Breaking Point (7 page)

‘Are you sure you should be doing that?’ Judith paused, remembering Mina’s recent promotion. Basically, she could do anything she wanted. ‘I mean, what happened?’

‘Couldn’t do it. I was advised that senior clearance was needed.’

‘But you’ve got that?’

‘Not yet. I’ve been slow sorting it out. Anyway, I haven’t needed it until now.’

‘So you’re saying names from the Negatives are coming up in recent crime reports, and the Negatives themselves have moved?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Well, how many profiles have we got in the Negatives?’

‘Thirty-six thousand, give or take.’

‘Really? So what you’re also saying is that of thirty-six thousand people we’ve tested for exclusion from major crimes over the years, a small number have recently been associated with various offences?’

‘Yes.’

‘And is that any real surprise? Just because they were innocent of specific murders, rapes and kidnappings doesn’t mean they’re saints. People break the law. It’s what they do.’

Mina sighed. When you put it like that … She was a great believer in the power of saying things out loud. Silent thoughts and suspicions could fester and seem more important than they actually were. But listening to your words out loud, sensing another person’s reaction, that was the acid test. Like giving an oral presentation to an audience of scientists. That quickly made you realize what was true and what was not. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s a couple of coincidences that just feel wrong, that’s all. And as scientists, of course, we aren’t supposed to feel anything.’

Judith raised her eyebrows. ‘I don’t know,’ she
answered
. ‘Sometimes that’s all there is to go on. A hunch. Intuition. Instinct.’

Mina stood up and closed the laptop. A hunch. Judith was right. That’s all it was. A feeling that something wasn’t quite right. The lab door swung open and three technicians trooped in, fresh from their coffee break. Mina thanked Judith and retreated to her office.

14

IT WAS, REUBEN
noted unhappily, the sort of rain that penetrates. It wasn’t the heaviest rain or the fattest droplets or the most sudden of downpours. It was almost mist-like, seemingly half air and half water, free to drift into the gaps between jacket, T-shirt and jeans that normal rain can’t touch. It was still mild, and Reuben felt trapped between the sweat attempting to escape his body and the water seeping in.

He carried on, glancing down at his fingers. Gripped tight within them was the most precious commodity in the world, the one thing he would die for. The tiny hand of his two-year-old son. Lucy had been as good as her word. Joshua looked up at him and then away again, oblivious to the
thrill
Reuben felt just walking through the park with him in the rain.

Progress was slow. Joshua continually bent down to pick things up, absorbed in the minutiae of the park. A stick, the decapitated head of a flower, the ring pull from a can. Reuben found his thoughts drifting in the light rain. The three hours he had spent that day outside a steel shutter in a side street of North London. And then seeing Maclyn Margulis in the flesh. The first time in several months. Knowing that Margulis was unfinished business.

Margulis was personal. The instant Reuben had been fired from GeneCrime, he knew. This was his opportunity to bring down the villains he had been unable to touch in the force. The gangsters and career criminals who hid behind protocols, who understood where CID could and couldn’t go, who had more legal protection than the police trying to arrest them. The ones every detective knew they wouldn’t be putting away in a hurry. The sort of men like Maclyn Margulis who, Reuben had decided a long time ago, probably had informants on the inside of the Met.

Joshua let go of his hand and toddled into a gated play area. The surface was rubberized and black, a pretend sort of tarmac that was spongy
underfoot
. Reuben recalled his childhood days, falling off slides and roundabouts on to sun-baked concrete, summers of skinned elbows and grazed knees. The days when ‘health and safety’ were words only ever uttered by trade unionists and coal miners. Joshua said, ‘Swing,’ and reached his arms up. Reuben lowered him into a baby seat with its own double-locking harness.

As he pushed his son back and forth in the drizzle, Reuben’s thoughts returned to Margulis. He saw flashes of the day he spent in a charming village in Surrey, scraping what remained of two pensioners off their front door. Fourteen hours in the sweltering heat. A white body suit, blue nylon shoe covers and a gauze mouth guard all keeping the sweat in, until he was dripping on the inside. A cold wetness that ran down his back and made him shiver. Using a fine pair of forceps to drag hair after hair out of the paintwork and insert them into clear self-sealing bags. Using cottonwool buds to tease pieces of flesh off the door’s surface and into Eppendorf tubes. Recognizing some of the tissue types. Cartilage from the ears. Chunks of cerebral cortex. Chips of bone from the skull, possibly some from the bridge of the nose. A couple of hairy fragments of septum. Remnants of the clear and malleable
lens
of an eye. Whole teeth embedded in the blue-painted door. Metal fillings. Splinters of a dental bridge, suggesting that one of the deceased had dentures, the other their own teeth. And around the slivers of what used to be the faces and heads of two retired teachers, a wide spray of blackened shotgun pellets. Reuben shuddered in the rain. It had been a Jackson Pollock in flesh and blood, a hot day that had felt sickeningly cold.

The case had attracted a lot of attention. Whoever shot the couple had made them shut their front door behind them. Killed on their own front step. A messy execution in a well-tended village with close-cropped thatches and neatly trimmed borders. Reuben had led the investigation. Ballistics had concluded a twelve-bore at point blank. The wife first, then the husband. A barrel each. Faces blown away, virtually decapitated by the force of the blast. And although the scene was awash with the cells, hairs and fluids of the deceased, no forensic samples were ever retrieved from the assassin. But Reuben knew who had pulled the trigger. Everyone did. The gangster whose operation had lost three men in a dispute with Joe Keansey’s outfit in South London. The gangster who had managed to track Joe Keansey’s parents down to a neat village in
Surrey
. The gangster who had patiently waited for Keansey to be put away for fifteen years. The gangster who had then executed Keansey’s parents in broad daylight.

Maclyn Margulis.

Reuben shook himself round. Joshua sounded unhappy. He had been pushing hard, the swing slightly too high for comfort. Reuben eased back. ‘Sorry, little fella,’ he said. This is what it used to be like, he reminded himself. Wrapped up in work cases when he was at home, GeneCrime gnawing into his family life. But now things were different. He unbuckled Joshua and pulled him out of the swing. Not better, just different.

He slid the wet sleeve of his jacket up and looked at his watch. Nearly quarter to six.

‘We’d better think about getting you home to Mummy,’ he said. ‘She’ll be getting back from work and wondering where you are.’

Reuben led his son out of the play area and towards the main road. The rain had eased back a little, now more like a film of moisture in the air. Through the mist he spotted the golden arches of a fast food restaurant. The phrase ‘McDonald’s Dad’ flashed up in his brain. Being a part-time father was bad enough, but spending it surrounded by plastic tables and chairs and
disposable
cutlery … Reuben pressed on. Lucy’s house wasn’t far.

Joshua began to dawdle again, so Reuben bent down and picked him up. He kissed him on his cold wet cheek. Then he strode on, past the promise of Happy Meals, and on towards Lucy’s house, the thought of Maclyn Margulis and his previous atrocities never quite leaving him.

15

DOTON OKE FOLLOWED
the dark-haired female down the concrete steps of Ealing Broadway Tube station, a full stop on the Central Line. Doton looked again, noting that she was undeniably attractive. Probably Italian, though she could be Spanish at a push, or even Portuguese. Soon, the exotic females that brightened subterranean London would begin to decline in number, winter killing them off or dressing them up in disappointingly thick jumpers and long coats. He walked a pace behind, swimming against the tide of commuters heading up into the damp evening air, happy simply to be in the presence of beauty.

The woman half turned to check he was following and Doton smiled in acknowledgement. The ticket barriers were understaffed today. Queues
would
be forming, frazzled passengers complaining that their tickets weren’t working or had been lost or stolen, or whatever other excuse came to hand. Fuck ’em, he thought. They would have to manage without him.

So far, Doton had little idea about the nature of the Italian/Spanish/Portuguese woman’s complaint. It was probably some sort of foreign confusion, but he was content to stretch his legs for a couple of minutes, making the passengers upstairs sweat for a bit. At first, at the barrier, it had resembled a typical London exchange. Pointing and gesticulating, foreign words thick and fast, almost under the breath, exact meanings lost in translation. After a couple of minutes, Doton had held up his hands and said, ‘Show me.’

The woman checked he was behind again, and then entered a train that was standing motionless at Platform 3 with its doors open. Doton scratched his face wearily and stepped on. The woman stopped in front of a passenger who had failed to alight. She gesticulated with her hands as if to say, ‘There, that’s what I was talking about.’ Doton smiled at her and nodded. It was a common occurrence, although usually on the later trains. People out after work, or drinking on
empty
stomachs. The stop-start lull of the Tube, the warm air piped in, the chance to sit down and take the weight off weary feet. Doton had even heard stories of passengers doing laps of the Circle Line, utterly unaware that they had been all the way round and then some.

Doton stooped to examine the female passenger. Black, possibly African, darker skin than his own. She was business-smart, her hair – probably extensions, although it was hard to tell for sure – was pulled back tight in a pony tail. White headphones were jammed in her ears, the music just audible, a woman’s voice wailing away over a slow drum beat. Her sunglasses looked expensive, the sort that wrapped around, thick stylized sides to them. She was leaning slightly to the right, her head propped on her shoulder, mouth open – the classic public transport sleeping position.

Doton sighed and pulled out his biro. He prodded her gently with it. ‘Train terminates here, love,’ he said. He glanced back at the woman who had brought him down. She smiled, making a sleeping gesture with her hands pressed together tight against her tilted cheek. Doton smiled back. She was magnificent.

The passenger didn’t move. The music from her
iPod
played on regardless, five thousand songs to shuffle through until the batteries gave way. He prodded her again in the shoulder, harder this time. ‘Love? We’re here, love. Time to wake up and shake up.’ She remained still, her sunglasses fixed, her slumber uninterrupted.

Doton put his pen back in his pocket. He peered through the window. A train was pulling in at Platform 1. He needed to get back to the barrier. Doton shrugged at the woman next to him. She was chewing her top lip with a beguiling mixture of amusement and uncertainty. Really, he should just let the passenger sleep it off. But something was starting to unnerve him.

He reached forward and touched her face, his fingers trembling slightly. Doton didn’t like touching the passengers, not skin to skin. She was cold, clammy even. He withdrew his hand, not quite believing what he had felt. And then, very slowly, he moved his hands into position, one either side of her sunglasses. He glanced at the Mediterranean woman. She had her hand in front of her mouth, and was biting on her knuckle. Doton gripped the glasses and slid them off.

Her eyes. Wide open and startled. Staring blindly back at him. Red capillaries bursting and bleeding into the white. The pupils huge, the
irises
just visible around them. They told him everything he needed to know. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck.’

A queasy feeling settled in his stomach. He turned and ran out of the carriage, pulling out his radio and barging through the crush of commuters.

16

AT 6.05 P.M.
, Navine Ayuk left the hospital pharmacy, took a side door marked Emergency Exit, and skulked around the back of the grey-brown building. He glanced miserably at a succession of recent No Smoking signs, which pointed the way to the nearest designated smoking shelter. This was a new addition to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. It kept staff and patient smokers united and isolated from the rest of society. ‘Twenty-first-century apartheid,’ Navine muttered as he approached the sectioned-off area of perspex. He stepped inside and lit up, glancing along the road. It was like a bus shelter, with no prospect of going anywhere. To make matters worse, music entered through a speaker in the roof, piped from God knew where in the
hospital
. If they really wanted people to give up, they should just say so, Navine thought as he sighed through a smoky breath. This was verging on persecution.

A light drizzle was beginning to fall, and Navine tried not to feel too grateful for the shelter. It still felt unnatural, a mini leper colony, displaying the antisocial underclass to the world. There was no dignity to it; there had been more before, when he used to nip out of the pharmacy and loiter in a doorway or lean against a wall. The rain stepped up a gear, slightly larger droplets running down the shelter’s clear sides. Navine pulled a batch of prescriptions out of his pocket, visualizing on which shelf and in which section each drug was housed. When he returned, he would round them up in turn by memory. It was a game he played with himself to keep his mind sharp. RapidAct,
Diabetics
, Shelf 3C. Co-coadamol,
Pain
, Shelf 5. Mystatin,
Fungals
, Shelf 2A. Prednisolone,
Steroids
, Shelf 11. He replaced the prescriptions and committed the information to memory.