Where There's Smoke

by Penny Grubb

  She wanted officialdom out at that farmhouse, but not just on spec. She needed them out there knowing what they were looking for and motivated to search.

  Carl’s voice went on in her ear, inviting her to take Christa where she wanted, but washing his hands of the difficulties in which she’d find herself.

  ‘I can’t just leave her,’ she told him.

  ‘Stay with her, then. I’m not stopping you. It’s too late now, anyway.’

  Annie felt panic rise inside her as her eyes snapped to the unconscious form on the floor in front of her. ‘Too late for what?’

  She heard a tut of exasperation. ‘Oh, not her. She’ll be fine.’ He hesitated, then spat out, ‘You’ve really fucked things up for me.’ With that, he cut the call.

  Annie sat back with a heavy sigh and looked down at Christa, sleeping peacefully as if tucked into a comfortable bed, not lying on a cold wooden floor. The business card that had fallen from Christa’s jacket lay face down on the floor. She knew she should cart her down the stairs and get her to a doctor, but Carl was probably right. Christa looked far better than she often did when conscious. Maybe she should just stay and keep an eye her, though another night in the office wasn’t what she’d planned and she wouldn’t get much sleep in an uncomfortable chair, not with everything that swirled around in her head. She pulled herself to her feet and went to turn on the radiator. Pat would grumble at the cost but she couldn’t let Christa lie here in the cold night air.

  As she knelt to retrieve the card and put it back in Christa’s pocket, Annie again shook her colleague’s shoulder.

  ‘Christa! Wake up!’

  Not a murmur. She was spark out, but her breathing was normal and her pulse strong.

  She glanced at the card. It was a business card with an ornate border and fancy lettering that said: R Brocklesby Associates, Legal and Financial, followed by a mobile number. It was the typical profile for someone in Christa’s network, vaguely worded expertise and corporate identity with no contact details other than a mobile number. Annie reached for Christa’s inside pocket and pulled out her phone. A search for R Brocklesby’s number proved fruitless. She turned the card in her hand. R Brocklesby? The R could stand for anything. It might not even be a man and Christa might have had the card for weeks.

  Using Christa’s phone, she called the number. As she listened to the ring tone, Annie was aware of the heating clanking into action. Water gurgled in hidden pipes to the background purr of the boiler, usually lost amongst the sounds of the office during business hours.

  On ten rings, Annie thought it unlikely she’d get an answer, but hoped for an answering service to cut in. After fifteen rings, she decided she would get neither. But on the sixteenth, the phone was answered and a bleary voice said, ‘Hello?’

  Although she’d half-expected it Annie felt a jolt of surprise. It was Vince’s companion, Reg.

  ‘Hello.’ She kept her voice soft, barely a whisper.

  ‘Ah, is it the little girl from the car? You’ve woken sooner than I expected, too soon for an old man to get some much needed sleep. Never mind. Now you tell me where you are and I’ll sort things out for you. That young scamp, Carl, he forgot to tell me where he was taking you.’ Behind the tiredness in his voice, Reg’s tone tried for avuncular joviality.

  ‘Come along now,’ he repeated, when she didn’t say anything. ‘You know who I am, don’t you? You can trust me. But you listen to me carefully, you mustn’t trust Leah. She’s not working in your interests. I’ll sort things out for you. No need to worry about finance yet awhile. Now, where are you?’

  ‘Uh … I’m not sure.’ Annie played for time as she tried to work out what his agenda might be. ‘I’ve only just woken up.’ And although she knew the answer, she asked anyway, ‘Who are you?’

  The response was a sharp intake of breath and he snapped out, ‘What’s your name?’

  Annie hesitated, but they knew who Christa was.

  ‘Tell me,’ he insisted. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Christa …’ Again she held off, waiting to be pushed for a surname.

  But instead of that, he roared, ‘I’ll skin the little bleeder,’ and the line went dead.

  Annie stared at the handset. So much for that. She couldn’t even contemplate trying to work out what that might have meant. Instead, she turned to the PC and searched for suppliers of medical trailers. She didn’t find anything identical to what she’d seen in the big barn at Sleeman’s place, but they came in all shapes and sizes and could be specially kitted out. Common customization seemed to be for chemotherapy and dialysis. No change from a substantial six-figure sum for one of those. As she began to dig deeper into the company websites, her mobile sang out. She reached for it and saw Pat’s name on the screen.

  ‘Pat?’

  Pat’s voice was breathless and hurried. ‘Annie, I need your help. I—’

  Then that line too went dead.

  CHAPTER 24

  Annie floored the accelerator. The road swept up ahead of her in a long curve that begged for speed, so she obliged, even though she knew she might be heading into a Sleeman trap. Not that she wasn’t already held in their grasp. They’d been reeling her in from the start. The call from Pat might be just another dangling bait to draw her in, but she didn’t think so. The tangle had begun to make sense. She wondered how she hadn’t seen it earlier. She’d left Christa sleeping like a baby, her phone and a glass of water in reach, also a note, RING ME, ANNIE, in felt tip too prominent for Christa to miss.

  As she drove her head began to spin, as though she’d been drinking on an empty stomach. It was tiredness, lack of anything to eat, but she daren’t stop. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen soon. She needed to know more, to fill in some of the gaps, and then she could get help. The latest unknown was Reg Brocklesby, who’d put his business card in Christa’s pocket without Carl’s knowledge, Annie was sure. But he’d realized he wasn’t talking to Christa. He must have been there when they’d caught Christa breaking in, and clocked her voice well enough to realize it wasn’t her ringing him. That was pretty sharp of him because she’d pitched her voice low and light to imitate Christa’s tone, the line hadn’t been great and the guy had clearly been woken from a deep sleep. It didn’t feel right, but maybe she was reading too much into it.

  Interesting that he’d warned her off Leah. Everyone else treated Leah with respect, if not liking. She had no idea where Reg Brocklesby fitted into the picture but surmised he was one in a queue looking to profit from Vince’s death. Carl Sleeman was another and his position, too, was ambiguous.

  She wished it was morning, that her mind was sharper, that she’d had the chance to sleep or at least to eat. She imagined the Sleeman empire destabilized with Vince’s diagnosis, feuds raging round his deathbed. But Vince Sleeman wasn’t one to bow out quietly. Pat had described the whole family tribe being taken to a clinic somewhere for tests. None of them was a match, or were they? Barbara lying injured after a hit and run. Wasn’t that the sort of event that preceded a transplant? But Barbara was recovering fast. Nonetheless, Vince needed a liver transplant and would prolong his own life at the expense of one of his family. Pat and Barbara were only distantly related and might have expected to escape the trap. Carl, a closer blood relative, had dodged a bullet. Was that why his position seemed so ambiguous? He knew what his uncle would have done to him. But who was Reg, the guy who wanted Christa under his wing? Where did he fit?

  Vince had money, influence and networks that spread far and wide. When his family couldn’t provide had he set out to buy himself a new liver? Well, of course he had. But he’d have done better to travel abroad. There were places where human organs were easier to come by. She wondered that he hadn’t, but maybe the disease had moved too fast. He conducted the fight of his life in one of the world’s closest surveillance societies. But then Sleeman’s life had been devoted to ducking under the surveillance radar and dodging the controls put in place to stop people l
ike him.

  The road was quiet and dark. Annie made herself drive faster than felt safe, knowing her reactions would be compromised if anything unexpected happened, but knowing also that she would have to slow right down once out beyond the reach of the streetlights. No proper hands free or Bluetooth with this phone. Trying Pat’s number at intervals was something else she shouldn’t be doing. She might drive herself off the road. Futile anyway. Straight through to voicemail, just as it had been every time she’d tried from the immediate call-back after Pat’s original call had been cut off.

  Vince had discharged himself from an NHS hospital. She’d been with Pat when she’d taken the call. Yet he’d been in a private clinic at some point, too. If a potential donor went through the NHS system, you waited your turn, but a private clinic must hold more opportunity to circumvent the processes, fiddle the paperwork. But even with a clinic on side, where did the donor come from? They couldn’t pluck crash victims and violent deaths off the streets, and even if they could, what chance was there of a match via such a random process? With Sleeman’s money and contacts and complete lack of conscience, there was little you couldn’t do to your fellow man.

  Yeah, there are thousands of slaves hidden behind the veneer of what we call civilization.

  If you were the sort of person happy to own another person as a slave, it wasn’t such a leap to using their body parts for yourself. Vince hadn’t waited around for the system to deliver. He’d gone out and bought his own donor. The woman from the sea.

  Somewhere along the line, the clinic had failed him. Vince, with his network, might buy his donor but he wouldn’t buy a surgeon so easily. She thought back to Barbara’s case: Hassan. It had the feel of a panicked last-minute move. You surely didn’t threaten someone into doing something like this. You bribed someone ready to be bribed. There’d been no time to look up that story of corruption in the Midlands, but it had hit Pat’s radar for some reason.

  I don’t give a damn if he’s legit, I said find me something.

  And the fights between Vince and Leah. Could this be Stills’s civil war? Leah had wanted him in hospital. He’d kept discharging himself. He’d taken himself off the transplant list. If she were in on it, why on earth would she want him in an NHS hospital? Could it be that Leah had a conscience; that there was a line she wouldn’t cross?

  This was the last stretch of lit road. Up ahead, she could see the snaking line of lights fade into an inky-black mist. She hoped it was a trick of the light and not real fog. Already, tiredness had pictures dancing in front of her eyes. She clicked the buttons so that both windows slid down and she could savour a rush of air that was not as cold as she expected. What she really wanted was a bacon buttie and a strong cup of coffee. A vision grabbed her of the tiny kitchen back at the racecourse. She still had the key; still had the OK to be there. The pony camp had packed up early and gone, but the kitchen might still be stocked. Annie’s mouth watered at the thought of a packed fridge. She was closer to the racecourse now than to Hull. Could she take a detour? No, she couldn’t ignore Pat’s call for help.

  The big trailer: it had started life as some type of mobile clinic but, whatever its original purpose, Vince had had it kitted out for something far more complex. Annie hadn’t found any hint that a mobile medical facility could be used for something as complex as a major transplant, but maybe that was the only option left to Vince when his tame surgeons let him down. Buy an organ donor, buy a sterile medical environment and threaten a surgeon. And why hadn’t he gone abroad to a place that already had the set-up? Why had Carl Sleeman been so keen to tip her off about the horsebox that wasn’t, and then done it in such a roundabout way? The argument in his driveway … Leah and Carl … the big trailer backing in, crushing the concrete surface. Why was Reg Brocklesby so keen to find Christa and so furious when he realized it wasn’t her at the end of the phone?

  The internal feuds in the Sleeman clan were key to it all, but she didn’t know enough. And now she must stop trying to work it out because very soon she’d be close to the farmhouse entrance and didn’t intend that anyone would see her arrive. That meant doing the last stretch without lights, with her head out of the window trying to make out the line of the verge whilst the darkness played patterns in front of her. The point was that Vince intended to have that woman’s liver inside him and his timetable was tight. That was all she needed to know for now.

  Just before the bend in the lane that would make her lights visible to anyone watching from the Sleeman place, Annie stopped the car. Her priority now was to get Pat out if she could. She wanted to save the woman from the sea who clearly had no idea of her intended fate, but there were too many holes in her knowledge. How many people was she dealing with, who were they, who was on whose side? She had barely any answers, and could only hope she had enough to persuade Scott to mobilize official help.

  She pulled out her phone and punched in his number. It was the middle of the night. Scott’s mobile might be switched off. He had young children who might be woken by the phone. OK, so maybe she would have an uncomfortable few moments persuading him to listen, but he would, because she had information about the woman he’d plucked off the beach. Whether he’d been taken there deliberately or had been an unwanted passenger in Greaves’s car, all that mattered was that Scott felt a level of unease; a level of responsibility for the woman he thought he’d rescued. He would listen. In all the tangle of questions, there was one she wished she could answer. How long did she have? She’d heard Vince say: there’s a donor on life support right now, is there? He hadn’t meant life support. He simply meant alive and imprisoned.

  ‘Hello?’ It was a woman’s voice: Scott’s wife, Kate – the woman who had always insisted on treating her as a rival for her husband’s affections. Annie fought back the temptation to disguise her voice, pretend to be someone else. That was a tactic that was sure to backfire.

  ‘Uh … hello, Kate. It’s Annie Raymond. Sorry to ring so late, but it’s important. I need to speak to Scott.’

  There was a ghost of a pause into which Annie read Kate coming abruptly awake. ‘You can’t. He’s not here. He’s on duty.’

  Her heart sank. ‘Can you give me a number where I can reach him?’

  ‘I could … but I won’t. Tell me what it is and I’ll decide whether or not to contact him.’

  Annie fought down an urge to argue with Kate, knowing it would do no good. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘but promise me one thing. Please tell Scott but no one else. It’s really important.’

  ‘Tell me what it is.’ Kate’s tone was neutral, but Annie didn’t doubt the underlying hostility. Kate wasn’t going to promise anything. Her only other option was to try and track Scott down herself; that could take ages and alert all sorts of people.

  ‘It’s Vince Sleeman,’ she told Kate. ‘You’ve probably heard that he’s on his deathbed. His liver’s packing up. He’s bought himself a donor. It’s the woman Scott picked up four weeks ago; the one who was supposed to be handed on to Immigration. They’re out at the Sleeman family home right now, all of them. They’re planning to do the transplant out there.’

  Kate, who had remained silent during Annie’s account, gave a derisory snort at this. ‘That’s ridiculous. You can’t do major surgery in a place like that.’

  ‘They’ve bought themselves one of those big medical trailers. It’s all kitted out. I’ve seen it. It’s inside a big barn next to the farmhouse.’

  ‘A trailer? That’s not suitable for major abdominal surgery, and even if they tried it, what about the aftercare? It’s not feasible.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Annie. ‘But Vince has given the order and they’re going to try. He’s probably signed his own death warrant, but then he’ll be dead soon anyway. And so will she.’

  After a pause, Kate rapped out, ‘I’ll get on to Scott. And someone’s going to want your statement. Your best choice is to go straight to Queen’s Gardens and wait.’

  ‘OK,’ said Annie meekly, resistin
g the urge to remind Kate about not telling anyone else, about the need to be quick, knowing it would only rile her more. ‘You have my number.’

  Dissatisfied but knowing that was the best she could do, Annie set off at snail’s pace along the dark road. Knowing that activity was always centred around the back of the house, or maybe was now all concentrated on the big barn, she risked inching her car up the gravel drive, cringing as it crunched over the surface. Carefully, she backed it into the bushes where she’d hidden the other car on her first ever visit to this place. It was as close as she dared take it.

  A stiff breeze blew in her face as she skirted the edge of the driveway and approached the house. It might be her imagination or maybe light was leaking from somewhere round the back, but she felt she could see the first tendrils of dawn snaking across the night sky.

  No background voices this time. Apart from the breeze, there was no sound at all. The house lay in an eerie quiet after the pandemonium she’d left here a few hours ago. She made her way to the back of the big shed and to the bent panel. Looking into the dense black pool of the animal hole, she knew nothing would persuade her to go down there right now and she carried on round the far side, straining to hear any sounds.

  Nothing, just the whisper of the breeze. Aware of the camera above the front elevation, she pressed herself to the wall of the barn as she reached the far corner. The darkness of the night would conceal her as long as there were no motion-sensitive lights.

  The front of the barn gaped open. Annie blinked to adjust her eyes to the heavy darkness, trying to make out the shapes within. She felt her heart rate increase as she pulled out her pencil torch and clicked it on. Thick heavy coils of wire lay to one side of a huge empty space.

  The trailer had gone.

  CHAPTER 25