Breaking Point (25 page)

‘I’ve told you all I know about the tobacco,’ Tommy said.

Maclyn made a growling noise. He lifted the top lip of the dog’s mouth. A row of sharp white teeth gleamed out at him.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure, Rico.’

‘You see, that raises a problem.’

‘What?’

The growling got louder, and rose in pitch.

‘You treat me like a dog, I’m going to treat you like one.’

Tommy felt the choker tighten again, Valdek pulling it taut. He caught the eye of Warren Mathers, fear and anger in his battered face. Praz continued to stare dead ahead, blocking it all out. Maclyn stepped forward. He was still growling. He opened the dog’s mouth fully with both hands. Tommy saw the blood on its neck, its dark pink tongue lolling at the back of its throat. He suddenly felt sick. Valdek tugged harder, and Tommy stopped breathing. Maclyn rotated the
mouth
of the dog ninety degrees and forced it across Tommy’s open mouth. The stench of dead dog invaded his nose. Maclyn was going fucking insane. Then Maclyn pushed the canine’s upper and lower jaws together. Two rows of fine pointed teeth dug into Tommy’s cheeks and lips. Maclyn pushed harder, snarling all the time, shaking the head back and forth like it was chewing a fucking bone and wouldn’t let go. Tommy closed his eyes, screwing them up in agony, vowing that when he got out, Margulis was a dead man.

‘You don’t fuck,’ Maclyn growled. ‘You really don’t fuck with me.’

Tommy tasted blood in his mouth. Razor-sharp points of pain digging deeper into soft flesh. His eyes watered again and he opened them. Maclyn Margulis was staring at him. An animal. A visceral, primeval monster.

A fucking madman.

5

IT SEEMED TO
be raining inside. A penetrating alarm was echoing around the room, shrill and intense. Through the haze of spray fanning out from the ceiling, Reuben and Mina spotted a commotion near the back of the lecture theatre. The room was large, designed to seat a couple of hundred people, with banked seating extending upwards from the lectern.

‘Dr Crannell?’

There was no reply, the answer maybe lost somewhere in the ringing of the alarm. Reuben started to walk towards the steps on the far side of the room, shielding his eyes from the all-pervasive water.

‘Dr Crannell?’ he shouted again.

And then he got a clearer view. He sprinted up
the
stairs. James Crannell, a distance in his eyes, a sense of mania about his face, was strangling a man in a baseball cap. The man was pale, his head lolling to one side, and Reuben knew he was either already dead or about to die. He shuffled along the enclosed seating.

‘James, for fuck’s sake,’ he said, grabbing Dr Crannell.

He prised away the fingers of his left hand and forced his arms apart. The man slumped between them. Reuben felt for a pulse. There was something just there, a weak throb on the side of his neck.

‘Mina, call an ambulance. Get some back-up,’ he shouted.

Below him, standing near the door and trying to stay dry, Mina called back, ‘I’ll dial it in.’

‘And try and find the Off switch for the alarm system.’

Reuben turned back to James Crannell. His white shirt was soaked, a few of the buttons torn, his tie hanging forlornly down. He seemed to stare straight through Reuben, almost as if he had forgotten what he was doing. Reuben glanced down at the man on the floor who was lying motionless and pale, his lips blue, his arms by his side.

‘James, I want you to take a couple of steps back,’ he said evenly.

‘It’s him,’ James said, not moving.

The alarm continued to pierce the air.

‘I’m asking you to step away. Now.’

Reuben weighed Dr Crannell up. There was an intensity in his face he hadn’t seen before, a seething absorption he didn’t like the look of.

‘He’s one of the men who’ve been attacking my family.’

‘I understand that. Now, the best thing is you give me some room.’

The alarm stopped, and a few seconds later the sprinklers ceased as well. Dr Crannell moved his head from side to side, as if shaking off the noise and the wetness.

‘OK.’

‘You calm?’

‘I am,’ he answered. He looked to Reuben like he was just coming down from some serious drugs, shaky and vague, an intense energy starting to ebb.

Reuben returned to the man in the baseball cap. He removed the hat and examined him more closely, his head to one side. The man coughed and retched, a small amount of watery blood running out of his mouth.

‘What’s he doing here?’ he asked.

‘They came into my lectures a couple of times, followed me to my car.’

‘And where’s the other one?’

James Crannell scanned the lecture theatre. ‘Haven’t seen him.’

Reuben bent down closer. The man was hanging on, but only just. He was breathing, short, rapid intakes, sucking in small volumes of air. Involuntary programmed responses were taking control, an oxygen-starved brain running on autopilot. Out of the corner of his eye, James still appeared restless and uneasy. And then something occurred to Reuben. A flash of memory, the image of a short encounter with the unconscious man. Different clothes now, wet hair, blue lips, a face drained of colour. The build, the slightly blunted nose, the pale features that echoed somewhere. He stared harder, trying to pin it down, seeing him as if he hadn’t just been strangled for several minutes. He patted the man’s pockets. His trousers had a zipped compartment. He pulled it open and slid out a bulky leather wallet. As Reuben flipped it open, he realized where he had seen the face before. The moment crystallized. He had spent two minutes with this person a week or so earlier.

He stood up.

‘Dr Crannell,’ he said, ‘are you certain this is one of the men who have been attacking you?’

James Crannell rubbed his face. He was fidgety and tense. ‘Yeah,’ he answered. ‘A hundred per cent.’

Reuben looked down at the wallet in his hand. He opened it up and held it in front of James’s face for him to inspect.

‘Jesus,’ James answered. He started to back along the seating.

‘Look, an ambulance is coming. Police will be coming. Even university security I guess will arrive at some point. There’s nothing to be gained from going anywhere, James. I’m on your side. We can sort this together.’

James glanced uncertainly down at the man on the floor. ‘I reached my breaking point, didn’t I? And I’ve hurt someone. I’m going to be arrested and put away for a long time.’ He bit hard into his knuckle. ‘Oh my God.’

‘Don’t panic,’ Reuben said. ‘It will be worse if you run.’

He weighed him up again. Would he stop him if he chose to flee? Judging from what he’d just done to the man in the baseball cap, James was a hell of a lot stronger than he looked. Reuben
quickly
decided that if he tried to attack the man on the floor, he would fight him. If he decided to run then that was his decision. He watched James vacillate.

‘Look, we came over to talk to you about what we’ve found out, but this changes things. We’ve now learned something important. This is my best guess at what has been going on. We know this has come through GeneCrime, the elite forensics unit. Your genotype has been scanned and you have been identified as having a potentially unstable set of genes.’

James scratched the back of his head, like he had just been stung there. ‘I know all that.’

‘But this tells us something else.’ Reuben inspected the warrant card in the wallet again. A police wallet. The name said Detective Simon Grainger. ‘If this man has been attacking you, and he’s clearly a policeman, it explains how he and his partner have been able to track you down so easily, to find your family and get access to the others.’ Reuben was thinking as he spoke, piecing it all together. Someone in GeneCrime passing information out to a copper. A name came to him, the man who had introduced him to Grainger at the pub, the day of Commander Abner’s official burial. Detective Leigh Harding. He dismissed it
as
soon as it came. This was the work of Forensics, not CID. Scanning genotypes was not something a police officer could do. ‘This is more dangerous than I thought. This raises the stakes.’

‘How?’

‘It means that the motivation, the reason why this has all happened to you and several others, may be very different from what we’ve guessed so far.’

Reuben heard a siren, then another one. His hearing had always been acute, almost like the wail of a distress signal was a sound he was attuned to above all others. He waited a few seconds for James to pick it up as well. On the floor, Detective Grainger remained still, his chest rising and falling quickly, oblivious to everything around him. He was hanging on. Reuben hoped that one of the sirens was an ambulance.

‘So, I guess this is it,’ James said.

‘Grainger obviously has a plan,’ Reuben continued. ‘He put himself in real danger of exposure doing this, so it must be something he believes in deeply. I met him once, only for a few minutes. He was fairly unexceptional. Didn’t strike me as anything other than a committed copper. But to embark on a mission like this, without sanction, without the knowledge of
the
force, suggests that this is something big. Criminals intimidating innocent people is one thing. When the police start doing it, you know you’ve got problems.’

James Crannell stared back. There was a growing air of defeat, of surrender, of utter disillusionment about him. Four or five minutes earlier he had been on the verge of killing a man; now he looked like he was ready to die himself. The sirens grew louder and Reuben wondered suddenly about his genotype. Had it been there, in the background, waiting? Had it allowed him to attack a larger man, a policeman who had been trained to fight off attackers, and almost kill him? He would never know. That was the trouble with human genetics. There were absolute truths and statistical certainties, but genes were hidden, buried deep, invisible unless you had the means to dig them up and read them. And as he studied Dr James Crannell, he appreciated that even if you do sequence all of someone’s DNA, that was only ever half of the story.

Mina entered through a door at the front of the lecture theatre. Reuben left James and walked down to meet her.

‘They’ll be here any second,’ she said.

Reuben raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Thanks,’ he
answered
. ‘Think you can handle it from here?’

‘Sure.’

Reuben opened the door and walked out. He passed an old security guard heading in the opposite direction. Outside, he saw two police cars stop, a mix of uniform and plainclothes climbing out. An ambulance pulled up behind them. Reuben opened a side door and walked away from the commotion, into the fresh air.

6

REUBEN WALKED QUICKLY
. It was cold, the unmistakable smell of autumn in his nostrils. He shivered as the cool air started to bite into the skin under his damp shirt. Reuben pulled his phone out of his denim jacket. He strode away from the campus, looking for an Underground station, punching numbers as he walked.

Sarah sounded busy and hassled, her tone of voice hard. ‘What is it?’

‘Meet me at the usual place,’ Reuben answered. ‘Forty minutes.’

There was a pause of four or five seconds. A bitter northerly ruffled his short wet hair.

‘I’m busy,’ she said.

‘You’ll want to hear this.’

‘Tell me over the phone.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘This involves GeneCrime. I’ve got something you need to hear. Something you don’t want going through the GeneCrime switchboard.’

There was another long pause.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she replied.

As Reuben buttoned his pocket shut he took stock of what he now knew. Five minutes in a sodden lecture theatre had given him more information than he and Mina had been able to gather all week. No one was passing information out of GeneCrime and on to the streets. It was copper to copper, division to division, force to force. At least one of the thugs intimidating future psychopaths was uniform. That meant simple access to addresses and workplaces. Slipping through the city with impunity. Terrorizing a series of men with relative ease.

Reuben had to find Moray, needed to talk to Sarah, had to get the message out to the potential psychopaths. He had to talk to the provoked and the unbalanced, had to give them this new information. Maclyn Margulis, in particular, would need to be handled carefully. Reuben had heard from Mina that there were reports of gangland unease.

He headed into the Islington Tube station. There was no queue at the ticket machine, no line by the barriers, no crush of people on the escalators. He passed at least a dozen uniformed officers as he descended and reached the platform. Reuben pictured the streets above, thinking about the burden on Metropolitan policing, musing on the fact that while the force did everything to apprehend one killer underground, it was neglecting half the population above ground. The face of Detective Simon Grainger kept coming to him. Grainger in the pub, thickset and stolid, an acquaintance of Leigh Harding; Grainger in the lecture theatre, pale and fighting for his life; Grainger dressed in anonymous sportswear, kicking and punching a handful of men. He knew now that the other thug was also a copper. He had to be. This was all about insiders, not outsiders.

The train was a quarter full at best. He was aware of scrutiny, of rapid glances out of the corners of eyes, of being weighed up as a potential killer. Reuben knew that a formal suit and an ironed shirt would change all that. But scientists were generally spared the restraint of cufflinks and ties. You were judged on what you thought and how you thought it, not on how you looked or who you appeared to be. A democracy of clothing
that
applied from the humblest technician to the most senior professor. In fact, it was the smartly dressed scientists you had to be suspicious of. If you were allowed to be scruffy, if it was almost encouraged, then what was there to gain by wearing suits and ties? As the Tube hissed quietly along its tracks, he thought of the forensics team at GeneCrime. Bernie, Simon, Birgit and Rowan, all as scruffy as hell, Paul Mackay the only one even to come close to smartness. And among them a guilty party.