Breaking Point (10 page)

Reuben looked down at his hand, awkward suddenly. There was the faint noise of a diesel generator outside, and the shout of a man. He pulled his hand away and said, ‘Right, Mrs Babymaking-machine, back to work.’

Reuben placed the first chip into a small tray in the GeneImager and pushed it shut. He typed some more commands into his laptop and pressed the Enter key. Then he turned back to Judith, who was still clasping her stomach. ‘So, here goes.’ Moray stood up and joined Judith. Together, they turned their attentions to Judith’s sheet of printed paper.

A flurry of numbers came and went across the screen, a database scrolling automatically from top to bottom. And then an image began to appear, a grid that started to fill with densely packed red and green bars. After a few seconds it slowed, a two-tone bar code in the middle of the display, subtly changing, fine detail being added, locations and parameters being mapped and checked.

‘Right,’ Reuben muttered, ‘the heat map’s almost there. This is double-blind sample four, tested under the most rigorous of scientific conditions.’ He raised his eyebrows at Judith and Moray who were standing side on, facing each other. ‘Give or take.’ Soon, he thought, looking at them, their stomachs would be the same size. He checked the image, which was now static. ‘And the prediction is …’ Reuben ran his finger along the screen to a number in the bottom right. ‘Psycho.’

Moray moved his eyes down the list Judith was holding. ‘Number four is Lars Besser,’ he answered. ‘One out of one. Reasonable start, I suppose.’

Reuben inserted a new chip into the phospho-imager. ‘OK, this one is chip number nine.’ He waited while the phospho-imager scanned the chip and converted intensities to numbers, which then buzzed into the laptop. He pictured the process while the colours in the grid started to crystallize. DNA samples being amplified and labelled, then applied to the chip and hybridized, non-specific interactions washed away, the binding of DNA bases to those on the chip detected by fluorescence, intensities swapped for numbers, numbers rushing through databases,
matches
given positive values and disparities negative, data converted back into colours, reds and greens appearing on a screen and drawing a heat map, the final picture boiling down to a single value, a number Reuben could convert into a likely period of time. The laptop was quiet, its screen still. Reuben read the number. ‘Forty-four years,’ he said. ‘Borderline. But much more within the normal range than the abnormal.’

Moray consulted the piece of paper he and Judith were glued to. ‘Another lucky guess,’ he said. ‘That was Colm, Judith’s husband.’

‘So he would be seriously violent every forty-four years?’ Judith asked.

‘That’s the estimate. How long have you been together?’

‘Less than that.’

‘He doesn’t knock you around?’ Moray asked.

‘He certainly knocked me up. I don’t know about around.’

Moray smiled at Judith. ‘Ah, there’s time yet.’

Reuben slid another pre-prepared chip into the phospho-imager. While they waited, Moray and Judith stared out of the window, chatting idly away, watching the builders stream around the site, busy insects dressed in firefly greens and yellows.

Reuben cleared his throat and said, ‘Sample six, psycho.’

‘Aiden Boucher,’ Judith answered. ‘Bang on.’

Reuben’s mouth twitched. Without looking up, he busied himself with the next sample.

‘Three for three,’ Moray muttered. ‘I still think you’re cheating somehow.’

Reuben performed four more assays, and each came out as predicted. When he was ready to announce the result of the eighth, he rubbed his face, yawned, and said, ‘Number three. That’s if I’m not disturbing you two.’

Moray and Judith paced back from the window together.

‘Go on, then,’ Judith answered. ‘Moray’s got the list.’

‘This one’s going to be interesting – it’s yours,’ Moray said, peering at the matched names and random numbers. ‘Let’s hear how many years. Because if it’s any less than four lifetimes, or whatever mine was, there’s gonna be trouble.’

Reuben shook his head. ‘Sorry, my fat friend, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. It’s a technical fail.’

‘How do you mean?’ Judith asked.

‘It hasn’t hybridized well enough. We’ll have to strip it and have another bash later.’

‘When later? I’m due at GeneCrime.’

Reuben picked up one of the two remaining chips. Lost in the mechanics of science, he didn’t answer. He was excited and tried not to let it show. Seven correct results meant nothing. All ten would mean nothing. And it wasn’t a matter of whether the odd sample occasionally needed re-running for technical reasons. No, the fact was that Reuben had faith again. He knew this technique worked. He could carry it out in front of other people, perform blind testing, and it behaved exactly as he had predicted. This was independent corroboration, what true science thrived on.

Of course, Reuben knew that not all psychos had the same genotype. Far from it. Acute criminal behaviour, the sort that made front pages and shocked communities, the extreme actions of small numbers of men that blighted lives and sickened society, this was a wide spectrum. But the point he had learned was that there was overlap. Almost all sociopaths had four or more of the five critical aberrations he had identified. The other genes were just fine tuning, filling in the gaps, bridging the regions that separated one killer from another.

The three years of development he had carried
out
in GeneCrime had proved that the science was right. Thousands of samples, not just ten, had shaped and moulded Psychopath Selection to the point where it was rarely wrong. And now, after letting the technique slip through his hands when he was dismissed, Reuben knew it was back up and running with a vengeance. He had been able to remember enough of the code, the polymorphisms that mattered, the positive and negative controls and the principal pitfalls to avoid. This was a moment of resurrection, of rebirth, of a new beginning. He was back in business.

21

DANNY PAVEY PULLED
the umbrella tight over his head. CCTV was everywhere, sweeping and scanning, trawling the West London streets, searching for him. A killer on the run, a manhunt gaining pace. He pictured uniformed men in darkened rooms scrutinizing banks of brightly lit monitors. Danny shivered, glad of the rain that was falling. He was getting tired of wearing hooded tops emblazoned with the names of sporting teams and fashion labels he had no interest in. An umbrella meant immunity from above, protection from the thousands of cameras dredging the pavements. He knew he had to keep away, keep moving, keep changing, while he worked it all out. What had happened to him. What had suddenly flared up. What had made
him
beat a man to death in a local pub in front of his wife and friends.

He thanked God that he had just been paid for a two-week job. He had collected the cash on the way to the pub. Victoria had stopped the car, and he had knocked on the door. The fat wad of notes in his jacket pocket had made him wary in the crush of the pub. The money wouldn’t last for ever, but at least it put a roof over his head and food in his stomach. With careful spending and cheap accommodation, he would be OK for a few more days. After that, he dreaded to think. But for now, Danny just needed to figure it all out.

He had never so much as thrown a punch in his life. But he knew there was something, an entity, a shape, a feeling, lying in the shadows just out of sight. There always had been. Danny sat down on a bench next to an empty bus stop. He stared intently at a large revolving door ten metres away. As he did so he continued to pick at the mental splinter he’d been trying to grasp since he ran out of the pub with another man’s blood soaking his clothes. He wasn’t violent, he knew that. Nor aggressive or destructive or sadistic. None of the attributes of a murderer. But there was something.

Danny had tried to think it through in the language he knew best. Electricity. For the best part of three days, that was all he had done. He had pictured wiring, fuses and junctions, as if the brain was one large circuit board. And that was the truth, wasn’t it? He had seen a documentary and it had stuck with him. The firing of neurons, their myriad interconnections, the storage and discharge of tiny currents. The brain was a motherboard, with individual components that fulfilled individual roles. Memory, processing, behaviour. But something had tripped, a surge of charge from somewhere, a current spike that had changed his circuit in an instant.

On the morning of the second day he had cried and paced and balled his fists and pummelled the wall of his room. An exasperated anger grew and intensified, which had begun to tell him what he needed to know about himself. That it had always been there at the edges of who he was, waiting. The centre of his life was good. He had a decent family, an honesty in his work, an abhorrence of discrimination and unfairness. When he closed his eyes all he saw was a lightness. But as he had forced his bleeding knuckles into the wall time and time again, he knew there was something else. He pictured the boxing matches, the
gangster
films, the horror movies, the images from unedited news events. While his friends had turned away, Danny had watched ever more intently. A feeling that excited him rather than shocked him. A sense of understanding, of empathy, not always with the victims, sometimes with the protagonists. The ones meting out the punishments, the cuts, the bullet wounds, the tissue-deep bruises and broken bones. In his most brutally honest moment, slumped on the thin carpet, bleeding from his swollen knuckles, he finally conceded that his wiring might be at fault. It suddenly seemed aberrant and dangerous, live and uninsulated, capable of atrocity.

Danny couldn’t stomach the grimy room he had rented for more than a few hours at a stretch. He had spent the rest of his days hiding deep below the city. Thronging from platform to platform, from station to station, from train to train, lost among the hectic and the anxious, surrounded by people who seemed as nervous as he was. There were CCTV cameras on the Underground, but nothing like as many as glared silently down from buildings, lamp-posts, traffic intersections, anywhere they could be physically strapped above the surface of the city. He kept the umbrella tight over him, savouring the protection it brought.

He checked his watch. Almost one o’clock. He continued to stare through the clear perspex of the bus shelter at the revolving door.

He knew that it hadn’t taken much to expose it. Just his wife, and one of his friends. Darren. Someone he had known since sixth form college. An empty envelope he had discovered in one of Victoria’s drawers. Darren’s almost dyslexic use of a capital R in her first name, the way he always wrote R instead of r. The way Danny had noticed them almost studiously avoiding each other’s eye when a group of his friends had turned up at the pub. The new clothes Victoria had recently bought. But as Danny ran over it again, it still didn’t add up. Victoria and Darren may have been having an affair, he didn’t know for sure. The envelope was empty. He had nothing to go on other than Darren’s handwriting. Suspicion but nothing else. Surely not enough to make him club an innocent person to death during a game of pool? If he had been so insane about the thought of another man and his wife, why hadn’t he attacked Darren? These were the questions he needed to answer now.

And then he spotted her. Victoria, coming through the rotating doors of the office she worked in. A light brown coat with dark leather
boots
. Pulling out her own umbrella and pushing it open. Heading for the Tube station Danny had just come out of. He stood up, excited, fearful and anxious, just wanting to rush up to her and grab her and ask the sharp tangle of questions that were growing in his head.

He scanned the pavement for police, ducked his head down low and followed her into the Underground.

22

‘I USED TO
meet Sarah here occasionally,’ Reuben said, almost to himself. He cast his eyes around the room, with its wooden floors and small windows. It was reassuringly dingy, a coffee house that didn’t have some sort of fake Italian name, and wasn’t part of a spiritless American chain of caffeine peddlers. The staff who worked there even seemed to own it – a last bastion of independence in a city full of conglomerates.

‘How come?’ Mina said. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’

‘Just helping out. You know, the benefit of whatever wisdom I’d managed to hold on to. Cases that came up that couldn’t be solved with bog-standard forensics and needed something different, something lateral.’

‘And now?’

‘Sarah’s got you.’

Mina blushed through her dark skin. ‘I don’t know about that.’

‘And she’s got a lot on her plate now she’s taken over the unit.’

‘Look, Reuben, this is awkward.’

Reuben peered at her and scratched his chin. His stomach rumbled, telling him it was lunchtime. The results from earlier had stayed with him. Nine correct predictions, one technical fail. He was on the verge of something big, and he knew it.

‘Come on,’ he said, raising his eyebrows, ‘let’s have it.’

‘I don’t know how well I’m doing. I mean I watched you do the job and I saw what it was doing to you. I thought it might be different for me. But it’s not. It’s bloody hard. And I’m not sure I’m really making it happen. I know it’s only temporary until they get someone in to take over permanently—’

Reuben shushed her, holding up his hands. ‘You have the ability to do this. And like you say, it’s temporary. Enjoy it while you can. If and when they do appoint, you’ll be older and wiser, and capable of anything.’

Mina tugged at a small piece of skin surrounding a fingernail. ‘Look, there’s something else I wanted to pick your brains on. Some software has been run through the network, stuff I didn’t know still existed.’

‘What kind of software?’

Mina hesitated, using her nails like a pair of pincers to yank the skin clean off. It left a tiny track of red in its wake. Reuben noted that it wasn’t the only one.

‘Your software.’