‘Well, thank you for nothing.’ She was scathing. ‘After getting you all that, is that the best you can do?’
‘We made a deal that you wouldn’t —’
‘I’ve explained about that! If I’d been able to get hold of you I would have done, but they said you were out on that robbery and, now I come to think of it, what are you doing here?’
‘Taking a break,’ he said. ‘The stuff’s gone off the patch and it’s another force’s problem. So I’m off the hook. But even though I was still on it when you called you could have kept your word. I’m not the only one on the team, after all. Just because I was out and about over that bloody heist — three lorryloads o’ the best malt whisky Scotland ever produced, vanished like a bunch o’ fairies. I ask you! — you didn’t have to go off half cocked. You could have talked to Roop. Got him to trot along and question them.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said with all the sarcasm she could muster. ‘And can you see your precious Rupert getting the story out of them?’ She made her voice stiff and nasal at the same time. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Dudley, now just you tell me all about what happened to you. Right now, no messing about.’ Her voice returned to normal. ‘I ask you, Gus! He’d have frightened the hell out of them and got nothing.’
He grinned at her, a wide winning smile. ‘Fair enough. He’d have gone in like a hippopotamus, I can’t deny. All right. You done good, girl. You done real good.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, half mollified. ‘The thing we now have to do, then, is find this woman. The one who arranged the whole deal. The one who took all the money.’
‘You didn’t think to get the name of the friend to whom Sylvia Hillman confided her desperate need for a baby, did you? The woman who put them together?’
She bit her lip with chagrin. ‘Hell, we did talk about that, but then —’
‘I didn’t think you had.’ He was in a high good humour, clearly finding pleasure in having caught her out. ‘Not to fret. One of my women constables’ll be going along there in the morning to sort out the taking of statements. She’ll get it and we’ll follow up. It shouldn’t take long.’
‘You reckon whoever it was — the agency contact, I mean — was the murderer of the baby?’
‘Who else?’
‘And what about Harry?’
‘That’s a puzzle, I agree. But even there I think we should get some answers once we’ve got whoever was running the adoption business. It’s my guess that Harry found out what was happening and let whoever it was know he had, and that was why he was killed.’
‘It’s definitely someone here, then,’ George said. It wasn’t a question and he didn’t treat it as one.
‘It has to be. The way I see it is this. Tell me if you disagree. Someone here is running an adoption racket, using babies from abroad, smuggling them in.’
‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about that. There’s a big —’ George began.
‘Shut up,’ he said amiably. ‘Let me sort this out first, then you can join in. OK? Someone here runs a racket, Harry Rajabani gets wind of it, doesn’t cover his back and gets killed. The murderer also realizes that one of the babies is sick — it was sick when it arrived, wasn’t it? And thinks she’d better do a check. She knows that if this baby turns up in another hospital and is diagnosed as having AIDS which is what she thinks the kid has, I imagine, then questions will be asked, like where did he get it? and she doesn’t want that. They might realize the child was fetched in from a country where there’s a lot of infantile AIDS.’
‘Romania,’ George said.
‘Right. OK, so she suspects this child has AIDS — though why she handed it over, thinking that, I can’t imagine, but we’ll worry about that later. She suspects it, arranges to get the child from the new parents with a tale of taking it to a good doctor and scarpers with it, leaves them high and dry. Then she kills the baby and thinks she’s safe enough.’
‘There’re a lot of questions to be asked there, Gus. First, as you say, why hand it over if she knows it’s sick? And then the business of getting the baby in. How does she do it? That’s the big flaw in the whole thing. Don’t babies have to appear on their parents’ passports? You can’t just tuck a baby under your arm and waltz through immigration and passport control and so forth. People ask questions. That’s what worries me about this whole smuggling notion. It’s mine, I know, and it has to be a smuggler, or else why hand the baby over at the airport?’ She frowned. ‘But it’s all so — Can people just transport babies without passports and no questions asked?’
‘No, you’re right there,’ Gus said. ‘Even if a woman travels while pregnant and then gives birth abroad there has to be some documentation when she travels back with it. The birth certificate maybe, or something. I can’t see Immigration just letting babies in ad lib.’ He scribbled in his notebook, snapping the rubber band that held it in satisfaction when he’d done so. ‘I’ll check with the Immigration people at Heathrow on that. That’ll be easy enough.’
‘I know!’ George said as an idea hit her. ‘The woman who runs the thing isn’t the same one as the one who does the fetching and carrying!’
‘Eh?’
‘It’s different people! I mean if the same woman kept bobbing in and out of Heathrow with babies, someone’d be sure to notice, surely? Recognize her? I know it’s a busy airport and so forth, but all the same.’
He got to his feet. ‘We can’t get any further till I talk to Heathrow, obviously,’ he said. ‘No, no need for you to come along. It’s too late tonight. I’ll go tomorrow first thing. Right now, I’ve got to clear up the last of the paperwork on this robbery.’
‘I wasn’t going to suggest it,’ she retorted. ‘I do actually have some work of my own to do in the morning. A PM on a man they found on the waste ground down by the river. Another homeless one, I’m afraid, but it has to be done. Let me know as soon as you can, then? I’m really very —’
‘I know.’ He was at her office door, looking back at her questioningly. ‘You do agree it’s someone here at Old East who’s been running things?’
‘I don’t see how it can’t be, if you see what I mean. There are a lot of things that obviously tie together — the stealing of the babies in maternity, for example. I reckon it’s all very obvious — they were taken to sell to adopters — but why steal babies and risk the enormous hoohah that would happen if people found out? And where did the replacement babies come from?’
‘They were smuggled babies who died,’ Gus said. ‘She had a customer, our mysterious woman, but dead goods. So she helped herself to live ones.’
‘Oh, God,’ George said softly. ‘How horrible it all is.’
‘Yes.’ They were both silent for a while, trying to see into the mind of a person who could behave so, and then Gus gave a little shiver. ‘Horrible, indeed. Listen, you have work to do.’
‘I know. A PM.’
‘After that. You said you’d talk to people on Matty, remember? See if you could snoop for me, find out who, what, where. You know the sort of thing.’
‘Dear me,’ she said. ‘I’m really in the force then?’
‘As if you didn’t know it.’ He tipped his invisible hat at her. ‘I’m going to Heathrow. Get me what you can, hmm? Talk to you tomorrow.’
All the time she was doing the post-mortem, next morning, which was fortunately a routine affair and not particularly surprising — she rapidly discovered that the man had died of a massive stroke — she thought about the Hillmans. They had gone on talking for a long time, clearly finding relief in pouring everything out, and she had escaped gratefully after another hour of it, feeling herself almost overwhelmed by their obsessive grief.
It was as though over the years their horizons had narrowed until all there was in view was the prospect of a child to care for. Sylvia in particular had banished all other considerations from her life; he at least had had the daily escape hatch of his business. As she had listened, George had realized why the pair were so very ric
h and lived so very high on the hog. As all Sylvia’s energies had been funnelled into the search for a child, so his had been shunted into his business. There was no doubt which was the more fortunate — or fortunate up to a point, George thought. The more Sylvia talked about her feelings and her actions the more George realized just how heavy the guilt burden was for David Hillman. Not only did he blame himself for depriving his wife of the one thing she wanted; he also blamed himself for not suffering so much pain; because he had a child of his own. His business. Buried as he was amid the accounts of his clients, he made money for himself and for Sylvia at a great rate, yet every pound he made compounded his guilt even further. It was a dreadful trap for any man to be in, and George pitied him profoundly.
But she had picked up other facts from their talk as well as the sense of oppression that came from them. That the idea of using the name Oberlander had been his: ‘John Smith would have been too obvious, wouldn’t it? And anyway, I had a friend called that once, long ago. We used to make jokes about how we were really the same person, likes Signor Casanova was really Mr Newhouse, and Joe Green was Giuseppe Verdi.’
There had also been some talk about the friend of Sylvia’s who had put her in touch with the so-called adoption agency in the first place. George had made a mental note to remind Sylvia to give her the name and address before she left the flat, but by the time escape had been possible the matter had gone out of her head. Still, she told herself as she finished off the last notes for the old man and consigned him to Danny’s casual care, it gave Gus something to feel superior about and he enjoyed that. And perhaps it’s as well the police have something concrete to ask the Hillmans when they go to see them this morning, George thought. It will give the Hillmans something else to think about for a little while, too.
Back at her desk, freshly showered and changed, she sent Sheila over to the canteen to fetch her a sandwich for lunch and then settled to thinking about what she had to do in Matty. Find out, Gus had said, about who, what, where — and maybe why? That was her own idea and she considered it for a while. And then shook her head at herself.
The why was obvious. If she (and did it help to have the field narrowed to females? That had to be thought about too), if she had taken from the Hillmans thirty thousand pounds for Teddy, the motive was very obvious. Smuggling babies for sale paid well (and that still gnawed at her; how, for heaven’s sake, was the smuggling done? Babies weren’t watches or drugs that could be hidden in luggage, or disguised as anything else. Another matter to be thought of later). If whoever it was brought in only one a month that added up to three hundred and sixty thousand pounds — more than a third of a million in a year, and the chances were that there were far more than a dozen a year. She remembered the coded list; there had been nine names on that, and even allowing for the fact that three of those had been people whose babies had apparently died, it was still obvious that this scam was a big one. Reasonably carefully run, too; the details of hair colour and so on were there almost certainly to enable the babies to be matched, where possible, to the appearance of the would-be adopters. That was, she knew, normal practice with bona fide adoption agencies; why not with a rogue one? There was no need to think more about the motive, however. Vast sums of money like that were ample motive for anyone.
So; who and what and where; those were the questions Gus wanted answered. And George was somehow, she promised herself, going to answer them. Her success in tracking down the Hillman-Oberlanders had gone a little to her head, she could not deny. There was enormous satisfaction in digging out information that Gus and all his policemen had so far failed to find, and she preened a little as she thought about it.
But preening would get her nowhere, and she drained her coffee cup and pushed it aside. Time to do some hard thinking. She took a large sheet of paper and a pen and ruled it into columns. She’d do the corny thing; why not? It had helped before. No reason it shouldn’t work this time.
She pondered long before making headings to her columns, twice ripping up the sheet and starting again, and in the end stopped and looked doubtfully at what she ended up with. There were just five columns. The first she had headed ‘PERSON’, the second ‘TYPEWRITER’, the third ‘BABIES’ and the fourth ‘RAG AND BOTTLE’.
She contemplated the paper and then, unable to think at this stage of anything else, merely added the heading ‘MISC’ to the final column, and chewed the end of her pen before starting, hesitantly at first and then more quickly, to write names.
But she hadn’t got very far before she realized that there was no way she could work this out sitting here at her desk. She had to go over to Matty and quiz people, and she leaned back in her chair as she contemplated how much she didn’t want to do that. She had no business to be in Maternity, that was the trouble. It was one thing to help the police with enquiries, another to be seen by the staff of Old East, colleagues after all, to be doing so. She could think of nothing more likely to make life unpleasant for her here, and even more importantly, to shut doors to her. If she was to be of any use to Gus at all she had to find a logical reason for going over to Maternity and asking her questions.
It was Jerry who gave her the idea she needed. As she sat there still chewing her pen he put his head round her office door. ‘Dr B.,’ he announced. ‘I have to go off sick,’ and he beamed at her happily.
‘Off sick?’ She frowned. ‘What is it this time?’ Jerry was famous for the ingenuity of his excuses for taking time off, and circumventing him was one of the skills she had learned to develop in her year as his boss.
‘True bill this time,’ he said cheerfully and came right into the room. ‘See?’ He held out his right hand. The thumb was clearly swollen; she could see that from halfway across the room. ‘I’ve got an old fashioned paronychia! An honest-to-God hangnail. It’s discharging nicely, and I thought I ought to take a look at what the infection is.’ He smirked. ‘I just checked the result. It’s a strep viridans. Very nasty. Now, you wouldn’t want me spreading that around, would you? I really think this time you’ll have to let me go.’
‘Like hell I will,’ George said vigorously. ‘Get it dressed over at A & E and then come back. I’ve got work you can do on the histology films where the odd bug won’t matter a damn. Yeah, I know, you don’t like paperwork, but hard luck, Buster. It’s where you go till you stop being a walking pesthouse. I can’t use you anywhere else, and you’re not sick enough to go off work! But thanks, Jerry, you’ve given me a hell of a good idea for something else.’ She jumped to her feet and reached for a clipboard to which she attached her sheet of ruled columns. ‘On your way!’
‘Oh, well,’ Jerry said philosophically. ‘I thought it was worth spreading on the old Petrie dish to see what would grow. Didn’t think I’d get far with you! Glad I was of use anyway.’ And he held the door open for her as she came round her desk at full pelt.
‘Oh, you were useful, Jerry,’ she assured him happily. ‘You were very useful!’
34
‘Well, it could be nasty, Sister,’ George said. ‘Strep viridans, you know.’
Sister Lichfield looked pained. ‘Strep viridans? In my department? I don’t think so!’
‘I hope you’re right, indeed I do,’ George said and smiled at her, making herself look the epitome of hopefulness. ‘But for all our sakes, a little check-up won’t do any harm, hmm?’
‘Well, if you insist.’ She was grudging. ‘Though checking people’s movements hardly seems to me to be a way of —’
‘Oh, you know how it is with infection control,’ George said vaguely. ‘We have to look into the oddest corners as well as the obvious issues. Let me start with you, if I may. On these dates, can you tell me if you were on duty?’
George handed over the sheet of paper she’d brought with her. She’d scribbled it in the lift on her way to the department; a list of dates, most of them arbitrary but including all the significant ones; the dates the three babies had died; the date Harry Rajabani died; the date
the Hillmans brought Teddy into Paediatrics and the date they came and took him away again (as well as the date they took him to Harley Street and he was taken from them). She reasoned that if people were on duty in Maternity on the last four, they could hardly have been involved with the dead babies, so date checking was, she was sure, the quickest way of clearing away obvious non-starters in the suspect stakes.
Sister Lichfield looked at the list, muttered and went across her office to rummage in her bag, which was hanging on the back of the door. ‘I’ll check my diary,’ she said. ‘But honestly, I can’t see how this’ll help you.’
‘Honey, I’m not sure either,’ George said with an air of great candour. ‘But I’ve been asked by the Department to make these checks and there it is.’ Please don’t let her ask which department, she prayed inside her head. I’ll be hard put to it to think of who might talk such nonsense about infection control. But she was safe. Sister Lichfield didn’t ask — public health investigation wasn’t a subject many people in hospitals understood very well — and came back to George, thumbing through a small diary.
‘Here we are. Sing those dates out then.’
George did, and Sister agreed that in fact she’d been on duty for all the days on the list. ‘Which isn’t so surprising,’ she said a little sniffily. ‘Seeing there’s no one else here to carry the ultimate responsibility apart from me. I’ve been asking for a full time deputy for months and do you think the Clinical Manager’ll listen? Not on your bloody — Oh, all right!’ A bell was ringing urgently down the corridor and she went hurrying out, leaving George to fill in the columns on her clipboard.
So, Sister Lichfield had had the opportunity to exchange the three babies who had ostensibly died, but she had not been in Paediatrics the night the Hillmans had come in with Teddy, and of course not in the Rag and Bottle pub either. The thought of Sister Lichfield in the Rag and Bottle made George’s lips quirk. She’d hate it, she thought and, more to the point, she’d be very visible, the classic sore thumb. People would undoubtedly have noticed someone like Sister Lichfield in the public bar there.
Second Opinion Page 35
