Control

by John Macken

  ‘So you can isolate which DNA sample came from the killer?’

  ‘I can’t see another way of doing it.’

  Most of Moray’s substantial bulk was leaning forward, his thick arms propped against his equally sturdy legs. ‘Putting the old team back together, eh?’ he said. ‘I’ve barely done anything illegal for weeks.’

  ‘I don’t believe that for a second.’

  ‘I didn’t say immoral, I just said illegal.’

  ‘So?’ Reuben asked.

  ‘Count me in.’

  ‘Judith?’

  Judith was busy adjusting Fraser in his car seat, loosening the straps, sitting him up. He remained utterly unconscious. ‘It’s not going to be easy,’ she said. ‘Not with an eight-week-old baby.’

  ‘I know. And I’m sorry.’ Reuben tried not to sound impatient. ‘But what do you think?’

  Judith glanced from her child to Reuben and back again. ‘We’ll manage. We’ll have to.’

  Reuben clenched his fists under the table. With Judith and Moray he had half a chance.

  ‘Look, there’s one other thing.’

  ‘Here we go,’ Moray grumbled.

  ‘The killer has set a trap.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I have no idea. He simply said that if he senses GeneCrime are closing in on him, he will kill my son. That if we are starting to get too close to him he will know.’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘Lucy asked me the same thing.’

  ‘You’re speaking to each other?’

  ‘More so these days.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘What I’m telling you. That there’s no way of knowing for sure.’

  ‘Could be a bluff.’

  ‘But would you gamble your child’s life on a bluff?’

  ‘I don’t have a child,’ Moray answered. ‘Clearly.’

  ‘Judith?’

  Judith gazed deep into the sleeping perfection of her newly born son. ‘Not in a million years. But is it actually possible for someone to set a trap, find out if the investigation is closing in? I don’t see how they’d do it. Unless . . .’

  ‘What?’ Reuben asked.

  ‘Unless they had someone on the inside. Someone in the force, or in the FSS, or even inside GeneCrime.’

  Reuben pondered Judith’s words for a second. ‘An informant? It would have to be someone close to the case.’

  ‘Maybe another member of the team has been targeted,’ Moray said. ‘How do you know you’re the only one?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Presumably no one in the building is aware the killer has contacted you. So it’s entirely feasible he’s got another member of staff doing what he wants.’

  ‘Seems a lot of trouble to go to,’ Judith said. ‘I mean, what’s wrong with just going out and killing a few people? Proper old-fashioned slaughter.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Reuben picked out the Sudocrem from the crowd of baby paraphernalia on the table. It was a small grey tub with a grey plastic lid. He sniffed the contents, a rush of memories flooding in on the wave of oily antiseptic. Chaffed skin, nappy rash, the sticky ointment cooling and soothing his crying son at bedtime when he was younger. ‘I can’t see it. Taking a child is . . .’ Reuben felt a hot tight surge of anger erupt in his temporal lobes and swell through him, making him squeeze the tub hard. He waited a second while the anger eased, loosening up and subsiding. ‘Taking a child is a lot of trouble. Anything on top is even worse. If you were the killer, why would you put yourself through that?’

  ‘Because this means something,’ Judith answered. ‘This is important. So important the killer can’t afford it to go wrong.’

  ‘But this has been going through my mind, over and over. What drives someone to need to kill so badly that they have to go to such lengths?’

  Moray and Judith were silent. Fraser Meadows, two months old, stirred in his car seat. His eyes blinked open, dark like his mother’s. The door of the café opened and closed, a shock of icy air slamming in. Reuben bit deep into a fingernail, his brain crammed tight with images and words and ideas crashing into one another. Above the background hum of activity and conversation, Fraser started to wail.

  20

  The garage was just like any other garage in the world. Carless, dusty, stacked full of items that didn’t belong anywhere else. Reuben rooted around. Stiff useless paintbrushes, tins of paint that would never be opened again, broken items that should have been thrown away but were instead stored out of sight, a car seat that Joshua had grown out of, a few lengths of wood that would never be nailed to anything, an internal door that had been removed at some point and not re-hung. Reuben paused, hands on hips, sweating. He loved the place. It was the only part of the house that escaped Lucy’s regimen of immaculate orderliness.

  He piled a mound of worthless junk in the corner, directed Moray towards the nearest tip, then swept up before clearing a section of racking and setting the internal door horizontally, balancing it between two sturdy kitchen stools. He covered the door in several layers of clingfilm. Then he began unpacking boxes holding the laboratory equipment. As he pulled out each piece of apparatus, he recalled where he had got it from. The sequencer was being decommissioned by a general FSS lab in Dulwich. The PCR machine, which was old-fashioned, was being junked by GeneCrime. The microfuge he got from a skip outside a hospital diagnostics department. Judith had taken the Gilsons one at a time from the lab. The freezers he had bought second-hand from an electrical shop. The reagents had been systematically begged, stolen or borrowed from former colleagues. The rudiments of a laboratory that had helped him hunt the men he hadn’t been able to touch before he was sacked from the force.

  Taking out a bottle marked ‘70% Ethanol’, he began to swab the area down. He was methodical in his movements, losing himself in the repetitive action, quick but precise, sterilizing the surfaces and the equipment. He kept his brain away from the cold facts of the last twenty-four hours, and focused instead on sorting the lab out. When everything was clean, Reuben plugged the machinery in and turned it all on. It had taken an hour from start to finish, and a frantic one at that, but he was almost ready.

  He walked through into the house. Female voices bounced off the kitchen surfaces and ricocheted into the hallway. Judith was holding Fraser in her arms, gazing into his face, answering Lucy’s questions without looking up at her. Reuben stood and watched for a second, unnerved that there was a child in the house that Joshua lived in, and that somewhere in the city Joshua was with a complete stranger. He rocked on his feet, trying to shut out the notion of another man with his child. All that mattered now was sticking to the plan.

  ‘Judith,’ he said, walking into the kitchen, ‘I think we should start. We don’t have much time to get everything done.’

  Judith looked up at Lucy, who was watching her intently. ‘I feel horrible. Here I am with my baby while you—’

  Lucy cut her off. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘I know. But all the same.’

  ‘Luce, would you mind looking after Fraser for a couple of hours while Judith gets things properly up and running in the garage?’

  Lucy swung her attention from Judith to Reuben and back again.

  ‘But if you don’t feel up to it . . .’

  Lucy took a step towards Judith and the child in her arms. ‘No, I’d like to look after him, Judith, if that’s all right.’

  ‘You sure?’

  Reuben watched his ex-wife carefully. He appreciated that she was a difficult woman to read. He imagined her battling the urge to scream. As she spoke she was composed, the corporate lawyer in her emerging and smoothing everything over.

  ‘In a strange way it will be comforting,’ she said. ‘The house feels wrong without a child in it. Empty and quiet. I don’t know what else to do with myself.’

  Judith handed Fraser over, slowly and carefully, Lucy sliding her hands und
er Judith’s and supporting the weight. Fraser’s arms jerked upwards then stopped, falling slowly back into place. Reuben raised his eyebrows at Lucy, a brief smile twitching across his features. Then he walked Judith back towards the garage.

  ‘Everything’s plugged in, it just needs calibrating. Can you check the reference dyes on the sequencer, make sure the PCR machine is cycling OK, ensure that everything else is talking to each other?’

  ‘I guess so. And when it is?’

  ‘I’ll be back by then.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Ah, Judith. Having a baby hasn’t changed you. Still too many questions.’

  ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘My job over the next couple of hours is to snatch GeneCrime’s DNA samples from the two murder scenes.’

  ‘How the hell are you going to do that?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Well, you’d better get thinking. It won’t be easy.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Then we’ll profile them and attempt to match them against the cigarette butts?’

  ‘Like I said, reproducing hasn’t ruined you. If we get an exact match between any of the butts and the DNA samples from the houses of Everitt and Gillick, we’ll know the DNA profile of our man. And if we know that, and he’s ever encountered the police before, we can hunt him down.’

  ‘If he hasn’t set a trap.’

  ‘Who else is going to find out? If we do it here in the garage, no one in the world knows anything except us. Not CID, not GeneCrime, not the killer.’ He frowned, an angry ridge of skin rising up between his eyebrows as they knotted together. ‘And then I intend to make him very, very sorry for what he has done to my family.’

  Reuben heard the doorbell go. He waited silently. He listened to the sound of the door being pulled open. Detective Veno’s voice. A pause. The Missing Child team trooping in. The door slamming shut again. Reuben checked his pockets for his car keys, then he opened the garage door and left, jogging quickly towards the white Ford Focus parked thirty metres away.

  21

  The midday traffic was heavier than he expected. The winter sun was struggling to warm the city. It seemed remote, too high up, not really interested. Reuben stayed in second and third, the pedal an on/off switch, darting from traffic light to traffic light, from junction to junction.

  This is where the real subterfuge begins, he told himself when he pulled into the GeneCrime car park. He killed the engine, and caught himself in the rear-view mirror. His eyes stared back. Pale green irises, circled with dark green. Red capillaries searching in from the corners, looking like they were grasping for the iris. He rubbed the bags beneath, still staring deep into himself. You can do this, he said. You can lie to everyone and find out the truth about your son. He took in the parallel creases across his brow, the tightness of his mouth, the flecks of grey in his light brown hair. He needed to burn bright for every moment of the next few days, then he would be OK. Reuben opened the car door and climbed out, unconvinced by his own pep-talk.

  Inside, he made straight for his office. He had no idea how he was going to take the DNA samples. They would be in a freezer somewhere, coded and hidden. Stealing from the police with no one noticing. He entered his office and stared into the DNA lab. Then he checked his watch. A quarter to one, give or take. There hadn’t been another death reported yet. Joshua would still be alive. But every minute mattered.

  He rested his forehead against the cold internal window. The noises of the lab made minute vibrations across the glass. The whine of a centrifuge, the buzz of a large freezer, fragments of scientists’ conversations. The window was one-way and Reuben knew he couldn’t be seen. He remained still, thinking, the progress of the room pressed into his forehead. Nothing constructive came to him.

  There was a knock at the door. Reuben stepped away from the window, rubbing his weary face. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Mina Ali entered. ‘You been out? I couldn’t find you.’

  ‘Sorry. Had a few things that needed sorting. What’s the news?’

  ‘Nothing much. We’ve done all the extractions from both crime scenes. Eighty-three priority samples, plus a couple of hundred ancillary ones. Because you’ve requested speed, we’re already running the eighty-three through standard profiling, with the others backed up and ready to go.’

  ‘When will we have the results?’

  Mina pulled out her mobile and checked its clock. ‘By two thirty, give or take. Then half an hour for quality control and manual checking. Say three o’clock.’

  Reuben didn’t answer. There were eighty-three DNAs that Forensics felt might be useful, plus a larger number of lower quality. Eighty-three was good. The sequencer in his garage could process ninety-six samples at a time. With Judith’s help he could assess all the specimens in a single run, plus controls. If only he could get the things out of GeneCrime.

  ‘Boss?’ Mina asked.

  Subterfuge. Lies. Misinformation. In the heart of the search for the truth, in the unit whose only function was to determine what was genuine and what wasn’t. It starts here, Reuben reminded himself. Here and now.

  He turned to his trusted deputy. ‘Mina, can you show me the samples, walk me through all the analyses?’

  ‘Sure.’ She regarded him quizzically. ‘If you really want to.’

  ‘I really want to,’ Reuben answered flatly. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Mina led Reuben out of the office, around the corner and into the lab. He looked around, almost expecting to see the physical evidence of the hours he had spent at the bench through the night. Five scientists acknowledged him: Bernie, Paul, Simon, Birgit Kasper, and a technician called Alex who was covering Judith’s maternity leave and whose surname he still hadn’t learned.

  Mina pulled on a pair of purple vinyl gloves. ‘OK,’ she said, leading him around the room. ‘This is what we’ve got cooking. Those of us lucky enough to visit Ian Gillick’s scene of death prioritized samples there. Because GeneCrime didn’t initially handle Carl Everitt’s scene, we trawled through the specimens the FSS took and prioritized retrospectively. The two scenes have been kept entirely separate to avoid cross-contamination. The Gillick DNA is in Freezer Four, and Everitt’s is in Seven.’

  ‘So the eighty-three samples currently being profiled are from both scenes?’

  Mina checked with Bernie Harrison, who was overseeing the bio-informatics. ‘Bernie, what’s the split?’

  As Bernie checked a spreadsheet, slowly running a pencil down the screen of a laptop, Reuben’s mind raced. Judith would be calibrating the equipment. The sooner he got the samples to her, the quicker he could hunt down the man who had his son. He glanced at the bank of freezers against the far wall. But now the fuckers were stored separately. He would have to take them from two different locations. This was suddenly more complicated.

  ‘OK. Thirty-eight from the salesman, forty-five from the scientist,’ Bernie called over.

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ Reuben instructed Mina.

  Mina walked silently over to the bank of tall, white upright freezers. They loomed over her diminutive frame, impassive and broad, numbers marked in their upper right corners in black marker pen. Each displayed their internal temperature above the door. Number 4 read – 82°C in red digits. Mina pulled the sturdy blue handle on the side of the freezer, which unlatched it and allowed it to open. Then she opened the lower of two slim internal doors. Inside, rows of frosted metal racking held columns of white plastic boxes the size of house bricks. On the lid of each box was a number and a description. Mina pulled out the closest box to her, which read ‘09/#4701-4745: Ian Gillick’.

  Reuben held it in his hand. He alternated his fingers. At minus eighty-two degrees his skin could easily stick. He knew from the label what was inside. Forty-five sample tubes labelled consecutively from 4701 to 4745. DNA taken from the murder scene of the scientist Ian Gillick. The box felt light and portable. Half of him wanted simply to run out of the lab with it. But no one could know. He ha
nded it back and turned away.

  Mina showed him a similar small white box in Freezer 7. Reuben then made a show of touring the lab, making sure everything was being done correctly, all the time thinking, how the hell do I get the samples out of here? He noted that Simon Jankowski was just finishing up with the cigarette butts. He checked the lab clock. GeneCrime were seven hours behind him.

  Reuben stared into the clock. Lunchtime. Ordinarily, it would be quiet. But everyone was working flat out, skipping lunch, hanging around because their boss was in the vicinity. He realized belatedly that staying where he was only hindered his chances of taking the boxes unnoticed.

  He left the lab. Next to it was a windowless room housing yet more slab-like minus-eighty freezers. He opened one marked Emergency Back-Up. It was half full. He checked behind it, thought for a second, then headed for the floor below. Reuben had been consulted in the original design of GeneCrime. He made his way down a set of concrete stairs and into the solitary corridor that ran through the lower floor. He passed metal storage racks housing surplus plastic ware, a locked cell, wide pipework for fume cupboards, a sturdy chemical storage cupboard, three disused offices and a reading room that was hardly ever used, finally stopping at an unmarked door which lay directly under the final strip light. Inside the room, the GeneCrime server, small banks of green flashing lights and short sections of grey cabling, squatted in the corner. This was the portal, the hub that processed the information flowing in and out of the building’s computers, attached directly to the National DNA Database. A cube the size of a washing machine upon which most of GeneCrime’s operations depended. But it wasn’t the server that interested Reuben. Thick blue cabling led from the server into an adjacent cupboard. Reuben opened it. Inside lay exactly what he was after: rows of untouched fuse boards and trip switches, the power supply to the whole unit.