the phone call, as if there had been no communication with the man holding his son.

  Reuben punched the steering wheel. This was fucked up, and things were only going to get worse.

  He overtook a car on the wrong side of the road. Five or six more turns and he would be at Lucy’s house, the address he used to call home, the building where he used to put his son to bed, and read him stories, and play with him in the bath, before everything went wrong eighteen months ago. A sense of dread began to eat into him. Lucy had sounded distraught, almost hysterical. If someone with Lucy’s composure was panicking, then God help the rest of the world.

  He dragged himself back to the case, forcing his mind to extract as much detail from the facts as he could before he reached Lucy’s house. A sales executive and a scientist. Seemingly no connection between them. He pictured the killer tracking his mobile number down. The name Reuben Maitland in the weekend papers, the news that he was going to be heading the case. The incredible availability of information in the twenty-first century. Websites, databases, electronic fragments of facts, figures and personal records. Almost everything out there if you knew where to look. And the killer clearly hadn’t struggled to find him. Reuben tried to build a mental picture of the man holding his son. Smart, resourceful, rational about his need to kill, unusual and brutal in his methods. Fingertips and rats. This was no hot-blooded killer or random psychopath. This was someone with a planned mission, a strategy, a fierce and sadistic murderer who was comfortable with his ability to take on the police.

  Reuben kept his foot pressed hard into the floor as he thought. Three elongated London streets to go. White terraces with lacquered doors. Georgian residences that passed in a blur. Trees every ten metres, wide pavements, cars lining both sides. He tried to summon up the killer’s voice. Nasal, slightly monotonous, mid range. Over the distress of his son, he realized he had barely heard it; his ears had hunted for the high-pitched crying, searching out the alarm in Joshua’s sobs. It was primeval – the anxious infant, the protective parent. Reuben wondered whether he had met the killer before, come across him as a criminal,
or served him as a client. The first strand in any kidnap or extortion case: consider acquaintances of the victim, the inner circle. And that was what Reuben was, he belatedly realized. The victim. The killer was targeting him, blackmailing him, extorting him. Joshua was simply the guarantee that Reuben did as he said.

  Reuben punched the steering wheel again. The horn sounded, and a couple of people glanced round before quickly returning to their business. He sped through a T-junction into Lucy’s road. Smart semis, built in the thirties. Tiny front gardens that had been paved over to make room for cars. All except for Lucy’s. Reuben loved the fact that they had grass between them and the street. He had reinstated it when they moved in, a defiant statement of something he had never quite been able to define in words.

  Reuben pulled up quickly, the tyres complaining, the cooling fan kicking in. He parked twenty metres away, spotting two squad cars and a support vehicle as he walked towards the black front door. The sense of dread returned, burrowing into his gut. He paced across the grass, feeling its springy softness underfoot.

  Reuben put the killer out of his mind. He had done as much thinking as he could for the time being. What mattered now was finding his son. He rapped hard with his knuckles, and his ex-wife pulled open the door.

  9

  Lucy’s usually immaculate bob was out of shape, stray strands jutting sideways, refusing to be marshalled back into line. She hugged Reuben close. Reuben took in her smell, a moisturizer on her skin that seemed vaguely familiar, a perfume on top of it that he didn’t recognize. Then she let him go and looked directly at him in a way she hadn’t for months. Her large hazel eyes seemed to expand, a film of moisture gathering across their surface and thickening. And then she began to cry, tears spilling over the dam of her lower eyelid and diving down her cheeks. Behind her, Reuben saw a support officer loitering just inside the kitchen door. In the living room, he spotted two uniforms sharing the sofa, examining their clipboards, talking quietly. All three officers gave the impression of controlled awkwardness, as if they were practised at intruding during the critical moments of people’s lives.

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ Reuben said.

  ‘Like I said on the phone, he was just snatched.’

  Lucy wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. Reuben wanted to grab her and hug her, but he didn’t. They had been through too much, a distance had settled between them, a physical awkwardness that hung in the gap between their bodies. He felt suddenly and acutely that this was all his fault, like he was somehow guilty, as if he had kidnapped Joshua himself.

  ‘We’ve had a couple of sightings, that’s all,’ Lucy added.

  ‘But how did it happen?’

  ‘Don’t blame me, Reuben. I couldn’t bear it.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you, Luce. I just want to know what happened.’

  Lucy turned away and led him into the kitchen, blowing her nose as she walked. She perched herself on a stool, her elbows resting on the counter, her hands covering most of her face. When she talked, it was through her fingers, her words flat and filtered. ‘As you know, we were on our way home from his three-monthly check. I caught the bus because Paddington is a nightmare for parking. After I spoke to you on the phone, Josh made a thorough mess of himself with a yoghurt drink I gave him. Spilled most of it down himself, soaked everywhere.’

  Reuben glanced over at the support officer. Early twenties, female, stocky, square glasses and blonde hair. He knew she was taking it all in. Not just Lucy’s words, his own as well.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  Lucy wiped her eyes again, but kept her hands over her face. ‘I ran into a newsagent’s to get some wet-wipes. One of those long, thin, cramped places that sell everything. Would have been a struggle to get the bloody buggy in. Parked it where I could see it. Only turned away for seconds.’ Lucy was sobbing again, her words spilling out between broken breaths, just the way Joshua’s had. ‘I was in there thirty seconds at the most. I edged my way back out of the shop. And that was that. The buggy had disappeared into a packed sea of shoppers. He was gone.’ She started crying more loudly, her sobs echoing around the hard surfaces of the kitchen. Almost mechanically, the support officer pulled out a small pack of tissues and brought them over. ‘We’ve got to find him, Reuben.’ Lucy looked frantic. ‘We’ve got to get out there.’

  It was as much as Reuben could do not to kick down the front door and rush into the street.

  ‘Where was it?’ he asked.

  ‘On the high street. A mile away at the most.’

  ‘He couldn’t have got out of the buggy and just wandered off? And then someone nicked it?’

  ‘He was strapped in. There was no way he could have freed himself.’ Lucy nodded in the direction of the front room. ‘I’ve been through all this with the police. We combed the streets for nearly an hour. Fifteen officers, more now. A couple of sightings that turned out to be false. A few seconds was all it took for our son to disappear into the bloody shoppers of St John’s Wood.’

  Reuben watched Lucy. He felt sick to the bone. At GeneCrime, he had got on with his job, let the mechanics of forensic procedure protect him. Now, outside the police unit, he was just as raw and exposed as Lucy. He was suddenly restless, wanting to get back in the car and join the hunt for his son. But he knew it would only be a token effort. CID would be systematically stopping cars, monitoring CCTV, taking witness statements. Reuben knew how it worked. He had to do whatever was most useful.

  He stood up and walked into the living room. One of the uniforms was making a call on his mobile. He ended it as Reuben approached.

  ‘I’m Dr Reuben Maitland,’ Reuben said. ‘Head of Forensics at the GeneCrime Unit in Euston.’ It felt awkward using his official designation in his own living room, but if there was one thing police responded to it was rank and title.

  ‘We know who you are, sir,’ the officer said, his light blue eyes creased with concern. ‘And for what it’s worth, we’re very sorry about what has happened.’

  ‘So what do we know?’ Reuben asked.

  ‘Just what your ex-wife has told you.’

  His partner, thin and dark, opened a standard-issue Metropolitan notebook. ‘We received a call at 10.09 a.m. Three different units were on the scene within nine minutes.’

  Reuben thought back. The call from the killer had come through at 10.31. He had made a mental note, glancing up at the Command Room clock. Lucy had called him just over half an hour earlier. The killer had had Joshua certainly for no more than thirty minutes before dialling Reuben’s number. That meant he had to live somewhere reasonably near. Half an hour in mid-morning traffic got you four or five miles in a car, same distance on the Tube, a mile and a half on foot. He had a buggy, which made things slow. Removing a child, folding the buggy into the boot, strapping the child into the car, it all took time. Same issues with a taxi. Or negotiating the Tube, taking the lift instead of the elevators, fighting through the human tide, pushing a bulky object. So the kidnapper had travelled two or three miles at most.

  ‘And then what?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve been combing the area, knocking on doors, sealing off the pavement where the incident took place, setting up road blocks, everything we can do. Your wife, ex-wife, has provided us with photos which we’ve emailed to the scene and are showing around.’

  Reuben checked his watch. 12.24. His son had been missing almost two and a half hours. ‘And what else are you doing? Now, I mean, at this very minute?’

  ‘No point shaking out known paedos at this stage, sir. Statistically, your son is probably on the young side. But we’re working through similar cases over the last few years.’ The blue-eyed officer turned his phone over in his hand to emphasize the point that he was in constant communication. ‘Mostly, we’re assembling a team, looking at media liaison.’

  Reuben tried not to spit the words back. ‘Media liaison?’

  ‘We need to start generating publicity, see if we can get this on the six o’clocks.�
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  Reuben slumped down on the leather sofa opposite the two cops. His headache was returning with a vengeance. He was fighting an enormous urge to rush over to where Joshua was taken from and run around the streets screaming his name, convinced that he alone could find him. But years of police training were marshalling his thoughts in other directions. Bad directions. Statistics on snatched children. Timelines and outcomes. The kind of person who took infants from their parents. This was different, though. A whole new arena. A man had taken Joshua for a specific reason. He wasn’t lost or missing, he was being used. Reuben had to find a way of telling Lucy. And he had to keep his end of the bargain. Delay the investigation, keep his son alive. Trawling the streets wouldn’t help his son. The only thing that would save him was obstructing GeneCrime’s investigation into the man holding him.

  The officer’s mobile vibrated and he answered it. From the kitchen, Reuben could just make out the sounds of Lucy crying. He stared into the carpet, rage and violence coming to the boil, needing to be released. Joshua, the tiny embodiment of everything he held dear.

  The dark-haired officer stood up. ‘We’ll bring them over now, boss,’ he said into his phone. ‘I’ve explained the situation. We’ll see you in fifteen.’

  10

  Reuben tagged the police Mondeo, staying a couple of car lengths behind. He glanced across at Lucy, who was staring silently out of the side window. She hadn’t bothered with her seatbelt and was leaning forward in her seat, her hands in her lap. She was picking at her fingers, tearing at loose flaps of skin with small rapid movements. Reuben knew this was his one opportunity to talk to her.

  ‘Luce,’ he said.

  She didn’t turn away from the window.

  ‘There are a few issues I have to talk to you about. Joshua being snatched . . . I know something I haven’t told the police, something you can’t tell them either.’

  Lucy moved her head slowly towards him. ‘What?’ she asked, almost absently.