by John Macken
‘One final thing,’ Reuben said as Phil moved towards the exit. ‘I just don’t get the rush. GeneCrime is thriving. We’ve had several big breakthroughs in the last six months.’
‘And?’
‘There’s something else going on here, isn’t there?’
Phil held the door handle, which was wrapped in a clear plastic evidence bag. He hesitated. ‘I’ve always admired your suspicious nature, Reuben. It’s what has pushed you to the top of your field. But do me a favour, my friend. Turn it off from time to time. Or else who are you ever going to be able to trust? Me? Sarah? Your team?’ Phil Kemp pulled the door open. Despite the hour, his phone beeped, receiving a document for his electronic signature. He stared at the screen and sighed. Then he raised his eyebrows at Reuben and left the room, whistling a tune without troubling any of the right notes.
5
A fat Chinese man walks as if he is wading through treacle, rolls of flesh rippling like waves. Two men following him separately begin to converge. One is tall, fair and lean. The other is shorter and darker, and is dressed as if he is just leaving a nightclub. It is late afternoon.
‘Jehovah’s Witnesses,’ the taller man says as his new mobile rings. ‘How might I direct your call?’
‘Punishments, please,’ his accomplice announces.
‘Just putting you through. Praise the Lord.’
‘Oh hello. My name is Jez. I’d like permission to carry out a shooting, please.’
‘Busy street? Broad daylight? Obese Chinese man?’
‘All of the above.’
‘And, verily, thou shalt strike him down with a mighty vengeance.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Just don’t miss him.’ Reuben scans the busy pavement. ‘Where are you, by the way?’
‘Ahead of you, other side of the road, passing the pub with the flower baskets.’
‘I see you. God, you look shit.’
‘You don’t look so good yourself.’
‘I guess not, Jez,’ Reuben acknowledges, swallowing a yawn.
‘Late to bed?’
‘Took a while to wrap up the drowned man.’ Reuben had left the scene and returned to his lab, spending a sleepless night coming down from the amphetamine mania, methodically performing the world’s first Predictive Phenotyping test. ‘So, what about the target?’
‘Red jumper, about to cross to your side of the road.’
‘Got him,’ Reuben says. ‘I’m hanging up. Pass me the gun after you pull the trigger.’
‘You’re the boss.’
‘Right, he’s turning into the park. Let’s do him out of sight. Catch up with you back at the lab. And Jez?’
‘Yes?’
‘Pray to Jehovah you get a clean shot.’
A gun appears and is passed from the fairer to the darker. The fat man wades into the park, kicking up litter. Behind him, two glances confirm the time is right. The weapon appears and its trigger is pulled in close proximity. The Chinese man cries out and clutches his neck. Blood appears through his fingers. The gun is exchanged. The men split up and walk away.
*
Ten minutes later, Reuben Maitland passes a small gun-like object to his senior technician Judith Meadows. Reuben notes that she appears happier than yesterday, her usually serene features pulled undeniably upwards. Judith takes the gun and asks, ‘So how was it, boss?’
‘Fair to middling.’
‘And this is Run Zhang?’
‘The very same.’
‘And the gun itself?’
‘Think we’re going to have to modify it.’ Reuben rubs his face, a greasy fatigue lurking in his skin. ‘I’m not sure we need the retraction part. It seems to be hurting them too much.’
‘Another squealer?’
‘Like a pig. Mind you, I haven’t spoken with him yet. Knowing Run he’s probably checked himself into hospital.’
Judith positions the barrel of the implement in an Eppendorf tube. She swills the red fluid around before leaking a drop on to a microscope slide. ‘So let’s see what’ve we got,’ she mutters, squinting through the eyepiece. ‘Couple of million cells maybe.’
‘Great.’
Judith turns and trains the full attention of her large dark eyes on him. ‘You know what I heard this morning, Rube?’
‘What?’ he asks, momentarily caught in the depths of her irises.
‘Someone’s been fishing around in our freezers again. Any idea what’s going on?’
Reuben holds his hand up. ‘Relax,’ he says. ‘This time it was me.’
‘Oh.’ Judith is quiet, looking from the microscope to her boss and back, trying not to ask.
‘You keep a secret?’
‘Always.’
Reuben glances around. ‘Predictive Phenotyping has just had its first outing.’
‘You’re joking! But what about all the—’
‘Phil Kemp, Sarah Hirst and a lot of other people are going to discover exactly what happens when you open Pandora’s box.’
‘So who have you profiled? Mark Gelson?’
Reuben stares into the shiny lab floor and sees a distorted reflection of the laboratory and its upside-down personnel. ‘No. And that’s all I ought to say about it.’
Judith pauses for a second. ‘At the risk of irritating my boss, could I at least see the actual Pheno-Fit?’ She flutters her eyelashes. ‘Pretty please?’
Reuben scans the lab. Run Zhang, theatrically clutching his neck, is making his way in through the heavy security doors. He stops to show off his wound to a couple of technicians. Reuben takes what looks like a colour photograph from his inside pocket and holds it up briefly for Judith to inspect. The Pheno-Fit depicts the 3D face of a handsome male with hazel eyes, wavy hair, a broad nasal bridge, and a sharp chin. In a textbox at the bottom right, the information ‘1.85–1.9 m tall, slim build, shoe size 10–11, athletic’ is printed.
‘Don’t suppose you can predict his phone number?’ Judith asks, absently flicking at her wedding ring through her vinyl glove.
‘’Fraid not. But what do you think about the actual picture?’
‘Looks like you’ve finally cracked it. Can we have a go at it now?’
Reuben nods his head slowly. ‘Any day,’ he says, ‘any day soon.’
‘So what about the Psycho-Fit?’
‘Medium intellect, a propensity for argument, poor ability to differentiate right from wrong.’
‘Doesn’t sound too dangerous.’
‘That’ – Reuben frowns – ‘depends entirely on the context.’
‘By the way, the new guy, Dr Paul Mackay, is due any minute to get his security clearance sorted.’ Judith pulls her gloves off, removes her lab coat and smooths her skirt. ‘OK if I go and bring him in?’
‘Of course.’
‘You going to do your trick?’
‘I’m not feeling . . .’
‘Come on.’ Judith smiles. ‘You know it freaks them out.’
As Judith leaves, Reuben brings the Pheno-Fit up to eye level and stares into its face. He experiences a dizzying mix of anger and apprehension. ‘I don’t know who the fuck you are, but I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to meet pretty soon,’ he whispers to it. ‘And that it won’t be good for either of us.’ The Pheno-Fit stares back: expressionless and impassive. Reuben is both excited that his own technology works, and scared at the direction it is inevitably pushing him in. His furrowed concentration is broken by Run Zhang.
‘Look, Dr Maitland,’ Run points, shuffling over to reveal a small nick just above his collar.
‘A graze,’ Reuben answers, slotting the picture away.
Run is a forensics researcher, big and lazy, a mild hypochondriac who is disinclined to have anything shot at him in the name of field testing. He has only been in the UK for two years, and is still adapting to GeneCrime’s predominant language of scientific Londonese. ‘A graze? That fucking thing almost, ah, take my spinal column out. You told me it won’t hurt.’
‘I
t was only an exercise, my brave friend.’ Reuben’s phone announces that over the next few minutes he will receive fresh crime-scene footage. ‘But we’re getting there. Soon, we’ll be able to do what we did today for real. Take an unambiguous DNA sample from a suspect in the street, with them feeling little more than a mosquito bite.’
‘This fucking shark bite.’
‘OK, OK. We’ll redesign it. Grab a plaster from the first-aid box and I’ll see if I can’t stem the tidal wave of blood.’
Standing alone in the middle of the laboratory, Reuben watches a few members of his team huddled together in discussion. There is an awkwardness about them, a pronounced lack of coherency. He sees Mina Ali, dark, bony, her scowl lop-sided; Bernie Harrison, tall, bearded and serious; Simon Jankowski, centre parting, glasses, a loud shirt doing the talking for him; Birgit Kasper, mousy, stout, almost deliberately unremarkable in appearance and conversation. He flashes back to the Christmas party several months previously, observing a group of scientists out of the laboratory, drunk, having fun, racing round like a batch of lab rats released from their cage.
Reuben checks his watch, unfastening its metal strap and peering at the flattened hairs on his wrist. He feels like he has two different timepieces. The one he holds in his fingers now seems to count slowly and inevitably. The one he wore through the night was quick and erratic. He doesn’t know which he prefers. Reuben stares intently at the back of the Dugena. Just visible are a series of scratches which surround its leverage point. He licks his dry lips, fighting a sudden urge.
‘Nervous?’ Simon Jankowski asks, pulling a blank lab coat over his Hawaiian shirt.
‘What?’
‘The interview. It’s now, isn’t it?’ Simon tunes the lab radio and calls to his co-workers. ‘Anyone want to hear the boss on . . . what station was it this time?’
‘Radio Two.’
Several of Reuben’s group desert what they are doing and amble over as Simon finds the station.
‘. . . leading authority on forensic detection, and the scientist accredited with solving, amongst numerous others, the murder of the Harrow sisters Bethany and Megan Gillick, joins me now in the studio. So, Dr Maitland, thank you for joining us. What do you make of the Government’s newly proposed legislation to introduce genetic testing for everyone suspected – not just convicted, but suspected – of minor crimes or misdemeanours?’
Reuben half listens to his voice crackling out of the speaker, yesterday’s words recorded and regurgitated. ‘There are clearly two issues here. First, you mentioned the Gillick sisters. Now, we would never have made the link to the killer, Damian Soames, if his profile hadn’t been on record from a pilot study we performed on Category B prisoners in the mid-nineties. So information in isolation often seems arbitrary or intrusive, but when you have the power to cross reference, as we do now, on a massive scale, it can suddenly assume a logic of its own. However, and this is the second point, the issue of civil liberty, particularly within a legal framework that almost exclusively predates the discovery of DNA, is paramount.’
‘In what way? Surely the common good—’
‘Look, when I buy a washing machine, my personal information – my address, telephone number, consumer habits, et cetera – go on record somewhere. They are passed around. I end up being called on the phone to see if I want to buy insurance or change my gas supplier. I get junk mail thrust through my letter box. Information at whatever level – be it shopping habits or be it DNA sequences – has to be handled carefully.’
‘But there’s an enormous difference between shopping and DNA-testing.’
‘They simply reflect different scales of the same issue. Consumer profiling and genetic profiling . . .’
Reuben silently concentrates on his own words; his voice is calm, his answers are rehearsed, his arguments occasionally stretched and inflated for public consumption. This is one more in a long line of radio and newspaper interviews over the last year that have taught him what to say and how to say it. He wonders momentarily whether he has begun to sound too polished, question after question wearing his teeth down to the gums. Surrounding him, his group listen intently, smiling, occasionally looking from him to the radio and back again, almost wondering why his lips aren’t moving. He takes in their loyalty and respect, and for a second enjoys the warmth. The interview continues, widening its scope, Reuben’s position as an eminent authority on forensic detection pushing the debate.
‘. . . and so we struggle to keep up. Always, laws are reactive, crimes are reactive, people are reactive, and yet technology is proactive. The potential is enormous. But potentially fantastic or potentially disastrous. That’s what we have to decide.’
Reuben stares uncomfortably at the floor, glad that the cross-examination is beginning to draw to a close. He feels increasingly that while forensics nudges its way further into the public consciousness, maybe it should do so without him for a while. He can see battles ahead, and appreciates that he will soon need to cut out all distractions.
Finally, the interview ends and Simon switches the radio off. ‘Show’s over, folks,’ he says.
‘You should be on TV,’ Birgit Kasper suggests, her face pale against her strikingly red glasses. ‘Any offers?’
‘One or two.’
Run Zhang grins. ‘I don’t know, boss.’
‘Why not?’
‘You got, ah, perfect face for radio.’
‘OK, OK.’ Reuben smiles. ‘Any chance of anyone doing some work around here? The new guy will be here in a minute. Let’s at least pretend to look busy . . .’
‘You going to do your trick?’ Mina asks.
‘I wouldn’t rule it out.’ He winks. ‘Now, people, let’s catch some bad guys.’
Reuben watches his group melt away with gentle reluctance. Glancing up, he sees Judith reappearing from the far side of the lab with a tall man in tow. From the man’s paper-thin air of confidence, Reuben senses that he is nervous about starting at Gene-Crime. Reuben shrugs, replacing his timepiece. It is a building brimming with the bright and the sharp. He is right to be wary.
6
‘Dr Maitland, do your trick,’ Judith implores after Reuben has shaken hands with the new recruit.
‘Judith . . .’ he answers, a dizzying moment of fatigue draining his opposition.
‘Oh, come on. I’ve told Dr Mackay all about it.’
Reuben finds Judith’s demure persuasion hard to refuse. ‘Dr Mackay?’
‘I’m curious.’
‘If we have to.’ Reuben yawns and shakes his head. ‘Right, Dr Mackay, here we go. We’ve only met once, when I interviewed you for the job. And during that time you told me nothing about your background, aside from your qualifications and vastly exaggerated work experience. So let me guess.’ Reuben peers intently at the man before him, running his suddenly open eyes from left to right, from top to bottom, as if scanning his image on to a screen. He pauses, taking in a deep breath. Then he begins. His delivery is brisk and direct, serious but light, playing along with the game. ‘You have an uncle on your mother’s side with acute male-pattern baldness. Your father went prematurely grey. You are taller than your mother, but not your father. One of your parents has blue eyes, the other either blue or green. Your dimple comes from your father’s side of the family. In temperament, you consider yourself to be more like your mother, but in actuality you are somewhere in the middle. Both parents are slim, tending towards the athletic. There is Nordic ancestry in your deep, dark past. You have relatively sparse body hair, and your stubble, when you haven’t shaved it to make a good impression on your first day, grows with a tinge of copper. One of your parents – I’m not sure which – has slightly bucked teeth. You are highly intelligent and an above average sportsman. Judging from the relative length of your index and ring fingers, I would guess’ – Reuben winks at Judith – ‘that you are fairly well hung. How am I doing so far?’
Dr Paul Mackay shrugs. ‘OK, I suppose.’
‘Right. Let�
�s step things up a bit. You enjoy, among other things, rowing and cycling. And you follow motor-racing and read American crime fiction, particularly Ellroy, Grisham and—’
‘Where are you getting my hobbies from?’ Dr Mackay asks, obviously unnerved.
‘Your CV.’
‘Picasso!’ Judith exclaims. ‘You cheat!’
‘OK. Let’s get serious again.’ Reuben squints at Dr Mackay, his half-closed eyes blinking rapidly. ‘So, here’s the thing. Despite what’s on your CV, you rebelled in your mid to late teens. Challenged authority, that sort of thing. Disappointed your parents. Did something serious. Went much further than the usual teenage mutiny. Maybe got yourself into some trouble?’
Dr Mackay shuffles uncomfortably. Reuben’s phone tells him that the video footage is ready to view.
‘Is he right?’ Judith asks.
‘About almost everything. But how—’
‘Simple mix of genetics and observation. Key point: a previously pierced nose and earlobe, both well grown over. The other body and facial features speak for themselves, if you know how these things are inherited. It’s really just Mendelian theory with a bit of guesswork and the odd generalization thrown in.’
‘Scary, isn’t it?’ Judith adds.
‘Why “Picasso”, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘He paints. Obsessively. Face after face after face. He’s not bad, either.’
‘Don’t mind me.’ Reuben grins, walking to the far side of the lab, opening drawers and taking out sample bags and sterile tubes.
‘And has he ever painted you?’ Dr Mackay enquires.
‘I don’t think he’s ever looked close enough,’ Judith answers quietly, when she is sure that Reuben can’t hear. ‘But there’s something else you should know about him.’
‘What?’
‘He’s different. Not like normal scientists or coppers.’
‘How do you mean?’
