Breaking Point (18 page)

A man. A dark sombre suit with a cheerful tie. The sort of tie that says I might appear serious, but actually I’m fun. He looks European, Scandinavian maybe. The man is close. Too close.

He uses his free hand to feel behind him. There is nowhere to retreat. He is pushed into the corner, his back against the cold plastic wall of the carriage. The man is tall, looming over him. Looking down. Pushing and squeezing. Squashing and imposing. Crowding and suppressing. He starts to sweat. The man stares past him, his body dominating and menacing.

People get on and people get off. The man stays where he is. Too close. The door slides shut to the sound of a high-pitched beeping that cuts right through him. The train starts to pick up speed. The man sways slightly and brushes against him. He slides the needle forward between his index finger and thumb. The sweat intensifies. His stomach muscles tighten.

Come on, he says to himself. Fight back. Don’t let them push you. Don’t let them dominate you. The ones who pressure you, the ones who invade your space.

He is coming to the boil. He needs to release it. He reaches forward, ready. This man will die. This
man
has got to die. He stabs the needle suddenly into his upper thigh. Too rough this time, no subtlety. Just an urge that has to be satiated. The man feels it, no doubt at all. Their eyes lock for several long seconds. The man with the colourful tie seems like he wants to say something. There is curiosity and mild surprise in his face. But he doesn’t. He simply glances down at the site of entry and then back up again, an unformed question on his lips.

And then the train starts to slow once more.

Your work is done, a voice inside says. He shuffles away. His right hand returns to his coat pocket. As the doors start to open, he carefully caps the hypodermic and steps off on to the wide platform. The sweat is subsiding, the feeling intensely peaceful, the release sweet and absolute. Behind him, in the carriage, the poison will be in full effect. Slowing the heart, making it misfire, shutting down the nervous system.

The train moves off, sliding through the tunnel like a plunger in a syringe.

12

PINNED TO A
large blue noticeboard in the corner of the room were four A4 colour photographs. Images of four faces labelled with their names in black marker pen at the bottom margins. Two female and two male, three Caucasians and one Afro-Caribbean. All with wide-open eyes, staring and bloodshot. In the top right corner of each, a sticker displayed their printed case number above a bar code. A face had become a name, which had become a number.

DCI Sarah Hirst forced down the last couple of mouthfuls of cold toast. She had brought the slices with her from home, buttered sides facing each other, a freezer bag protecting the other contents of her case from the crumbs. ‘Go on,’ she said, her mouth still full.

Dr Mina Ali lifted her head from the tangle of papers she was having difficulty replacing in a brown cardboard wallet file. A thick and defeating hangover was grinding through her system. Four large glasses of white had almost made up for taking the team out. She had stayed to the end, just her and Alex Brunton going the distance. ‘That’s it for Forensics,’ she said. ‘DNA negative, clothing uninformative, fibres still being analysed. Despite our best efforts, no matching profile between any of the four.’

Sarah traced a middle finger around the outline of her mouth, checking for stray crumbs. ‘OK,’ she sighed, suppressing a yawn. A very late night had almost stretched into a very early start. Almost. In between she had managed three hours of dead sleep in her own bed, which had felt like a luxury. ‘We’ve got a careful one.’ She turned her attention to the pony-tailed man next to Mina. ‘Bernie, you’ve been liaising with Toxicology. What have we learned overnight?’

‘Not much. The trouble is we still don’t know exactly what the substance is. We know the family of substances and likely chemical groups, but the Tox and Poisons people can’t be any more specific than a sodium arsenate derivative. They reckon with cases like this it can take a couple of
weeks
to define an uncommon substance entirely, especially since the only samples we can provide them with are congealed bloods.’

Sarah frowned. Her stomach growled, and she spoke louder to mask the complaint of her intestines. ‘I don’t understand how we could do things differently.’

‘Look, usually someone is poisoned – accidentally, or through a suicide attempt – and they turn up at A and E. Blood is taken, and urine gets tested.’ Bernie scratched his chin through the tangled coils of his beard. ‘Now that’s important because of the excretion of arsenates and other poisons. The doctors get an idea of dose and severity from what the kidneys are able to handle. Then, apparently, poison victims often vomit or have severe diarrhoea, again providing fluids that can be examined.’

‘But not ours.’

‘Exactly. They are dying on underground trains, a long way from medical intervention. And from what the CCTV is showing us, death, or at least unconsciousness, seems to happen fairly quickly. By the time fellow passengers have realized the problem, alerted someone, instigated the chain of events that results in medics getting underground to the scene, the poor bastard is
dead
and our hopes of getting large quantities of fluids are already diminishing.’

‘So what can we change?’

‘We can’t drain the bladders of the corpses in the mortuary. We’ve already thought about it. Trouble is, they’ve tended to lose bladder control shortly after death.’

Sarah was quiet, and her silence hung like a punctuation mark, no one wanting to interrupt. She was thinking, on the verge of saying something. A few members of the room glanced around at one another, raised their eyebrows or shrugged.

‘The key to this,’ Sarah said finally, ‘is supply. Let’s not get bogged down in exactly which arsenite or arsenate this is. The point is, the killer is careful. Despite Mina’s best efforts with victim clothing, the DNA evidence is fairly flimsy. CCTV isn’t showing us anything yet. We don’t know what he looks like or why he’s doing what he’s doing. We have no idea what links the four dead people in our morgue, other than that they travelled on the Tube at rush hour. So until a forensic breakthrough, or a CCTV match, our CID line of inquiry has also got to focus on the supply chain. Who could get access to this stuff? Not the exact compound, but this
type
of compound.’

Detective Leigh Harding cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been doing some checking,’ he said, ‘and it’s not as rare as you might hope. These substances are actually relatively common.’

Sarah peered at him. Newly promoted, a bright officer, seconded from a rough patch in Tottenham. A man who had once disappeared off the radar for two years, so deep underground among a gang of racist extremists he had almost been given up on by his superior officer. As she watched him take a small notebook from his jacket, she suddenly thought, I don’t know these people. I spend most of my waking hours with them, but really, who do I know? Charlie maybe; that was about it. They were strangers who spent intense hours together in windowless rooms staring at pictures of the dead.

‘Common?’ she asked. ‘Well I don’t have any of it knocking around at home, and I’d hope none of you have.’ Sarah cast her eyes around the room, at Charlie, at Mina, at Bernie Harrison, at Paul Mackay, at the pathologist Dr Chris Stephens, at the other CID officers and support staff. Relative outsiders and misfits who had all been recruited to GeneCrime due to exceptional ability of one sort or another. She returned her gaze to Detective Harding. ‘So come on, who in the real world
could
get hold of sodium arsenate or arsenous acid anhydride, or whatever it is?’

‘Well, this class of chemical is used in industry. Derivatives are used in manufacturing, in the motor trade, in metal treatments and in certain pharmaceuticals. It says here,’ Detective Harding added, reading from his notes, ‘that the anhydride form of arsenous acid, arsenic trioxide, is used as a herbicide, pesticide and rodenticide.’

‘Did you make that last word up?’

‘You’d be surprised what I’ve learned this week. And pharmacists and the like sometimes have stocks of things they maybe shouldn’t have.’ Detective Harding blew air through his pursed lips, an act Sarah took to be slightly melodramatic. ‘Then there’s the terrorist connection.’

‘As in overseas?’ Charlie asked.

‘Maybe. The raw ingredients for biological weapons – explosives, dirty bombs, you name it – seem to be cheap and plentiful if you have the right contacts. And moving those substances between countries, as we’ve seen, isn’t necessarily as difficult as we might like to believe.’

‘But we don’t think this is anything to do with an organization?’

‘I’m just making the point that we shouldn’t
confine
our search to the UK. This in no way smacks of something like al-Qaeda, but the principle remains. We are in a global culture. People are in a constant state of flux, and what they have access to is as well. Which might explain why we can’t get an exact handle on what the substance is. It could simply be a chemical that isn’t used much in this country.’

Sarah raised her palms to stem the speculation. ‘OK. Let’s not get too sidetracked. Time is precious. CID need to be building a picture of who could get this stuff while we churn through the gross forensics. The final DNA analyses need to happen ASAP on the latest body, the German man who was brought in last night. We have to keep ploughing through the vast number of CCTV feeds. We all know our missions.’

Sarah turned to Charlie, her closest ally. She appreciated that she was not a man-motivator. She scared people, made them uncomfortable, knew how to throw her weight around to achieve results. But Charlie was the man to get them fired up and ready for battle.

‘Anything to add, DI Baker?’ she asked.

Charlie stood up and folded his arms. He began quietly, his voice gradually rising as he spoke, his soft London accent slowly hardening
from
statement to statement. ‘I want you to remember something. Just because they haven’t been disembowelled, or mutilated, or hacked to pieces like most of our corpses, I don’t want this treated any less seriously. Blood is an emotive thing to human beings. We see the red stuff sprayed about and it does something peculiar to us all. As police officers and forensic experts it makes us want to get out there and catch the scumbag and make him pay. But this is no different. Just because the victims have come to us looking relatively unscathed means nothing.’ He turned to the noticeboard with its four pictures. ‘I want you to think about Tabatha Classon, about Toni-Anne Gayle, about Anthony Maher, and about last night’s fatality, Fabian Arlt. I want you to use that primal feeling, that hunger for vengeance, that angry sense of hurt and injustice that blood and guts instil, and I want you to take this bastard down. Some fucker has killed four innocent Londoners in under a week using a poison that fucks you from the inside as badly as any knife or bullet ever could.’ Charlie made a point of staring down at the thin blue carpet. ‘Beneath our very feet, under this room, in the tunnels that run through the city, things are going to go mental now. The Met is going to
want
to get involved. London transport is going to get messy. The newspapers will be screaming for results. Ready yourselves. This is going to be war.’ He paused, nodding his head slowly. ‘But we’re going to win. We’re going to get to this bastard before he gets to anyone else. And then let’s see how brave he is in a roomful of coppers with no hypodermic syringe.’

13

NICK FURNISS KICKED
the Formica doors of the public toilets open, one at a time. Nothing. All six of them empty. A couple of the toilets weren’t flushed. The place stank. Sour and damp, something hanging in the air he didn’t want to breathe in. The doors were scratched and battered, brutal drawings and crude words etched deep, as if they held great meaning or had been carved in desperation. He read the scrawls, his eyes not really taking it in, just skimming the litany of graffiti.

He glanced around the subterranean space, angry and on edge. At the far end was a cubicle with a blue wheelchair symbol he hadn’t checked yet. How the fuck disabled people were supposed to get down the stairs in the first place he had no
idea
. Nick walked over to it and smashed the door open. It slammed against the wall, a loud crack echoing off the grubby floor tiles and ruined Formica. ‘Fuck,’ he shouted. It was empty. This was the place, he was sure of it. A large public toilets diagonally across the road from the Ibis hotel in Stratford.

He checked his watch and swore again. Nine forty-seven a.m. He was late for work, which wasn’t good. Things were dire enough as they were, and getting worse by the day. His IT team was in disarray, three of them off sick, others bitching about being swamped, the rest barely seeming to do anything. Only a matter of days before he was sacked, his mortgage defaulted and his financial life collapsed.

Nick’s mobile rang and he pulled it out irritably. This had better be the man he was supposed to be meeting. ‘Yes,’ he said curtly.

The voice on the other end was not the one he had expected. ‘Is that Nick Furniss?’ the man asked.

‘Yes.’

‘My name is Reuben Maitland. I’ve been trying to track you down for a few days. I think we need to talk.’

Nick grimaced, a sick coldness in his stomach,
the
sour air of the toilets seeming to sink straight into him and solidify. This could only be bad news. ‘What about?’ he asked. But he was sure he knew already. A partner in the bank, a senior exec ringing him up to bollock him. Nick hadn’t been taking calls for the best part of a week. He’d only turned on his phone because of what he was about to do.

‘This isn’t straightforward. Maybe we could meet? Where are you?’

In a huge fucking underground toilet. Going fucking crazy, climbing out of my skin. Waiting for some cunt I’ve never met. My life completely fucked up. Mugged a few days ago in an alleyway, then attacked outside a bar after work. No visible cuts or wounds, just bruises all over, making me hurt if I so much as fucking breathe. Two men both times, evil cunts who kicked and punched, almost for the sake of it.