The Cassandra Complex (32 page)

The police force was not a happy organization in 2005. For ten years and more, it had been bruised and battered by attempts to root out corruption, institutional racism, and institutional sexism, and its officers were all too well aware of the fact that one of the most widely publicized effects of the introduction of new methods of scientific analysis had been to expose numerous cases of wrongful conviction in which police evidence had been shown to be manufactured. The siege mentality adopted by the police in response to seemingly never-ending criticism of their attitudes and methods ensured that a large minority among them—perhaps even a majority—saw the arrival in their staff operations of a legion of laboratory workers as an invasion of potential fifth columnists. Everyone recognized the necessity of working together, and everyone recognized that the new partnership was capable of delivering considerable rewards, but the necessity was tinged with bitterness and the rewards seemed, in the beginning, to be the rations of Tantalus.

In spite of her own best intentions, Lisa found that she had to cling hard to the relationships she had formed at the university in order to provide some relief from the constant stress of her new workplace. She continued to seek what solace she could in the arms of Morgan Miller, but exposing her new troubles to the commentary of his abrasive mind made her feel as if she were trapped “between the devil and the deep blue sea.” She often found it more restful to see Ed Burdillon or Chan Kwai Keung on a purely platonic basis. Their advice was worthless—Burdillon suggested she immerse herself more fully in her work and focus her attention on the quest for promotion, while Chan wondered whether she might not be a great deal happier if she returned to the groves of academe in order to climb the postdoctoral ladder to tenure—but they were unfailingly sympathetic.

Unfortunately, Lisa was well aware that her continued reliance on old friends was part of her problem rather than any kind of solution. She had to form new relationships within the station, not merely with the laboratory staff alongside whom she had been set to work, but with the officers whose Herculean labors she was supposed to be supporting. She certainly did not want to embark upon any new sexual relationship—within the police force, such liaisons were generally considered to be unhealthily incestuous—but she did need to set up productive and satisfying professional alliances.

It was in this context that her acquaintance with Mike Grundy was forged and tempered.

When she first met him, in 2006, Grundy was a detective constable who had relocated after a sideways move from the uniformed branch. He was hardworking, cheerful, and laid-back. He was not particularly handsome, but he made up for this with a natural charm that made him easy to like. He enjoyed his work enough to be un worried about the necessity of making upward progress through the ranks. Having had no education in science to speak of, he was fascinated by the apparent miracles that the lab workers could perform in regard to fibers and stains, and fascinated by the lab itself, which seemed to him to be a kind of wizard’s cave. He loved to be invited to look down a microscope or to inspect some intricate pattern inscribed in gray gel by patient electrophoresis. And he laughed at Lisa’s jokes.

He didn’t always understand the jokes, but he laughed at them anyway. He soon became her favorite source of puzzles, and she in her turn became his favorite consultant. Without actually intending to, they began to rely on one another, not merely for constructive assistance, but for all the kinds of reassuring strokes that made the routines of everyday life more comfortable. They never dated, and rarely saw one another in any kind of one-to-one situation, but whenever they were in a crowd, they gravitated together to form a distinct subunit.

If Mike Grundy was ever jealous of Morgan Miller—or, for that matter, of Chan and Burdillon—he never gave any sign of it. His sexual interest was routinely attracted by women much prettier than Lisa, and any flirtatiousness in their relationship was understood by both parties to be purely superficial. Once their friendship was solid and comprehensively defined, in fact, Mike frequently used Lisa as a useful source of advice on the management of his love life. Once he had grown used to seeing her as an expert, he tended to assume that her expertise was far less specialized than it was. He had such awesome faith in the linearity of her intelligence that he seemed to expect her to know everything he didn’t, or at least to be able to form a more reliable impression than his own. This did not, however, prevent him from disagreeing with her on various issues of personal importance. One of them was marriage.

“You’re wrong about there being no point in marrying if you don’t intend to have children, Lis,” he told her, while using her as a shoulder to cry on the first time he had made an unsuccessful proposal, in 2012 or 2013. “People aren’t programmed for the solitary life. They’re gregarious, and families—even if they’re just couples—are the real units of society, not individuals.”

“It’s a common argument,” she informed him loftily. “The couple as the atom of community—a hydrogen atom, one presumes. But which partner is to become the proton and which the mere orbiting electron? During courtship, it’s the men who buzz around the honey pot—but once the ceremony’s over, they expect the roles to be reversed, taking it for granted that they’ll be the nuclei around which their wives will helplessly circle. I can see why men like the idea—but I think I’d rather be a free radical.”

Mike had no idea that the metaphor had become disastrously mixed, although none of her university friends would have allowed her to get away with it. Even Ed Burdillon would probably have begun rhapsodizing about the analogies to be drawn between the waywardness of human passion and the counterintuitive wonders of quantum mechanics, but Mike Grundy’s intellect was cut from coarser and more utilitarian cloth.

“That’s
so
twentieth century,” he protested. “In fact, it borders on the Victorian. Modern marriage isn’t a matter of domestic slavery. Everybody works nowadays, if they can. Modern marriage is more like a business partnership.”

Lisa did not like to seem trite, and flatly refused to consider the obvious jokes about sleeping partners, shareholdings, and dividends. “Partnership creates unnecessary obligations,” she said instead. “The modern trend is toward freelance consultancy and free-floating labor.”

“Not in our Une of work,” he pointed out. “The consulting detective was a literary conceit, like the lone scientific genius making monsters in the basement.”

“Those are all surprisingly stubborn conceits,” Lisa observed, “but not as stubborn as the love story. You don’t feel obliged to fit your working life into the mold formed by TV cop shows, so why feel obliged to fit your private life into the mold of the kind of paperback pulp you’d be ashamed to display on your bookshelves?”

“Given the number of crimes of passion we have to deal with,” he said, “that’s ridiculously cynical.”

“Given the percentage of crimes of passion that fall into the thoroughly modern categories of road rage, phone rage, and store rage, it would be ridiculous to take any other view.”

“That’s frustration, not passion.”

“All passion is frustration, Mike. Sexual frustration is no different, physiologically, from all the other kinds of stress that eat away at the lining of your gut and pile pressure on your clogged-up arteries. The trick is to deal with it without letting the adrenaline run wild. If you can’t do that, your natural cheerfulness and charm will leach away by slow degrees, until you turn into a middle-aged grouch—just like all the other senior officers.”

It wasn’t intended as a prophecy, but it proved all too true. Mike Grundy’s cheerfulness and natural charm did indeed diminish with every decade that passed and every promotion he gained. The fact that he got stuck at DI didn’t save him, any more than impact with her own glass ceiling saved Lisa from adding the last few twists to her own brand of bitterness. Mike got married too, to his precious Helen of Troy: an unambiguously lovely girl he always considered to be that little bit too good for him.

It was an opinion that the Helen in question inevitably came to share, as Lisa could have prophesied but never did. Where Mike Grundy was concerned, she felt obliged to keep her Cassandra Complex on a tight rein—and she sometimes wished in later years that she had kept it under even slightly tighter control in her relationship with Morgan Miller.

There were times, during the early phases of Mike’s marriage, when Lisa doubted her own judgment of that institution, and she was by no means glad when the passage of time eventually proved her right.

Although they had more than enough in common, Helen Grundy and Lisa never got on well after the marriage. It would have been an exaggeration to say that Helen ever hated Lisa, but that probably had more to do with a policy decision to consider her too contemptible to be worthy of hatred than any lack of passion. In hydrogen-atom terms, Helen had no intention of being switched from a nuclear to an orbital role by any mere ritual. Having given herself in marriage, she expected to become and remain the center of her husband’s existence, and she was intolerant of any distraction beyond the demands of duty. From the very beginning, Lisa could see that Helen was far more career-minded than Mike, and that his lack of impetus in that regard would develop into a nasty bone of contention, but she never told Mike. At least, not in so many words. He would not have believed her, and he would have resented the prediction.

He would have resented it even more when it eventually came true, but the fact that Lisa had never actually spelled it out enabled her to remain sympathetic and steadfast when disaster finally struck.

Helen Cornwell, as she was before her marriage, was a hospital social worker at the Royal United, which had recently been combined with the nearby Manor Hospital into one of the country’s largest healthcare institutions—exactly the kind of institution that a burgeoning cityplex needed. Her duties ranged from abortion counseling to surgical aftercare, and she was constantly under pressure to extend herself even further; she worked hours that were just as long and often as unsociable as a detective’s, and had found that as injurious to her personal relationships as did any policeman.

Helen first encountered Mike Grundy in the context of a delicate series of child-abuse inquiries, and was initially quite comfortable with his friendship with Lisa. The rapid expansion of genetic counseling at the interface of medicine and social services provided them with a ready-made topic of conversation, although Helen never took aboard Mike’s certainty that Lisa was a ready font of infallible information regarding the fallout of the Human Genome Project. As Mike and Helen drew closer together, however, Helen made a concerted effort to draw their atom of community away from all rival attractions.

At first, Lisa had tried to defuse Helen’s anxieties, going out of her way to assure her that she was no threat to their partnership, but her attempts to form as close a friendship with Helen as she had with Mike were always doomed.

Helen was the kind of feminist that Morgan Miller deplored: a die-hard subscriber to the notion that science and technology were ideologically polluted with the worst kind of masculine ambitions. She was overfond of analogies representing contemporary ecological crises as the aftermath of a “rape of the Earth” that had begun with the Industrial Revolution. She also took far too much notice of propaganda that saw the entirety of genetic science, and the Human Genome Project in particular, as a “Frankensteinian bid” by the male of the species to usurp essentially female prerogatives of reproduction.

Lisa attempted to undermine these opinions with as much subtlety as she could muster, but she couldn’t entirely control the temptation to excoriate them with a Müleresque fervor. She even tried to soften that kind of blow by crediting the most scathing observations to Morgan Miller and delicately refraining from lending them her own wholehearted endorsement, but the tactic never worked.

“Your problem, Lisa,” Helen said to her with treacly concern, on the last occasion when Lisa attempted a full-scale conversion, in 2024 or 2025, “is that you’ve sold out. You know deep down that that’s what you’ve done, but you can’t bear to face it—so you cover it up with all these layers of dismissive arrogance and barbed sarcasm. You’ll never be happy until you can be reconciled with your own conscience, and you’ll never achieve that unless you can tear down the walls of false consciousness you’ve erected in your psyche.”

“It’s kind of you to lend me your expertise when I’m not one of your clients,” Lisa replied as mildly as she could, “but I’m happy as I am, and joining the police—for me as well as for Mike—was more a matter of buying in than selling out. We all have to do what we can, in our different but complementary ways, to hold society back from the brink of chaos.”

“I’ve heard you say many a time that nothing can stop us from going over that brink,” Helen pointed out sweetly. “Too many children in the world. Masculine science does love its simple explanations, doesn’t it?”

“Even if a fall is inevitable,” Lisa replied, “it still makes sense to delay it as long as possible. When the collapse begins, good policing will be even more essential than it is today—and science offers the only hope we have of getting the parachute open before the fall becomes a fatal crash.”

“The only remedy we’ll ever have against disaster is the capacity to treat one another with courtesy and charity,” Helen informed her.

There was no point in contradicting Helen’s ready assumption that courtesy and charity were essentially female virtues—or, indeed, in denying most of her other assumptions. She was not the kind of person to admit that she might be fundamentally mistaken, and for all her feminist philosophizing, she certainly couldn’t allow the possibility that a plainer and older woman might have the advantage of her. So Lisa gave up trying to be a friend to Mike and Helen alike, and contented herself with maintaining half a friendship with Mike alone. It was not so great a loss as all that, especially while she still had Morgan Miller, Ed Burdillon, and Chan Kwai Keung. Or so it seemed, until the day when
everything
fell apart.