Breaking Point (11 page)

‘Mine?’

‘The project we were working on when you were sacked. Psychopath Selection.’

Reuben sat bolt upright. ‘But I thought it got deleted.’

‘So did I.’

‘Commander Abner’s purge, getting GeneCrime back on track, stamping on anything unofficial, anything that I had been messing around with outside my official remit.’

‘This is my point. Lots of things changed after you were sacked. We did get back to basics, back to doing what we did best. Your name was dirt for a while. Your directories were deleted, your belongings thrown out, your papers shredded. You might remember that you
brought
a lot of very unwelcome attention on the division.’

‘And how.’

‘Which is why I was amazed to see a program that looked very like Psychopath Selection installed on the mainframe.’

‘You’re saying that this hasn’t been there all along?’

‘I don’t think so. For various reasons I’ve been spending a lot of time trawling through the IT system. Maybe I’m just noticing things I wouldn’t have spotted before. But that isn’t what really matters.’

‘It isn’t?’

‘What really matters is that it has been used. A batch test, data dragged through it. And recently.’

‘How recently?’

‘Days.’

Reuben blinked rapidly, a series of unsettling images darting through his mind. Someone messing with Psychopath Selection just as he had resurrected it himself. His own technology being used and abused. Surely Mina was wrong.

‘So you’re saying that a member of GeneCrime has actually loaded DNA profiles into it?’

‘All I can say for certain is that—’

‘But what about the DNA chips? We only printed a few preliminary ones.’

‘I know. It seems a bit weird to say the least.’

‘And you’re sure this isn’t just idle curiosity on someone’s part? If there’s one thing computers are good for, it’s idle curiosity. God knows I’ve clicked on things I shouldn’t have in my time.’

Mina finished her cup of coffee, grimacing slightly, showing her teeth. ‘If this is curiosity, it isn’t the idle sort. This is active. Files look to have been created and then destroyed. Someone has been putting some time into this.’

‘I still don’t get how they could have got access to the code. I mean, you and me were the main people working on it. Are you sure you didn’t keep a spare copy that could have fallen into someone else’s hands?’

‘I didn’t get a chance even to back it up. It was sickening after all that work, but CID went through everything on Abner’s orders, making sure the whole division was legal and above board, and not, you know …’

Reuben flashed back to the time before his dismissal. Things getting out of hand. Pressures and deadlines, catching serial killers, desperately researching ways of making crime detection better and faster, lines becoming
blurred
, fantastic possibilities hampered by rigid protocols, being increasingly pushed to introduce unproven technologies. ‘Yes, I know,’ he answered quietly.

‘Look, I’ve had an idea, a way to test this.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’s going to involve some fairly intense legwork on your part. Several long hours glued to your lab machinery, a whole day or so of activity.’

Reuben grimaced. ‘It’s what I do best.’

‘Here,’ Mina said, reaching inside her handbag. ‘You’ll need these.’

She glanced around and then pulled out a bright orange box the size of a cigarette packet. As she slid it across to Reuben, streaks of condensation appeared on the table.

‘You’ve smuggled these out?’ he asked.

‘Thirty-eight DNA samples from GeneCrime,’ Mina answered. ‘Store them somewhere safe.’

Reuben hesitated, then took the plastic box, slotting it into his jacket pocket. It was cold to the touch, and he could feel it through the lining of his coat. The technology he thought he had left behind coming back to life. Someone on the inside of GeneCrime starting to take risks. An unproven technique in the wrong hands. But what
for
? What could be gained by doing it silently? What could the technique achieve that couldn’t be accomplished through official routes?

Reuben had a sudden notion, but then dismissed it. That would be too astonishing. But as he finished his drink amid the rattle and din of the café, Mina watching him carefully and silently, a nervousness rose in his stomach and the possibility refused to go away.

23

DI CHARLIE BAKER
glanced up from the screen as the door opened. Mina Ali entered, flustered, her mouth open, looking like she had just run up several flights of stairs.

‘What did I miss?’ she said, striding over.

Charlie fought the urge to ask her where the hell she had been. He had phoned her, texted her, even emailed her, and there had been no reply. She had clearly been outside the building. It wasn’t a crime to leave the premises during the working day, but the acting head of Forensics should at least be contactable. He let it go. What was on the screen was far more important than small matters of work protocol.

‘This,’ he answered, picking up the remote control and pressing Play.

Charlie watched Mina push through, moving her small frame past CID officers and forensic scientists. She positioned herself between Sarah Hirst and Bernie Harrison. The ten or so GeneCrime staff crowding around the flatscreen monitor subtly readjusted their positions to get the best possible view.

A couple of seconds of static gave way to a blue screen, which then blinked a few times. And then they were there, in the carriage of a train. Black and white CCTV footage inside a rounded cylinder. People standing and sitting, pushed in tight. Fatigue lurked in several of the faces, as if they were on their way home after work. From the flash of light through a near-side window, followed by sudden blackness, it was clear the train was accelerating out of a station. Passengers on either side rocked back and forth as the Tube started to take corners beneath the city.

Charlie pressed the Pause button and said, ‘For the benefit of Dr Ali, remember to keep a sharp eye on the bottom left of the screen.’

He pressed Play again, and the black and white image resumed. Charlie had watched the footage three times – twice on his own and once with the whole group – and had seen something different each time. It was a matter of almost focusing
through
the pictures, letting your eyes take you where they wanted, absorbing the whole of the scene and all of the information it contained. True, the main action was confined to the bottom left of the screen, but Charlie was well aware from years of viewing CCTV that it was all too easy to miss peripheral events. And that what went on at the margins of sight, as at the margins of life, was sometimes every bit as important as the main occurrence.

He skimmed once again through the passengers he could see most clearly: a Caucasian man polishing his glasses on his tie; a young Japanese male playing with a mobile phone; a smartly dressed woman reading a novel; a young Mediterranean couple staring up at a Tube map; an Afro-Caribbean workman in a paint-spattered sweatshirt with his arms folded; a blonde-haired woman rummaging in her bag; a short older man holding a hand rail; a white youth staring into an MP3 player; a middle-aged black woman flicking through a magazine; a pair of female students talking, their faces serious; an Asian male, seated with his eyes closed.

After another twenty seconds of unremarkable footage, Charlie transferred his attention to a male passenger who was standing close to the camera.
He
was holding on to a metal rail, swaying with the train, reading a folded newspaper. He appeared to be in his early to mid thirties. His clothing was the smart end of casual, fairly generic stuff, Gap or Next or Marks and Spencer, Charlie guessed. A small jolt rippled through the carriage as the Tube hit an uneven stretch of track. Charlie knew that this was where the footage got interesting. He scanned the passengers around the man, looking for anything out of the ordinary – for sudden movement, for anything resembling intent. But there was nothing. It was almost a tableau, twenty or thirty passengers lost in their own journeys, daydreaming their way between stations, reading or listening to music, staring up at adverts and station maps. He could almost feel the boredom, the frustration, the claustrophobia eating into each and every one of them.

And then the man started to alter. His posture loosened, his face changed. Staring hard into the image, Charlie could just about make out the eyes lolling, the lower jaw dropping. His newspaper fell to the floor. He let go of the hand rail and grabbed at his stomach. His other hand moved to his neck, fingers spread wide across its surface, just above the V of his jumper. The train jolted again. All the standing passengers moved in
unison
, starting from the front of the carriage and almost instantly spreading to the back. But the man at the bottom left of the picture didn’t move in the same way. His knees buckled and he toppled forward. Charlie felt like shouting, ‘Help him, for Christ’s sake, help him,’ as if it was live, happening in real time, and they could make a difference. The man slumped to the floor, knocking into the two young students. They turned around, jerky in the footage, shouting silent words. Charlie tried to lip-read. He was sure they were grousing, swearing maybe, upset that another passenger had crashed into them.

Charlie watched the rest of the carriage react. It was a London reaction, people craning for a view of the action and then turning away, ignoring it, blotting it out. Eyes meeting and then darting quickly away. An older woman got up and checked on the passenger, who was face down on the floor, his features invisible. She beckoned to someone else, slightly out of view. One or two more of the commuters looked round, their eyes staying a second longer this time before turning away.

Charlie stared intently at the footage. The Tube was slowing, flashing past advertising hoardings, entering the light of a station. At the very top of
the
picture there was a small amount of activity close to the doors, passengers getting ready to alight, checking they had their belongings. The doors slid open and seven or eight people shuffled off, their backs to the CCTV.

Charlie pressed the Pause button again.

‘Conclusions?’ he asked. ‘Come on, we haven’t got all day. This is happening now. Right now.’

Sarah was first to speak. ‘It might sound obvious, but we can now officially rule out coincidence in the deaths of Tabatha Classon and Toni-Anne Gayle. The most recent victim’s name is Anthony Maher, by the way. And Christ help the city’s transport infrastructure. What else are we thinking? Come on, you’re the bright young things of crime detection in this country.’

There was a moment of hesitation.

‘Two female and one male,’ Detective Helen Alders said, staring into the space between Sarah and Charlie. ‘We can rule out sexual deviancy. And those other possible two last month. The diabetic and the student from Latvia—’

‘Lithuania.’

‘They were male and female, weren’t they?’

Sarah nodded. ‘But as you know, there’s a good chance we’ll never be able to link them to this case. We have to exclude them for now.’

‘So it’s random?’

‘No. This is rush hour on the Tube. People are being selected.’

‘On what basis?’

‘On the basis of why go underground to kill? Why not pick people off on the dark streets above?’

‘Fair point,’ Helen said.

‘So it’s about being in the depths of the city, repressed, claustrophobic and packed in tight?’ Bernie Harrison asked.

Sarah blew a stream of air out of the side of her mouth. ‘Look, we’re CID, not Psychology. Let’s think practically here. Who is the killer? How do we arrest him? That sort of thing.’

Charlie ran a hand across the TV image. ‘I’ll tell you who he is. One of those people is the killer.’ Still frozen on the screen were twenty or so passengers, vainly waiting for the doors to close and the train to continue its journey.

‘I’m not so sure,’ Bernie answered. ‘It depends how long the poison takes. We don’t know how quick or slow it is. It could have been administered on the platform, or on an escalator, even.’

‘Any word on the toxes?’ Sarah asked.

Dr Paul Mackay flicked through a couple of pages in the monogrammed leather notebook he
was
holding. ‘The best guess at the moment is that it’s an anhydride derivative.’

‘Which one?’

‘The Guy’s and St Thomas’ Poisons Unit aren’t sure yet. Based on molecular weight and NMR results, it could be an acid anhydride, possibly arsenous, or some other heavy metal.’

‘And what about its likely action?’

‘We’ve contacted a toxicologist specializing in heavy metal poisons, but he was a bit slow getting back to us. And when he did it was all stuff about arsenites versus arsenates, LD50 doses and chronic and acute exposure.’

Sarah gave Dr Mackay an undisguised look of impatience. ‘So …’

‘So in the meantime I’ve Googled it.’

‘What the hell did we do before the internet? What does the fountain of all useless information say? How quick between injection and death?’

‘Well, as our expert was alluding to, that depends on the dose and the method of delivery. But at a rough estimate, a small number of minutes.’

‘Like how many?’

‘Could be three or four. I’m guessing, but there you go. The Poisons Unit need a larger volume of blood from Tabatha and Toni-Anne to run some
further
analyses, which are being biked over to them as we speak. We won’t be sure until they get back to us.’

Sarah turned back to the frozen image on the screen. ‘So it’s entirely feasible our killer injected the poison as the train pulled into the last station, hopped off, and left the victim to die midway between stops. Virtually undetectable.’

Charlie stared back at the screen. He didn’t share his boss’s assessment. Someone had to have seen something. No crime was undetectable. And if anyone was going to find the killer, it was going to be him.

24

REUBEN WATCHED MINA
as she ran a hand through her thick black hair. It was a tired gesture that managed to look almost luxurious, like she was immersed in fatigue, seduced by it. Behind her, an arrow of birds appeared, flying across the laboratory window. The light was fading, giving way to a dark blue sky with black cloud. The birds, virtually in silhouette, were synchronized, flapping, pausing and flapping again like some sort of avian Morse code. They were fleeing the country, aware that summer was over, chasing the good times on some other continent. Reuben could see the attraction.