Free Breaking Point by John Macken

Rowan Lyster and Dr Paul Mackay, still in their lab coats, avoided her eye. Two CID officers, Helen Alders, slim and boyish, and Leigh Harding, fair-haired and broad, monitored the forensic scientists opposite them, as if waiting for an answer.
    ‘Anybody?’ Sarah said.
    DI Charlie Baker cleared his throat. ‘No cause of death yet, boss. Both under forty, different Underground lines, one white, one black, both female.’
    ‘Do we have names?’
    ‘A Tabatha Classon, twenty-seven, and a Toni-Anne Gayle, thirty-three.’
    Charlie fished about in a cardboard wallet file. He pulled out two A4 pictures, headshots of the victims. Sarah examined them, her neck bent forward, her light hair spilling down and touching the edges of the pictures.
    ‘These are the afters, I take it?’
    Charlie nodded.
    ‘Good job. You had eyes like that in real life, you’d scare the world to death.’
    Sarah continued to pore over the images. They were photos taken in the mortuary, the lens looking straight down on the faces as they lay on light-green operating tables. A few years ago these would have been stark black and whites. Now, a digital camera plugged into a desktop printer, and the deathly skin tone was staring back at her. The unmistakable pallor, an indefinable matt finish that rendered Caucasian and Afro-Caribbean skin equally dead. But the eyes were what really unsettled Sarah. Wide open and staring, bloodshot, a final message of pain and shock haunting them.
    She slid them on to Mina and asked, ‘And?’
    ‘And that’s about it,’ Charlie answered. ‘Toxicology coming through, but obviously linked.’
    ‘What makes you so certain?’
    ‘These aren’t random deaths. Two women on successive days are found dead on Tube trains in the rush hour. Neither of them appear to be drug users or have any serious medical history. It’s early days, but I think we have to assume they’re linked.’
    Sarah frowned. She reached for her coffee and took a sip, quickly realizing it was cold. She grimaced at the bitter liquid. ‘Forensics?’
    Mina Ali checked with Drs Harrison, Lyster and Mackay. ‘Nothing as yet. But we’ve got two technicians in the morgue taking swabs, as well as Gross Samples checking clothing for fibres.’
    ‘Good. I want everything you can get. If it can be poured in a tube, or squeezed in a plastic bag, or stuck on the end of a cottonwool bud, I want it done. We need clothing, shoes, jewellery, whatever. We need skin, internal and external. The whole damn package.’
    ‘Internal?’ Mina asked. ‘Are you sure that’s necessary? There’s no evidence of rape or sexual assault.’
    ‘And there’s no evidence against it either. We’re going to do a blanket job on this. Because when you know nothing, it’s best to try everything.’
    Mina nodded. ‘OK,’ she answered quietly.
    ‘Besides, there’s always a point of contact. If these deaths are murders, someone will have touched them somewhere.’
    Bernie Harrison chewed his biro and said, ‘Unless it’s poisoning, and they’ve ingested something.’
    Sarah turned to face him. She was well aware that scientists tended to be a scruffy lot, the jeans, trainers and T-shirt brigade who rarely shaved and presumably didn’t have mirrors, but Dr Harrison had taken this dishevelment one step further. Unlike the discipline of Charlie’s beard, Bernie’s looked like it hadn’t had a trim in its whole life. And the less said about the length of his hair the better. It was symptomatic of the critical difference between the two main professions of GeneCrime. No matter how plainclothes the CID officers became, they would never be mistaken for scientists.
    ‘And do you think that poisoning is particularly likely? Given that both victims would have had to consume their fatal dose at some indeterminate time before coincidentally dying on Tube trains in the rush hour?’
    Bernie shrugged. ‘I was just saying …’
    ‘Fine. What about Pathology? Dr Stephens? What’s