Trial by Blood Read online

  Reuben Maitland has lost everything – his job, his marriage, his reputation. Fired from CID’s elite forensic investigation unit, he is forced to turn to the other side of the law to find work.

  Michael Brawn is currently enjoying the hospitality of Her Majesty at Pentonville maximum-security prison. He is not who he claims to be. He has been placed there on forged genetic evidence. But who is he, and why is he there?

  Reuben is offered one chance to clear his name. He needs to discover Brawn’s real identity and, more importantly, his reason for falsely entering prison. And there is only one way of getting to him. Reuben is going to have to enter Pentonville. But as he is about to find out, prison can be a very dangerous place, especially for an ex-copper…

  ‘Truly gripping’ Big Issue

  John Macken works as a scientist in a large windowless building. His first novel, Dirty Little Lies, is also published by Corgi Books.

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Also by John Macken

  DIRTY LITTLE LIES

  and published by Corgi Books

  TRIAL BY BLOOD

  John Macken

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Epub ISBN 9781446423455

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  TRIAL BY BLOOD

  A CORGI BOOK: 9780552154628

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Bantam Press a division of Transworld Publishers

  Corgi edition published 2008

  Copyright © John Macken 2008

  John Macken has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  For Alison, Joshua and Fraser

  Table of Contents

  Trial by Blood

  One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  Two

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Three

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  TRIAL BY BLOOD

  ONE

  1

  Detective Inspector Tamasine Ashcroft leaves the office block, her excitement swirling through the double doors after her. This is the once-in-a-career moment of breakthrough, the link that unites several separate pieces of evidence. After two years, she knows that all three children have been killed by the same man. More importantly, she knows exactly who the man is and where he lives.

  Tamasine skips off the pavement and across the road, fresh and excited, despite the fact that it is almost two a.m. Tamasine has been working almost without pause for eight days. When it is as important as this, her reserves of energy are almost boundless. And then, as she knows all too well, she will crash, struggling to get out of bed, a cold coming on.

  There is the sound of footsteps behind her. She looks back and sees the figure of a man in the half light. He is moving rapidly, a squeak of trainers on damp paving stones. She is suddenly awake and alert. The alleyway is high-sided, a gap between office blocks and shops, and easily two hundred metres long. Joggers don’t take short-cuts to taxi ranks, she recognizes.

  DI Ashcroft quickens her pace and risks another glance back. This is no runner. Something in the way he is leaning forward, heading towards her, smacks of hunger. Tamasine hesitates. It is probably nothing, but she should be on her guard. She curses that she has no weapon, no stab jacket, no police radio. He is gaining, and quick. She considers how to tackle him if need be. Think like a copper, she tells herself, not like a frightened panicking female. Stay low, aim a kick to the crotch, that ought to do it.

  She stops and turns round, pulling out her warrant card. He is twenty metres away, fifteen, ten.

  ‘I’m a police officer,’ DI Ashcroft says, cool and slow, just like she has been taught.

  The man stops. Tamasine sees him clearly for the first time, a small light illuminating his features. He is big, wide, bony and unhinged. Dense black hair, thick eyebrows, burning eyes. Teeth bared, a real-life psycho. From his jacket pocket he pulls out a six-inch hunting knife and a clear plastic bag.

  ‘I am a police officer,’ she repeats. ‘Put the knife down.’

  The man stares at her. Tamasine stares back. Her heartbeat is frantic, everything else shut out. Classes on disarming assailants flash through her brain. He smiles at her. Tamasine slides her warrant card away. She knows that if she fails to disarm him, she is utterly alone and at his mercy. The plastic bag scares her. He has done this before. For an instant, she pictures the man she is going to arrest in the morning. Is this just coincidence? she asks herself. And then, an instant decision, an automatic response: she turns and runs.

  Halfway down, the alley dog-legs to the left. After that, the main road will be in full view. Tamasine sprints with all her might. Panic is good, she tells herself. Nothing else matters. Forget the child-killing creep. Forget the urgent need for sleep. Just get the hell out of this alley and on to the road. Now.

&nbs
p; For as long as she can bear, she doesn’t look back. There is a noise behind her, and she glances over her shoulder. He is flat out, twenty metres away, but gaining. There is something in his eyes, and she knows she has to escape. Tamasine puts her head down, the lights of the main road just eighty metres ahead.

  Forty metres. She flails, knuckles scraping the bricks. A couple of taxis pass the end of the alley in quick succession. She can hear traffic. He is too far back. When she reaches the main road she will be safe. A night bus pulls up and stops opposite the mouth of the alley. There are people on board, witnesses, her protection. Tamasine risks a final look back in her last few paces. He is ten metres behind, and no longer gaining.

  And then she stops dead. The buildings are looming over her. A strange feeling of reverse vertigo dizzies her mind. A flashing whiteness crashes behind her eyes. A bleeding numbness in her mouth. She is unable to move. It takes a second to register. Her brain tries to right itself. She is on the floor.

  She tries to get up but can’t. Something is weighing her down. The man who was chasing her comes to a halt. He keeps his distance, glancing down at his knife, and then slowly back up again. Tamasine attempts to right herself, but she is wedged firm. The reason floods into her, the last few seconds finally making sense. Something has smashed her clean in the mouth. And that something is now pinning her to the floor.

  She cranes her neck round as far as she can. Another man. He is large and firm, an unshakeable bulk. Tamasine looks back at the psycho with the knife. He is bristling, the blade gripped so hard she can see his knuckles in the half light. His full attention has switched from her to the man holding her down. There is nothing but the sound of the psycho’s breathing for a few long seconds. Tamasine watches his face gradually alter beneath his brush of black hair. He is boiling over, on edge, almost quivering with intent. But she can also see that he is conflicted. And what she detects in his eyes as she focuses more intently into them scares her more than anything so far.

  He is afraid.

  And then, pace by pace, he gradually backs away, swallowed by the shadows, never averting his eyes from the man above her.

  Tamasine starts to thrash on the floor. A gloved hand reaches down and clamps itself over her mouth. She smells the rubber, her nose desperately sucking air in and out, the oxygen debt needing to be repaid. Another hand fixes itself across her windpipe. She sees the bus pull away from the stop, passengers oblivious, just metres away. Detective Inspector Tamasine Ashcroft tries to scream but the air is blocked. As she fights and kicks for dear life, two burning questions fill her head.

  What did the psycho see? And what was it that scared him?

  2

  Wide-open pupils stared hard into the fluorescent light, fixed and unblinking. Dr Reuben Maitland dragged a cottonwool earbud across the cold surface of one eyeball, feeling it judder, dry friction jerking its progress, shivering along with it. Up close, fibres of cotton stuck to the surface, while others grabbed at corneal cells and tore them off. He flipped the earbud round and drew it slowly across the other eyeball. Its frozen pupil continued to suck in the penetrating brightness. Surrounding it, burst capillaries oozed into the white, leaking a congealing redness.

  Reuben frowned at the man standing over him. Kieran Hobbs half smiled, fascinated and appalled in equal measure. He straightened, scratching at his blond hair.

  ‘Nice line of work,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Reuben grunted, dipping each end of the stick into a different tube of blue fluid.

  ‘What’s next?’

  ‘You enjoying this?’

  ‘I’m just asking.’

  ‘I’ve got cheek, hair, blood and eyeballs.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re starting a collection.’

  ‘Belt and braces, Kieran.’

  ‘And fucking cummerbund, by the looks of things. I mean, is there any bit of him you don’t want?’

  Reuben stared sadly down at the corpse on the floor. Or at least what was left of it. It had an amorphous quality, beaten literally to a pulp. The light shirt and trousers were seeping into redness. Reuben imagined for a second that the clothes were all that was holding it together, skin and bones mashed into an oozing paste that was straining to be free.

  He lowered his voice. ‘Look, if your boy had been a little less sadistic—’

  ‘Efficient.’

  ‘Then it might have been a bit easier. But as it is, the body will be contaminated with his fists, his boots and his iron bar.’

  ‘Like I said, efficient.’

  Reuben stared into the dead man’s face. Efficient indeed. The nose was spread, the forehead collapsed, the mouth a gaping hole, the chin split open. His long black hair was tangled and matted, a burgundy sheen to it. Reuben tried and failed to imagine what he would have looked like before he made the mistake of trying to assassinate Kieran Hobbs. During his time running the élite GeneCrime unit of the Forensic Science Service, Reuben had seen a larger share of corpses than seemed fair. But rarely had he encountered one which had been so systematically ruined.

  ‘I’ll give him his due, though.’ Kieran dabbed at a small stain on his tailored shirt. ‘He didn’t speak a word.’

  Reuben glanced towards the rear of the disused factory. Leaning against a table was Valdek Kosonovski, one of Kieran’s two full-time minders; on the tabletop lay a dark iron bar. Valdek was brooding and still, wearing a grey flannel sweatshirt flecked in red. His torso sustained an ugly musculature which yelled steroid abuse. He stared straight back at Reuben, his eyes lifeless, his face shiny with sweat. Suddenly nauseous, Reuben returned his attention to the ruined corpse on the floor.

  ‘I mean, fair’s fair. He came here to kill me. What does he expect?’ Kieran asked. ‘A cuff around the ear, and on your way, sonny? So my boys get a bit carried away from time to time. Well, tempers tend to fray when someone comes along trying to put a bullet in you.’

  Reuben looked momentarily into the eyes of Kieran Hobbs. Thick knitted eyelashes blocked the light, pale blue irises prowling behind, lurking in the shadows. This was the law according to men like Kieran. Someone comes to get you, you get them first and you finish them off. The more brutal you are the better. Word gets around. Even psychopaths baulk at the idea of being beaten to death should it all go wrong.

  Reuben glanced back at the mashed face beside Kieran’s shoes. ‘All the same . . .’

  ‘Don’t go soft on me now, Rube. You seen worse than this before.’

  Reuben closed a small plastic box of tubes, and slipped it inside his case. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen worse than this. And I’ve also caught the people responsible.’

  ‘What’re you trying to say?’

  ‘Keep your boys under control, Kieran. You can’t afford to have them killing people like this.’

  Kieran glanced over at Valdek, who was now busy cleaning up, a stringy mop soaking up small patches of red and diluting them in a bucket of water. Kieran scratched his chin, his skin so pink and clean it almost shone, his fingernails leaving thin white tracks.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, appearing to consider Reuben’s words.

  ‘Otherwise . . .’

  ‘Otherwise what?’

  Reuben removed his blue plastic shoe covers. He had helped Kieran on and off for almost a year, and still didn’t feel comfortable around him. But Kieran had proved increasingly useful over the last twelve months, in ways that Reuben could never have imagined. There had been a time, at the beginning of their relationship, when events had almost come to a head. Like a couple who had rowed and made up, however, it had only brought them closer. But there were days like today when the whole thing stank. Now he found himself fighting every urge in his body to call for backup, to have Valdek arrested, to have the factory isolated and searched. But he checked himself. He was no longer in the police, and no longer had any back-up to come and rescue him. As he screwed up the shoe covers and squeezed them tight in his fist, he reminded himself that he was an outsider, a civili
an, an exile.

  ‘Just keep them out of trouble.’

  ‘OK,’ Kieran answered quietly. ‘So, when will you let me know?’

  Reuben pulled his bloody gloves off and sealed them inside a small plastic bag, which he zipped into his case.

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Flat out? Forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Great.’

  And then Reuben asked the question he’d been trying to avoid. ‘What will you do with the body?’

  Kieran flashed him a comforting smile. ‘You let me worry about that, sunshine.’

  He placed his thick fingers on Reuben’s shoulder and gave it a playful squeeze, and for a second, Reuben tried his hardest to stop his muscles from recoiling.

  3

  Reuben picked his way across the weed-strewn car park of a derelict block of flats in Mile End. The tarmac was sprinkled with chunky cubes of shattered windows. The burned-out vehicles had long since been towed away, but the glass lived on, a sparkling reminder of past damage, slowly being ground into the floor. Crunching towards an unpromising doorway, Reuben passed a metal sign proclaiming ‘Quebec Towers’, its black enamel paint cracked and peeling, its shiny steel supports browned with rust. He glanced around and pulled the main door open. ‘Out of decay . . .’ he whispered to himself.

  Inside, the cold footwell of the stairs clung on to a faint impression of piss. It was no longer intensely acrid, people now urinating elsewhere, but an acidic dampness had invaded the concrete and was reluctant to leave. Reuben ascended quickly, carrying his small leather case.

  On the third floor, he entered a weed-infested corridor and stopped outside a flat. The window and door had been sealed with anti-squatter steel plating, grey and unyielding, perforated by an army of small regular holes. As Reuben ran his fingers over the perforations of the door, he imagined the flat breathing and sighing in the chilly afternoon air, redundant and retired, marking the days until its consignment to rubble.

  He moved his hand to the top of the surface and fumbled for a second, until a quiet click released a hidden catch. Reuben pulled the heavy door open and closed it behind him, stepping into a gleaming white room. He glanced around at the grey equipment which lined the benches, at the series of fridges and freezers buzzing away in the corner, at the industrial light fittings bolted to the ceiling. Reuben hoped to God his two companions were home.