But there was still no damn guarantee the transplant would work.
And, assuming it did, there was the further problem of finding several thousand pounds a year to pay for the anti-rejection drugs, for life.
But, more to the point, there wasn’t an alternative. Except for the unthinkable.
What if Marlene Hartmann was a con woman? She would have handed over every penny she could cobble together in the world and still be nowhere. OK, the company checked out from the credit enquiries she had made, surreptitiously, from work yesterday, and now she had the references, which she would contact for sure. But all the same she was worried sick about taking the next step – to sign and fax the contract and transfer 50 per cent of the fee, 150,000 euros, to Munich.
Breakfast was on the television, with the sound turned down to silent. The host and the hostess were seated on a sofa, chatting and laughing with a guest, some beautiful young woman in her twenties she vaguely recognized but couldn’t place. She had dark hair and was similar in build to Caitlin. And suddenly she had an image of Caitlin sitting there on that sofa, chatting and laughing with those hosts. Telling them about how she nearly died, but beat the system, yeaaaahhhhh!
Maybe Caitlin would become a huge star. It was possible. She was beautiful; people noticed her. She had personality. If she had her health back, she could be anything she wanted.
If.
Lynn glanced at her watch and did a quick calculation.
‘Wisconsin must be six or seven hours behind the UK, right?’
Luke nodded pensively. ‘Phoenix will be about the same.’
‘So it would be the middle of the night. I would particularly like to talk to the mother there – I’ll call her this afternoon.’
‘The one in Manchester has a daughter of a similar age. You should be able to get hold of her. I think you should kick off with her.’
Lynn looked at him and, through her tiredness and her frayed emotions, suddenly felt a deep affection for him.
‘Good thinking,’ she said, and dialled the woman’s home number. After six rings it went to voicemail. Then she tried the mobile.
Almost instantly there was a click, followed by a loud background roar, as if the woman was driving.
‘Hello?’ she said in a thick Mancunian accent.
Lynn introduced herself and thanked the woman for emailing her.
‘I’m just dropping the young ones off,’ she replied. ‘I’ll be home in twenty minutes. Can I call you back?’
‘Of course.’
‘And listen, love, don’t worry. Marlene Hartmann is a star. You can come up here and meet my Chelsey. She’ll chat to you, tell you the nightmare she went through with the National Health. I can show you the photos too. Twenty minutes all right for you, love?’
‘Absolutely fine, thank you!’ Lynn said.
She put the phone down with hope suddenly soaring in her heart.
78
As Glenn Branson drove along the perimeter road of Shoreham Airport, the strong wind buffeted the small Hyundai. He passed a cluster of parked helicopters, then glanced at a small, twin-engined plane that was coming in to land on the grass runway. He turned right, beyond the end of the hangars, and drove up to the converted warehouse, inside a mesh-fenced compound, that housed the Specialist Search Unit. The car clock read 12.31 p.m.
A few minutes later he was in the cluttered conference room, which doubled as the canteen and shared communal office, with a mug of coffee beside him, carefully spreading out the photocopy of an Admiralty chart, which Ray Packham had helped him to prepare, on the large table.
There were charts on the walls, wooden shields, a whiteboard, some framed photos of the team, as well as a bravery award certificate. The view through the window was on to the car park and the featureless grey metal wall of the warehouse beyond. On the windowsill was a goldfish bowl, containing a solitary fish and a toy deep-sea diver.
Smurf, Jonah, Arf and WAFI were already seated. The young woman sergeant wore a black, zippered fleece, embroidered with the word police and the Sussex Police shield above it. The three men wore blue, short-sleeved shirts, with their numbers on the epaulettes.
Gonzo, also wearing a fleece, came in and handed Glenn Branson a stiff paper bag. ‘In case you need it.’
The other four grinned.
Glenn looked puzzled. ‘Need it for what?’
‘To throw up in,’ Gonzo said.
‘It’s quite rough outside!’ Jonah said.
‘Yeah, and this whole building moves a bit on a windy day,’ said WAFI, ‘so we thought – you know – bearing in mind last time you were with us . . .’
Tania Whitlock gave Glenn a sympathetic smile as her team ribbed him.
‘Yeah, very witty,’ he retorted.
‘Heard you applied for a transfer to this unit, Glenn,’ Arf said. ‘Cos you enjoyed being with us so much last time.’
‘Mutiny on the Bounty springs to mind,’ Glenn said.
‘So, Glenn,’ Tania Whitlock said, ‘tell us what you have.’
The chart showed a section of coastline from Worthing to Seaford. There were three crude red ink rings drawn on it, marked A, B and C, with a sizeable space between each. A green dotted line plotted a course out to sea from the mouth of Shoreham Harbour, with a childlike drawing of a boat at the end of it, beside which someone had written Das Boot. There was also a large blue arc.
‘OK,’ Branson said. ‘The skipper of the Scoob-Eee, Jim Towers, had a mobile phone on the O2 network. These three red circles indicate the O2 base stations and masts covering this section of coast. The phone company has given us a plot, which is all marked on here, of base station signals received from Towers’s mobile phone on Friday evening, between 8.55 p.m., when it was noticed by a harbour pilot and by a shore boatman passing through the lock, and 10.08 p.m., when the last signal was received.’
‘Glenn, are these calls that Jim Towers made?’ Sergeant Whitlock asked.
‘No, Tania. When the phone is in standby mode, once every twenty minutes it sends out a signal to a base station, a bit like the way, when I was with you, you radioed the coastguard from time to time and gave him your position, yeah?’ he explained, pleased with his analogy. ‘It’s like checking in – calling home. It’s called, technically, a location update.’
They all nodded.
‘The signal gets picked up by the nearest base station – unless it’s busy, and then it gets passed to the next one. If there’s more than one base station in range, it could be picked up by two or even three.’
‘Blimey, Glenn,’ said Arf. ‘We didn’t realize you were a telephone scientist as well as a master mariner.’
‘Piss off!’ he retorted with a big grin. Then, continuing, he said, ‘So this is what was happening here. After the boat left Shoreham Harbour, the first location update was picked up by this Shoreham base station and this Worthing one.’ He pointed at the ones marked A and B. ‘Twenty minutes later, the second signal home was also picked up by these two. But the third one, approximately one hour after leaving harbour, was picked up by this third one as well, just east of Brighton Marina.’ He pointed at C. ‘That tells us Towers was steering a south-easterly course – which we’ve marked, as a best guess, with this green dotted line.’
‘Good film, Das Boot,’ Gonzo said.
‘Now here’s where it gets interesting,’ said Glenn, ignoring him.
‘Oh, great!’ WAFI said. ‘We’ve been waiting for it to get interesting, because it’s been pretty boring so far!’
The DS waited patiently for them all to stop laughing.
‘The timing advance can be anything from zero to sixty-three for a given link with a phone,’ Glenn went on, ignoring their barracking. ‘So if the maximum range is about twenty miles, then divide that into sixty-three slots and you can work out distance to within about eighteen hundred feet.’
‘OK,’ Gonzo said. ‘If I’m understanding this correctly, you said this shows the direction the boat was h
eading. So this is its last known position before it went out of range?’
Glenn Branson shook his head.
‘No, I don’t think it went out of range.’
He looked up. The others all frowned.
‘This is where the fourth and last signal – the last location update – was transmitted from,’ he continued. ‘Now, the seaward range from standard base stations is about twenty miles. But I was told that the mobile phone companies, where possible, build their coastal masts exceptionally high to increase range, so they can pick up lucrative roaming charges from foreign ships passing, so the range here is probably quite a bit further than that – could be as much as thirty miles.’
Gonzo scrawled some calculations down on a notepad.
‘Right,’ Glenn said, ‘you all know the Scoob-Eee. It’s not a fast boat – its maximum speed is ten knots – roughly twelve miles an hour. When this last signal was picked up, she had only been out for less than ninety minutes – and she was sailing at an angled course, putting her approximately ten miles out to sea – well within range.’
There was a few moments’ silence while they all reflected on this. It was Tania Whitlock who broke it.
‘Perhaps his phone battery died, Glenn?’ she suggested.
‘It’s possible – but he was an experienced skipper and the phone was one of his lifelines. Don’t you think it’s unlikely he’d have put to sea either without a charger or with an uncharged battery?’
‘He could have dropped it overboard,’ said Gonzo.
‘Yep, he could,’ Glenn agreed. ‘But again unlikely for an experienced skipper.’
Gonzo shrugged. ‘Yeah, Towers knew what he was doing, but it’s easily done. You think something else happened?’
Branson stared at him levelly. ‘What about the possibility that it sank?’
‘Ah, now I get it!’ Arf said. ‘You want us to go out there and take a look for it, scan the bottom?’
‘You guys are catching on quick!’ Branson said.
‘She’s a solid boat, built to take heavy seas,’ WAFI said. ‘She’s unlikely to have sunk.’
‘What about an accident?’ Branson said. ‘A collision? A fire? Sabotage? Or something more sinister.’
‘Like what, Glenn?’ Tania asked.
‘The voyage doesn’t make sense,’ Branson said. ‘I’ve interviewed his wife. Friday night was their wedding anniversary. They had a restaurant reservation. He had no clients booked for any night fishing trip. Yet instead of going home, he got on the boat and headed out to sea.’
‘Yep, well, I can sympathize with him,’ Arf said. ‘The choice of dinner with your missus or being out at sea on your own – no contest.’
They all grinned. Tania, who was newly married, less humorously than her colleagues.
Gonzo pointed out of the window. ‘There’s a Force Nine hooley blowing out there. Do you know what the sea’s like at the moment?’
‘A bit choppy, I should imagine.’ Glenn looked back at Gonzo quizzically.
‘If you want us to go out there, mate, we’ll go,’ WAFI said. ‘But you’re coming with us.’
79
Lynn sat impatiently at her desk at the Harrier Hornets work station with her phone headset on. She glanced at the calendar, tacked to the red partition wall, to the right of her computer screen.
Three weeks to go till Christmas, she thought. She had never felt so unprepared – or uninterested – in her life. There was only one Christmas present she wanted.
Her friend Sue Shackleton had told her she could come up with £10,000 quickly. That now left a shortfall of £15,000.
Right at this moment, Luke was at his bank, setting up everything for the wire transfer of 150,000 euros to Marlene Hartmann at Transplantation-Zentrale. But he would not actually make the transfer until they’d checked out all the references.
So far it was so good on that score. She had spoken to the woman in Manchester, whose name was Marilyn Franks. Her daughter’s liver transplant had been done at a clinic in Sussex, near Brighton, and it had been a complete success. Marilyn Franks could not praise Marlene Hartmann highly enough.
It was the same with the man in Cape Town. He’d had initial complications, but the aftercare, he assured Lynn, was far more thorough than he had imagined was possible. The Swedish woman in Stockholm, whose husband had had a new heart and lungs, was equally emphatic in her praise. With both the last two cases, the operations were carried out in local clinics.
It was still too early to phone America, but in her own mind, from what she had now heard, Lynn was already convinced. Still, she owed it to Luke, especially, to complete the checks. And there was not going to be any second chance.
Hopefully, some time this afternoon, or tomorrow at the latest, after she had spoken to the other two references, the transfer of the first half of the money would be done. The remaining 50 per cent would have to be handed over, cash on delivery, on the day of the transplant. Which gave her days, at most, to find the last £15,000.
She had tested the German woman out on what would happen if she had a shortfall and Marlene had been firm. It was all or nothing. She could not be more clear.
Fifteen thousand. It was still a lot of money to find – and even more so to find inside a week, maybe less. Further, the exchange rate of the pound against the euro was predicted to worsen. Which meant the shorfall might get even bigger.
From the moment Luke made the transfer, the clock would start ticking. At any time in the following days, Lynn could get a phone call from the German woman, giving her and Caitlin as little as two hours’ notice before they were picked up and transferred to the clinic. As Marlene had explained so clearly, you could not predict when an accident was going to happen that would provide a suitable matching organ.
She glanced around. Christmas cards were starting to appear on desks in the office, and tiny bits of tinsel here and there, and sprigs of mistletoe. But the company had a number of Muslims working for it and there was an edict that Christmas was not to be openly celebrated by employees for fear of offending the non-Christians. So yet again there would be no proper decorations going up – nor an official office Xmas lunch.
Last year that had made her blood boil, but this year Lynn didn’t care. At this moment she cared only about one thing. The time. It was five minutes to one. At one there was a lunch-break exodus, as regular as clockwork, from several of her Harrier Hornet colleagues. Crucially, Katie and Jim, who sat either side of her and could hear everything she said, if they chose to listen, and her team manager, Liv Thomas.
On the screen on the wall, the COLLECTED BONUS POT had risen to £1,450 this morning. The big pre-Christmas grab was on, to pull money in before clients blew it all on presents and booze.
Making a big effort to focus on work, but without hope of scooping this week’s pot, she dialled the next number on her call list. It was answered a few moments later by a slurred, female voice.
‘Mrs Hall?’ Lynn asked.
‘Who’s that?’
‘It’s Lynn, from Denarii. We just noticed that you didn’t make your payment on Monday this week.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s Christmas, innit? I got stuff to buy. What do you want me to tell my kids? They’re getting no presents this year cos I got to pay Denarii?’
‘Well, we did have an agreement, Mrs Hall.’
‘Yeah, well, you sodding come here and explain that to my kids.’
Lynn closed her eyes for an instant. She heard a gulp as if the woman was swigging something. She didn’t have the energy to deal with this right now.
‘Can you tell me when we might be able to expect you to resume your payment plan?’
‘You tell me. Tell me about the social housing, yeah? You know, what about the Welfare? Why don’t you speak to them?’
The woman’s slurring was getting worse and what she was saying made no sense.
‘I think I’ll call you back tomorrow, Mrs Hall.’
Lynn hung up.
&
nbsp; Jim, to her right, a short, wiry Geordie of thirty, pulled off his headset and exhaled sharply.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘What’s with people today?’
Lynn gave him a sympathetic smile. He stood up.
‘I’m off. Think I need a liquid lunch today. Fancy a drink? I’m buying.’
‘Sorry. No thanks, Jim. I have to work through.’
‘Suit yourself.’
To Lynn’s relief, she saw Katie, a tubby red-haired woman in her forties, remove her headset and pick up her handbag.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Off to do battle with the shops!’
‘Good luck,’ Lynn said.
A few minutes later she saw her team manager wrestling her coat on. Lynn pretended to busy herself checking her emails, as she waited for all three of them to leave the room, then pulled up the client file and jotted down a number.
As soon as they were gone, she pulled off her headset, took her mobile phone from her bag, altered the setting to Number Withheld, then dialled the mobile phone of her most loathsome client of all.
He answered warily, after the third ring, in his deep, treacly voice.
‘Hello?’
‘Reg Okuma?’
‘Who is this, please?’
Keeping her voice down to barely above a whisper, she said, ‘Lynn Beckett, from Denarii.’
Suddenly his whole tone changed. ‘My beautiful Lynn! Are you phoning me to tell me that we can now make beautiful love together?’
‘Well, I’m actually calling to see if I can help you with your credit rating. We’re making some special Christmas offers to our clients. You owe thirty-seven thousand, eight hundred and seventy pounds, plus accruing interest, to the Bradford Credit Bank, yes?’
‘If that’s what you tell me.’
‘If you could raise fifteen thousand pounds right away, in cash, I think we’d be prepared to write off the rest of the debt for you, and give you a clean bill of health to kick off the New Year.’
‘You would?’ He sounded incredulous.
‘Only because it’s Christmas. We’re thinking about our year-end figures. It would be good for us to have closure with some key clients.’