Then, with her coat still on, she peered around the living-room door. Luke was lounging on the sofa, drinking a can of Diet Coke, his hair looking even more stupid than ever, most of it hanging in one big, gelled, lopsided spike over his right eye. But he did not look as stupid as the two slender girls dancing on the screen, in the pop video that was playing.
Clad only in black bras and briefs, wearing silver boxes on their heads, they were gyrating in jerky, mechanical movements to a hard, repetitive beat. Various phrases were stencilled in crude black letters on different parts of their arms, legs and midriffs. do it ! make it ! work harder ! ever better !
‘Daft Punk?’ Lynn said.
Luke nodded. ‘Yeah.’
Jabbing the remote, she turned the volume down. ‘All OK?’
He nodded. ‘Caitlin’s sleeping.’
With this fucking racket? she nearly said. Instead she thanked him for looking after her, then asked, ‘How is she?’
He shrugged. ‘No change. I checked on her a few minutes ago.’
Still with her coat on, Lynn hurried up the stairs and went into her daughter’s bedroom. Caitlin was in bed with her eyes closed. In the weak glow of the bedside lamp, she was looking even more yellow. Then she opened one eye and peered at her mother.
‘How are you, angel?’ Lynn leaned down and kissed her, stroking her hair, which felt damp.
‘I’m quite thirsty actually.’
‘Would you like some water? Fruit juice? Coke?’
‘Water,’ Caitlin said. Her voice was small, and reedy.
Lynn went to the kitchen and poured out a glass of cold water from the fridge. She noticed, to her dismay, a build-up of ice at the back of the fridge – a sure sign, she knew from past experience, that the appliance was on its last legs. Yet another expense looming up which she could not afford.
As she closed the door, Luke came in, barefoot, in a grey cardigan over a ragged shirt and baggy jeans.
‘How did you get on today, Lynn?’
‘Raising money?’
He nodded.
‘My mother’s come up with some. And Caitlin’s father has offered his life savings. But I still need to find one hundred and seventy-five thousand.’
‘I’d like to help,’ he said.
Surprised, she said, ‘Well, thank you – that’s – that’s very kind of you, Luke. But it’s an impossible sum.’
‘I’ve got some money. I dunno if Caitlin ever told you about my dad – not my stepfather – my real father.’
Holding the glass of water in her hand, and anxious to take it up to Caitlin, she said, ‘No.’
‘He was killed in an accident at work. On a building site – a crane toppled on to him. My mum got a big compensation payment, and she gave most of it to me, because she didn’t want my stepdad getting it – he has a gambling habit. I’d be happy to contribute it.’
‘That really is very kind of you, Luke,’ she said, genuinely touched. ‘All contributions are more than welcome. How much could you spare?’
‘I’ve got one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. I want you to have it all.’
She dropped the glass.
75
Sometimes, Roy Grace thought, it was easy to become over-confident and forget the most elementary stuff. It was good, occasionally, to go back to basics.
Seated in his office at quarter to seven in the morning, drinking his second cup of coffee of the day, he pulled down from his bookshelves the Murder Investigation Manual, a massive but definitive tome, compiled by the Centre for Policing Excellence for the Association of Chief Police Officers.
Updated regularly, it contained every procedure for every aspect of a murder investigation, including a well-mapped-out Murder Investigation Model, which he turned to now. The Fast Track Menu, which he read through again now to refresh himself, contained ten points which were ingrained in every homicide detective’s brain – and precisely because they were so familiar, some of them could easily be overlooked.
The first on the list was Identify Suspects. Fine, he could tick that box. That was in progress.
Second was Intelligence Opportunities. He could tick that one too. They had Norman Potting’s man in Romania, his own contact, Kriminalhauptkommissar Marcel Kullen in Munich, DS Moy and DC Nicholl intelligence gathering in the brothels, Guy Batchelor trawling through struck-off surgeons and the HOLMES analyst’s scoping operation.
Scene Forensics was third on the list. The bottom of the Channel didn’t give them much to go on there. The plastic sheeting was their best hope, as well as the new fingerprint technology on the outboard, and the long-shot of the cigarette butts Glenn had sent to the DNA labs.
He moved on to Crime Scene Assessment. They had the dump site, but as yet no crime scene. Fifth was Witness Search. Who would have seen these three teenagers? Staff at whatever hospital or clinic they had been operated on? Passengers and staff at whichever airport, or seaport, or station through which they had entered the UK? They would probably have been picked up on CCTV cameras at their point of entry, but he had no idea how long they had been in the UK. It could have been days, weeks or months. Impossible at this stage to start looking through that amount of footage. Another thought he noted down, under this heading, was Other Romanians working here who might have known them? The e-fits had been circulated widely and been featured in the press, but no witnesses had come forward.
Sixth was Victim Enquiries. His best source on those was DS Potting’s man in Romania. And perhaps Interpol, but he wasn’t holding his breath on them.
Possible Motives, the seventh point on the list, was where he stopped to think long and hard. He was fond of telling his teams that assumptions were the mothers and fathers of all fuck-ups. As he had mulled over last night, was there a danger they were they being led down a blind alley by assuming human trafficking for organs was behind these three murders? Was there some sicko out there who enjoyed filleting people?
Yes, possibly, but less so if he applied the principles of Occam’s Razor. There was a world shortage of human organs. Fact. Romania was a country involved in human traffficking for, among other purposes, the international trade in human organs. Fact. Skilled medical and surgical work had been carried out on these three victims. Fact. Supporting that was the information that an eminent British surgeon, Dr Raymond Crockett, had at one time been struck off for illegally purchasing four kidneys from Turkey for patients. Against was that there was no other history of human organ trafficking in England.
But there was always a first time.
And, it occurred to him, Dr Crockett had been caught. Was he a lone maverick, or had he just been unlucky to be found out? Were there dozens of other specialists like him in the UK who were using illegal organs and had not yet been caught? Was Crockett working again? He needed to be interviewed and eliminated.
Media was next. They were using the media as best they could, but the most important resource, the television programme Crimewatch, did not air for almost a week – even assuming they could get on it.
Then there was Post-mortems. At the moment he had all the information he required from these. If they found the surgical instruments, then further work might be required. For the moment, the bodies were being held in the mortuary.
He yawned, shaking off his tiredness and took another long sip of his coffee. When he had woken, at half past five, his brain had been whirring. He should have gone for his early-morning run, which always helped him to think clearly, but he was feeling guilty that he hadn’t finished his work last night, so instead had come in even earlier than usual.
Last on the list was Other Significant Critical Actions. He thought for some moments, then read through the list he had already noted in his policy book. Then he added, in his notebook, Outboard? Missing Scoob-Eee?
He leaned back in his chair until it struck the wall. Dawn was starting to break outside his window. The storm had died down overnight and it was a dry morning. But the forecast was bad. Red and pink streaks
speared the dark grey sky. How did that old adage go? Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning!
What do I need to take warning of? What am I missing? he challenged himself. There must be something. What? What the hell is it?
He stared silently into his coffee cup, as if the answer might lie there in the steaming blackness.
And then, suddenly, it came to him.
Sandy used to like pub quiz nights. She was brilliant at general knowledge – far better than he was. He remembered a quiz they had attended, eleven or twelve years ago, and one of the questions had been to guess the size of the English Channel in square miles. Sandy had won, with a correct answer of 29,000.
He clicked his finger and thumb.
‘Yes!’
76
‘We are looking in the wrong place,’ Roy Grace announced to his team. ‘And we might be looking at the wrong people. That’s what I think.’
Instantly, he had the full attention of all twenty-eight police officers and support staff at the morning briefing. Then he tapped the side of his head.
‘The wrong place, mentally, not geographically.’
Twenty-eight pairs of curious eyes locked on to his.
It was the fourth item on the Fast Track menu of the Murder Investigation Manual that had sparked him.
‘I want you all to stop thinking about your own lines of enquiry, for a moment, and focus on Crime Scene Assessment. OK? Now, we’ve been assuming that this choice of dump site was an unlucky or an ignorant one. But think about this. The English Channel covers twenty-nine thousand square miles. That licensed dredge area is a hundred square miles.’
He looked at Glenn, Guy Batchelor, Bella, E-J and several others.
‘Anyone here good at maths?’
The HOLMES analyst put up her hand.
‘What percentage of the Channel is that dredge area, Juliet?’ he asked.
She did some fast mental arithmetic. ‘Approximately 0.34 per cent, Roy.’
‘Small odds,’ Grace said. ‘A third of 1 per cent. We’re talking needle in a haystack percentages. If I was going to dump a body at random out in the Channel, I’d consider myself pretty unlucky to dump it on the dredge area. Actually, I’d rate the chances of that happening to be so slim as to be not worth worrying about. Unless of course I chose that area deliberately.’
He paused to let this sink in.
‘Deliberately?’ Lizzie Mantle queried.
‘Hear my reasoning,’ he said. ‘If we take the line that we are dealing with international human trafficking – the fastest-growing criminal business in the world – we can be reasonably sure of one thing: the calibre of the criminals we are dealing with. If they’re sufficiently well organized to be able to bring teenage kids into this country, and to have an effective medical organ transplant facility here, they are likely to be as professional about disposing of the bodies. They wouldn’t just go out to sea in a rubber dinghy and lob them over the side.’
He saw a general nod of approval.
‘I know we’ve been over this ground before, and we concluded the bodies were taken by either private boat or private plane or helicopter. But whatever the perps used, they would have hired a professional skipper or pilot. That person would have had charts, and been aware of the different depths of the Channel, and in all probability would have known these waters like the back of their hand. The dredge area may not be marked on all charts, but even so it is relatively shallow. If you are going to dump bodies, and you’ve got the whole of the Channel, wouldn’t you go for depth? I would.’
‘What’s the deepest point, Roy?’ Potting asked.
‘There are plenty of places where it is over two hundred feet. So why dump them in sixty-five?’
‘Speed?’ Glenn Branson suggested. ‘People panic with bodies sometimes, don’t they?’
‘Not the kind of people we’re looking at here, Glenn,’ the Detective Superintendent said.
‘Maybe they genuinely didn’t see it on their chart,’ Bella Moy said.
Grace shook his head. ‘Bella, I’m not ruling that out, but I’m postulating they might have been put there deliberately.’
‘But I don’t get why, Roy,’ DI Mantle said.
‘In the hope that they would be found.’
‘For what reason?’ Nick Nicholl asked.
‘Someone who doesn’t approve of what they are doing?’ Grace replied. ‘He dumped the bodies there, knowing there was a chance they’d get found.’
‘If he didn’t like what they were doing why didn’t he just call the police?’ Glenn Branson asked.
‘Could be any number of reasons. Top of my list would be a pilot or skipper who liked the money but had a conscience. If he shopped them, his nice little earner would stop. This way his conscience was salved. He dropped them in an easy depth to dive. If the dredger didn’t bring them up at some point, he could tip the police off – but not for a good long while.’
The team were quiet for a moment.
‘I accept I may be off beam here, but I want to start a new line of enquiry – starting with Shoreham Harbour, we need to check out all the boats. We can get help from the harbourmaster, the lock operators and the coastguard. The boats we should look at closest are fast cruisers and fishing boats – and all the rental boats. Glenn, you’re on the case on that missing fishing boat, the Scoob-Eee. Anything to report?’
The DS raised a padded brown envelope in the air. ‘Just arrived, five minutes ago from O2, the phone company, Roy. It’s a plot of all the mobile phone masts the skipper’s phone made contact with on Friday night. It’s unlikely he crossed the Channel, so with luck we may be able to track his movements along the south coast. Me and Ray Packham are going to work on them straight after this meeting.’
‘Good thinking. But we can’t be sure the Scoob-Eee had any involvement, so we should look at the other boats.’
Grace delegated two detective constables at the meeting to do this. Then he looked at Potting.
‘OK, Norman, I said we might be looking at the wrong people.’
Potting frowned.
‘I asked you to contact all transplant coordinators to see if any of these three were familiar to them, but you’ve still had no positive hit?’
‘That’s right, chief. We’ve spread pretty far on this now.’
‘I have something that might be better. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it. What we need is to check all the people who have been on a transplant waiting list, waiting either for a heart/lung transplant, a liver or a kidney, who did not receive a transplant but dropped off the waiting list.’
‘Presumably there are a number of reasons why people would drop off a waiting list, Roy?’ Potting said.
Grace shook his head. ‘From what I understand, no one on a waiting list for a new kidney or liver gets better by themselves, bar a miracle. If they drop off the list it is for one of two reasons. Either they had the transplant done elsewhere – or they died.’
His mobile phone began ringing. He pulled it out and glanced at the display. Instantly, he recognized the German dialling code, +49, in front of the number that appeared. It was Marcel Kullen calling from Munich.
Raising an apologetic hand, he stepped out of the briefing room, into the corridor.
‘Roy,’ the German detective said, ‘you wanted me to call us when the organ broker, Marlene Hartmann, arrived back in Munich, yes?’
‘Thank you, yes!’
Grace was amused by how the German constantly confused ‘you’ and ‘us’.
‘She flew back late last night. Already, this morning, she has made three phone calls to a number in your city, in Brighton.’
‘Brilliant! Any chance you could let me have that number?’
‘You don’t reveal its source?’
‘You have my word.’
Kullen read it out to him.
77
At quarter to nine in the morning, Lynn sat in the kitchen, with her laptop
open, studying the five emails that had come in overnight. Luke, who had spent some of the night with Caitlin, then had crashed on the sitting-room sofa, sat beside her. All of the emails were testimonials from clients of Transplantation-Zentrale.
One was from a mother in Phoenix, Arizona, whose thirteen-year-old son had received a liver through the organ broker two years ago and she provided a phone number for Lynn to call her on. She was, she said, utterly delighted with the service, and was certain her son would not have been alive today without Marlene Hartmann’s help.
Another was from a man in Cape Town who had received a new heart through the company just eight months ago. He too claimed he was delighted and provided a phone number.
The third was again from America, a particularly touching one, from the sister of a twenty-year-old girl in Madison, Wisconsin, who had received a kidney and said Lynn could call any time. The fourth was from a Swedish woman, in Stockholm, whose thirty-year-old husband had been provided with a new heart and lungs. The fifth was from a woman in Manchester, whose eighteen-year-old daughter had received a liver transplant this time last year. There were home and mobile numbers provided for her.
Lynn, still in her dressing gown, sipped her mug of tea. She had barely slept a wink all night, she had been so wired. Caitlin had come into her room at one stage, crying because she was in agony from where she had scratched the skin on her legs and arms raw. Then when she had settled her, Lynn had just lain awake, trying to think everything through.
The enormity of taking Luke’s money was weighing heavily. So was taking her mother’s nest egg. Taking the contribution from Mal worried her less; after all, Caitlin was his daughter too. But what if the transplant did not work? In the contract she had been through with Frau Hartmann, which the woman had left here, failure of the transplanted liver was covered. In the event of failure or rejection within six months a further liver would be provided at no charge.