by Peter James
‘The people here aren’t Filipinos,’ Bella said.
‘I spoke to the coastguard again,’ Potting said, ignoring her. ‘Gave him the weight of the breeze blocks holding down our first poor sod. He doesn’t think the weather conditions of the past week would have been strong enough to have moved him. Most of the current is on or near the surface. Maybe if there had been a tsunami, but not otherwise.’
‘Thank you. That’s good information,’ Grace said, noting it down. ‘Nick?’
Glenn Branson, still looking ragged, raised a hand. ‘Sorry to interrupt. Just a quick point, Roy. All three of these persons could have been killed in another country, or even on a ship, and just dumped into the Channel, right? The story that you told the Argus?’
‘Yes. A few more miles further off the coast and they would not have been our problem. But they were found inside UK territorial waters, so they are. I’ve already got two of our researchers compiling a list of every known vessel that has passed through the Channel in the last seven days. But I don’t know yet how we are going to find the resources to follow up that information, or even if it’s worth trying.’
‘Well,’ Branson went on, ‘the bodies were found in about sixty-five feet of water – so if they hadn’t drifted they were dropped there, from a boat or a plane or a chopper. Some of the bigger container ships and supertankers using the English Channel need more draught than that, so we should be able to eliminate quite a bit of shipping. Also, I would have thought that any boat skipper would know from the Admiralty charts that it was a dredge area, and keep clear of it as a dump site if he didn’t want these to be discovered. A chopper or private plane pilot might not have looked at the Admiralty charts – or noticed. So I think we ought to check out the local airports, particularly Shoreham, find out what aircraft have been up during the past week and check them out.’
‘I agree,’ DI Mantle said. ‘Glenn’s making a good point. The problem is we don’t know what might have taken off from a private airfield without filing a flight plan. If it was a light aircraft on a mission to dump bodies, it’s quite possible the pilot wouldn’t have done.’
‘Or it could have been a plane from overseas somewhere,’ Nick Nicholl said.
‘I doubt that, Nick,’ Grace said. ‘Any foreign aircraft, say from France, would just go out a few miles into the Channel. They wouldn’t fly into British airspace.’
Branson shook his head. ‘No, sorry, chief, I disagree. They might have done it deliberately.’
‘How do you mean deliberately?’ DI Mantle asked.
‘Like, a double-bluff kind of thing,’ the DS replied. ‘Knowing we might find them and assume they were from England.’
Grace smiled. ‘Glenn, I think you’ve watched too many films. If someone from overseas was dumping bodies in the sea, they’d be doing it because they didn’t want them to be found – and they wouldn’t fly that close to the English coastline.’ He jotted down a note. ‘But we need to check every local airport and flying club – and air traffic controllers. And that can be done over the weekend, as they’ll be open.’
David Browne raised a hand. The Crime Scene Manager, in his early forties, could easily have passed for the actor Daniel Craig’s freckled, ginger-haired brother. It had long been a standing joke among his colleagues that a few years back, when the film company was casting the new James Bond, it had sent the contract to the wrong man. Dressed in a zippered fleece jacket, over an open-neck shirt, jeans and trainers, with his powerful shoulders and close-cropped hair, he appeared every inch an action man. But Browne’s looks belied his thorough approach to crime scenes, and his tireless attention to detail, which had taken him almost as high up the SOCO ladder as it was possible to rise.
‘All three bodies were wrapped in similar industrial-strength PVC, which can be purchased from any hardware or DIY store. They were bound with high-tensile cord that’s again widely available. My view is whoever did this wasn’t intending them to come back up. So far as the perp was concerned, it was job done.’
‘What are the chances of finding out where these items were purchased?’ Grace asked.
‘It wasn’t a big quantity,’ Browne said. ‘Not enough to stick in anyone’s mind. There are hundreds of places that sell them. But it would be worth doing a trawl of all the local suppliers. Most of them will be open over the weekend.’
Grace made another note on his Resourcing list. Then he turned to DC Nicholl again.
‘Nick?’
‘I’ve checked the Mispers lists. They have quite a number of missing teenagers who could be matches. They want me to let them have photographs of the victims.’
‘Chris Heaver’s been given photographs of all three of them. He’s preparing sanitized versions to release to the press on Monday. You can send them to the Missing People office at the same time.’
Chris Heaver was the Facial Identification Officer.
‘We’ll also get them circulated to every police station in the south-east, and see if we can get them on Crimewatch if we’ve no joy by the time the next show screens. Anyone know when that is?’
‘Tuesday week,’ Bella said. ‘I checked.’
Grace screwed up his face in disappointment. It was a long time to wait. Then he addressed the young DC, Emma-Jane Boutwood.
‘E-J?’
‘Well,’ she said, in her plummy, public-school voice, ‘I’ve looked into the case of the headless and limbless torso of the small boy that was recovered from the Thames in 2001. The police gave the poor little chap, who has never been identified, the name Adam. It was eventually established that he had come from Nigeria by the examination of microscopic granules of plants found in his intestines. The expert used was a Dr Hazel Wilkinson of the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew Gardens.’
David Browne, the Crime Scene Manager, raised his hand again. ‘Roy, we know Hazel – we’ve worked with her on a number of cases.’
‘OK,’ Grace said. ‘E-J, will you arrange to get her what she needs from Nadiuska?’
‘Yes, and there’s something else. I read about this in hospital.’ She gave a wan smile and a shrug. ‘Thought I might as well try to make use of my time there! One of the forensic labs we use for DNA, Cellmark Forensics, has a US parent, Orchid Cellmark. I’ve been in touch with a helpful guy over there called Matt Greenhalgh – he’s the Director of Forensics. He told me their labs in the US have been making progress analysing the isotopes in enzymes in DNA. Matt said they have established that food – in particular its constituent minerals – is sufficiently localized to get a region of origin, if not an actual country. Lab samples from Unknown Male 1 have been expressed out there and we should hear back early in the week.’
‘Good. Thanks, E-J,’ he said. He pondered the value of this for a moment, when foodstuffs were now regularly shipped all over the world. But it might help. Then he stood up and walked over to one of the whiteboards and pointed at the close-up photograph of the female’s upper arm. ‘Do you all see this?’
Everyone in the room nodded. It was a crude tattoo, one inch long, spelling rares.
‘Rares?’ Norman Potting said. ‘Could be a bad spelling of rash! Which might mean it’s a nasty rash!’ He chuckled at his own joke.
‘My guess is it’s a name,’ Roy Grace said, ignoring him. ‘The most likely thing a teenage girl would have tattooed on her arm is the name of a boyfriend. This one looks as if she might have done it herself. Anyone ever heard of this name?’
No one had.
‘Norman and E-J, I’m tasking you with finding out if this is a real name – and in which country. Or what it means if it isn’t a name.’
Then he looked at DI Mantle. ‘I know you’ve been out of the loop for a couple of days on your course, Lizzie. Anything you need to know at this stage?’
‘No, I’m up to speed, Roy,’ she said.
‘Good.’
Still on his feet, he glanced around the room and looked at the HOLMES analyst, Juliet Jones, a dark-haired woman in a brown-
striped shirt.
‘Over the weekend we need a scoping operation – check with every county force in the UK to see if they have anything remotely similar. We can’t assume this is about transplants. It’s the most obvious line of enquiry, but we mustn’t rule out having a lone nutter on our hands. Nadiuska reckons that whoever did this has surgical skills. We need to find out from the Home Office about every surgeon, and doctor with surgical skills, who has been released from prison or from a mental home in the last couple of years as another starting point.’ He thought for a moment. ‘And all surgeons who have been struck off who might have a grievance.’ He noted this down as an action for the researchers.
‘What about the Internet, Roy?’ asked David Browne. ‘I recall that someone advertised a kidney for sale on eBay a few years ago. It would be worth a trawl.’
‘Yes, that’s a very good point.’ He turned to Lizzie Mantle. ‘Can you get the High-Tech Crime Unit on to that? See if anyone is advertising organs for sale.’
‘Do you really think anyone would do that, Roy?’ Bella asked. ‘Kill victims and sell their organs?’
Grace had long passed the period when he questioned human potential for evil. You could take the most horrific thing your brain was capable of imagining, then multiply it by a factor of ten and it still would not bring you close to the levels of depravity that people were capable of.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, I do.’
41
Half past three and it was already growing dark outside. Lynn stood at her kitchen table, staring out of the window, waiting for the microwave, which was making a sound like a chainsaw inside a metal dustbin, to finish its cycle. Rain was pelting down and the back garden, which she tended proudly for most of the year, now looked badly neglected.
The autumn roses needed dead-heading, and the grass, beneath a carpet of fallen leaves, needed cutting again now, even though it was the end of November – thank you, global warming, she thought. Maybe next weekend she would have the energy and enthusiasm. If . . .
A big if.
If she could get through the terrible fear for Caitlin that was gripping her, almost paralysing her mind, making it impossible to concentrate on anything, even the newspaper.
There was something about Sunday afternoons that she had never liked, for as far back as she could remember. A feeling of gloom that the weekend was ending and it was back to the real world the next day. But it wasn’t just gloom this afternoon. She felt sick with fear for Caitlin and helpless – and angry at her helplessness. Seeing her daughter’s frightened face these past days in the hospital and being unable to offer her anything but words of reassurance, a few teenage magazines and some CDs was eating away at her soul.
Helping people was one of the things she had always done best in life. For two years during her mid-teens she had helped her younger sister, Lorraine, crippled and bedridden after being knocked off her bike by a lorry, slowly get back to health and start walking again. Five years ago, she had again helped Lorraine through her divorce and then through the battle she had finally lost against breast cancer.
After her own divorce, her mother had been her rock, but she was growing old and, although still strong, at some point in the coming years Lynn knew that she would lose her too. If she lost Caitlin as well, she would be utterly alone in the world, and that selfish thought scared her almost as much as the pain of seeing Caitlin suffering now.
The last few days in the Royal South London had been a living hell. They had organized a room for her for the past three nights, in a Salvation Army training centre across the street from Caitlin’s ward, but she had barely spent any time in it, not wanting to miss out on any of the examinations and tests for transplant suitability that Caitlin had been put through, almost around the clock. She’d chosen instead to sleep in a chair next to her daughter’s bed.
She had lost count of the people her daughter had seen. All the different members of the transplant team, the social workers, the nurses, the registrar, the consultant hepatologist, the consultant surgeon, the anaesthetist. All the scans, the blood tests, the base line measurements, the imaging, lung function, cardiac assessments and seemingly endless and repetitive clinical reviews.
‘I’m just an exhibit, right?’ Caitlin had said, despairingly, at one point.
The one person to whom Caitlin responded, the consultant, Dr Abid Suddle, had assured them both, this morning, that hopefully a match would be found very quickly, despite Caitlin’s rare blood group. It was possible within just a few days, he said.
Lynn always felt reassured by him. She liked the man’s energy, his warmth and his genuine concern. She saw he was someone who worked incredibly long hours and she believed he truly would go the extra mile for Caitlin, but the fact remained that there was a world shortage of livers and Caitlin had a rare blood group. And there was another problem. As had already been explained to them, Caitlin had chronic liver disease. Priority was given to those with acute liver disease.
Dr Suddle had explained that there were other, not so rare blood groups that could be a match in liver transplants, so that needn’t be a cause for worry. Caitlin was going to be fine, he told her. And Lynn knew that Dr Abid Suddle did want her to be fine.
But she also knew he was part of a system. He was just one exhausted member of a very big, very overworked and permanently exhausted but caring team. And Luke, who had frightened her, had made her go to the Internet herself. It was hard to find an accurate figure for the number of people in the UK waiting for a liver transplant. Dr Suddle had admitted privately that 19 per cent at the Royal died before one became available. And she felt sure he was not telling her the whole truth. Priorities got shifted at every week’s Wednesday meeting. In all the down-time she had, she talked to patients who found themselves endlessly bumped down the list by others in worse condition than themselves.
It was a lottery.
She felt so damn helpless.
The thick wodge of the Observer newspaper and all its supplements lay on the table and she glanced at one of the front-page headlines, forecasting more economic gloom, falling property prices, rises in bankruptcies. And tomorrow, going back to work again, she would have to deal with the human fallout from all of that stuff.
She felt sorry for almost everyone she spoke to on the phone when she was at work. Decent, ordinary folk who had got themselves into a financial mess. There was one woman, Anne Florence, almost the same age as herself, and with a sick teenage daughter. Her problems had begun a few years back when she bought a car on hire purchase for £15,000, but failed to keep up the insurance payments and then the car was stolen. It left her still owing the hire purchase company, but without a car.
Unable to afford another car, she had gone ahead and bought one using plastic. And had then taken out new cards, using the cash limits of each new one to pay off the previous ones.
For over a year now, Lynn had almost weekly renegotiated her monthly repayments on a £5,000 debt to one card company, a client of her firm, allowing her smaller and smaller repayments. But to make matters worse, she had fallen badly into arrears with her mortgage. She knew it was only a matter of time before the poor woman lost her house – and everything else.
She wished she had a magic wand that could make everything OK for Anne Florence, and the dozens like her she dealt with daily, but all she could do was be sympathetic but firm. And she was a damn sight better at being sympathetic than at being firm.
Max, their tabby cat, rubbed himself against her legs. She knelt and stroked him, feeling the reassurance of his soft, warm fur.
‘You’re lucky, Max,’ she said. ‘You don’t know all the shit that happens in human lives, do you?’
If Max did, he wasn’t letting on. He just purred.
She picked up the phone and dialled her best friend, Sue Shackleton, on whom she could always rely for cheery support. But the phone went to Sue’s voicemail. She remembered, vaguely, something about Sue’s new boyfriend taking her aw
ay to Rome for the weekend. She left a message, then hung up forlornly.
As she did so, the microwave pinged. She waited for another minute, then opened the door and took out the pizza. She then cut it into sections, put it on a tray and carried it through into the lounge.
As she opened the door, the television was blaring. On the screen she recognized two of the characters of Laguna Beach, one of the soaps her daughter was addicted to. Caitlin was lying on the sofa, her head on Luke’s chest, barefoot, her toes curled, two cans of Coke open on the glass-topped coffee table. She looked at her daughter’s face for a moment, saw her totally absorbed in the programme, smiling at something, and for an instant she felt overwhelmed by a rush of emotion. She had a strong desire to cradle Caitlin in her arms.
God, the girl needed reassurance – deserved reassurance. And she deserved someone a lot better than that dickhead, with his stupid, lopsided hairstyle, on the sofa with her.
She was still furious at him for spooking Caitlin – and herself – with the statistics about the numbers of people on transplant waiting lists – and their mortality rate.
‘Pizza!’ she said, a lot more cheerfully than she felt.
Luke, in a hoodie, ripped jeans and untied trainers, peered at her from under his slanted fringe, then raised a hand as if he was directing traffic.
‘Yeah! Cool! I’m cool with pizza.’
You’d look even cooler wearing it as a hat, Lynn thought. She could have happily dumped it all on his head. Instead, she kept calm, put the tray down, exited the room and returned to the kitchen. Ignoring the Sunday newspaper, she picked up the Val McDermid crime novel she had been reading for the past few days, in the hope of immersing herself in a different world for an hour or so.
In the novel a man was putting a victim into a replica of a medieval torture machine and Lynn suddenly thought how pleasant it would be to put Luke into such a machine.
Then she put the book down and cried.
