Breaking Point (32 page)

‘Put the box down, Dr Maitland,’ he said.

Reuben lowered it. There was fear in Sarah’s face. It was the terror of sudden understanding. Reuben had just made the same leap. In a couple of seconds, everything had just clicked. It had
arrived
like a kick in the stomach. Instant dread that squeezed him tight. The box of chemical compounds in Reuben’s hands. The presence of senior police in the animal house. The wrong conclusion James Crannell had jumped to and was now acting upon. But mostly the slim hypodermic syringe pricking into Sarah’s skin.

‘It’s OK,’ Reuben said. ‘We haven’t come to arrest you, James. We just need your help.’

Sarah was motionless, her eyes wide, her mouth tight. Reuben judged that the needle was biting in. He flashed back to the lecture theatre. Crannell with his fingers deep into Simon Grainger’s windpipe. An unexpected strength. A force that had come from somewhere and burst to the surface. And now Sarah, half the size of Grainger, buried in the grip of his arms. One glance told him Crannell was not to be reasoned with. He suddenly realized that he had reached his breaking point a lot earlier than the lecture theatre. Emails, letters, attacks. A failing scientist with a fragile genotype who had been pushed too far. But now he had shown a senior police officer something that had compromised him. A reaction, a misreading of a situation, a sudden exposure. There was no way back. No retreat. No route out.

‘What’s another officer when you’ve nearly killed one already?’ His voice was calm, a flat distance to it, words dulled by the white cotton face mask.

‘As I said, we haven’t come for you.’

Reuben peered at the box again. Multiple variants of arsenous compounds. Subtly different chemicals with diverse properties. His brain continued to flash through scenarios. Poisons as chemotherapy agents. He had read about it many times but hadn’t made the connection. Substances that killed growing cells used to treat cancers. Mouse models used to test the effects on tumour growth.

‘Put the syringe down, James,’ he said.

Dr Crannell just stared at him. He was on fire, in charge, a ferocity in his eyes. Reuben sensed the mania, knew Sarah was about to lose her life unless he did something. In a matter of moments, everything had been turned on its head.

All around them, mice in cages scratched and scrabbled, frantic pink feet clawing at plastic surfaces. The smell was intolerable.

Sarah looked at him, pleading, desperate, knowing that with one tiny movement she would be dead. But Reuben remained rooted to the spot.

18

REUBEN TOOK IN
a sweep of the animal lab. Seven metres by four. Enclosed by white walls. Each wall lined with shelves of cages. Some free bench areas holding anaesthetizing equipment and clusters of standard chemicals. The anteroom door at one end, the main door at the other. No sign of Anna. Reuben standing between Crannell and the exit. Crannell motionless, Sarah rigid with fear. He knew what was going through her mind. This man has a dangerous genotype. This man has been pushed to his breaking point. This man has killed before.

In the seconds of stillness, a mass of notions flashed through Reuben’s brain. Crannell was bright. A Ph.D., an academic at a good university. This wasn’t Margulis and a hired thug. This
was
a different proposition. Almost without exception the men Reuben had tracked through his career had been of average intelligence at best. Men who acted on base instincts, who tried to right perceived wrongs, who were unable to overcome the damage of their lives. Crannell was statistically rare. A killer with a superior intellect.

Reuben realized he was powerless. Not because Crannell was necessarily brighter or more gifted, but because he knew instinctively that talking him down was not an option. Force was clearly out too. A centimetre of movement with his right hand and Sarah would die horribly in two or three minutes. He suddenly appreciated why Toxicology had been unable to ascertain the exact compound that had been used in each of the Tube murders. Probably it barely had a name. One of a range of arsenous derivatives developed with the chemistry department. Experimental substances generated by multiple arbitrary reactions. It could be anything.

Thoughts continued to bounce around his head, trapped with nowhere to go. He began to talk, the only constructive thing he could think of doing.

‘So what do we do now?’ he asked.

Crannell glared back at him, his face
partially
hidden by the surgical mask, his eyes distant. Reuben knew he was weighing up the options. Crannell was just as trapped as Sarah. There was no way back from this point.

‘The one thing that mustn’t happen, James, is that you hurt DCI Hirst. That won’t help anybody.’

Reuben suspected Crannell was only half listening. The stench should have been receding by now, his sense of smell fatiguing. But it wasn’t. It was getting worse, a sharp dampness burrowing into his sinuses.

‘What we have at the moment is an equilibrium,’ he said. ‘A steady state.’

There was a yellowish fluid in the barrel of the syringe. Reuben wondered whether Crannell had discovered this as a compound that stopped cancer cells dead. Whether in his genetically imbalanced mind there was a link to his actions on rush-hour Tube trains. Probably, Reuben would never find out. The motivations of killers often turned out to be culs-de-sac and tangents, thought processes that developed in directions few could properly understand. But all that mattered for the moment was protecting Sarah. She looked vulnerable in a way he hadn’t witnessed before, as though the façade of tough
cop
had been stripped away, revealed for the camouflage it really was.

‘You know, and I know, that you have a dangerous genotype, James.’

Reuben began to pace about between the two stacks of rodent cages on either side of him. He didn’t move any closer to the man in front of him, just bounced left and right as if he was trapped. He needed his body to shift while his brain got stuck into impossible scenarios and consequences. Hundreds of mice around him continued to scurry and scratch.

‘Five major genes seem to influence our potential for violence and brutality,’ he muttered. ‘Two of them on the Y chromosome and therefore confined to males. A host of other genes are linked to more subtle attributes. And I don’t think by any means we’ve nailed the whole story. But that’s where we are. You have the risky form of each of those five behavioural genes. It might be linked to testosterone levels, to cognition, to a loss of normal feedback mechanisms, to a fragile disposition. I don’t know.’ Reuben raised his head to look straight at Dr Crannell. ‘But you have to understand, you don’t have to do something violent. You aren’t programmed to hurt. There is no inevitability
about
your actions. You, James, are in control. Your conscious, breathing self.’

Crannell remained silent. He had barely moved a muscle. Reuben could detect only the heavy rise and fall of his rib cage, deep breaths being sucked in and forced out. By contrast, Sarah’s breathing was jagged and shallow. Her cheeks were flushed and she was starting to perspire. Reuben still felt helpless. He would gladly have swapped places with Sarah, just so as not to feel so incapable. Crannell’s utter silence undermined. His lack of movement was beginning to feel ominous.

‘I developed Psychopath Selection when I was working at GeneCrime. Never got the chance to use it properly because I was fired before it was fully tested. But that’s only half the truth.’

Sarah focused on him, her eyes uncertain.

‘The real truth, James, is that I dropped the technique, stopped testing it, began delaying. And you want to know why?’

Crannell tilted his head back. It was as close to curiosity as he had come.

‘Because I tested myself. Ran my own DNA through it. And I didn’t like what it showed me.’

There was no more reaction from Crannell. The mice seemed to be going wild. The less
Crannell
moved, the more frantic they were becoming. They were gnawing at the bars, teeth grating against the metal.

Sarah was still monitoring Reuben closely.

‘It said that I have four of the genes. Four aberrant isoforms. Not enough to automatically make me a danger, but perhaps enough to push me in that direction. It took me a while to get over that. It’s fine trawling other people’s genes, but when it’s your own …’ Reuben rubbed a hand through his short-cut hair. ‘And then someone else ran with the ball. Resurrected my technology, began doing things they shouldn’t. And here we are. You are the end result. Screening that should never have happened, an educated man being repeatedly punched and battered and attacked, and pushed towards his breaking point.’

Reuben saw it all, an onslaught of images, in his heightened state. Crannell’s research stuttering on. Funding drying up. A single postgraduate student in a decent-sized lab. Testing derivatives of known toxins for the selective ability to kill cancer cells. But struggling. Being pushed into more and more teaching. Spending his days with an alluring girl half his age. A turbulent home life resulting in estrangement from his wife and three daughters. And then a series of emails and letters,
followed
by unprovoked attacks. His home life, his personal life, his family life, all under pressure and starting to fall apart. Grainger mixed up in it. For some reason turning the screw. Making Crannell’s children feel threatened and vulnerable. Striking right at his heart. And Crannell, off balance, ill-equipped for trauma, starting to lose it. Taking it out on innocent people.

Reuben stopped pacing and regarded Crannell again. His right hand was shaking. The short, fine needle juddered against Sarah’s delicate skin. Crannell was quivering, his eyes fixed and distant, his jaw clenched tight. He was a grenade with the pin removed, a bottle of Coke that had been shaken hard. Inner turmoil was about to explode. Reuben knew this was going to end one of two ways: Crannell was going to snap out of it, see there was no point in fighting, or he was going to kill Sarah and come at him needle first. Reuben made a quick decision. Crannell needed a strategy. Reuben was going to have to feed him one.

He was between Crannell and the exit. He jumped up on to a lab bench, balancing above the cages.

‘James,’ he said. ‘Leave Sarah and get the hell out of here. The door’s open. Just go.’

Crannell peered up at him. Something seemed to wash through him. His eyes squinted around the racks of cages. He pulled the mask away from his mouth. Slowly, cautiously, he lowered the hypodermic. Even from four metres Reuben could see a small prick of blood on Sarah’s neck.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘I just …’

He didn’t finish the sentence. His words hung in the bright whiteness of the animal room. He relaxed his grip on Sarah. Reuben heard the wail of a siren in the distance. And then another. The sounds duetted, filling in each other’s gaps, rising in intensity. Crannell caught it as well. A noise of panic heading his way, piercing the windowless animal house.

‘What was your Ph.D. in?’ he asked Reuben, almost absentmindedly.

‘Molecular biology,’ Reuben answered. ‘You?’

‘Biochemistry.’

Then Dr Crannell pulled Sarah close again and stabbed the needle deep into her neck. Before Reuben could react, he pushed the plunger. He let go of Sarah. She staggered to the side, one hand on the wound, one on her stomach. Reuben watched, astounded. Sarah is dead! a voice screamed inside his head. The life of my
former
boss has just ended. It stops here, in this moment. Everything we have been through … Crannell straightened. He held the syringe out in front of him like a knife, its barrel half full. And Reuben knew he was next.

19

THE VAST MAJORITY
of the world’s animal testing is performed on mice. Reuben knew this as fact. Mice had become the new model of choice, their genes similar enough to humans’ to yield useful experimental data. An image of the animals flashed through his frontal lobes as Crannell stepped forward. Thousands of them surrounding him, isolated from one another, awaiting their moment of laboratory sacrifice. Homogeneous pure lines, bred merely to serve a genetic purpose. Pink wrinkled skin, like they were prematurely aged. Whiskers but no other hair at all. Ears, tail, paws all the same sick shade of pinky grey. The ears like open holes. The eyes small and slit, black orbs glinting out. Athymic nude mice. Entirely
hairless
and with compromised immune systems. The ideal biological tool.

The name of the procedure came to him as well in that instant. Xenografting. Transplanting human cancer cells beneath the hairless skin to grow into bulging tumours. Then trying to shrink the tumours with different compounds. And that was when he saw it. Crannell as a laboratory animal. Pushed and prodded and poked. Experimented upon by police officers. A rare and precious genotype to be manipulated. An almost unique strain that needed to be analysed. A thin skin that showed the damage.

Sarah slumped to the floor, her fingers running down the front of a stack of cages. Crannell was alive now. The past three or four seconds had passed almost in slow motion, Reuben’s brain kicking through doors, neurons firing wildly all over the place. He shook himself round, jumped down from the bench. Sarah was on the floor. Crannell was coming slowly towards him, his bloodshot eyes wide, his teeth clenched. The sirens were louder. Somewhere closer to the campus maybe. Reuben suspected Crannell was no longer listening.

Reuben backed up as far as he could go.
Crannell
was three paces in front of him. Reuben felt the cold surface of the door against his back. The channel between the left and right rows of animal cages was less than two metres. Reuben edged away from the door.

Sarah began to cough and retch. He knew that her internal organs were shutting down one by one. Her heart was frantically trying to force blood around her cardiovascular system. Her breathing would slow and eventually stop. A compound that maybe inhibited the growth of a cancer when injected directly but was a systemic poison in high concentration. Sarah Hirst, who had lived the fiercest of lives, had burned as bright as anyone he had ever come across, was being snuffed out before his eyes.