on. A hunch. Intuition. Instinct.’
Mina stood up and closed the laptop. A hunch. Judith was right. That’s all it was. A feeling that something wasn’t quite right. The lab door swung open and three technicians trooped in, fresh from their coffee break. Mina thanked Judith and retreated to her office.
14
IT WAS, REUBEN noted unhappily, the sort of rain that penetrates. It wasn’t the heaviest rain or the fattest droplets or the most sudden of downpours. It was almost mist-like, seemingly half air and half water, free to drift into the gaps between jacket, T-shirt and jeans that normal rain can’t touch. It was still mild, and Reuben felt trapped between the sweat attempting to escape his body and the water seeping in.
He carried on, glancing down at his fingers. Gripped tight within them was the most precious commodity in the world, the one thing he would die for. The tiny hand of his two-year-old son. Lucy had been as good as her word. Joshua looked up at him and then away again, oblivious to the thrill Reuben felt just walking through the park with him in the rain.
Progress was slow. Joshua continually bent down to pick things up, absorbed in the minutiae of the park. A stick, the decapitated head of a flower, the ring pull from a can. Reuben found his thoughts drifting in the light rain. The three hours he had spent that day outside a steel shutter in a side street of North London. And then seeing Maclyn Margulis in the flesh. The first time in several months. Knowing that Margulis was unfinished business.
Margulis was personal. The instant Reuben had been fired from GeneCrime, he knew. This was his opportunity to bring down the villains he had been unable to touch in the force. The gangsters and career criminals who hid behind protocols, who understood where CID could and couldn’t go, who had more legal protection than the police trying to arrest them. The ones every detective knew they wouldn’t be putting away in a hurry. The sort of men like Maclyn Margulis who, Reuben had decided a long time ago, probably had informants on the inside of the Met.
Joshua let go of his hand and toddled into a gated play area. The surface was rubberized and black, a pretend sort of tarmac that was spongy underfoot . Reuben recalled his childhood days, falling off slides and roundabouts on to sun-baked concrete, summers of skinned elbows and grazed knees. The days when ‘health and safety’ were words only ever uttered by trade unionists and coal miners. Joshua said, ‘Swing,’ and reached his arms up. Reuben lowered him into a baby seat with its own double-locking harness.
As he pushed his son back and forth in the drizzle, Reuben’s thoughts returned to Margulis. He saw flashes of the day he spent in a charming village in Surrey, scraping what remained of two pensioners off their front door. Fourteen hours in the sweltering heat. A white body suit, blue nylon shoe covers and a gauze mouth guard all keeping the sweat in, until he was dripping on the inside. A cold wetness that ran down his back and made him shiver. Using a fine pair of forceps to drag hair after hair out of the paintwork and insert them into clear self-sealing bags. Using cottonwool buds to tease pieces of flesh off the door’s surface and into Eppendorf tubes. Recognizing some of the tissue types. Cartilage from the ears. Chunks of cerebral cortex. Chips of bone from the skull, possibly some from the bridge of the nose. A couple of hairy fragments of septum. Remnants of the clear and malleable lens of an eye. Whole teeth embedded in the blue-painted door. Metal fillings. Splinters of a dental bridge, suggesting that one of the deceased had dentures, the other their own teeth. And around the slivers of what used to be the faces and heads of two retired teachers, a wide spray of blackened shotgun pellets. Reuben shuddered in the rain. It had been a Jackson Pollock in flesh and blood, a hot day that had felt sickeningly cold.
The case had attracted a
Mina stood up and closed the laptop. A hunch. Judith was right. That’s all it was. A feeling that something wasn’t quite right. The lab door swung open and three technicians trooped in, fresh from their coffee break. Mina thanked Judith and retreated to her office.
14
IT WAS, REUBEN noted unhappily, the sort of rain that penetrates. It wasn’t the heaviest rain or the fattest droplets or the most sudden of downpours. It was almost mist-like, seemingly half air and half water, free to drift into the gaps between jacket, T-shirt and jeans that normal rain can’t touch. It was still mild, and Reuben felt trapped between the sweat attempting to escape his body and the water seeping in.
He carried on, glancing down at his fingers. Gripped tight within them was the most precious commodity in the world, the one thing he would die for. The tiny hand of his two-year-old son. Lucy had been as good as her word. Joshua looked up at him and then away again, oblivious to the thrill Reuben felt just walking through the park with him in the rain.
Progress was slow. Joshua continually bent down to pick things up, absorbed in the minutiae of the park. A stick, the decapitated head of a flower, the ring pull from a can. Reuben found his thoughts drifting in the light rain. The three hours he had spent that day outside a steel shutter in a side street of North London. And then seeing Maclyn Margulis in the flesh. The first time in several months. Knowing that Margulis was unfinished business.
Margulis was personal. The instant Reuben had been fired from GeneCrime, he knew. This was his opportunity to bring down the villains he had been unable to touch in the force. The gangsters and career criminals who hid behind protocols, who understood where CID could and couldn’t go, who had more legal protection than the police trying to arrest them. The ones every detective knew they wouldn’t be putting away in a hurry. The sort of men like Maclyn Margulis who, Reuben had decided a long time ago, probably had informants on the inside of the Met.
Joshua let go of his hand and toddled into a gated play area. The surface was rubberized and black, a pretend sort of tarmac that was spongy underfoot . Reuben recalled his childhood days, falling off slides and roundabouts on to sun-baked concrete, summers of skinned elbows and grazed knees. The days when ‘health and safety’ were words only ever uttered by trade unionists and coal miners. Joshua said, ‘Swing,’ and reached his arms up. Reuben lowered him into a baby seat with its own double-locking harness.
As he pushed his son back and forth in the drizzle, Reuben’s thoughts returned to Margulis. He saw flashes of the day he spent in a charming village in Surrey, scraping what remained of two pensioners off their front door. Fourteen hours in the sweltering heat. A white body suit, blue nylon shoe covers and a gauze mouth guard all keeping the sweat in, until he was dripping on the inside. A cold wetness that ran down his back and made him shiver. Using a fine pair of forceps to drag hair after hair out of the paintwork and insert them into clear self-sealing bags. Using cottonwool buds to tease pieces of flesh off the door’s surface and into Eppendorf tubes. Recognizing some of the tissue types. Cartilage from the ears. Chunks of cerebral cortex. Chips of bone from the skull, possibly some from the bridge of the nose. A couple of hairy fragments of septum. Remnants of the clear and malleable lens of an eye. Whole teeth embedded in the blue-painted door. Metal fillings. Splinters of a dental bridge, suggesting that one of the deceased had dentures, the other their own teeth. And around the slivers of what used to be the faces and heads of two retired teachers, a wide spray of blackened shotgun pellets. Reuben shuddered in the rain. It had been a Jackson Pollock in flesh and blood, a hot day that had felt sickeningly cold.
The case had attracted a
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