Trial by Blood

by John Macken

  ‘Fuck,’ Reuben said to himself. ‘Fuck.’

  He scanned the article, double-checking the name, making sure. This changed things. An idea was beginning to form. An idea he didn’t like the feeling of. He pulled out his phone and dialled a number, his thumb quick across the keys, rising excitement and fear in his chest.

  6

  Sarah Hirst had been sitting with her hands cradling her head for the best part of ten minutes. The skin of her cheeks was pulled tightly back, her eyes fully open, her brow creased with a series of fine parallel wrinkles. DI Charlie Baker, his arms straight, continued to lean against her desk, giving her the impression that he was looking down at her. As he talked, a myriad of scenarios jumped and danced around inside her skull. She saw names and descriptions and wounds and motives and statements and violence and desperation. But mostly she saw empty database files; sequencing traces with depressingly irregular peaks; patchy stretches of coloured bands on profile read-outs; neutral blue DNA swabs; empty agarose gels; matching patterns which failed to match.

  The fucker, she had recently decided, knew about forensics. He understood how to keep out of trouble. He appreciated how to avoid contaminating a body. And then Reuben’s notion came to her again as it had done almost hourly since he mentioned it a week or so ago: whoever had put Michael Brawn away was still inside GeneCrime. And if they had doctored one investigation, what was to say they wouldn’t alter others? Maybe they were tampering with evidence right now, swapping samples or muddying the truth while she sat and stared into the middle distance. It was only a hunch, with no facts to support it, but it was beginning to eat away at her with unsettling regularity.

  Sarah glanced up at DI Baker. He was talking rapidly, his mouth barely seeming to open behind his sharply trimmed beard, his eyes dark and distant, as if he was visualizing something as he spoke. Sarah saw him as a threat. Twice recently she had seen him coming out of the secretary’s office which buffered Robert Abner from the rest of GeneCrime. Prolonged contact with the big man was generally an event reserved for bollockings, sackings or promotions. She wondered momentarily whether Charlie was after her job, but quickly dismissed the notion. Commander Abner understood policing too well to mess his staff around in the middle of what could be their largest case for years.

  Charlie was now quiet, staring down at her. Sarah lifted her head from the support of her hands and mumbled, ‘Sorry, Charlie, you lost me.’

  Charlie narrowed his eyes. ‘I was saying, Path are still a bit fifty fifty about it. The other four women are definites, including Joanne Harringdon, killed, we think, in the car park of her surgery. All held down and strangled first, raped second. But Laura Beckman doesn’t fit the pattern.’

  ‘Except that she was killed late at night, on her own, half a mile from the Thames.’

  ‘Half of London is half a mile from the Thames. Besides, Path can’t confirm it as a murder yet.’

  ‘Smashed cranium, broken ribs?’

  ‘She could have been knocked down. Fallen off something. Whatever. No witnesses, just a young woman bleeding from the back of the head into the pavement. There’s no way we can link it.’

  Sarah sighed, showing Charlie without saying it that she was prepared to back down. ‘OK. But if it’s not our man, and it’s not an RTA, then the likelihood is that we have another killer on the loose.’

  ‘Nah, I don’t see it,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just don’t. No way.’

  Sarah looked up at him. He could be irritatingly dismissive at times, a slamming of the door which endeared him to few. Before DCI Phil Kemp’s sacking and arrest, Charlie had been one of his closest allies. Relatively new to GeneCrime, and making very few friends, but always there when Phil needed the support of a CID stalwart. And it was now, for the first time, staring into his eyes, seeing the mix of defiance, contempt and detachment which always seemed to dwell there, that the words came to her. You’re up to something, Charlie. You’re involved in something you shouldn’t be. It was intuitive, illogical and without foundation, but it struck her with all the certainty of a stone-cold fact.

  Charlie turned his head, glanced around the office, bit into his top lip through his beard. ‘Either way,’ he continued, ‘it’s irrelevant. It’s unlikely to be our man, there’s nothing to link him, and we need to be focused on the job at hand.’

  Sarah flashed him a short, insincere smile. I’ve got my eye on you, she said to herself as she asked, ‘So what now?’

  ‘Fuck knows. Four definites in the morgue. We keep looking at what we’ve got, hope he makes a mistake.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll stop. Take a break.’

  Sarah grimaced. ‘I don’t know. Our sick friend seems to have got a taste for it.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Charlie straightened, stretching, pushing his shoulders back. As he did so, his jumper lifted, revealing a mat of dark hair across his belly which Sarah tried to ignore, the thick primal blackness unsettling her. ‘Look, I’m going to get Mina Ali and some of the forensics section together with senior CID later this afternoon. Kick some ideas about. You OK with that?’

  Sarah nodded. Technically, it was her job to coordinate the disparate factions of GeneCrime, to make sure Forensics were updating CID, that Pathology was talking to SOCOs, to help IT and Technical Support integrate all areas of evidence collection. But she let it go. There were more important issues than protocol.

  The phone rang, and Sarah picked it up.

  ‘DCI Hirst,’ she said.

  ‘Sarah, it’s me.’

  Sarah looked at DI Baker, cupping the mouthpiece with her hand. ‘Charlie, I need some privacy.’

  Charlie sucked his cheeks in, lingering, taking his time. ‘Now?’ he asked.

  ‘Now,’ Sarah repeated. She watched her colleague leave the room, slowly and defiantly, and waited until the door was closed before putting her mouth to the receiver. ‘What is it?’

  Traffic noises and Reuben’s breathing. Maybe the rustle of a newspaper held close to the phone. He sounded excitable, his words quick and direct.

  ‘I don’t know if I should tell you this, but what the hell. There’s no one else.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Damian Nightley has committed suicide, just weeks before his release date.’

  ‘Nightley? Ten years for weapons trafficking, right?’

  ‘Yeah. What can you find out about suicides in Pentonville?’

  ‘In case you’d forgotten, I’m in the middle of a murder hunt here.’

  Reuben sighed. ‘Sorry. Any news?’

  ‘Look, your advice on what we think was the first death – you know, the one with the oil and algae issues – helped, but not enough to say one way or another.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘We’re getting DNA but it’s more degraded than we’d hoped. And because we’re still having difficulty purifying it, it’s proving unreliable.’

  ‘Is it good enough for matching?’

  ‘We’ve got partial matches to four hundred profiles. But as you know, we don’t deal in the currency of partial matches. So we’re playing a waiting game. Testing and re-testing, and almost hoping he strikes again and makes a mistake.’

  ‘So you’ll help me?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  There was the sound of a car door slamming, and the background noise instantly disappeared.

  ‘Look,’ Reuben said, ‘I’ve got a fair idea Nightley’s suicide may turn out to be important.’

  ‘Well it had better be, Dr Maitland. I’ll get back to you later.’

  Sarah replaced the receiver. She held her head in her hands again, feeling the weight, annoyed at the distraction, but interested anyway. Nightley had flagged up a couple of interesting issues when she’d run his file for Reuben. Contacts and acquaintances across the capital. And now he was dead. An alarm bell was ringing somewhere inside her but she couldn’t quite track it down. Damian Night
ley. Where else had she heard that name?

  Sarah turned to her computer and began pulling records and requesting files, suddenly alive and animated, a new urge surging through her.

  7

  Reuben tried to make his troubles disappear into the protocols of forensic detection. The fact that Joshua was ill and fading fast; that the police had launched a manhunt for him; that Damian Nightley had committed suicide; that his lab had recently been ransacked; that a footballer and his wife were dead. All of these gnawing, seeping wounds were soothed by his utter concentration on the task at hand. It had to be done quickly, and done well.

  Reuben pulsed Michael Brawn’s dissolved DNA specimen in the noisy bench-top centrifuge, decanted off its supernatant and suspended the remaining pellet in 70 per cent ethanol. He labelled a series of sterile tubes, flicked them open and added minute quantities of colourless fluids to each. He then vortexed the tubes and set a hot-block to fifty-five degrees. The methods and procedures were imprinted in his brain, each step coming to him as he needed it, as if he was running a mental finger down a vastly elongated recipe. Amid the volumes, temperatures, ratios and molarities, thoughts of his son remained controlled and disciplined. By imposing order on one part of his consciousness, Reuben kept the rest in check as well.

  While a PCR machine hummed through a pre-amplification step, Reuben pulled his gloves off and scratched his face, before biting into a sandwich. He was acutely aware that being in the laboratory was risky. It was more than possible that its location was known to CID. But Reuben needed to grasp the answer. Who the hell was Michael Brawn? Solve this and he could go straight to Commander Abner, who would be able to use the information to validate Reuben’s mission and call off the manhunt. But without Michael Brawn, Reuben would be detained, maybe shipped on to Wormwood Scrubs, locked up while his claims were investigated, testimonies taken, evidence considered. All of which would take precious days, even weeks – time that Joshua didn’t have. He swallowed his sandwich and pulled on a fresh pair of gloves. Until he could take his answer to Robert Abner, everything else was just about manageable, an unavoidable limbo from which he would soon be emerging.

  Three hours into the process, Judith entered. ‘Got a few hours between shifts,’ she said, swapping her leather jacket for a cotton lab coat and joining Reuben at the bench. Just like the old days, Reuben thought with a smile. Side by side in the GeneCrime laboratory, pipetting samples and solving cases, Reuben occasionally cracking jokes, Judith quiet between bursts of laughter. They loaded the sequencer together, Reuben injecting the sample, Judith the controls. While it ran, they tidied up, scrubbing the bench with paper towels, returning reagents to freezers and restoring solutions to shelves.

  Reuben then sat at the bench and doodled on a piece of paper, his drawing skills rusty, the faces he conjured rough and uneven. Throughout his career it had been his habit to restore some dignity to the dead, people who had met obscene and violent ends, penetrated, hacked and mutilated. He would paint them late at night in his study, picturing them as they were before the atrocity that drained them away. It had been therapeutic, a way of coming down from the adrenalin rush of each crime scene. He resolved to take up painting again. His hobby had bitten the dust of late, and Reuben suspected he knew why. Every face was haunted by the fact that he was somehow caught up in the death.

  ‘You got access to the national database?’ Judith asked, bringing him round.

  ‘Sarah’s ID and password.’

  ‘You could have used mine.’

  Reuben glanced down at the sketch he had started. Lesley Accoutey, as she had appeared in the papers, blonde and effervescent, a toothy smile, a sparkle in her eye.

  ‘Sarah reckoned it would be better this way.’

  ‘Are we done?’

  ‘Looks like it.’ Reuben examined the sequence profile, scanning through the multicoloured lines on the screen. ‘Quality fine, no bands maxing out, background low. A reasonable profile. You ready to find out who Michael Brawn really is?’

  ‘When you are.’

  Reuben copied the sequence file on to a memory stick, and inserted it into the networked PC which sat on a small wooden desk in the corner. He typed some commands, copy-pasted the information into a text-box and pressed a button on the keyboard to begin the database search. The computer murmured into life, its hard drive buzzing and crackling, galloping through the database and grabbing for similarities.

  ‘What do you reckon, Rube?’ Judith asked.

  ‘Dead cert we find something. A match to someone already on file. And then we start closing in on whoever in GeneCrime put him away.’

  ‘Why so confident?’

  ‘Why else use a fake profile? I think we’re about to find some surprises about Michael Brawn.’

  Judith made herself comfortable on the couch. ‘OK. I’m going to bet we draw a blank.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because science is like that. Ten negatives for every positive.’

  ‘The usual stake? Loser buys the beers?’

  Judith hesitated for a second, before answering, ‘Deal.’

  Reuben and Judith remained silent, sensing the technology of detection, the algorithms and pattern matching, the invisible binary digits, the plundering of datasets held somewhere else, on ethereal servers, insubstantial and otherworldly, intangible processes they knew were happening but which they barely understood, the only evidence of any action the noise of a computer hard drive vibrating and humming. Human time passing slowly while unimaginably vast amounts of communication raced back and forth along telephone cables.

  An insistent beeping broke the silence. Reuben and Judith rushed over to the computer. On the screen was a list of numbers and names and, by one of them, a small button marked ‘Update’. Reuben glanced at his watch.

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ he announced. ‘The searches are getting slower.’

  ‘The databases are getting longer,’ Judith said, through an elongated yawn.

  ‘Well, moment-of-truth time. You ready to buy the drinks?’

  Judith nodded. Reuben pressed the ‘Update’ icon, then double-clicked on a tab marked ‘Classified’. After a few seconds of rapidly scanning the information, he let out a slow, extended whistle.

  ‘Last known address, telephone number, criminal record, the lot.’

  ‘Is it unequivocal?’

  ‘’Fraid so. Stats of ten to the minus seven. You’d better have been paid this month.’

  ‘Any chance of taking it out of my earnings?’

  Reuben didn’t answer. He was scrolling through records, arrest dates, background info, physical characteristics.

  ‘And haven’t we been a busy boy, Mr Cowley?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Who’s Mr Cowley?’

  ‘Michael Brawn. His real name. False genetic identity, false criminal identity. Michael Brawn doesn’t exist.’

  ‘No? What else does it say?’

  ‘Here, I’ll print you a copy. You pass a postbox on the way?’

  ‘Several.’

  Reuben pressed ‘Print’, and the printer hummed into life.

  ‘If I pop this in an envelope, could you send it to the PO box number on the last note? Give the man his twenty-five grand’s worth.’

  ‘And then what?’

  Reuben quickly jotted some of the details down on a yellow Post-It note and slotted it in his back pocket. As he wrote, his brow furrowed in concentration, and he said, ‘The search gets called off and I can actually go and help my son.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘We now have evidence that Michael Brawn has been using a false identity. Sarah will be able to use this to convince the Met that I was in Pentonville on police business, and that I don’t need to be recaptured.’

  Judith picked a copy off the printer and scanned it. ‘Guess so. But this is interesting. A false profile gets him a false ID, which is convenient given the seriousness of his previous offences. Still doesn’t add up though. Juries aren’t allowed to
know previous. Why go to the trouble of changing your whole identity, genetic and otherwise?’

  ‘I guess that’s the whole point.’

  ‘Anyway, I’ve got to dash. Late for the next shift. It’s brutal at the moment. You seen my helmet?’

  ‘On the sofa.’

  ‘I’d leave my head if it wasn’t screwed on.’

  ‘In which case you wouldn’t need your helmet.’ Judith scanned the lab. ‘I’m bound to have forgotten something.’

  ‘As long as you post the letter.’

  Judith picked up the envelope, slotted it into her upturned helmet, smiled briefly at Reuben and left the lab. Reuben barely noticed. He was absorbed, his eyes wide, sucking all the information in, the possibilities and the meanings. He stared into the screen, a summary view of Ian Cowley’s previous convictions. Numbers and figures which told short, staccato truths: Agg Burglary, Conv. July 5 1988, 1yr susp 6mo. ABH/GBH, Conv. Aug 12 1989, 9mo. Manslaughter, Conv. Jan 23 1990, 6yr 6mo. ABH, Conv. March 19 1996, 2yr. Attmptd Murder, Conv. Feb 27 1999, 5yr 8mo. Reuben rubbed his face, thinking. He glanced at the newspaper that had announced his escape from the prison van. Dots were beginning to join, the truth starting to dawn.

  Behind him, there were a couple of light taps on the door. He walked over, brow furrowed, swimming in ideas and notions.

  ‘Judith,’ he said, pulling the door open, ‘I think I know the truth about Michael Brawn.’

  He looked up. He was standing in the doorway, pushing a gun into Reuben’s chest.

  ‘Do you now?’ he asked.

  Reuben stared into the face, shocked, disbelieving, his brain fighting for sense. For a second he was blank. He looked into the eyes, cold and dark and wide. The name and the face suddenly merged.

  Michael Brawn forced Reuben back into the lab and kicked the door shut.