Breaking Point (5 page)

The train stopped again, and a different person stood unbearably close. A mid-twenties woman with a neat brown case. Judith smelled leather, something almost alive compared with the odours surrounding it. Nine more minutes, she said to herself.

Judith flashed through the details of her shift at GeneCrime. Processing routine samples from the Danny Pavey murder. Hairs, bloods, fingernail specimens. A very ordinary day. Eppendorf tubes opened and closed, small volumes of liquids pipetted, batches heated and cooled, sequencers loaded and analysed. They would catch him soon, and a new batch of testing would be needed. Scrapes from under his fingernails, blood tests on his clothes, gross analysis of fibres and footwear.

The woman with the neat brown case swayed as the train took a corner. It was a pronounced movement, and Judith guessed that she’d been drinking. The train slowed again. Another station, another couple of minutes crossed off. The doors opened and the woman started to move, then stopped. Judith glanced up. She was definitely having problems. She was pale. Her eyes seemed bloodshot. There was an expression in them that took Judith a second to place. Surprise. Her head lolled forward. Judith had a premonition of what was about to happen. She reached out but was too low, her strength at the wrong level to help. The woman dropped her case. Her knees buckled. She fell across Judith, her head coming to rest on the next passenger’s lap. Someone shouted something, a muffled sound that could have come from any direction. Judith felt the weight on her, pushing against her bump. She tried to wriggle free but couldn’t. Judith suddenly found herself a long way underground, another human bearing down on her, crammed into a tiny space.

The woman wasn’t moving, so Judith took her wrist, felt into the little hollow on the underside with her thumb. Nothing. She adjusted her grip. Still nothing. She moved her index and middle fingers back and forth, scanning the area. She
glanced
across at her face. It was side on, eyes open, lips parted. Surprise now unmistakably etched into the openness of her mouth and the size of her pupils. Judith could find no pulse. She started to sweat more heavily, panic rising. The woman was dead.

9

DR MINA ALI
entered the lab with what she hoped was an air of authority. It didn’t come naturally. Just three months earlier she had been a senior forensic scientist, helping to coordinate the multiple investigations GeneCrime pursued at any one time. The serial killers, rapists, terrorists, kidnappers and paedophiles who needed the specialized attention of the elite Euston division. The cases handed over by the FSS that routine testing couldn’t touch. The highest-profile investigations which required the pioneering methodologies of the country’s leading forensics institute. Mina had been involved, enthusiastically, her growing technical expertise helping to make the difference.

And then, after Reuben’s dismissal, things
had
changed. As she walked through the larger of GeneCrime’s two labs, Mina could see that her recent promotion came down to that single event. His one moment of temptation. Crossing the boundary that should never be breached. The scientist getting involved in his own experiment. Then the backlash had come. The newspaper articles, Reuben disappearing off the radar, setting up a hidden lab somewhere, going after the villains he could never touch in GeneCrime. A senior CID officer had been put in charge of Forensics, priorities had become blurred, and mistakes had been made. Finally, Sarah had asked Mina to become acting head of Forensics while they sought a permanent replacement. Mina had been flattered and terrified in equal measure.

She pulled open her office door and sat down at her desk, head in her hands. The intervening weeks had taught her something important. Managing science was easy. Managing scientists, however, was a nightmare.

Technicians and researchers were glancing through the glass walls at her so Mina sat upright and made herself look busy. It was the unrelenting slog, the pressure to solve cases as they happened. Forensics was getting faster, to the point where you could only just about keep up with the body
count
. An efficient serial killer could be tracked in real time, DNA profiles obtained as they came in, databases scanned, patterns matched, victims identified, strategies adapted. The battle plan could constantly shift. CID would hammer on the door, demanding results, wanting to get out there and neutralize the bad guys. But the science had to be right. Rigorous controls, careful exclusions, multiple corroboration – everything had to join up into evidence that was inarguable.

Mina flicked on her computer. This had been the cruncher for Reuben. The pressure to instigate the untried technologies he had invented, the desperate balance between the enormous potential and the terrible pitfalls. Not to mention the sixteen-hour shifts at crime scenes, the almost endless days spent surrounded by the tortured and the mutilated. Mina determined that she would be different. She would take it less personally, put less of herself into the hunt for killers, give herself more of a cushion than Reuben had. But even as she considered these thoughts, Mina appreciated that she was already getting caught up in the impossible stresses, pressures and politics of the division.

There was a knock on the glass, a duller sound than the crack of knuckle on wood, and she
glanced
up. A new recruit, seconded from the FSS, here to be trained up in advance of Judith Meadows’s maternity leave. Mina took him in. Tall, very short hair verging on the bald, glasses so square that they put her own to shame, the sort that usually screamed media relations or PR. An effeminate handshake, a non-threatening smile. What magazines might call a ‘metrosexual’. What her father might call something far worse. She walked him back into the lab, introducing herself as she went, looking round for someone to palm him off on. Bernie Harrison, bearded and long-haired, had his back to her. An ideal victim, she smiled to herself.

‘Bernie, this is Alex Brunton, research tech over from the FSS. You may have seen him around. He’s been shadowing CID for the last two or three weeks, and now it’s his turn with us.’ She turned back to Alex. ‘Dr Harrison is our senior bioinformatics guy. Head-hunted from Cambridge a couple of years back. As bright as they come.’

Bernie stared down at his grubby trainers for a second, trying not to take the compliment too obviously. Mina could see that he was pleased nonetheless.

‘Alex is going to be covering Judith’s maternity. Do you think you could show him a few basics,
start
him off gently? You know, take him through the set-up, and how forensics relates to the CID operation he’s been busy observing.’

Bernie looked back at her, his eyes narrowing, the intention of the compliment now obvious. ‘Sure,’ he answered flatly.

Mina stalked back to her office. She could do this, she told herself. Man management was all it needed. Carrots and sticks, thanks and threats. And there was one bonus: she wouldn’t have to put up with the heartache and pain of training new people.

She opened her desk diary and immersed herself in the details of her day. The meetings, the strategies, the priorities. About half an hour had passed when she became aware of a presence at the door. Alex Brunton was standing there, his head stooped, looking awkward.

‘What’s up?’ she asked.

‘What should I do with the bar staff DNA profiles? You know, the ones from the Danny Pavey case?’

‘Where’s Bernie?’ Mina asked.

‘He left me to it.’ Alex puffed out his cheeks. ‘Quite a while ago.’

Mina sighed. Man management indeed. Bernie had simply dumped his work on the new guy and
buggered
off to do something more constructive.

‘OK, insert them in the Negatives.’

‘The Negatives?’

‘It’s a sub-directory off the main GeneCrime database.’

Alex looked dubious. He paced over to the computer he was using and double-clicked for a few seconds.

‘I’m not seeing it,’ he called out.

Mina rubbed her eyes beneath her glasses and left the sanctity of her office. ‘Here, budge over. Let me have a go.’ She grabbed a chair and sat down, skimming the mouse across its mat, opening and closing files, collapsing and expanding multiple directories. ‘That’s funny, it usually comes up under …’ She continued to double-click, her jaw occasionally moving from side to side in concentration. ‘There you are,’ she said finally.

‘So I should click and drag the profiles into the trash?’

Mina continued to stare at the screen, her brow furrowed. Something had just occurred to her. And it had taken a new member of staff to spot it. She totted up some rough numbers, checked the dates by each entry and examined the directory
structure
, lost in her thoughts for a few moments. Alex cleared his throat with a high-pitched cough, bringing Mina round.

‘Right,’ she said, shaking herself back to the present, ‘give me a shout if there’s anything else. Or preferably ask one of this bunch.’ She gestured in the direction of Birgit Kasper, Paul Mackay, Rowan Lyster and Simon Jankowski, four scientists entering the lab ready for another long shift of forensic detection in a windowless room.

Mina turned to walk back to her office, chewing her lip hard. Then she changed her mind, turned round and crossed the large laboratory. This time the air of authority needed no encouragement.

10

DCI SARAH HIRST
watched Mina Ali’s lips moving, tuning in and out of the conversation. Sarah had a habit of doing this, and was aware that she did it more than she really should. She had discovered over the course of her career that maybe one in every three sentences uttered during the working day was worth listening to. This applied to CID officers, pathologists, IT technicians, support staff, even area commanders.

Almost everybody had a built-in mechanism of repetition. If they didn’t repeat the same information exactly, then they dressed it up in subtly different guises to reinforce their point. An officer might tell her that the heavens had just opened; that he had got wet; that he should have brought an umbrella. Three points conveying
a
single useful piece of information: that it was raining. And since she had become the unit commander, things had got even worse. Her silence encouraged further reiteration, more of the same described in slightly different ways by junior officers scared to death of gaps in conversation.

The one exception was Forensics. They were different. Forensics usually cut straight to the chase, numbers and facts offered just the once on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Sarah liked this, and when scientists discussed their findings she listened to every word. The same was usually true for Mina, but now Mina wasn’t discussing profiling data or pattern matching. She was trying to make a general point. Sarah continued to nod, and tuned back in to what she was saying.

‘So, as I say, it’s continuing to grow.’

One, Sarah counted.

‘The Negatives gets larger every day.’

Two.

‘We’re putting more and more profiles into it all the time.’

Three. It was amazing. You could almost set your watch by other people’s repetition.

‘Go on,’ she said.

‘I’ve totted it up. Just a rough count. There are almost thirty-six thousand profiles on it.’

‘Where from?’

‘All over. I mean, think what happens to all the punters we test who get excluded. Not the ones who are charged, later found innocent and still get shoved on the National DNA Database.’

Sarah sighed with practised irritation. ‘You’re not going all civil liberties on me?’

‘I’m talking about the ones we’ve taken from mass screening, just to narrow the field. You know, fifty here, a hundred there, maybe three or four hundred sometimes. You put that together over a few years …’

‘It’s small fry compared with the four million punters on the National DNA Database, but I suppose it adds up,’ Sarah conceded. ‘I thought there was a Forensic Science Service directive about this sort of thing.’

‘There is – we’re supposed to get rid of them.’

‘How quickly?’

‘It depends where they’ve come from and whether an investigation is ongoing or subject to appeal or whatever. I’m just saying we should be a bit more efficient at deleting these things.’

‘I guess so.’ Sarah glanced at her monitor as a fresh batch of emails lined up in chronological order. ‘Although we have bigger fish to fry at
the
moment than worrying about a few left-over profiles.’

‘You’re right. But …’

‘What?’

Sarah watched Mina intently. Mina did her trick of rubbing her eyes beneath her glasses, her fingers magnified momentarily, her movements tired and jerky.

‘I’m concerned that these samples have been accessed.’

‘Accessed?’

‘Trawled through.’

‘And we’re not allowed to do that?’

‘Technically no. I just noticed when I was showing the new guy where everything is.’

‘Any other explanations?’

‘People could be checking back through things, I suppose.’

‘And who has been doing this?’

‘I don’t know. All I can see from looking is that a fair number of files look like they have been pulled.’ Mina peered hard at her, and Sarah held the look. ‘Has there been an IT reorganization that I’m not aware of?’

Sarah reached forward and ran her fingers along the leaf of a spider plant on her desk. She noticed for the first time that the leaf tip was
brown
, as if it was about to start slowly dying on her. She glanced around the office. The death of greenery in this room seemed to be a recurrent event. ‘You’d have to ask them. But I don’t think so.’

‘So how could a database change its location?’

Sarah glanced back at Mina, gauging her body language. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Just that the Negatives folder isn’t where it used to be.’

‘Are you sure?’

Mina paused. Sarah noted a hint of uncertainty in her face, a hesitancy, a flicking of the eyes to another location and back again. ‘Reasonably,’ she answered after a couple of seconds.