Breaking Point (8 page)

Two more smokers entered the shelter. Navine shuffled back to make room. The speaker was playing a classical song. Navine recognized the piece but not the composer. He noticed that his fellow smokers weren’t lighting up. They had
turned
to face him, and Navine glanced away. They certainly weren’t staff. They had the look of 90 per cent of the hospital’s patients: rough, sports clothing, probably tattoos beneath their sleeves. Really, Navine believed, if you ever needed proof of the link between socio-economic group and health, come and look around a hospital. They were like exclusion zones for the middle classes.

Navine pulled on his cigarette. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the men were still staring at him. He flushed slightly, uncomfortable. The rain beat down more heavily. He turned to face them.

‘Do you need a light?’ he asked.

In an instant the two men stepped forward. They filled the width of the shelter. Navine tried to retreat but had nowhere to go. He stared at them in surprise. He judged them as the kind of animals that attacked NHS staff. Usually, though, they did it inside the building. They were tall and wide, baseball caps pulled low, the collars of their sportswear pulled high. Like the fourteen-year-old scrotes you saw in the town centre trying to dodge the CCTV.

Navine was suddenly on edge. Neither man had answered. He finished his cigarette and said, ‘Excuse me, I need to get back to work.’ They
stayed
where they were, a wall of flesh and bone. Navine looked through the perspex wall of the shelter. It was distorted with swollen raindrops. There were people in the middle distance but no one close. The world outside the shelter suddenly looked blurred and warped.

‘Really, I should be going.’

One of the men thrust his hand forward, palm open, and pushed it into Navine’s chest. Navine was forced back until he was pinned against the rear wall of the shelter. From nowhere, a punch took his breath away. Another bent him double, penetrating deep into his stomach. Navine fought for air. In between gasps he said, ‘I can’t give you any drugs.’

‘We don’t want drugs.’

‘What do you want then?’

‘We want you, Mr Ayuk.’

Navine pulled himself upright and squinted at them. They were looming over him in the small shelter. ‘How do you know my—’ He didn’t get any further. The second man leaned forward and pummelled him in the ribs, five or six quick jabs. Navine moved to shield himself, hunching his shoulders and crossing his forearms. Fists continued to smash into him, slapping his skin, breaking blood vessels, bruising muscles. Long
second
after long second. He curled up tighter, soaking up the blows. And then everything stopped. When he looked back up they were already outside, walking away, figures deformed by the wet plastic of the smokers’ refuge.

17

SARAH HIRST RAISED
her eyebrows and took a sweep around the Procedures room. ‘So, what have we got?’ she asked.

Mina and Charlie glanced at each other. The Path assistant shuffled a couple of papers. Dr Bernie Harrison, Dr Rowan Lyster and Dr Paul Mackay, still in their lab coats, avoided her eye. Two CID officers, Helen Alders, slim and boyish, and Leigh Harding, fair-haired and broad, monitored the forensic scientists opposite them, as if waiting for an answer.

‘Anybody?’ Sarah said.

DI Charlie Baker cleared his throat. ‘No cause of death yet, boss. Both under forty, different Underground lines, one white, one black, both female.’

‘Do we have names?’

‘A Tabatha Classon, twenty-seven, and a Toni-Anne Gayle, thirty-three.’

Charlie fished about in a cardboard wallet file. He pulled out two A4 pictures, headshots of the victims. Sarah examined them, her neck bent forward, her light hair spilling down and touching the edges of the pictures.

‘These are the afters, I take it?’

Charlie nodded.

‘Good job. You had eyes like that in real life, you’d scare the world to death.’

Sarah continued to pore over the images. They were photos taken in the mortuary, the lens looking straight down on the faces as they lay on light-green operating tables. A few years ago these would have been stark black and whites. Now, a digital camera plugged into a desktop printer, and the deathly skin tone was staring back at her. The unmistakable pallor, an indefinable matt finish that rendered Caucasian and Afro-Caribbean skin equally dead. But the eyes were what really unsettled Sarah. Wide open and staring, bloodshot, a final message of pain and shock haunting them.

She slid them on to Mina and asked, ‘And?’

‘And that’s about it,’ Charlie answered.
‘Toxicology
coming through, but obviously linked.’

‘What makes you so certain?’

‘These aren’t random deaths. Two women on successive days are found dead on Tube trains in the rush hour. Neither of them appear to be drug users or have any serious medical history. It’s early days, but I think we have to assume they’re linked.’

Sarah frowned. She reached for her coffee and took a sip, quickly realizing it was cold. She grimaced at the bitter liquid. ‘Forensics?’

Mina Ali checked with Drs Harrison, Lyster and Mackay. ‘Nothing as yet. But we’ve got two technicians in the morgue taking swabs, as well as Gross Samples checking clothing for fibres.’

‘Good. I want everything you can get. If it can be poured in a tube, or squeezed in a plastic bag, or stuck on the end of a cottonwool bud, I want it done. We need clothing, shoes, jewellery, whatever. We need skin, internal and external. The whole damn package.’

‘Internal?’ Mina asked. ‘Are you sure that’s necessary? There’s no evidence of rape or sexual assault.’

‘And there’s no evidence against it either. We’re going to do a blanket job on this. Because
when
you know nothing, it’s best to try everything.’

Mina nodded. ‘OK,’ she answered quietly.

‘Besides, there’s always a point of contact. If these deaths are murders, someone will have touched them somewhere.’

Bernie Harrison chewed his biro and said, ‘Unless it’s poisoning, and they’ve ingested something.’

Sarah turned to face him. She was well aware that scientists tended to be a scruffy lot, the jeans, trainers and T-shirt brigade who rarely shaved and presumably didn’t have mirrors, but Dr Harrison had taken this dishevelment one step further. Unlike the discipline of Charlie’s beard, Bernie’s looked like it hadn’t had a trim in its whole life. And the less said about the length of his hair the better. It was symptomatic of the critical difference between the two main professions of GeneCrime. No matter how plainclothes the CID officers became, they would never be mistaken for scientists.

‘And do you think that poisoning is particularly likely? Given that both victims would have had to consume their fatal dose at some indeterminate time before coincidentally dying on Tube trains in the rush hour?’

Bernie shrugged. ‘I was just saying …’

‘Fine. What about Pathology? Dr Stephens? What’s your best guess?’

Dr Chris Stephens stared resolutely at the wood-effect table and said, ‘I’ve only had twenty minutes with them. No external marks, nothing to go on at all.’

‘So the cause of death could be …’

‘It could be anything.’

‘Great.’ Sarah ran a finger along the line of an eyebrow. She sighed loud enough to share it with the room. ‘I know it’s incredibly early, but we need to move fast. And if any group can move fast, it’s you lot. It’s what you’re set up to do.’ Her phone beeped but she ignored it. ‘Just to fill in those of you who don’t already know, GeneCrime have officially been tasked with investigating. No outside help as yet.’

‘Why us, ma’am?’ Leigh Harding asked. ‘I mean, it seems a bit preliminary for GeneCrime to be wading in.’

‘There’s something else here, detective.’ Sarah directed her attention across the table. ‘Charlie?’

Charlie Baker sighed and rubbed his eyes. ‘There might have been more. Two other people have died suddenly on the Tube in the past month. One was diabetic, but other than that,
an
average male of forty-eight. The other was a female foreign student aged twenty-three. The deaths occurred three and a half weeks apart on entirely different regions of the Tube.’

‘Presumably there were post-mortems?’ Dr Stephens asked.

‘The male could have had a heart attack. Apparently the results were inconclusive. Diabetic, smoker, liked a bit of a drink now and then …’

‘And the student?’

‘She was repatriated to Lithuania, and we haven’t been able to trace whether a post-mortem examination was carried out there.’

‘So two fresh deaths in two days have begun to ring bells at the Met. They could be linked to previous events, or it could just be a case of four passengers out of several million randomly dropping dead.’ Sarah frowned. ‘Either way, we’re to do this quietly. Word gets out of several suspicious deaths on the Tube, we’re going to start a panic that will grind London to a halt. We have to be thorough and organized. If someone is out there doing this, well … you know what I’m saying.’

‘What about other priorities?’ Mina asked. ‘Are you advocating that we drop any cases?’

‘Nothing is to be dropped. Just back-burner
for
the time being. Danny Pavey still hasn’t been apprehended, so that case isn’t going anywhere for a while. The gangland stuff can grind on, as and when. In the meantime, this gets priority. That goes for CID and Forensics. OK?’

There was a muted series of confirmations around the room. Scientists and CID officers made mental lists of actions, of procedures to be followed, of workloads to be shifted. As Sarah had just reminded them, this is what they did. Rapid responses to potential crises.

‘Right,’ Sarah said. ‘Forensics report to the morgue ASAP to start sample preps. Chris, you can have access as soon as Forensics are done. Helen, Leigh? I want you chasing back through Tabatha and Toni-Anne’s daily lives – where they worked, where they lived, where they went, anything that might link them. And get witness statements.’

‘Ma’am, we’ve just learned that Judith Meadows is a witness to Tabatha’s death.’ Detective Harding frowned at Sarah. ‘Should we question her officially?’

‘Our Judith?’

Detective Harding nodded.

‘No, just find out what she saw. I know how you CID boys and girls like to play rough. I don’t
want
her giving birth in one of the interview rooms. We’ve just had the buggers decorated.’

Sarah reached for her coffee again and stopped herself just in time. ‘Anything else?’ she asked. No one responded so she stood up to signify the meeting was over.

18

VALDEK KOSONOVSKI PULLED
hard on the lead, and the dog fell into line. Canines had strong necks, he concluded, compared to people. Put a lead on a man who didn’t want to talk and a few quick yanks would make all the difference. Chokers were the best, the sort of lead that had almost gone out of fashion. Get behind some fucker with one of them around his neck, squeezing and crushing, closing off tubes and biting into skin, and he would fucking bark if you asked him to. Just ask Sol.

Valdek looked down at the thin line of spine and ribs beside him. No meat, no muscle, just skin and bone. Jaws that looked like they’d snap on a decent-sized bone. This wasn’t a dog, a proper dog, an Alsatian, a Rotty, a Staff. This was
an
artist, a thoroughbred, an aesthete. Dogs were meant to fight and to fuck, to be low down and dirty, to hunt in packs and scare people shitless. But greyhounds acted like they were above all those things, as if their ability to run meant they were somehow exempt. Valdek hated walking the fucking thing, and picking up after it. Any dog whose shit was bigger than its brain, he had long decided, went against the laws of natural selection and deserved to be executed.

‘This way, Rico,’ he growled, tugging hard.

Valdek was well aware that every job came with its bad points. His previous employer, Kieran Hobbs, had made Valdek clear up other people’s blood once too often. And now he was dead. Valdek wasn’t happy about that, but the knowledge of Kieran’s business activities had helped him come to the attention of Maclyn Margulis. And now, as part of Maclyn’s crew, Valdek was back to doing the things he liked best. Lifting weights, cracking skulls and torturing thugs. A little less dog walking and his life would be complete.

Valdek tugged the collar again and the greyhound trotted back next to him.

Maclyn had once told him that he rescued Rico from execution. As Ricochet Lad, he was a failed racer, one of the hundreds of greyhounds that
outlived
their usefulness by running too slowly or getting themselves injured. Valdek had heard numerous human pleas for mercy that Maclyn had ignored, men fighting for their lives, owing money, encroaching on his business, stealing his goods or trying to take him on. Men who had been tied up in his underground base, a dog lead around the neck, Maclyn facing them with his eyes alight and his teeth bared. And not one of them had experienced anything like the mercy Maclyn had shown for this dog. In fact, in the four months he had been working for him, Valdek had helped torture over a dozen men, one of whom could no longer walk, one of whom had been beaten so badly that he was still in hospital, and Sol, who wouldn’t be smelling anything or smoking any cigars for many years to come. Mercy for a dog, but no mercy for a gangster. That seemed to be Maclyn’s stance. It worked though. None of the men would be bothering Maclyn Margulis or his business interests ever again.

Valdek left the parkland through a short alley infested with weeds and broken bottles. Rico trotted lightly across the tarmac, nails clicking on the surface. Valdek encouraged it through a gate against its will. He cursed. It was forever wanting to take gargantuan strides across the grass, to find
real
rabbits to chase now that it no longer had to pursue plastic ones.

The large black X5 was directly ahead. Valdek stopped in disbelief, and the dog stopped too. The car was fucked. Valdek started walking towards it, quicker and on alert, scanning up and down the road. There was glass everywhere. All of the BMW’s windows had been put through. Even the glass of the wing mirrors was shattered, the rear-view too. This had been systematic. A message.