Murderous traits, p.10
Murderous Traits, page 10
“What happened?” she said in little more than a whisper.
Dayton sighed deeply. “She died,” he said.
“But …”
“What I mean is, she was killed. There was an accident, about two years ago, in the Caribbean.”
“I’m sorry, that’s tragic.”
“Yes. I had planned so much for us. I am very wealthy, you see, and I had intended … her life was only just beginning.”
He paused, gathering his thoughts. This wasn’t a conversation he’d had with anyone before. He looked up and sighed. “It happened only a few months after I’d explained about myself to her and how she was the same. Obviously she didn’t believe me at first, but after seeing all this and realising that like my health, her own incredible health was something very unusual, she had accepted it.”
“But you must have had other children. Did you reveal nothing about yourself to any of them?”
“I have had many, but none was like me, like Emma. I tried to tell some, but mostly I didn’t. It’s a very difficult concept to understand, and, as I’m sure you have found, it can cause many problems. You must remember that for most of my life, society has been steeped in superstition and profoundly strong and inflexible religious dogma. Our so-called enlightened times are a very recent phenomenon. They are taken for granted now in the West, but things could easily regress and revert.” He paused and then swept an arm around the room. “I certainly never got as far as showing them any of this.”
“You’re a secretive man, Mr Dayton.”
Paola stood watching her captor, focussing her full attention on him, the priceless art surrounding her temporarily forgotten. She was aware she had let her guard slip in these two amazing rooms and she knew she had to be careful. But she was also aware that Dayton had let his own down. And now she had discovered the vulnerability in his steely exterior, she wanted to learn more about him, what was driving him. She would keep him talking.
“You said you were a young man in the time of the Greek Empire. Do you know exactly how old you are?”
“Not exactly, no. Dates were recorded very differently when I was young and since then there have been many systems. Historians have pieced a lot together and we blithely tend to quote or refer to dates as if they are absolutely accurate. They are not, believe me.
“In those days, people had a very different perspective on time passing and of course there were none of these ridiculous BC or BCE dates, as if the apparent date for the birth of Christ was the most significant event in the history of man. The system we use now in the West was in fact invented by some monk over five hundred years after the assumed date for the birth of Christ, a date for which, I should point out, there is very little agreement. So you can imagine how prone to error it is.”
“For some it is,” interrupted Paola, “the most significant event, I mean, although I admit that after my dealings with numerous representatives of the Church over the centuries, I am not one of them.”
“For some, yes,” agreed Dayton, “but they are in the minority, a large one I admit, but still a minority if you consider all the other major and minor religions in the world, let alone atheists, who use our present system of recording dates purely as a matter of convenience. You don’t think people in the time of Julius Caesar thought in our dates, do you? People then didn’t say to each other as, for example, 54 BCE drew to a close, ‘gosh, the year has flown, in a matter of days it will be 53 BCE’.”
Paola laughed. “That’s really quite amusing.”
“So in answer to your question,” continued Dayton, “it was difficult to keep track. The ordinary people didn’t really care that much. Most of them couldn’t read or write, so their lives related mainly to seasons and harvests, not the birth of some prophet or other. But taking all that into consideration, I estimate that I am around two and a half thousand years old.”
Paola raised her eyebrows. “And I thought I was old. But are you telling me that in all that time you have only had one child like yourself? Have you met anyone else, not related to you, who is the same?”
Once again, deep in the blackness of Dayton’s eyes, there was a sadness, a weariness.
“Apart from Emma, you are the first, Paola. Until Emma was born, I had become convinced that I was simply a freak occurrence, a one-off, as the British say. Then after she died, I became obsessed with finding others. I knew they must exist.”
Paola pursed her lips as she absorbed the information. “I wonder why you’ve never fathered others. OK, I’ve only had one child like me, as you know from Dr Wright’s notes. In that respect, I was telling her the truth. But my father—”
“Your father?” interjected Dayton rather too forcefully. “What do you know about your father?”
Paola clenched her jaw. She’d said too much. It was bad enough that Dayton knew about Sara; she didn’t want him to know any more.
“I … I know nothing about him,” she stammered. “I never met him. It was rumoured, according to my mother, that he was like me, but I don’t know. I suppose if he was like me, he could have fathered others like me, who knows? Before he died.”
“Died?”
“My mother said that the Church caught up with him, executed him …” She faltered. She felt sure he knew she was making it up. She raised her chin and returned Dayton’s stare. “Have you any idea why we are like we are?” she said, hoping to deflect his attention. “Do you know if two ordinary people can have a child like us? Or if …”
She stopped as she remembered the conversation with the skeletal Dr Ronaldi, his interest in what he had called her monthly cycle. Her thought processes raced ahead of what she had been asking Dayton and she suddenly realised why she was there.
“What is it you want from me, Dayton?” Her voice had hardened, her guard back up. “You drag me from my home and drug me, some of your heavies appear to be nurses and there’s that creep of a doctor. Is this some sort of clinic? What’s really going on here? This place obviously isn’t just a private retreat where you can reflect on your lonely past.”
C hapter 13
Claudia Reid tapped her pen against her lips as she studied the data on her monitor. It was good, but not good enough. And there were some anomalies. The run would have to be repeated, which would mean several hours of meticulous extraction of the very sensitive DNA required for her tests.
Her elbows on the desk, she rested her head in her hands and scowled at the numbers, searching for inspiration. Then she sat back and ran her hands through her strawberry-blonde hair. She had let it grow again after experimenting with a boyish cut the previous year. She’d disliked it before she’d even walked out of the salon, not consoled by the words of her best friend, Sally Fisher, who had talked her into it in the first place. “It’s only hair, Claw, it’ll grow.”
Well, it had grown and now it was getting in her way. She fished in her desk drawer for a hairband and tied it back, trying to refocus her attention on the screed of figures that seemed to scroll on forever.
“Jeff!” she yelled to her assistant.
“Claudia,” came the far softer reply. “I’m on the other side of your desk, not on the other side of Lambeth.”
“What? Oh, sorry. Yes. Listen, do these figures make any sense to you?”
“Most of them, yes, but I’m not the prof, Claudia. I can’t look at a partial set of results, which is what these are, and predict with unerring accuracy what the rest are going to be and then what they mean.”
“No, of course you can’t. But the prof’s not here, so I thought you might have some idea, ’cos they’re bugging me.”
“I known what you mean, Claudia, but at least they’re consistent with the data we’ve got so far. They don’t conflict.”
Claudia’s reply was a noncommittal grunt.
“I’m going to fetch a coffee, Claudia, do you want one?”
“Love one, thanks. Here, I’ve got some change.”
“No, no, it’s, er, it’s my treat,” stuttered Jeff. Now he’d moved from laboratory business to a personal level, his confidence had floundered. He’d meant to sound cool, relaxed, hoping Claudia would look up from her screen and see the warmth in his eyes, but it never quite worked. He was crazy about her, but his natural reserve coupled with no indication that Claudia really noticed him at all made him absurdly cautious. His adoration seemed destined to bounce around the laboratory and out the door. Certainly none of it appeared to stick to its target.
Claudia looked up, smiling to herself as she watched him go. She was perfectly aware of Jeff’s feelings for her; he was as subtle as an air horn. The problem was that he simply wasn’t her type, although with her succession of disastrous relationships with men over the years, she had no real idea what her type was. She just knew it wasn’t Jeff. She shrugged and pulled a face. She’d better find her type soon; she was nearly thirty-five and her clock was ticking.
She turned her attention back to the monitor, sighing as she absently removed the band from her hair and tied her unruly locks into a loose knot. Her boss, Professor Frank Young, was away in Australia giving a plenary presentation at a cutting-edge genetics conference. Claudia was in charge during his absence. Their team was small but elite: six of the best geneticists in their field working on the highly classified research that had resulted from the discovery and interpretation of John Andrews’ DNA profile back in 2009. Claudia had been at the root of the discovery, having profiled John’s DNA while she was working for the now-disbanded Forensic Science Service. Her refusal to accept that John’s profile was just a strange quirk of what was then regarded as junk DNA had led her to John and to the unravelling of his secret. Sally’s then-boyfriend, Ced Fisher, now Sally’s husband, had shed a different light on John when, through his ground-breaking art forgery software, he found a series of artists dating back to the fifteenth century, all of whom proved to be John. The prof had tied all the strings together when he applied his brilliant mind to the problem and proved how John and anyone else with his very rare DNA would defy ageing and live for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The prof and Ced Fisher had then found themselves very much outside their comfort zones when they located and helped rescue John after he was kidnapped by the pharmaceutical industrialist Wallingford Peterson.
In the aftermath, Frank Young had used his connections in the rarefied world of Whitehall’s more secret corridors to broker a deal between John and Samson Blythe, whom both John and Frank knew only by his code name of Digby Smith. John’s problems over changes of identity were now solved in return for his unique accounts of life, language and history over the past almost six hundred years. In John’s wake and under Digby Smith’s purview were Frank, Ced and the others who had come to learn John’s secret. Claudia was part of this very special group.
None of this information was at the forefront of Claudia’s mind as she continued to scrutinise the data on her screen. Why did the most difficult problems always arise when the prof was away? It was only when her mobile phone pinged for the third time that the sound penetrated the barriers of her consciousness and registered. She turned her attention away from the strings of numbers on her monitor to check the screen on her phone, only to find the message was yet another string of numbers. She recognised the sequence, it was a pre-arranged code, but since it was the first time it had been used she was momentarily taken by surprise. Then her lips pressed together in a knowing half-smile and she replied with another sequence of numbers that indicated she was alone, safe and could talk. Seconds later, another text arrived with yet another sequence of numbers. She studied them and then dug into her handbag to retrieve a different phone, one that was reserved for a very special purpose. She turned it on and waited. After ten seconds, a text arrived containing just a double-digit number: 53. She waited for a ping on her computer as an email arrived, one with nothing sensible in the sender’s box. The email was a list of a hundred pairs of book titles and authors. She ran her eye down to number 53, hit the reply button on the phone and typed the letters CR, her initials, and waited. Her phone rang almost immediately.
“Pollyanna,” she said, quoting the book title against number 53.
“Anthony Trollope,” replied the caller, quoting the name of the author of the work one down the list at number 54.
“Digby!” exclaimed Claudia, relaxing now the protocols had been satisfied. “I wasn’t expecting a call from you until next week, and certainly not one using this rigmarole. I take it that it’s not a test, from the code numbers.”
“Quite, Claudia, my dear,” replied Digby Smith. “I hope you don’t mind; I have a little matter that I’d appreciate your help with. I’m not interrupting you, am I? I wish to draw on your profound knowledge of DNA.”
“Tell me more,” replied Claudia, wondering why Smith couldn’t have just called her direct. She could never get her head around all the cloak-and-dagger arrangements that he insisted on. Her laboratory and all its phone and Internet lines had been firewalled and encrypted to a staggering level of security by Smith’s people. Surely that was enough.
“I wonder if I could put a hypothetical situation to you regarding DNA profiling,” continued Smith. “Imagine, if you will, that there is a substantial amount of blood recovered from various locations at the scene of a crime. The blood is profiled according to the normal procedures and is found to have the same profile as a suspect in the case, a person for whom there appears to be CCTV footage placing him at the scene. This is a good profile, one in fact that the DNA laboratory involved is quite excited about since it appears to contain some very rare … groups, do you call them?”
“Alleles,” corrected Claudia, remembering only too clearly when she herself was in that situation when she first saw John Andrews’ DNA profile three years before.
“Alleles,” repeated Smith carefully, as if practising the word. “Exactly. Well, the problem is that the man in question, who has now been arrested for the crime, which was a murder, denies most emphatically that he was in any way involved. He says, in fact, that he was not even near the location of the crime at the material time.”
“Does he have an alibi?” asked Claudia.
“No, he doesn’t. He was alone throughout the entire timeframe of the incident and indeed was relatively close to the whole thing. He claims to have been about fifty miles from the scene.”
“Well,” said Claudia, nagging at her hair until it collapsed in her hand, “if the profiles match and they contain a number of rare alleles, I should say that he’s not telling the truth.”
“That is exactly the police perspective, Claudia, and I agree that they appear to have a strong case. The reason I’m calling you is to ask if there are any conditions or circumstances under which, despite the result, the blood profile could not have come from this man.”
Claudia smiled to herself; the answer was obvious. “Well, I’m assuming that contamination and a general cock-up on the part of the police or the lab can be ruled out—”
“Completely,” interrupted Smith.
“And that the blood could not have been planted in some way or for some reason—”
“Definitely not. There is no suggestion of that and nor does there appear to be any reason for it to have been done.”
“In that case, if your man is telling the truth, the only explanation is that he is an identical twin, a homozygous twin. For such twins, the DNA profiles used for crime investigation would be identical.”
“A twin,” repeated Smith. “That’s an interesting thought. That will have to be explored. But am I right in assuming that if identical twins’ DNA is identical, then everything else about them is identical?”
“No, you are not. You can’t assume that at all,” said Claudia. “In fact, there’s recent research, which we have confirmed here in this lab, that even their DNA is not going to be identical in all respects. However, as far as DNA profiling for criminal purposes is concerned, it will be the same since that profiling doesn’t target the areas where there will be differences. It requires some pretty expensive and sophisticated technology to show the differences.”
“Mmm,” mused Smith. “And you can do it, you say?”
“Yes, of course,” said Claudia. “But there’s a far simpler and easier solution than DNA profiling.”
“There is? What is it?”
“Fingerprints.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Yes. You see, fingerprints are formed in the foetus between the thirteenth and nineteenth week and the process leads to some differences occurring that make the fingerprints of identical twins very similar but not the same. There should be observable differences that will distinguish one twin from the other. I suggest that the investigating police check all the prints from the scene and compare them with your man. Any competent fingerprint examiner should be able to separate them immediately if he is in fact telling the truth.”
She paused, thinking through the scenario.
“Tell me, Digby, if you can,” she continued. “Do I know this man? I assume that because we’re having this conversation, it must be connected to John in some way.”
There was brief silence from the other end of the phone as Digby, ever cautious, considered his words.
“As it happens, Claudia, you are right, although I might just have been making an enquiry with respect to something quite unconnected, taking advantage, shall we say, of our special relationship and your undoubted expertise.”
Claudia pulled a face and stuck her tongue out at the phone. Pompous ass, she thought.
“However,” continued Digby, “yes, it is connected to John, although you needn’t worry, we’re not talking about John himself. To answer your question, you know of this man but I am fairly sure that you have yet to meet him.”
“That’s a relief,” said Claudia. “Although I’d have been very surprised if you’d told me it was John since there has never been an inkling of a twin. But if we are talking rare alleles here and I know of the man but haven’t met him, am I right in thinking that we are talking about John’s friend from the seventeenth century, the one who these days is called Adam Fowler, but who in his past I think was called Jacques Bognard?”
