He poured a small amount of the paint into the bag, then, holding it by the neck, passed it to her, making sure she had a good grip on it before letting go.
She brought the neck to her mouth, blew into it, as if inflating a balloon, then inhaled deeply through her mouth. She exhaled, then inhaled deeply again. And a third time. Now, suddenly, her face relaxed. She gave a distant smile. Her eyes rolled up, then down, glazing over.
For a short while, her pain was gone.
*
The black Mercedes drove slowly along the road, tyres sluicing through the rain, windscreen wipers clop-copping. It passed a small, run-down mini-market, a café, a butcher’s, an Orthodox church covered in scaffolding, a car wash, with three men hosing down a white van, and a cluster of dogs, their fur ruffled by the wind.
Two people sat in the back of the car, a neat-looking man in his late forties, wearing a black coat over a grey, roll-neck jumper, and a woman, a little younger, with an attractive, open face beneath a tangle of fair hair, who wore a fleece-collared leather jacket over a baggy jumper, tight jeans and black suede boots, and big costume jewellery. She looked as if she might once have been a minor rock star, or an equally minor actress.
The driver pulled over in front of a decrepit high-rise building, with laundry hanging from half the windows and a dozen satellite television dishes fixed to the bare walls, and turned off the engine. Then he pointed through the windscreen at a jagged hole where the road met the pavement.
‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s where she lives.’
‘So there’s likely to be several of them down there,’ the man in the back said.
‘Yes, but careful of the one I told you about,’ the driver said. ‘She’s feisty.’
With the wipers off, the steady droplets of rain were fast turning the screen opaque. Passers-by became blurred shapes. That was good. On top of the blacked-out windows, that would make it even harder for anyone to see in. The cars in this neighbourhood were beat-up wrecks. Every person walking past was going to notice the gleaming S-Class Mercedes, and wonder what it was doing here and who was inside.
‘OK,’ the woman said. ‘Good. Let’s go.’
The car pulled away.
Beneath the tarmac under its tyres, the baby slept. Valeria read a newspaper that was several days old. Tracy Chapman was singing ‘Fast Car’ again. Romeo held the neck of the plastic bag in his mouth, exhaling and inhaling.
Simona lay on her mattress, serene now, her head full of dreams of England. She saw a tall clock tower called Big Ben. She dropped cubes of ice into a glass, then poured in whisky. Lights glided past her. The lights of a city. People in that city smiled. She heard laughter. She was in a huge room with paintings and statues. It was dry in this room. She felt no pain in her body or her heart.
When, a long time later, she woke, her mind was set.
29
Lynn Beckett woke with a start. For some moments she had no idea where she was. Her right leg felt numb and her back ached. She stared, bewildered, at a cartoon on a television set that was mounted on a wall high up above her, suspended on a metal arm. On the screen, a man was being strapped to a catapult and aimed at a brick wall. Moments later he flew through it, leaving the wall intact but with an imprint of himself, like a stencil.
Then she remembered, and began gently pummelling her thigh, trying to get the circulation going. She was in Caitlin’s private room, off a small ward in the liver unit of the Royal South London Hospital. She must have drifted off. There was a faint smell of food. Mashed potatoes. As well as disinfectant and polish. Then she saw Caitlin beside her, lying in bed in her nightdress, her hair tousled, staring as ever at her mobile phone, reading something on the display. Beyond her, through the window of the small room, Lynn saw part of a crane, and the breeze blocks and spikes of a building under construction.
Despite having been allocated a bedroom, she had slept here last night, beside Caitlin. At one point, in agony from the cramped position of the chair, she had climbed into the bed and slept, curled up against her daughter, like spoons.
They had been woken at some horribly early hour and Caitlin had been wheeled off for a scan. Then, a while later, she had been wheeled back. Different nurses had come in and taken blood samples. At nine Lynn, feeling grungy and unwashed, had phoned work, telling her tough but kind team manager, Liv Thomas, that she did not know when she would be back. Liv was understanding about it, but suggested Lynn might want to work some extra hours in the following week to keep on target. Lynn said she would do her best.
And she sure as hell needed the money. It was costing her a fortune to be up here: £3 a day for Caitlin’s access to the TV and phone service; £15 per day to park; the cost of eating in the hospital canteen. And all the time running the risk of her employers deciding enough was enough and sacking her. She had used the entire, modest divorce settlement with Mal for the down payment on the house she now lived in with Caitlin, wanting to give her a proper home, to raise her with as much normality and security as possible. But it had been, and continued to be, a worrying financial stretch for her. As an additional worry, she was faced with having to come up with the money to fix her car, to get it through the imminent MOT.
Her job paid well, but her pay was performance-related, like a salesman’s. She needed to put in the hours to reach her targets and there was always the lure of a weekly bonus to the best performer. She took home, in a normal week, a lot more than a secretary/receptionist or a PA could earn in Brighton and Hove, and as she had no formal qualifications she considered herself lucky. But by the time she had paid the household bills and for petrol, Caitlin’s guitar lessons and all the stuff Caitlin had to have, like her mobile to keep in contact with her friends, and laptop and her clothes, as well as a few luxuries, like their bargain package holiday this summer to Sharm el Sheikh, she was left with very little. In addition, she was forever having to top up Caitlin’s empty current account. Her eight years at the debt collection agency had given her a morbid fear of owing money and for that reason she hated having to use credit cards herself.
Mal had at least been fair on the divorce settlement, and he did help out a little with his daughter, but Lynn was too proud to consider asking him for more. Her mother did what she could as well, but money was tight for her too. At the moment, Lynn had just over £1,000 put aside, which she had been saving all year, determined to give Caitlin a good Christmas – not that she was ever sure whether her daughter really connected to Christmas. Or to birthdays. Or to anything, really, that she had always considered normal life.
She wasn’t sure she could risk leaving Caitlin today and driving back to Brighton for work. Caitlin was not happy about being here and was in one of her strange moods, more angry than afraid. If she left her, she was scared her daughter might check herself out. She glanced at her watch. It was ten to one. On the screen, the man was in a house, making angry faces and puffing himself up. He ran out, straight through the front door, taking the whole front of the house with him. Despite herself, Lynn grinned. She’d been a sucker for cartoons all her life.
Caitlin was now tapping keys on her phone.
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ her mother said. ‘I drifted off.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Caitlin said, grinning suddenly, without taking her eyes from her phone. ‘Old people need their sleep.’
Despite her woes, Lynn laughed. ‘Thanks a lot!’
‘No, really,’ Caitlin said with a cheeky grin. ‘I just saw a programme about it on television. I thought about waking you, cos you ought to see it. But, you know, as it was about old people needing their sleep, I thought it was better not to!’
‘You cheeky monkey!’ Lynn tried to move, but both her legs had stiffened up.
There was a grinding roar of construction machinery outside. Then the door opened and the transplant coordinator they had met last night came in.
Today, rested and in daylight looking even more the English rose, Shirley Linsell was wear
ing a blue sleeveless cardigan over a white blouse and dark brown slacks.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are we today?’
Caitlin ignored her, continuing to text.
‘Fine!’ Lynn said, resolutely rising to her feet and pounding her dead thighs with both fists. ‘Cramp!’ she said, by way of explanation.
The transplant coordinator gave her a brief, sympathetic smile, then said, ‘The next test we are going to do is a liver biopsy.’ Walking across to Caitlin, she went on, ‘You are busy – got a lot of messages?’
‘I’m sending out instructions,’ Caitlin said. ‘You know, like what to do with my body and stuff.’
Lynn saw the shock on the coordinator’s face and the quizzical look on her daughter’s, that expression she so often had where it was impossible to tell if she was joking or being serious.
‘I think we have plenty of options for making you better, Caitlin,’ Shirley Linsell said in pleasant tone that did not patronize Lynn’s daughter.
Caitlin pressed her lips together and looked up with a wistful expression. ‘Yeah, well. Whatever.’ She shrugged. ‘Best to be prepared, right?’
Shirley Linsell smiled. ‘I think it’s best to be positive!’
Caitlin rocked her head sideways a few times, as if weighing this up. Then she nodded. ‘OK.’
‘What we’d like to do now, Caitlin, is to give you a small local anaesthetic, then we will take a tiny amount of your liver out with a needle. You won’t feel any pain at all. Dr Suddle will be here in a minute to tell you more about it.’
Abid Suddle was Caitlin’s consultant. A youthful, handsome thirty-seven-year-old of Afghan descent, he was the one person who, in Lynn’s view, Caitlin always seemed comfortable with. But he wasn’t always around, as the medical team were constantly being rotated.
‘You won’t take too much, will you?’ Caitlin asked.
‘Just the tiniest amount.’
‘You know, like, I know it’s fucked. So I sort of need whatever I’ve got left.’
The coordinator gave her a strange look, again uncertain whether Caitlin was joking.
‘We’ll take the absolute minimum we need. Don’t worry. It’s a minute amount.’
‘Yep, well, I’ll be pretty pissed off if you take too much.’
‘We don’t have to take any,’ the coordinator assured her gently. ‘Not if you don’t want us to.’
‘Right, cool,’ Caitlin said. ‘That would mean Plan B, right?’
‘Plan B?’ the transplant coordinator queried.
Caitlin spoke, still staring at her phone. ‘Yep, if I decide I don’t want your tests.’ Her expression was blank, unreadable. ‘That would be Plan B, wouldn’t it?’
‘What do you mean exactly, Caitlin?’ Shirley Linsell asked gently.
‘Plan B means I die. But, personally, I think Plan B is a pretty crap plan.’
30
After the post-mortem on Unknown Male, Roy Grace drove back to CID headquarters. He spent the entire journey talking on his hands-free to Christine Morgan, the Donor Liaison Sister at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, learning as much as he could about the human organ transplant process, in particular the administration of the supply of organs and donation procedures.
He finished the call as he drove into the car park at the front of Sussex House, manoeuvred around a parking cone marking off a space reserved for a visitor and pulled into his parking slot. Then he switched off the engine and sat, deep in thought, puzzling over who this dead young man was and what might have happened to him. Rain rattled on the roof and pattered on the windscreen, steadily covering it, turning the white wall in front of him into a shimmering, blurry mosaic.
The pathologist was convinced the organs had been professionally, surgically removed. The young man’s heart, lungs, kidneys and liver were gone, but not his stomach, intestines or bladder. From her own experience with organ donor bodies she had processed through the mortuary, Cleo had confirmed that families of donors often gave consent for those items, but wanted the eyes and skin retained.
The big inconsistency remained that Unknown Male had eaten a meal only hours before. A maximum of six hours before, the pathologist had estimated. Christine Morgan had just told him that even in the event of the sudden death of a victim who was on the National Organ Donor Register and carrying a donor card, it was extremely unlikely, to the point of pretty much an impossibility, that the organs would be harvested so quickly. There was paperwork to be signed by the next of kin. Matching recipients to be found on the databases. Specialist surgical organ recovery teams to be dispatched from the different hospitals where the organs would be taken for transplant. Normally the body, even if brain-stem dead, would be kept on life-support systems, to keep the organs perfused with blood, oxygen and nutrients until removed, for many hours, and sometimes days.
The timing was not absolutely impossible, she told Roy. But she had never experienced a situation where things had happened so quickly, and the young man had definitely not been in her hospital.
He picked up his blue, A4 notebook from the passenger seat, rested it against the steering wheel and wrote AUSTRIA? SPAIN? OPT-OUT COUNTRIES? Was it really a possibility that Unknown Male was an Austrian or Spanish organ donor buried at sea? Austria was a landlocked country. And if he was from Spain could he have drifted over 100 miles in just a few days?
Improbable enough to be discounted at this stage.
He felt hungry suddenly and glanced at the car clock. It was quarter past two. He never normally had much of an appetite after a post-mortem, but it had been a long time since his early-morning bowl of porridge.
Turning up the collar of his raincoat, he sprinted across the road, climbed over a low but awkward brick wall, ran up the short, muddy track and through the gap in the hedge, the standard shortcut to the ASDA superstore which served as Sussex House’s unofficial canteen.
*
Ten minutes later he was seated at his desk and unwrapping a dismally healthy-looking salmon and cucumber sandwich. Some while back Cleo had started quizzing him on what he ate when he wasn’t with her, knowing his tendency for junk food while at work and that for the past nine years he had survived on microwaved instant meals at home.
So at least he could look her in the face tonight and tell her he had eaten a Healthy Option sandwich. He would just conveniently omit the Coke, the KitKat and the caramel doughnut.
He quickly glanced through the post his MSA, Eleanor, had piled on his desk. On the top was a typed note in response to the Police National Computer registration plate check he had requested on the Mercedes he had seen earlier this morning, GX57 CKL. It was registered to a Joseph Richard Baker at an address he recognized as a high-rise block close to the seafront, behind the Metropole Hotel. The name was vaguely familiar but nothing that ran up any flags. There was no marker on the vehicle. There was a Joe Baker who had long been around the seedier side of Brighton, running saunas and massage parlours. It figured he would be out late and in a flash set of wheels.
He turned his attention to his emails, noting a few that needed urgent replies, then logged on to the serials. As he glanced through them, noting the usual domestics, muggings, break-ins, moped thefts and RTCs, but not major incidents, he took a bite of the sandwich, wishing he had gone for the All Day Breakfast option of a triple-decker egg, bacon and sausage wedge instead. Then, unscrewing the cap of the Coke, he remembered his promise yesterday to the Argus reporter. Reaching for his Rolodex, he spun it to find the man’s card and dialled his mobile number.
It sounded as if Kevin Spinella, who answered instantly, was also eating his lunch.
‘I don’t have much for you,’ Grace told him. ‘I’m not holding a press conference. Instead I’m just going to send out a press release, so I’ll give you the exclusive I promised. OK?’
‘Very good of you, Detective Superintendent. I appreciate it.’
‘Well, I think most of it you already know. The dredger, Arco Dee, pulled up the body of an u
nidentified male, believed to be in his mid-teens, yesterday afternoon, ten miles south of Shoreham Harbour, in its designated dredge area. A Home Office post-mortem was carried out this morning and the cause of death is as yet undetermined.’
‘Would that be on account of all the vital organs being missing, Detective Superintendent?’
How the hell do you know that? This was a real, ongoing problem, Grace realized. Where did Spinella get his information from? Some day soon he was going to find the leak. Was it someone here, within HQ CID, or at the Coroner’s Office, or in one of the uniform divisions or even at the mortuary? He thought carefully before answering, listening to the somewhat unpleasant sound of the reporter chewing.
‘I can confirm that the body has been subject to recent surgery.’
‘An organ donor, right?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t print that for the moment.’
There was a long silence. ‘But I’m correct?’
‘You would be correct to print that the body has been subject to recent surgery.’
Another silence. Then a reluctant, ‘OK.’ More chewing, followed by, ‘What can you tell me about the body?’
‘We estimate it has only been in the water for a few days at most.’
‘Nationality?’
‘Unknown. Our priority is to track down his identity. It would be helpful to me if you printed something along the lines that Sussex Police would like to hear from anyone with a missing teenage boy who has been subject to recent surgery.’
‘Foul play is suspected presumably?’
‘It is possible that the victim died lawfully and was buried at sea – and then drifted.’
‘But you are not ruling out foul play?’
Again Grace hesitated before replying. Every conversation he had with this reporter was like a game of chess. If he was able to get Spinella to word the story the way he wanted, it could be very helpful in generating public response. But if it was printed sensationally, all it would do was frighten the citizens of Brighton and Hove.