She was about to press the dial button when she stopped.
Realizing.
Realizing just how dumb that would be. If the organ broker knew that the police were on to her, she would probably abort the operation and flee. Lynn could not take that risk. Caitlin had perked up since Dr Hunter’s booster, but that was not going to last. She had bought time from him, by promising she would allow Caitlin to be admitted to hospital this afternoon.
Barring a miracle, she was certain that if Caitlin went back into the Royal she would not come out again. There was no way she could let this all fall apart now.
‘Hello? Hello? Hello, Mother? Mum? Anyone home?’
Lynn looked at her daughter with a start. ‘What?’
‘I asked you, why did the cops come round?’
Then, to Lynn’s shock, Caitlin’s body suddenly sagged and she lurched sideways. Lynn grabbed her just in time to stop her falling, gripping her tightly.
For an instant, her daughter looked at her in total confusion.
‘Darling? Angel? Are you OK?’
Caitlin’s eyes seemed unfocused. Looking as if she were surprised by what had happened, she whispered, ‘Yes.’ Her skin seemed even more yellow than last night. Whispering again, so that Lynn had to put her ear to her mouth to hear, she said, ‘Why did they come? The cops?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are they going to bust us?’
Lynn shook her head. ‘No.’
Caitlin’s voice gained a little strength. ‘They seemed pretty desperate, you know? That’s a desperate thing, right? To lay that photo of the child on us. Unless it’s true, of course.’
She stared hard at her mother, her eyes suddenly focusing sharply again.
‘They’re probably under pressure about those bodies. Maybe they are getting desperate for a result. They’ll try anything, resort to anything.’
‘Yeah, well, we’re pretty desperate too.’
Despite all she was feeling, Lynn smiled, then threw her arms around Caitlin and held her, hugging her closer and more tightly than she had ever hugged her before.
‘God, I love you, my darling. So much. So much. You are everything to me. You’re the reason I get up in the morning. You’re the reason I get through work. You’re my life. Do you know that?’
‘You should get out more.’
Lynn grinned, then kissed her on the cheek. ‘You’re so horrible to me.’
‘Yeah.’ Caitlin was grinning too. ‘And you’re so fucking possessive!’
Lynn pushed her gently away and held her at arm’s length.
‘You know why I’m so possessive?’
‘Because I’m beautiful, smart, intelligent and would have the world at my feet if it wasn’t for one small problem, right? God gave me a liver from the wrong box.’
Lynn broke down in tears. Tears of joy. Tears of sadness. Tears of terror. Hugging Caitlin tight again, she whispered, ‘They lied. He lied. Don’t believe him. The detective lied. Just believe me. Angel, darling, just believe me. I’m your mum. Just believe me.’
Caitlin hugged her back, with all her feeble strength. ‘Yeah, OK, I believe you.’
Then suddenly Caitlin turned away, making a retching sound. Breaking free of her mother’s arms, she stumbled over to the sink. Lynn caught up with her, gripping her arm to prevent her from falling.
Then Caitlin threw up violently.
To her utter horror, Lynn saw it was not vomit that was spattering the sink and the tiled splash-back and the draining board. It was bile specked with bright red blood.
As she cradled her heaving, choking daughter, she knew then, in that moment, that she did not care about anything else. Did not care if Detective Superintendent Grace was telling the truth. Did not care if that girl he had brought the photograph of had to die. Did not care who had to die. If she needed to, she would kill them herself, with her own bare hands, to save the life of her child.
109
Simona sat on a chair in a small, windowless room, crying and drinking a glass of Coca-Cola. The room reminded her of the prison cell she had spent a night in when she and Romeo had been arrested a couple of years ago for stealing from a shop. The same smell of disinfectant. There was nothing in here except cupboards full of medical supplies. She was so hungry her stomach was aching.
‘I want Gogu,’ she sniffled.
The big Romanian nurse, who had gripped Simona’s arm so hard it was now bruised and hurting, stood with her arms folded in front of the door, watching her drink.
‘I dropped him outside.’
‘I’ll fetch it later,’ the nurse replied.
Simona felt a little better about that and nodded appreciatively. She stared at her glass, then back at the woman.
‘Please may I have something to eat?’ she asked for the third time in the quarter of an hour or so that she had been here. ‘Anything?’
‘Drink,’ the woman commanded.
Obediently, Simona drank some more. Maybe when she had finished this second glass, then she would get something to eat, and the woman would get Gogu for her.
‘What kind of work will I be doing here?’ she asked.
The nurse frowned. ‘Work? What kind of work?’
Simona smiled dreamily. ‘I would like to do bar work!’ she said. ‘I would like to learn to make drinks. You know, fancy drinks. What do they call them? Cocktails! I think that would be nice work, to make drinks and talk with people. I would think they have a nice bar here in this hotel, don’t they?’ Seeing the continued frown, she added hastily, ‘But of course I don’t mind what work. Anything. I could clean. I’m happy to clean. I’m just happy to be here. I will be even happier when Romeo comes! Do you think that might be soon?’
‘Drink,’ the woman replied.
Simona drained the glass. Then she sat in silence, while the woman continued to stand, with her arms folded, like a sentry.
After a few more minutes, Simona began to feel sleepy. She had a sudden wave of giddiness, then lost focus on the woman. Lost focus on the walls, on the cupboards. They were sliding past in front of her eyes, faster, then faster.
The nurse stood impassively, watching as Simona’s eyes closed and she fell sideways on to the floor and lay still, breathing hard.
She then hoisted the girl over her shoulder, carried her out a short distance along the corridor into the small pre-op room and laid her on the steel trolley. Then she removed all her clothes, checking greedily that Simona had no valuables on her. Sometimes, street vermin like this girl secreted stolen valuables in their bodies, hoping to get cash for them in England.
Hastily pulling on a rubber glove before anyone else came in, she checked inside the girl’s mouth, then carefully probed her vagina and anus. Nothing! Useless little bitch.
Then, on her intercom phone, she called the anaesthetist and told him, barely masking the disgust in her voice, that the girl was ready.
110
Roy Grace was just walking back in through the door of MIR One when Romeo Sierra Zero Eight Alpha Mike Lima pinged an ANPR camera. The information was radioed through to him immediately. He stopped in front of the crowded work station and wrote down the information. Sir Roger Sirius’s Aston Martin was heading north from the Washington roundabout on the A24.
Instantly he called the Air Operations Unit and requested Hotel Nine Hundred, the police helicopter, airborne. They estimated seven minutes’ time to be over the roundabout, which was four miles north of Worthing and eight miles from their base at Shoreham Airport.
He did a quick calculation. Hotel Nine Hundred’s maximum ground speed, depending on any head or tail winds, was about 130 mph. The A24 at this point was largely fast, open dual carriageway, but Sirius was unlikely to want to risk being pulled over for speeding. Assuming he was travelling at 80 mph and continuing on this road, the helicopter should have the car in sight in about fifteen minutes.
Assuming he had not turned off on to a minor road.
Although the sky w
as overcast this morning, there was a high cloud ceiling, giving the chopper plenty of visibility. Raising his hand in acknowledgement at a couple of his team members who were trying to get his attention, he walked over to the map that had been pinned up on the whiteboard. It showed Sussex and parts of its neighbouring counties, with the positions of Lynn Beckett’s and Sir Roger Sirius’s houses ringed in red. Ringed in purple were the locations of all the private hospitals and clinics in the area. There were a large number, including sports injuries clinics, diagnostic centres and skin clinics, and Grace knew that most of them could be ruled out as too small to house the kind of facilities they were looking for.
He quickly found the A24 and the roundabout, then traced his finger up the road northwards. There were any number of places the car could be heading to. The conurbations of Horsham or Guildford were possibilities, but Grace’s hunch was that a private clinic with the kind of facilities needed for transplants, and all its support staff, would more likely be concealed somewhere in the countryside.
He glanced at his watch, anxiously waiting for the car to ping another ANPR camera, or for word from the chopper, and regretting his decision to keep the rural surveillance team outside Sirius’s gates rather than have them follow the car.
He did not know how much time they had, but from the call they had intercepted, Lynn Beckett and her daughter were due to be picked up shortly. His guess was that they had a few hours, at most.
They had not intercepted any calls since his visit and he considered that a bad sign. It meant she wasn’t panicked by his visit and was still going ahead. It was, of course, possible she had another phone, a pay-as-you-go one that didn’t show up on her records, but if that had been the case, she would surely have used that instead of her landline earlier, wouldn’t she? Or her daughter’s phone, assuming she had one.
Wherever she or Sirius went, and he was certain it was going to be to the same place, he was going in hard. During the night he’d been assembling the units and he had all the vehicles and crews on standby. Fortunately, so far it had been a quiet morning in Sussex and he had the full team he needed.
‘Sir!’ Jacqui Phillips, one of the researchers, called to him.
He went across to her. Yesterday he had tasked her with listing all manufacturers and wholesale suppliers of operating theatre materials, instruments and drugs in the country. But as she showed him now, it was an impossibly long list. One that would take weeks to work through.
Next, Glenn Branson wanted him. The DS had some feedback from the all-ports alert they had put out and the photographs of Marlene Hartmann and Simona they had circulated. There had been a number of potential sightings during the night and early morning, including a mother and daughter from Romania who had been held by Gatwick police for an hour, before being cleared, and another couple with a young girl, from Germany, who had been interrogated after arriving by Eurostar.
‘I think we have to assume she’s already here now,’ Grace said.
‘Want me to cancel the alert?’
‘Give it another hour, just in case,’ he said.
His radio crackled again. Another ANPR had been pinged by Sirius. He was still on the A24 – this time heading past Horsham, still travelling north. Grace glanced at his watch again. Sirius was going like the wind. At this rate, he would shortly be out of the county and into Surrey, which meant the police there would need to be informed of their pursuit.
He radioed the helicopter and relayed this information, asking where they were.
The observer replied they were just approaching Horsham themselves. Within seconds of ending the call, Grace’s radio crackled again and he heard the observer’s excited voice.
‘We have contact with Romeo Sierra Zero Eight Alpha Mike Lima! In slow traffic approaching roadworks, still proceeding northbound on A24.’
Grace went back to the map and made a wide east, west and north arc from the car’s position. There were seven purple rings within that arc, all existing clinics.
But ten anxious minutes later, the helicopter reported that the Aston Martin was still travelling north. If it kept on this route, Grace thought, staring at the map again, feeling vexed, it would soon reach the M25 London orbital road.
‘Where the hell are you bloody going?’ he said out loud.
None of the twenty-two members of his inquiry team in this room at the moment, hunched in front of their screens, or with phones to their ears, or poring over printouts, had any better idea than he did.
111
Lynn was in her room, zipping shut her overnight bag, when the doorbell rang.
The sound shrilled through her veins. Shrilled through her soul. She froze in total, blind panic.
Was it the police again?
Then she stepped across to the window and peered cautiously down. Outside was a turquoise and white Streamline taxi estate car.
Relief flooded through her. She had not been expecting a taxi, but that was fine, that was good, she realized as her thoughts clarified. A taxi! Yes, very good! A taxi meant that Marlene Hartmann had nothing to hide. A taxi was open. If she was happy for them to be picked up in a taxi, then everything had to be absolutely fine.
Sod you and your damn scaremongering, Detective Superintendent Grace, she thought. Then she rapped hard on the window. The driver, a man in his forties in a bomber jacket, who was standing outside the front door, looked up and Lynn signalled to him that they were coming.
Then she carried hers and Caitlin’s bags downstairs with a sudden burst of optimism in her heart. It was going to be all right. It was going to be fine. Everything would be brilliant. She was going to give Caitlin the best Christmas ever!
‘OK, darling!’ she called out. ‘This is it!’
Caitlin was sitting at the kitchen table, cradling Max on her lap and stroking him, staring at the face of the Romanian girl in the photograph. The glass of glucose water and the antibiotic pills from Ross Hunter lay untouched in front of her.
‘Have you done Max’s food and water, darling?’ Lynn asked.
Caitlin looked at her blankly.
‘Darling?’
Suddenly, Lynn’s optimism dipped as she saw the confusion in her daughter’s face.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it!’
She quickly filled up the water bowl, topped the food up in the dispenser, lifted Max gently from Caitlin’s arms, gave him a nuzzle and a kiss and set him down.
‘Guard the house, Max, OK! Remember what you’re descended from!’
Normally Caitlin would grin whenever she said that. But there was no reaction. Lynn touched her arm gently.
‘OK, angel, drink up and take your pills, and let’s rock and roll.’
‘I’m not thirsty.’
‘It’ll make you feel better. You can’t eat anything this morning, before the op, remember?’
Reluctantly, Caitlin drank. Holding the glass, she half stood up, then crashed back down heavily in the chair, slopping some of the liquid over the rim.
Lynn stared at her for a moment, panic rising again. She held the glass, helping Caitlin get the rest of the fluid and the pills down, then she ran outside and asked the taxi driver to help her.
Two minutes later, with their luggage in the boot, Lynn sat holding Caitlin’s hand in the back of the cab as it pulled away.
*
A hundred yards behind them, the green Volkswagen Passat radioed that Target Two was on the move and read out the index of the taxi.
From his desk in MIR One, Grace ordered them to follow and keep them in sight.
*
‘Where are we going?’ Lynn asked the driver.
‘It’s a surprise!’
She caught his grin in his mirror.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not allowed to tell you.’
‘What?’
‘It’s all a bit cloak and dagger. James Bond stuff.’
‘Die Another Day,’ murmured Caitlin, through half-closed eyes. She was now scratch
ing her thighs, harder and harder and harder.
They turned left into Carden Avenue, then left again on to the London Road, heading south towards the centre of Brighton.
Lynn looked at the driver’s ID card mounted on the dash. Read his name. Mark Tuckwell.
‘All right, Mr Bond,’ Lynn said. ‘Are we in for a long journey?’
‘Not this part of it. I—’ He was interrupted by his phone ringing. He answered curtly, ‘I’m driving. Call you back in a bit.’
‘Want to give me any clues?’ Lynn asked.
‘Chill, woman!’ Caitlin murmured.
Lynn sat in silence as they headed down towards Preston Circus, then turned right at the lights and went up New England Hill, under the viaduct. Then they turned sharp left. Moments later they crested the hill and began descending, down towards Brighton Station. The driver stopped at a junction, then carried on down the hill and suddenly pulled over sharply and halted by a row of bollards recently installed to prevent cars dropping off here.
A short man, about fifty years old, in a cheap beige suit, with greasy hair and a beaky nose, hurried over and opened Lynn’s door.
‘You come with me,’ he said in broken English. ‘Quickly, quickly, please! I am Grigore!’ He gave a servile, buck-toothed smile.
Staring at him in bewilderment, Lynn said, ‘Where – where are we going?’
He almost yanked her out of the car in his agitation, with an apologetic smile, into the bitterly cold noon air.
The taxi driver removed their bags from the boot.
None of them noticed the green Passat driving slowly past.
*
In the Incident Room, Grace’s radio beeped.
‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.
‘They’re getting out at Brighton Station,’ the surveillance officer informed him. ‘In the wrong place.’
Roy was thrown into total confusion. Brighton Station?
‘What the fuck?’ he said, thinking aloud.