Breaking Point (33 page)

Crannell glanced at the door. He stepped closer to Reuben and extended the syringe. Sarah let out a gasp. The mice seemed to stop moving all at once. Even the sirens ceased. There was silence. Just Reuben and Crannell, eye to eye. Sarah cried out again, louder this time. It was a guttural noise, an instinctive human sound of death. It echoed off the white walls, the plastic cages, the stark benches of chemicals. Reuben’s vision zoomed, Crannell suddenly up close, the rest of the room out of focus.

And then Reuben was moving, pounding forward, crashing through the air. An instantaneous momentum. His fists smashed into Crannell’s face almost together. One into the orbit of his eye, the other into his nose. He leapt forward, a pounce, his weight taking Crannell with it, balling him to the floor. The syringe was irrelevant. Reuben didn’t care what happened to it or where it went. He was on top of Crannell, off balance, still pitching forward, but punching him with all his might. A man he had watched almost destroy Detective Simon Grainger, but now being mashed into the floor. Reuben barely seeing anything. Just punching and kicking, gouging and destroying. A primal energy, a frantic burst of power. Feeling nothing but release and justice. Punch after punch, kick after kick. Crannell simply trying to shield himself from the onslaught. Blood from his nose, redness from his lips, all dripping on to the white laboratory floor.

Reuben started to slow, aching limbs starved of oxygen, his body feeling heavy, punches beginning to jar. Crannell was on his side, scrunched up, one arm over his face, the other over his chest. Reuben felt the mania dissipating. His fists felt raw, their knuckles skinned. He pulled himself to
his
feet. His breathing was laboured. He kicked the syringe under a stack of cages.

Reuben staggered over to Sarah. Her skin was white and translucent, blue veins visible across her forehead. She was still, barely breathing. It’s over, he told himself. The things that had happened with Sarah, the things that could have happened. The time they had once come close to being lovers, before careers and killers had got in the way. He stared down at Crannell. A part of him wanted to finish the job, but that wouldn’t be a victory. Putting Crannell out of his misery wouldn’t bring any dignity to Sarah.

Reuben realized belatedly that the sirens they had heard earlier were not for Crannell, just the emergency services going about their noisy business close to the university. He pulled out his mobile and hit the numbers. ‘Ambulance and police,’ he answered. He gave the address of the animal house. ‘And for Christ’s sake get here quick.’

Reuben slumped down next to Sarah. He lifted her head and placed it in his lap. Her tightly pinned blonde hair came undone and spilled across his legs. He stroked her forehead. It was cold and wet. From time to time her body shuddered. Reuben knew there was nothing he could do. The
ambulance
would be too late. He would hold her until she died.

Crannell let out a moan and tried to sit up.

Reuben stared into Sarah’s face. Her lips contorted briefly and her eyes flickered. He wondered whether she was conscious, and what battles were raging inside her. A derivative of an arsenous compound, that was all he knew. Something that attacked human physiology and shut it down, piece by piece, system by system.

Crannell finally managed to sit up. Reuben placed Sarah’s head gently on his folded jacket. Then he walked over and kicked Crannell hard in the solar plexus. It didn’t feel good, just something he had to do until the police arrived. Crannell fell on to his back, fighting for breath.

He was about to sit back down with Sarah when something caught his eye. A white plastic tub with a red lid. A label on the front had an orange hazard triangle on it. The symbol had a face with a mask over the nose and mouth, and safety goggles over the eyes. The word ‘Irritant’ appeared beneath the face. The chemical name at the top was ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid.

‘EDTA,’ Reuben said out loud. ‘EDTfucking-A.’

He grabbed a beaker, tipped a couple of shakes
of
the white powder in and rushed over to the sink. ‘Shit, what concentration?’ He filled the beaker quarter full, swirling it quickly round. Then he glanced back at the tub. He paused for a second, rubbing his forehead, rough estimates and calculations flashing through his brain. He added another slosh of water. ‘That’s got to be somewhere in the millimolar range,’ he muttered, heading back to Sarah.

He cradled her head again, this time opening her lips with the fingers of his left hand. ‘Drink this,’ he whispered. ‘If you can hear me, swallow it down.’ He poured a little into her mouth, which slid straight down. ‘It will taste like shit,’ he said, ‘and it will irritate your throat. But that’s it, swallow it all.’ He continued to pour the liquid from the beaker, small splashes at a time. Once or twice Sarah coughed, an instinctive spasm of her throat. The rest met little opposition, Reuben bending her neck back so that he could tip the fluid straight into her oesophagus.

When the beaker was empty, he held on to her again. He gripped her tight in his arms, his nose close enough to smell the untainted beauty of her skin. Lost in the aroma, he quietly willed sirens to approach, footsteps to come running, voices to fill the stillness.

20

GENECRIME WAS JUST
as he had left it almost a year earlier. When you move on, Reuben thought, leaving a house or a workplace or a locality, you expect it to change. Your life alters, and you naturally assume everything else does along with it. But as he strode past the security desk and down one of the building’s wide central corridors, he was simultaneously disappointed and relieved that GeneCrime was exactly how he remembered it. Forensic science needed consistency, above all else. It required continuity and rigour, tightly controlled approaches that measured evidence identically from one day to the next. Reuben bit into the side of his cheek and sighed quietly. Blank walls, lino floors, strip-lit ceilings. The uniformity of forensic science.

Walking next to him, Mina seemed excitable, like having a visitor in the building was a rare treat. Reuben knew there was a lot more to it than that, and let her continue talking without interrupting.

‘So Thorner wants you to sit in, if that’s OK? He says that seeing as you invented Psychopath Selection he would appreciate your technical input. Mind you, he’s been saying a lot of things. I didn’t realize you went so far back with big boys like Thorner.’

Reuben grunted. ‘I used to be important once upon a time.’

‘Maybe you could be again.’

‘How would you feel about that?’

‘Bloody relieved.’

They turned through a ninety-degree corner. The flooring changed from lino to carpet but the walls stayed resolutely white.

‘Really?’

‘Look, Reuben, I’m thirty-three. I’m no spring chicken but I’ve still got a lot to learn. And frankly, looking after scientists and coordinating investigations isn’t any good for my beauty sleep.’

‘When you get to be as knackered as I am, maybe it’s worth another bash. There’ll be no beauty sleep left to lose.’

He caught a flash of his reflection in a darkened lab window as he passed. From some angles, not so bad at all. From others, and at certain hours, nowhere near as good. Now, he noted the wrinkles, the heavy eyes and the pernicious greys. Still the right side of forty, but maybe beginning to show it, like the days of chasing around the capital were catching up with him.

‘So, how has Charlie been?’ he asked.

‘I haven’t seen him. There’ve been a hell of a lot of developments over the last twenty-four hours that you should know about. Important stuff that’s blown a lot of GeneCrime wide open.’

‘I’ve been a bit busy,’ Reuben said.

‘You’ll have to catch up as we go. And of course the whole unit’s still in shock about Sarah.’

Reuben pictured DCI Hirst, unconscious, so pale the blue veins under her skin were showing through. Being rushed out of the animal house on a stretcher, the medics not messing around.

‘Yeah,’ he muttered.

Mina slowed. ‘We’re in Interview Room Three,’ she said. ‘Just up on the right.’

‘I know where it is, Mina,’ Reuben said quietly. ‘I’ve wasted many hours of my life in there. Interviewing scum like Maclyn Margulis, for example.’

Mina stopped a couple of paces from a heavyset wooden door. It was marked with a blue square plaque that had an indented number 3 at its centre. She spoke softly, almost whispering, scanning the empty corridor. ‘Well, I guess this is where things start making sense. That moment you go into the force for. The elusive truth that you hunt so hard it hurts. The unknown becoming the known.’ Mina raised her eyebrows, her eyes widening behind her glasses. ‘I’m babbling. Tell the truth, I’m actually a bit nervous.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘You ready?’

‘Try stopping me.’

‘I don’t think it’s going to be pretty in there.’

‘The truth rarely is.’

Mina paused a second longer. Then she rapped twice on the door with her knuckles and entered.

Inside, Charlie Baker sat facing a bullish man with a domed forehead and a receding hairline. The man was around five ten and fidgety as hell. Charlie looked impatient and determined, staring hard across the table, as Reuben had witnessed him doing on hundreds of occasions. There was an intensity in the small bland room, a weight of recently shouted words, an aftershock of acknowledgement. Reuben sensed they had interrupted
something
critical, a momentum, a line of questioning that had been getting serious results. Both men glanced at him, then back at each other. He sat down quietly, and Mina did the same, listening to the words passing between them.

‘At first it was just an idea, something we were kicking about. And then Lee Pomeroy … Danny Pavey … that just kickstarted it all.’

Glaring eyes across the table. ‘Would you care to be more explicit?’

‘No I wouldn’t.’

‘Look, we know how the chain of command went. You, Detective Simon Grainger and his partner out in Tottenham, where you used to work. Grainger and his sidekick attacking a group of men while you fed them the information.’

‘Like you said.’

‘And we now believe that Grainger’s sidekick was a man called PC Robert Williamson.’

‘Do you really?’

‘We know all the fucking dots. All of them.’

‘So why are you still asking?’

‘Because I want you to join them for me. One by one. Just so we’re crystal clear. Just so we get it all right.’

There were a couple of moments of silence. DI Charlie Baker scratched his short beard. Reuben
stared
at him. He couldn’t help it. Charlie Baker, Sarah’s number two. The last man on earth you wanted to face across an interview room if you had killed or raped or abused. Bright and forceful. Energetic, as sharp as the dark spiky stubble that poked out of his face. And now sitting firmly on the wrong side of the table.

‘Charlie, we’ve got deleted profiles, we’ve got computer records, we’ve got testimony from the newly seconded forensic technician Alex Brunton. We’ve got video tape of Detective Grainger, footage you have watched twice now. Don’t clam up on me. Reuben and Mina are only here for technical input.’ Commander William Thorner nodded his balding head at Reuben, and Reuben nodded back. ‘So come on, Charlie, let’s not waste any more time.’

Charlie refused to meet Reuben’s eye. ‘I don’t want him in here,’ he said.

Commander Thorner sat forward in his chair, bristling with impatient energy. ‘The days of you deciding who does and does not enter an interview room are long gone, DI Baker. Now you know how this works. Let’s get everything sorted. Nothing to gain from stringing it out. I want you to tell me the truth. And I want it now.’

21

REUBEN WAS STRUGGLING
to catch up. His tired brain was scanning the new information, searching for inconsistencies, working it through, seeing how it fitted into what he knew already. He had heard a rumour from Judith, a snatched phone call as the ambulancemen rushed Sarah away. He knew that while he was being poisoned by Maclyn Margulis, while he recovered with Lucy and Joshua, while he was being attacked by James Crannell, a case had begun to build, based on Detective Grainger’s testimony. He knew that Charlie’s name had started to crop up. He knew that word had begun to spread. And he also knew that Charlie had saved his life just two days earlier.

It all still felt to Reuben like Charlie would say
a
few right words and the whole thing would be cleared up as a misunderstanding. But Charlie began to talk again, a soft voice spilling out through his jagged beard.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I was involved in an investigation where the eleven members of an amateur football team near Streatham were tested in a sexual assault case. An attack on a young girl in some council-run changing rooms. None of them were implicated by testing.’ Charlie stared deeply into the wood-effect table. ‘Dr Ali was also part of the investigation.’

Mina remained still, sitting on her hands.

‘A few months later there was a brutal attack on a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, a promising athlete. GeneCrime were not involved. A local man was arrested and charged. It was handled by my old station in Tottenham. That’s how I got to hear the name. From Simon Grainger and Robert Williamson.’

Reuben flashed back to the pub wake for Commander Abner ten days earlier. Chatting to Detective Leigh Harding. Simon Grainger on name terms with Leigh. And then Charlie coming over and shaking hands with Grainger as Reuben had walked away. Maybe a few seconds in the course of the last week and a half, but Reuben
realized
now that Charlie must already have known Detective Grainger.

‘What name?’ Commander Thorner asked Charlie.

‘Lee Pomeroy. Unusual name. More common in the south-west of England than London. But I recognized it as one of the footballers. This was a brutal attack. A fourteen-year-old boy who won’t walk again, let alone do any middle-distance running. But it got me curious. Why did this man, with no previous convictions, attack? What was it about Pomeroy’s make-up? And then I remembered conversations with Dr Maitland.’