by M K Farrar
That was one thing that had always worried Angela. How much were the doctors thinking about her daughter’s survival versus that of an organ? His words had spoken to a concern she’d held deep inside her for so long, even when she’d always tried to be positive and convince herself the doctors knew what they were talking about, she’d always had that niggling fear that they were putting the kidney ahead of Milly’s life.
“Okay,” she said, slowly, then paused as the waitress returned with her sparkling water. The bottle was wrapped in another cloth napkin, as though it was champagne instead of water, and served with an ice bucket and slivers of lemon. “Say I’ll be able to get the money, what sort of times are we looking at?”
“Depending on the outcome of the blood tests, we could schedule her in by the end of the week.”
Her mouth dropped open. “The end of the week?”
“That’s right. She’ll need some after-care treatment as well, of course.”
“What...what would I tell her doctors? They’re going to notice if she’s made a miraculous recovery.”
“I suggest you take a trip abroad while she’s recovering—once she’s strong enough. I can give you the name of a clinic who will say they treated Milly. My doctors will forward all of their notes to the clinic, so they have proof, should someone ask, but you’ll find that doctors tend to be covered by patient confidentiality, so reporting any suspicions would go against that.”
“But why would a clinic say they’ve worked on Milly when they haven’t?”
“It’s amazing what people will do for the right sum of money,” he said with a smile.
Where do you get the kidney? She knew she should ask. People who contacted desperate mothers via social media to offer surgeries weren’t working above board. She knew that—knew it would mean they were getting the organs through a way that was most likely illegal—but she couldn’t bring herself to ask. This might be her only chance of saving Milly’s life. The thought of Milly having had a transplant by the end of the week, of being well enough for them to travel, for her to finally no longer need the twice-weekly trips to the hospital, would be a dream come true. No more waiting, fearful that the phone was going to ring, but that they’d have their hearts broken once more by being turned away again. How could she possibly say no?
What if it went wrong? Or what if this was all bullshit and she’d hand over the money only to never hear from him again?
“How do I know you’ll go through with the surgery if I pay you the money?”
“You can pay half upfront, and half once the surgery is complete and your daughter is awake. I don’t want dissatisfied customers, Ms Hargreaves. I’m proud of the service I offer.”
Could she even get that kind of money together? She had some savings and a handful of investments. She had jewellery she could sell, and top-of-the-range iPads and laptops. She’d sell anything she could get her hands on, but would she be able to do so quickly enough?
“I’ll get the money,” she told him. “Just make this happen.”
He nodded and stuck out his hand to shake hers again. “I thought you’d say that. I will need the samples from your daughter before we can pin down a date for the operation.”
Her heart sank. What if they couldn’t find a match?
The dangling of possibility before her, only to be snatched away again.
He must have seen the disappointment on her face. “Try not to worry, Ms Hargreaves. Unless she’s a rare blood type, I’m sure we’ll find a match for her.”
“Right. That’s good, because she isn’t—a rare blood type, I mean,” she managed to say, her head spinning. How did they have access to whatever she needed? She didn’t think she was going to like the answer if she asked, so she kept her mouth shut. The most important thing was getting Milly better, and this was her only chance.
“We’ll need the first payment this time tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said, slowly. “That’s going to be tight.”
“I’m sure you can manage it, Councillor.”
“Yes, of course. And then how long until she’s able to have the operation?”
“Like I said, it’ll depend on what her blood results come back as. I’ll be in contact as to where you’ll need to deliver the money.”
Her jaw dropped. “You want cash?”
“I can’t risk any digital trail. We need to be of the utmost discretion. I’m sure you wouldn’t want that kind of thing showing on your bank records either. In your position, you must stand up to some serious scrutiny.”
Her cheeks flared with heat. She understood what he was saying. What they were doing was illegal, and they both needed to cover their tracks. This wasn’t like her at all. She never did anything wrong. She wasn’t one of those politicians who fudged all their expenses and claimed thousands of pounds worth of items that she wasn’t really entitled to or had never actually used. She was meticulous about only claiming what she was entitled to, and, even then, she felt guilty about it. They were so privileged in their job role—even their meals came at a discount. It didn’t seem right to her when they were high earners anyway, but she knew plenty of her colleagues would cause uproar if anything was changed.
“You’re right. I’ll get the cash.” It was going to take some smart manoeuvring of her finances to get that money made available, but it was possible. She hoped none of the bank managers flagged her up as doing something suspicious. The money-laundering red flags would probably start waving. She’d have to think of some excuse as to why she needed the cash, but her mind was blank right now. What possible reason could she have for needing that much money to hand that didn’t involve something illegal?
There was another problem. How was she going to approach this with Milly? For once, she wished Milly was much younger. If she was a toddler or pre-school age, she wouldn’t ask the difficult questions. She’d trust her mother implicitly. Unfortunately, Milly was of the age where absolutely everything Angela said was either questioned or ignored completely.
Milly was going to know they were breaking the law, and that put Angela in a very difficult position indeed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Linh and her daughter had spent the previous day mostly confined to their room, only leaving to use the bathroom. One of the men—not the one who’d taken their blood, but one who’d been there when they’d first arrived—brought them a simple sandwich of bread and processed ham, and they drank water from the tap. They whiled the hours away, watching the city from the dirty window. It truly was a whole different world out there. The view from the window looked down onto the row of back gardens and the narrow road—that wasn’t much more than a lane—beyond. On the other side of the lane, a second row of back gardens were all divided from both the lane and each other by six-foot-high fences or walls. It was as though these people wanted to live with as much division as possible, like they wanted to pretend they didn’t have these neighbours living either side of them. It was a strange thing to do in Linh’s mind. Back home, she knew all her neighbours and they knew her. They treated each other’s homes like their own.
That division wasn’t present in this house, however. Here, they lived side by side, so many of them squashed in together. What did the people in the other houses think of this? These tall fences and walls must go some way to stopping them noticing how many people were living here—or perhaps they simply didn’t care.
At around seven p.m. the previous evening, the other women had returned to the house, all exhausted, with backs bent and hands red and cracked from hard work. Linh wanted to ask them questions about where they’d been and how long they’d been working like this, but not only did the women appear too tired to want to talk, the language barrier was also an issue. At least she had Chau to talk to. She couldn’t imagine how lonely she’d be here if she didn’t have her daughter by her side.
They’d been brought more food—pasta in a tomato sauce—an hour or so later, and then everyone had bedded down around h
er.
Now, everyone was awake again.
As had happened the previous day, men arrived. The women took turns using the bathroom and accepted brown paper bags containing that day’s food and then lined up to be ushered downstairs and into a waiting van.
Linh held Chau’s hand, anxious about what they’d be directed to do that day. Her inner arm was bruised in a starburst of purples and greens beneath the beige plaster—standing out starkly against her darker skin tone. She didn’t want to spend another day stuck in this room, hearing others coming and going, waiting for the other women to come back.
Digging deep into the same courage that had brought her here in the first place, she approached the man, pulling Chau with her.
“We work today?” she asked him.
“Yes, you can work. It’s cleaning in a big hotel, so don’t get too excited.”
He glanced at Chau. “If anyone asks, she’s sixteen and only working part time, got it?”
She understood ‘work’ and ‘cleaning’ but the rest of it went over her head. She didn’t mind. It was a relief knowing she was being sent out to work. That had been her main reason for coming here—the ability to earn money and send it back to her family at home. If they hadn’t allowed her to work for whatever reason, she wasn’t sure what she would have done. Not that she could think of a reason why they wouldn’t have allowed her to go to a job. After all, that had been part of the agreement when she hadn’t been able to come up with all the money to bring both her and Chau here. She’d be working to pay off that debt initially.
Keeping hold of Chau’s hand, they shuffled into line to join the others. They left the room and filed down the stairs and out the back of the building. They walked through the run-down garden, potholes in the lawn, passed a dumped refrigerator and a supermarket trolley, and out to the lane she’d seen from the window. A white van, much the same as the one they’d been brought here in, waited for them, the rear doors open. The men hurried the women into the back, and they sat on the floor, side by side. The door slammed shut on them, closing them into near darkness.
A short drive later, the doors opened again, and the women climbed out. They were ushered into the rear entrance of a building that rose high into the sky and handed uniforms to wear.
“Our first day at work,” Linh told Chau. “We must work hard and do everything we’re told.”
Her daughter nodded.
“Good girl. Soon, we’ll get you into school, I promise.”
She didn’t know how she was going to make that promise come true, but she would, if it was the last thing she did.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was ten a.m., and Erica had managed to do the school run that morning before heading into work where she discovered the report on the second body from the pathologist had come in. She knew plenty of detectives were happy just to read the report, but she preferred to be more hands-on and see the body for herself.
Lucy Kim was already in the lobby, talking to one of her colleagues when Erica and Shawn arrived. Kim spotted the two of them entering and broke off the conversation she was having with a touch to the man’s arm. The man blushed right up to his roots and then turned and hurried away.
Erica tried not to laugh. Kim did have that effect on people, though Erica wasn’t sure the man was the pathologist’s type.
“As much as I enjoy seeing you both,” Kim said, “I wasn’t expecting another visit quite so soon.”
“Neither were we,” Erica said. “I’d been hoping this was a one-off, but it seems I was wrong.”
“You seem confident the same person or people are responsible.”
Erica shrugged. “Bit of a coincidence if it wasn’t. The lack of evidence from the first body makes it hard to know for sure, but the MO are both the same.”
Kim nodded. “Looks that way to me as well. You want to come down and I’ll run you through what I’ve found?”
“That’s why we’re here.”
They followed her down to the basement level.
“Did you manage to check those dental records off against the first victim?” Erica asked.
“Yes, I have, but none are a match. Sorry.”
Her stomach dipped in disappointment. “Not your fault. Would have been good to find out who she was, though.”
“Before you ask, I haven’t checked them against the second victim. There’s enough of her left to see she’s of a different ethnicity, so there’s no chance of any of those missing women being the one on my table.”
Erica didn’t want to be pleased about the idea of another person being murdered, but she hoped this would help point them in the right direction. The damage had been so bad on the first body that it hadn’t been able to tell them anything, and any DNA fragments that might have been left by the culprits had been destroyed. This second body might help them figure out what had happened to the first.
They put on their protective outerwear, and Kim led them through. She walked around the examination table and gestured to what was now a familiar scene of a burned body on the table.
“Estimated age at thirty-five to forty. Caucasian, five foot five, blonde hair and blue eyes.”
“Any discerning features?” Erica asked.
“She has a tattoo on the inside of her wrist. It’s a date. Sixteen, ten, oh-nine.”
Erica thought. “A date of birth of a child perhaps. Or a wedding date?”
“It’s definitely a date of importance. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, or any other jewellery for that matter, but the damage was too great to see if she had any kind of tan line or indent that would point towards a ring recently having been removed.”
“If it was stolen, you mean,” Erica said.
Kim shrugged. “It’s a possibility.”
“If nothing comes up,” Shawn said, “it might be an idea to bring the press in and see if anyone recognises the descriptions we have. These two women didn’t appear out of thin air. Someone must be missing them. We could look at doing a social media campaign, too.”
“Let’s give ourselves a few more hours and see what progress we can make with finding the identity of the second victim, and then we’ll go down the media route.”
Getting the press involved wasn’t something she relished. It would bring a whole heap of kooks out of the woodwork, all making out they had something useful to say when actually all they wanted was attention. The volume of information that would come pouring in would also create a huge amount of work—the vast majority of which would be a total waste of time. It was a scattershot method in the hope of hitting one tiny target. She didn’t like the amount of resources it would take up, preferring her detectives to work with more direction, but if they had nothing else to go on, they might not have any choice.
“There’s no sign of sexual assault, and the blood toxicology came back clean,” Kim continued. “She didn’t have any drugs or alcohol in her system when she died.”
Erica frowned. “Then what did she die of?”
“I don’t believe she was killed by the fire. Her lungs were relatively clean, though she may have been a smoker at some time in the past, but they weren’t showing any signs of recent smoke inhalation. There is something, though.”
From Kim’s tone, Erica could tell it was something of interest. “What’s that?”
“The victim is missing an organ.”
“Which organ?”
“As I’m sure you know, it’s common for certain organs to be removed for medical reasons, such as the spleen or appendix, or reproductive organs.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that. So which organ was removed?”
“The liver.”
Erica frowned. “A part of her liver?”
Kim shook her head. “Nope. The whole thing.”
“But you can’t live without your liver,” Shawn said. “I mean, you can live with part of it, I think, and it does grow again, but you can’t live without the whole thing.”
“No, you can’t,” Kim
agreed.
“How recently?”
“Very recently. Shortly before death. It’s quite possibly the thing that killed her, but it’s impossible to tell due to the fire damage if there were any other stab or knife wounds that contributed to her death.”
Erica hoped the poor woman was dead before her organ was removed. “Do you think someone killed her for her liver?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“What are you thinking? Black market organs?”
“Yes,” Kim nodded, “though I don’t understand why more of the organs wouldn’t have been taken. If this is organ harvesting for the black market, why didn’t they harvest? I’d expect them to take as much as possible—lungs, kidneys, heart, intestines. It all would have been worth money to them.”
“Maybe the liver was taken for a different reason,” Shawn said.
“Like what?”
“Cannibalism. It might be considered a delicacy.”
Erica couldn’t help grimacing.
“What about the first body?” she asked Kim. “Was it possible to tell if any organs had been removed?”
Kim shook her head. “All the internal organs had been burned down to nothing, and then the hoses from the fire department destroyed any chance of being able to distinguish what was left. There is one more thing,” Kim said. “Here.”
Erica frowned and looked down at something in the silver kidney tray Kim was holding out. The item it contained was shrivelled, and translucent, with some kind of black text on it. “What is it?”
“I found it melted onto the victim’s skin on her hip, where the waistband of her trousers would have sat. It must have been inside her clothes in order to bond to her skin in the heat.”
Erica’s confusion deepened. “But what is it?”
“A thin plastic, like the kind you’d wrap something in.”
“What’s the writing?”
“There’s only a few letters left. A capital ‘R’ and an ‘al’ then a ‘mf’.”
Erica let out a frustrated sigh. “That could be anything.”