by John Macken
After a full five minutes, during which the complaint of the phone grew inaudible to her, Sarah picked up the receiver and dropped it again, and the noise stopped. She hunted in a packed drawer for a directory of Metropolitan CID numbers, and began cross-referencing names against on-line lists of information. Soon, she was running her little finger across the screen, hostile static following its progress. Then she used her other hand to dial a number. And as she waited for her call to be answered, she convinced herself again that friendships were expendable in the midst of a murder investigation.
30
Reuben marvelled at how quickly city streets could turn from the exclusive to the downright execrable. Even in the most desirable areas of London, you were only ever three or four wrong turns from the types of people and housing that money helped keep out of sight. Reuben didn’t know the address of the shop he was seeking, but he knew the kind of road which would take him there. Within minutes, the number of shoppers had eased, the proportion of boarded or shuttered properties had rioted, and the number of youths hanging around on corners had reached epidemic proportions. He knew he was heading in the right direction.
The shop, when he found it, was more welcoming than he had imagined, but he still felt nervous. Not because he was afraid, but because this was a moment of commitment, of not turning back, of utter permanency. His hand gripped the wooden handle of the door, which was flaky and dry. He examined the pictures in the window for the one that he wanted, but couldn’t see it. Reuben loitered another second, before pushing the door open and stepping inside. A facially tattooed man looked up at him from his magazine and raised his pierced eyebrows.
Sitting in the padded chair, Reuben recalled the words of his father, who had always told him that no matter what anyone else said, it hurt like hell. Even after a few drinks, and a lot of bravado, the pain was still acute. And he had been right. Reuben focused on the buzzing source of discomfort, the minute needle shooting in and out, carrying with it a dark blueness, depositing it firmly under the epidermis and out of harm’s way, and in his soreness he felt a rare and sudden empathy with his father. They were finally bonding, long after his death. He closed his eyes, the hum of the instrument loud in his right ear, encouraging his mind elsewhere. They both had sons, and they had both made a clear mess of parenting. They both had weaknesses – spirits for his father, stimulants for Reuben. And they had both sat in a chair like this, feeling this pain.
Reuben shook his head. That was about it. But then a memory of his childhood tracked him down, one he had long since forgotten, pricked by the tattooing. With Aaron in the front room of their fourth-floor flat. Eleven-year-old twins in the same dark blue Adidas shorts and shirts, white stripes on the sleeves. Looking at Aaron, fair and freckled, with long blond hair, unkempt and shoulder-length. Watching him run his fingers over his father’s forearm. His father, tall and fair, with rougher and more blunted features than his sons’. On his arm a fresh tattoo of a dagger, firmly in the process of scabbing over, the pattern only just discernible. Aaron asking how much it hurt, and his dad smiling and saying even more when he had to pay for it. Reuben desperately waiting his turn, wanting to touch it and not wanting to, drawn and repulsed at the same time.
And then pushing his hand forward and Aaron withdrawing his. Reuben’s fingertips brushing the raised surface of the tattoo, red and blue ridges budding through the damaged skin, a stubble of fine blond hairs mapping out the area, a large, angry scab forming and brooding. Almost seeing it forensically, the damage to the layers of skin, the irritated response from the body. The warmth of his father’s arm beneath his fingers. Silently wondering why his father had had this done, what it meant outside the living room, outside the flat, on the streets and in the pubs he frequented. Seeing Aaron eyeing it almost enviously. His brother already knowing what it implied, and to whom, and wanting one himself. Reuben asking what would happen when the scab fell off, whether it would take the ink with it, and George Maitland laughing that fluid cackle of his, saying no, what will be left behind will be the real deal.
Reuben looked down at the needle. The real deal indeed. But this was going to be his calling card, his way in. The change in his identity that would get him what he wanted in Pentonville. The tattooist had changed needles, red shading with a finer point now filling in the gaps. Every line, every dot, every nuance would be there for life. Layers of skin would be shed, cells dying and falling away, scattering like dust. And always there, deep in the epidermis, the red and blue and black ink would shine through, getting duller and weaker with each tier of skin, but still lurking entrenched in the flesh like a memory that can’t be shaken.
The tattoo artist was silent, concentrating hard, flicking his eyes back and forth between Reuben’s arm and a picture in a book. Reuben was happy not to distract him. He looked away, the discomfort gnawing but not unbearable. He had experienced worse. A broken ankle, a dislocated shoulder, a spill of phenol on his hand. Physical and chemical damage. And that was neglecting the mental torture of watching a stranger play daddy with your son.
Reuben closed his eyes, wondering if Sarah was making the critical phone call on his behalf, and whether she had the authority to pull it off without alerting her superiors. Things were getting messy. When having a tattoo done seems like a step in the right direction, Reuben conceded, things were undoubtedly untidy.
31
Detective Inspector Charlie Baker brooded in the corner of the large open-plan living room. For his taste, the ceiling was on the low side, symptomatic of a new house masquerading as an old one. The furnishings were light and breezy, neutral to the point of banality, the walls cream, the flooring a patterned wood effect. It was, Charlie thought, chewing his teeth, a fucking vacuum.
He surveyed the forensics team in front of him bitterly. Above almost everything, Charlie resented forensics. It was middle-class detection, crime-solving for academics, criminality for people who didn’t want to get their hands dirty. The fuckers even wore gloves all day, wrinkled white fingers inside, isolated from the truths they delved into, and the human mess they poked about in. And not just any gloves. Surgical gloves, like they were carrying out life-saving operations, with divine power over the outcome of an investigation. Charlie had never been afraid to get involved, to bang heads together, to do house to house, to work all day and all night questioning some shifty fuck who was holding out on him.
Of course, he could see that there was a place for forensics, that you needed two types of policing these days: those who got out there and rattled cages and chased bad guys, and those who skulked in laboratories looking down microscopes. The one helped the other, and this is where GeneCrime had derived a lot of its success. There was an important distinction between the different elements, however. A case could be solved without forensics, but it could never be sorted without standard, no-frills police work. Both disciplines needed each other, but it wasn’t always a two-way street. He smiled thinly to himself. Let some of these overqualified nerds get out of their gloves and lab coats and chase a villain. Lock them in a cell with a wife-beating psycho. Get them to question a gang of paedos. Ask them to infiltrate a crack ring. Let’s see them take an armed robber down.
Charlie snatched a wad of forms from Dr Mina Ali, senior forensic technician. She was thin and angular, dark and lopsided, and he imagined snapping her like a twig. He signed all the yellow copies and returned them silently, seeing it in her eyes, as it was in most of their eyes. The animosity, the lack of trust. Charlie thrived on it. He wanted them to dislike him, to not be sure of him.
‘A couple more sample requisitions and an evidence exclusion,’ Mina said, producing a thin stack of blue forms.
‘And I thought CID had all the fun,’ Charlie answered curtly.
Mina stared at him a second longer than was absolutely necessary. She was sharp and outspoken, a force to be reckoned with, despite her diminutive height. Charlie stared back, deadpan. Now Commander Abner had put his trust in him, he was a man
with power. No one knew that yet, but they soon would. And Dr Mina Ali had better watch her forensically protected step. He scrawled his biro over the pages and shunted them back, watching Mina shuffle away, nonchalant and unconcerned but, his copper’s eye informed him, ever so slightly flushed and trying to hide it.
All around the elongated living room, technicians inched along on their hands and knees, teasing out samples with plastic forceps, opening drawers, filling tubes with minute volumes of liquid and cataloguing specimens with practised patience. Charlie’s gut rumbled somewhere deep inside him, an uncomfortable readjustment of his bowels. He wondered whether the forensic technicians could somehow detect his contamination of the scene if he broke wind. Charlie had sat through enough meetings on the promise of new technology, on their incredible levels of detection, on their sublime specificity of action. And yet no one ever spoke any more about the instinct of a copper, of his ability to pick one miscreant out of a crowd, or to recognize the one key fact in a whole dossier of information; of the diligence which identified the single strand of evidence among the tangle of crossed wires. The sensitivity and specificity of a chemical reaction was, he believed, nothing compared with the precision of the detective mind.
Charlie watched a junior CID officer carry something towards Mina, his movement rapid against the measured progress of the rest of the team. He was instantly alert, pacing over to the far side of the room, arriving within a few seconds. Charlie saw that it was a fragment of paper, thicker than normal, photographic perhaps, and decorated with a series of slender, closely packed coloured lines. It looked like a bar code drawn with randomly assorted pens. Mina held it in her upturned palms, frowning. Charlie reached forward and snatched it from her.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
Three or four technicians who had shuffled over stood uncomfortably, not meeting his eye.
‘What?’ he barked.
‘If you’d give it back,’ Mina said.
Charlie ground his teeth, then pushed it towards her. Fucking forensics, a voice inside him screamed.
Mina ran her dark eyes over the piece of paper. ‘An ABI 377 screen-shot,’ she answered.
‘In English?’
‘Before you get the actual bases out of an ABI sequencer, it produces an image file. And this looks like one of those.’
‘So this is sequence data?’
‘Kind of,’ Mina said quietly. ‘Though not the sort you see every day.’
‘And what the fuck would a footballer be doing with DNA sequence data?’ Charlie asked.
Mina turned to him, black irises huge through her glasses. ‘That, DI Baker,’ she responded with a smile, handing the scrap back, ‘would appear to be your problem now.’
Mina encouraged the team to return to work, and Charlie remained in the centre of the room, a name coming to him, a link where previously there had been just a dead footballer and his wife, an idea that grew and grew, a connection that made him happier the more he pulled it apart in his mind.
32
Reuben ran his hand through his short-cropped hair, getting used to the feeling. Grade 2 all over, a classic eighties crew-cut. It felt like the fur of a short-haired dog, or like stroking suede the wrong way. There was something good about the honesty of a skinhead, he felt. It wasn’t styled or coloured or otherwise tainted. It was the truth, before it twisted and turned and became distorted. This was, he thought, what he should have done years ago. But until now there had been no need.
In front of him, Stevo glared back. Reuben still wasn’t sure about him. He suspected that under different circumstances Stevo would have liked to hurt him for real. Stevo was helping him, but there was an undercurrent of malice in every practice punch that landed, and every kick that put Reuben on his back. Ex-coppers were rarely popular at the best of times, especially with borderline hoodlums like Stevo. The thought made Reuben shiver involuntarily. Things were going to get a lot worse where he was heading than Stevo’s muzzled hostility.
Reuben glanced up as the door to the gym opened and closed. Kieran Hobbs paced towards him, flanked by his ever-present security. Nathan sauntered over to Stevo and exchanged a high-five and a hug, his large frame almost swallowing his friend between distended muscle groups. Valdek remained where he was, arms folded and eyes glaring.
‘Thought we’d come and watch,’ Kieran announced with a grin. ‘Stevo tells me you’re getting better.’
‘Better than what?’ Reuben asked. He was on edge, not wanting to fight in front of Kieran and his minders.
‘Better than a lab monkey should be.’
Reuben once again felt the familiar unease of being around gangsters. Even Kieran, genial and good-natured, worried him. Not because of who he was, or what he did, but because every time he saw him Reuben pictured his own fall from grace. At GeneCrime, Reuben had spent a short period of time on a case involving one of Kieran’s many syndicates. And now, immersed in the duality of his existence, Kieran, underworld enforcer, the type of man who had would-be assassins like Ethan de Groot tortured and pulped, was closer to being a friend than an adversary.
‘Let’s raise the stakes a bit,’ Kieran said. ‘Fifty quid on Reuben. Nathan? Valdek? You want a piece on Stevo?’
Valdek slid a note out of his pocket and silently handed it over. Nathan left Stevo and similarly gave his boss a fifty. Reuben saw that the experienced cash of hardened enforcers, of virtual street fighters, had little confidence in his abilities.
Kieran clapped his hands, firing a sharp echo through the high-ceilinged room. ‘Now we’re talking,’ he roared. ‘Come on, Reuben, let’s see what all this training has done for you.’
Reuben examined his hands. This time there were no pads or gloves. Bare feet, jeans, T-shirts. They were fighting for real.
Stevo said ‘Ready?’ and Reuben nodded. He breathed deeply, watching Stevo, letting him attack first, as he’d been taught. Subtleties of body shape, of posture, of readiness all taken in and assimilated. Stevo switched his weight from foot to foot, his torso shifting and adjusting. He held his arms out, bent at the elbows, fists yet to form. And then he launched forward, three quick punches, right, left, right. The first catching Reuben around the ear. Stepping back from the second two. His ear ringing hot. He shook his head. Stevo kicked at Reuben’s midriff. He parried it and pushed him to the side. Stevo brought his right fist abruptly round. Teeth jarring together, his lip splitting, the taste of iron.
‘Come on, Reuben,’ Kieran shouted, ‘sort the wiry fuck out!’
Reuben ignored the buzzing numbness in his mouth. Stevo came at him again, fists first. He ducked smartly and drove his knuckles up into Stevo’s guts. Winded, Stevo grabbed Reuben round the neck, pulling him to the floor. Reuben’s face was forced into the mat, bleeding into its shiny rubber surface. Reuben kicked and thrashed. Frantic. He broke free and spun Stevo on to his back. Reuben forced his weight down on him, straddling his chest, knees pinning Stevo’s tattooed arms. Stevo was breathing hard, his ribcage heaving beneath Reuben. He looked up, eye to eye, and grinned. Bad teeth with ominous gaps stared back at Reuben.
‘That’s my boy,’ Kieran said, walking closer. ‘Now finish him.’
Reuben felt Stevo squirm. He was light and wiry, smaller than Reuben, but strong and quick. Reuben formed a fist and held it above Stevo’s face. ‘You want to quit?’
Stevo smiled again. ‘Hell no. I’m just catching my breath.’
And then Reuben’s head pitched forward, pain arriving in the back of his head in two almost simultaneous blasts. Off balance, he tumbled away. Stevo was instantly behind him. He pushed Reuben’s arm straight into its socket. A paralysing agony tore through his once-dislocated shoulder. Reuben fought to spin round, clawing at Stevo. He was mute with pain, helpless and desperate. He felt the bandage on his arm rip, and then the pressure ease. There was a moment of nothingness and silence. Then Stevo let go of him and stood up.
‘Jesus,’ he moaned.
Reuben pulled himself to h
is feet, his heart racing, the fire in his shoulder subsiding, the back of his head still smarting, his ear ringing. ‘What?’ he gasped. He looked down at his arm, the bandage hanging off, the tattoo exposed. The scab was partially detached, revealing pristine new skin below. He noted that Kieran and his minders were examining him closely. ‘What?’ he gasped again, but this time with less conviction.
‘I dunno.’ Kieran shook his head, half serious, half mocking. ‘First you lose me a hundred quid, and then that.’ He pointed with his eyes at the tattoo. ‘I thought you had more taste.’
Reuben pulled the bandage back up, feeling naked for a second. And this coming from a borderline albino with a penchant for gold jewellery. He snorted to himself, in discomfort, feeling future bruises, wiping the redness from the corner of his mouth.
Stevo came over and wrapped an arm around his shoulder. Reuben took comfort from the fact that he was breathing hard. It hadn’t been easy for him.
‘Nice one,’ he muttered.
‘Thanks.’
‘I think you might be ready.’
‘I don’t think I’ll ever be ready. But at least I’ll be prepared.’
33
Through the third-floor window Reuben spotted Sarah Hirst’s barely camouflaged police Volvo pick its way across the rubbled car park. He watched her talking on her mobile, a short, terse call which made her frown. Even from this distance he could see the lines on her forehead and the irritated pinch of her brow. He wondered who she was talking to, and whether it was work or private. As far as he knew, she was still single. But there were a lot of things Sarah didn’t talk about, a lot of territories their conversations were firmly steered away from. Reuben often asked himself what Sarah was protecting, why she felt the need to draw lines between people, who really mattered to her outside the job. Once he thought he had broken through, was close to seeing through the façade, but the shutters had come down again and he had been left with her three-word mantra of conduct – personal and professional.
