‘I can’t say I have. What are you seeing?’
‘When he called Annette by my name in briefing?’
‘He said he was tired. He’s been putting in a lot of hours and he’s not long returned to work after six months off sick. It’s not surprising the hours he’s putting in are getting to him.’ Tamsin looked confused.
There was a scrape of a chair. Elaine looked past Tamsin and saw Will getting up. To talk to the women already? But he moved past them and went to the men’s room.
‘I’d believe that if he hadn’t also taken a wrong turn when we were heading to Billy’s op that day. He made the same excuse then, that he was tired and in pain.’
‘I wondered what had happened.’
‘Yes, the guv was driving and it was as if he didn’t know where he was going. We had to swap seats and I drove.’
Tamsin laughed. ‘The guv not knowing where he’s going? You are kidding, right?’ She’d dropped her voice and twisted at the waist more so her back was to Gareth. He wasn’t paying attention anyway. Paula had the group in stitches, as she was taking the piss out of Will in his absence. Not worried about his return, as it was something she was more than willing to do to his face as well.
Elaine shook her head. ‘That’s what it felt like to me. In the car with him.’ She was beginning to wish she hadn’t brought this up now.
‘So what are you thinking?’ asked Tamsin.
‘I don’t know. I really don’t. But I do know I’m worried about it. It doesn’t feel right. Something is wrong. There’s something he’s not telling us.’ She spun her drink on the table. ‘Maybe it is tiredness. Maybe he shouldn’t be back at work, it might be that he’s not fully recovered. But in that vein, maybe the accident messed with his head and he’s still concussed or something.’
‘You know what I think?’ Worry lined Tamsin’s face.
Did she really want to know? ‘What?’
‘I think you could do with a little more sleep as much as he could.’ Her eyes were soft, kind. There was no malice. She wanted nothing more than to help her friend, Elaine could see that.
‘You’re probably right.’ She gave Tamsin a tight smile.
‘Hey, you two, are you with us or are you talking shop?’ Paula shouted across the table.
Tamsin straightened herself. ‘We’re here. Don’t worry about that.’
Elaine knew something was amiss. She could feel it. She would keep an eye on him. Even if she’d be doing it alone.
37
A few days of pulling together the paperwork for the court file and attempting to progress enquiries that would lead them to the guy at the head of the organisation, had caused some in the team to feel a little stir crazy. Ray watched from his office as Will and – he presumed it was – Paula, because it was always Paula, bickered about hell knew what. He would berate her and she’d laugh, causing him to get more annoyed. In the end, he turned his back and walked away. Ray rubbed his hand through his hair and looked at his own monitor, reading through the post-mortem report for Billy again. He understood the frustrations the unit were feeling, as he was itching with the very same irritation.
The phone rang and he picked it up. Tony from the control room. Said there was a message in the night from Basildon hospital, Essex, that he might be interested in.
Peartree Close at Ockendon, Essex, was as nondescript as any place Ray had encountered. Low three- and four-storey blocks of flats, maisonettes and garages crammed together. Cars parked all along the edges of the road and in front of garages, blocking them off. Space at a premium.
He looked at Elaine. ‘Glad to be out the office?’
‘Definitely. Though I wish it didn’t have to be for this.’ She put the handbrake on and switched off the engine. Looked at him. ‘So your leg is really playing you up, is it?’
Ray cleared his throat. ‘You wouldn’t believe. Driving makes it worse. I’m probably going to have to sort out some more physio.’
Elaine dragged her coat from the back seat and exited the car, pulling the coat on.
‘I’ll sort it. I’ll get in touch with a private physio and get it seen to as soon as I can.’ Ray slammed his door shut.
‘It’s not a problem.’
‘It may be safer with you driving.’ The laugh was forced, sounded brittle in the quiet of the street, and Elaine narrowed her eyes at him. He turned away. His stomach telling him to move away from the situation. He was making it worse.
The door was opened by an older man. Creases lined his face like a well-worn road map. His hair was a bright white mop on his head. Strands sticking out in different directions. Smells of cooking seeped out of kitchen behind him.
‘Mr Kayani?’
A single silent nod of the head.
‘I’m Detective Inspector Ray Patrick from the Metropolitan Police and this is Detective Sergeant Elaine Hart, we’re here to see Mrs Kayani if she’s available. I believe she’s expecting us?’ He held out his identification for the older man to see. He leaned forward, squinting at the ID card. Laughter lines radiating out. Though laughter was not an emotion he was going to be feeling any time soon. He looked at the photo and up at Ray. It was several years old and Ray had greyed a little more since it was taken.
The older man stepped back. ‘Come in please. She’s in the living room. Can I get you a drink?’
‘I’ll have a coffee please,’ said Ray.
‘And just a water for me,’ answered Elaine.
They walked through the busy kitchen, pans on every ring of the hob, each one bubbling away, with aromatic smells rising from its interior. Bowls and plates lined the work surface beside it and Tupperware boxes filled with foodstuffs lined the opposite counter.
In the living room the woman was surrounded by people. Beside her sat an older woman, her face grooved like the male who had let them in. Her eyes dark pools but red rimmed. Other men and women all squeezed into the small room, as well as a couple of teenagers and a younger boy, filling the sofa, chairs and space on the floor.
‘Mrs Kayani?’ asked Ray.
People parted, gave access to the woman. She stood. Arms crossed around herself, rubbing at her upper arms as if cold. ‘Yes?’ Her voice gentle.
Ray made the introductions again. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. Can we talk?’
Halima Kayani inclined her head and sank back on the sofa. A young male who had been sitting on a chair in the room vacated it and indicated that Ray could take it. He thanked him and took the seat. Elaine stayed on her feet. No one offered her a seat. The children stayed in the room on the floor.
‘We need to know what happened with your husband. It’s really important that we get to the bottom of this.’ He paused, looked Halima Kayani in the eyes. ‘So that no one else has to go through it.’
Her eyes were wide. Her clothes looked loose on her, as though she’d lost weight suddenly.
‘Your coffee, Detective Inspector.’ Mr Kayani came in from the kitchen and handed Ray a steaming mug. He took it and thanked him. The coffee smelled good and he was grateful for something to hold. This was always a difficult call to make.
‘What is it you need to know? Maybe I can help. My daughter-in-law is struggling to get her head around the loss. As you can imagine, we all are. But I can tell you what I know.’
Ray accepted the older man’s help. ‘We need to know the circumstances surrounding your son’s admittance to the hospital and his subsequent death,’ said Ray. ‘From what we’ve been told it doesn’t appear to be entirely natural.’
The old man looked down at his hands. Twisted them together.
‘It’s okay, you won’t be in any trouble. We just want to stop this happening again.’
‘You have to understand, my son was responsible for supporting his family. For keeping a roof over the head of his wife, his three children, his mother and me; and occasionally he’d need to support an uncle and aunt too. Times were tight. The factory he worked at cut his hours, and because he was on a zero
hours contract he couldn’t do anything about it.’
38
Dr Mei Zhang was the Home Office forensic pathologist who had done the post-mortem on Balbir Kayani, and she had been kind enough to make time for Ray and Elaine that morning between cases and paperwork.
‘It’s a disturbing one, I thought we should deal with it so that you can get on with what you need to do to prevent further deaths of this type,’ Dr Zhang said, her voice soft and lilting. She was a petite woman. Dark, glossy hair pinned up in a chignon at the back of her head. Small-framed glasses perched on her nose.
‘Thank you. We appreciate you making time for us,’ said Ray, before taking a sip of his second coffee of the morning.
The office they were in was small, compact, but tidy. The sharp tang of hospital antiseptic, strong down here in the mortuary area. Ray watched Elaine wrinkle her nose. It creased the scar under her eye. He looked away.
‘I mean what I say, this needs to be stopped before it takes more lives.’ Dr Zhang’s face was set.
‘Of course. We’re working hard on this. We already have a couple of people charged.’
She lifted an eyebrow. ‘With this?’
‘Well, no.’ He coughed. ‘It wasn’t possible, but they were involved. They indicated as such, but we didn’t have the evidence.’
Elaine looked at the floor.
‘Let me show you something, officers.’ The petite doctor stood, pushed her chair back and walked out of the room without another word.
‘She’s serious about this,’ said Elaine.
‘She’s not alone,’ answered Ray, rising and following her out.
Dr Zhang walked with purpose, her rubber soles making soft thwacking sounds on the hard floor as she strode to her destination. Arms swinging at her sides. Ray’s shoes and Elaine’s boots clacked in comparison as they kept pace with the doctor.
They turned into a well-lit room that was cooler than the rest of the hospital and was steel-lined floor to ceiling and had small doors within the wall. Ray knew immediately where they were.
Dr Zhang walked straight up to a door that was at floor level, bent over and opened it. Yanked on a bar that was inside the door, and a tray slid out, wheels giving a small obstinate squeak on her first pull. Laid on the tray, wrapped in a clean white sheet, was a body.
‘This is Mr Kayani. I think you need to see him. To understand what is happening to these people.’ Her voice was clipped now.
‘We understand, Dr Zhang. We know exactly what this group are doing and what they’re capable of. You don’t need to show us another body to prove a point. We’re here for your help. For your knowledge.’
With gentle, soft movements, she unwrapped the cloth that surrounded Kayani, exposing first his face, then his chest, and eventually his abdomen. He looked peaceful. Or he would have, had it not been for the Y-shaped incision, neatly stitched, starting at his shoulders and going down to his pubis.
‘Come this side please.’ Her voice was gentler. More conciliatory. ‘This is what you need to see.’
Ray and Elaine walked to the Kayani’s left, and Dr Zhang indicated the curved incision which was also now stitched back up around his left side. Going from the front to back. It was about fifteen centimetres in length and must have been an angry red colour, though it had faded in death.
‘Isn’t that what kidney removals usually look like?’ Ray asked.
Dr Zhang started to wrap Kayani back up. ‘Not anymore. They can remove the kidney laparoscopically nowadays.’ She looked at them. ‘Keyhole surgery.’
‘So what does this mean?’ asked Elaine as she helped tuck the final areas of Kayani’s cloth around him.
‘That they went for the quickest option rather than one that would be easier for their patient. Doing an open surgery like this is faster than doing it laparoscopically. They save time. But not care. And this wound was more infected than it looks. It was filled with pus, although that was cleaned away during the post-mortem process. He was in a real mess and would have endured quite a lot of pain.’
Ray winced.
‘They removed his left kidney. Then they failed to provide proper aftercare or advise him what to do if he had any problems, or what those problems could be. This man didn’t need to die, Detective Inspector Patrick.’
Ray nodded. ‘We understand the effects of this horrendous trade, Doctor Zhang.’ He felt his skin crawl, standing here with the male stripped down in front of him. Stripped of his clothes, his dignity and his life. During interview the offenders had sold the business as that of saving lives. As doing good. All parties involved were consenting and treated well, they said. But this man that Dr Zhang was now sliding back into the darkness had not been treated well. The only people gaining from this operation were those who were running it.
The loss brought home the utter devastation he felt about Billy and how useless he was in the hunt for his killer: the head of this group that was responsible for taking the lives of people desperate enough to sell anything, themselves included.
They returned to the small office space that they’d not long ago vacated. Dr Zhang perched on the edge of her chair. ‘There are senseless deaths and then there are deaths like this where they walk right into it through sheer desperation.’ Her voice was subdued.
Elaine leaned forward. ‘We do understand. We’re desperate to identify and locate those responsible for this.’
That word. Identify. If only she knew.
‘You have leads?’
‘We have people connected but they’re not talking. Anything you can tell us would really help.’
39
People were milling about. Talking, updating each other on different aspects of the job, and socially as well, from what Ray could hear
‘Okay, let’s get seated and get this briefing underway, shall we.’ He wanted to bring the room to order. Not because he was desperate to get the briefing going but because his head was swimming from the ebb and flow of his team. He needed to stem it. Seat people. Halt the tide of confusion.
A rumble progressed through the incident room as individuals settled. Once silence had draped itself over the room, Ray thanked everyone. ‘As you know, Elaine and I drove to Essex today after a report of a death that could be related to our investigation. I’m afraid to report that the body in the mortuary is in fact linked. Mr Balbir Kayani died after donating a kidney to a back-street organisation and getting an infection. His wife said he was too afraid to seek help from the NHS after he did this, because he feared they would report him to the police and then he would not be able to care for his family, and caring for his family was why he went ahead with the procedure in the first place. He felt it was his duty to look after the household, and he struggled. He was unable to get the help he needed from the group that had taken the organ from him, so he suffered in silence, not realising it was slowly killing him.’
‘What do we know, guv?’ Will asked.
‘Speaking to the pathologist, we know that the medical personnel involved in this racket are in fact trained professionals. It was a good clean incision, removal and stitch-up. As opposed to the organisations abroad, where we know the work is shoddy, where we know that little thought or consideration is given to the donors; all they’re after is what they can provide. Here, it would appear, they have genuine doctors on their books.’
‘So what happens, why are people dying then?’ Curls. Tamsin.
‘It’s the lack of aftercare. It’s a big surgery. The people who are selling their organs aren’t in a position to take it easy for as long as they need to and they aren’t looking after themselves. Something starts to go wrong, something that would be easily solved if they saw a doctor, but they don’t. It progresses. Infection sets in and they die. It’s not the surgery itself that kills them. It’s what happens after, as in the case with Billy’s brother.’
‘But what kind of doctors would do this?’ Her accent was Scottish. Paula.
Ray leaned back on the table behind h
im. ‘Doctors who are fully trained in organ transplants, Paula, I’m afraid to say. So we need to focus on this line of enquiry even more, please. Interview everyone who has been struck off in the last five years, and if no one stands out, go back ten years. Of course, there’s no saying they’re struck off, but I think it’s the best place for us to start.’
A murmur moved through the room like a ripple on a still pond. Everyone had something to say about the fact that a trained transplant doctor, someone who worked to save lives, could or would be involved in an underground practice.
‘I know. I know.’ Ray tried to bring them back to focus. ‘That’s why we need to up our game on this. It just got a whole lot more serious. Not only are we investigating a murder, an organisation trading in human organs, but we know more people are at risk of dying at the hands of this team. We have a medically trained doctor, potentially still on the register and seeing patients, working with a group of people stripping UK citizens of their organs. We’re up against it. We need to find out who these people are before we have to go and visit another family, another mortuary, and tell them we still don’t know who these people are.’
40
The next week was filled with the day-to-day running of the investigation. A myriad inquiries, meticulously run through. Contact with the General Medical Council, and lots of long days spent going through background checks of each doctor struck off, before planning for home visits to see what they would throw up. Without anything specific, anything suspicious, it was impossible to home in on any one of the doctors who had been struck off, so a lot of work had to be done.
The incident room was busy with people constantly walking in and out. Other than briefings, Ray tried to keep himself to his office.
When he had decided to return to work and not disclose the prosopagnosia, he hadn’t quite realised how overwhelmed he’d feel during a homicide investigation. Time was gradually allowing him to memorise people at a quicker pace, but it was still a slow process looking for the individual identifiers, and it was a process that frustrated him.
Dead Blind Page 12
