by Peter James
‘Fuckers!’
‘Yeah, cunts!’
‘Why don’t you go chasing real criminals, right?’
‘Yeah, ’stead of fuckin’ persecuting motorists.’
Tony Omotoso turned his head and saw two youths slouching past.
Because 3,500 people die on the roads of England every year, against 500 a year who are murdered, that’s why, he wanted to say to them. Because me and Ian scrape dead and broken bodies off the roads every damn day of the week, because of arseholes like this one in the Fiesta.
But he didn’t have time. His colleague already had the blue roof spinners flashing and the siren whup-whooping. He tossed the laser gun on to the back seat, climbed in the front, slammed the door and began tugging his seat belt on, as Upperton gunned the car out into a gap in the traffic and floored the accelerator.
And now the adrenalin was kicking in as he felt the thrust of acceleration in the pit of his stomach and his spine pressed against the rear of the seat. Oh yes, this was one of the highs of the job.
The Automatic Number Plate Recognition video screen mounted on the dash was beeping at them, showing the Fiesta’s index. Whiskey Four-Three-Two Charlie Papa November had no tax, no insurance and was registered to a disqualified driver.
Upperton pulled over into the outside lane, gaining fast on the Fiesta.
Then a radio call came through. ‘Hotel Tango Four-Two?’
Omotoso answered. ‘Hotel Tango Four-Two, yes, yes?’
The controller said, ‘We have a reported serious road traffic collision. Motorcycle and car at the intersection of Coldean Lane and Ditchling Road. Can you attend?’
Shit, he thought, not wanting to let the Fiesta go. ‘Yes, yes, on our way. Put out an alert for Brighton patrols. Ford Fiesta, index Whiskey Four-Three-Two Charlie Papa November, colour green, travelling south on Lewes Road at speed, approaching gyratory system. Suspected disqualified driver.’
He didn’t need to tell his colleague to spin the car around. Upperton was already braking hard, his right-turn indicators blinking, looking for a gap in the oncoming traffic.
4
Malcolm Beckett could smell the sea getting closer as his thirty-year-old blue MGB GT halted at the traffic lights to the slip road. It was like a drug, as if the salt of the oceans was in his veins, and after any absence he needed his fix. Since his late teens, when he joined the Royal Navy as a trainee engineer, he had spent his entire career at sea. Ten years in the Royal Navy and then twenty-one years in the Merchant Navy.
He loved Brighton, where he was born and raised, because of its proximity to the coast, but he was always happiest when on board ship. Today was the end of his three weeks’ shore leave and the start of three weeks back at sea, on the Arco Dee, where he was Chief Engineer. Not so long ago, he rued, he had been the youngest chief engineer in the entire Merchant Navy, but now, at forty-seven, he was fast becoming a veteran, an old sea dog.
Just like his beloved ship, every rivet of which he knew, he knew every nut and bolt of his car, which he had taken apart and put back together again more times than he could remember. He listened fondly to the rumble of the idling engine now, deciding that he could hear a bit of tappet noise, that he would need to take the cylinder head off on his next leave and make some adjustments.
‘You OK?’ Jane asked.
‘Me? Yep. Absolutely.’
It was a fine morning, crisp blue sky, no wind, the sea flat as a millpond. After the late autumn storms that had made his last spell on board pretty grim, the weather was set fair, at least for today. It would be chilly, but glorious.
‘Are you going to miss me?’
He wormed his arm around her shoulder, gave her a squeeze. ‘Madly.’
‘Liar!’
He kissed her. ‘I miss you every second I’m away from you.’
‘Bullshit!’
He kissed her again.
As the lights turned to green, she depressed the clutch, crunched the gear lever into first and accelerated down the incline.
‘It’s really hard to compete against a ship,’ she said.
He grinned. ‘That was a great bonk this morning.’
‘It had better last you.’
‘It will.’
They turned left, driving round the end of the Hove Lagoon, a pair of artificial lakes where people could take out rowing boats, have windsurfing lessons and sail model ships. Ahead of them, adjoining the eastern perimeter of the harbour, was a private street of white, Moorish-styled beachfront houses where rich celebrities, including Heather Mills and Fatboy Slim, had homes.
The salt in the air was stronger now, with the sulphurous reeks of the harbour, and the smells of oil, rope, tar, paint and coal.
Shoreham Harbour, at the western extremity of the city of Brighton and Hove, consisted of a mile-long basin, lined with timber yards, warehouses, bunkering stations and aggregate depots on both sides, as well as yacht marinas and a scattering of private houses and flats. It had once been a busy trading port, but the advent of increasingly large container ships, too big for this harbour, had changed its character.
Tankers, smaller cargo vessels and fishing boats still made constant use of it, but much of the traffic consisted of commercial dredgers, like his own ship, mining the seabed for gravel and sand to sell as aggregate to the construction industry.
‘What have you got on in the next three weeks?’ he asked.
Trusting the wives they left behind was an issue for all sailors. When he had first started in the Royal Navy he’d been told that the wives of some mariners used to stick a packet of OMO washing powder in their front windows when their husbands were away on a tour of duty. It signalled Old Man Overseas.
‘Jemma’s nativity play, which you’ll just miss,’ she answered. ‘And Amy breaks up in a fortnight. I’ll have her moping around the house.’
Amy was Jane’s eleven-year-old by her first marriage. Mal got on fine with her, although there was always an invisible barrier between them. Jemma was the six-year-old daughter they had together, with whom he was much closer. She was so affectionate, so bright, such a positive little person. A complete contrast to his own strange, remote and sickly daughter by his first marriage, whom he was fond of but had never really connected to, despite all his efforts. He was gutted that he would be missing Jemma playing the Virgin Mary, but was long used to the family sacrifices that his chosen career entailed. It had been a major contributing factor to his divorce from his first wife, and something he still thought about constantly.
He looked at Jane as she drove, turning right past the houses into the long, straight road along the south side of the harbour basin, going almost deliberately slowly now as if eking out her last minutes with him. Feisty but so lovely, with her short bob of red hair and her pert snub nose, she was wearing a leather jacket over a white T-shirt and ripped blue jeans. There was such a difference between the two women. Jane, who was a therapist specializing in phobias, told him that she liked her independence, loved the fact that she had her three weeks of freedom, that it made her appreciate him all the more when he was home.
Whereas Lynn, who worked for a debt collection agency, had always been needy. Too needy. It was one thing to be wanted by a woman, desired by a woman, lusted after by a woman. But to be needed. It was the need that had ultimately driven them apart. He’d hoped – in fact, they had both hoped – that having a child would have changed that. But it hadn’t.
It had actually made things worse.
The car was slowing down and Jane was indicating. They stopped, let a truck loaded with timber thunder past, then turned right, in through the open gates of Solent Aggregates. Then she halted the car in front of the security Portakabin.
Mal climbed out, already in his white boiler suit and rubber-soled sea boots, and flipped up the tailgate. He hefted out his large, soft bag and pulled on his yellow hard hat. Then he leaned in through the window and kissed Jane goodbye. It was a long, lingering kiss. Even after seven years,
their passion was still intense – one of the pluses of regularly spending three weeks apart.
‘Love you,’ he said.
‘Love you too,’ she replied, and kissed him again.
A tall man, lean and strong, he was good-looking, with an open, honest face and a thatch of short, thinning fair hair. He was the kind of man colleagues instantly liked and respected; there was no side to him. What you saw was what you got.
He stood watching her reverse, listening to the burble of the exhaust, concerned about the sound when she revved. One of the baffles in the twin silencers needed replacing. He would have to put it up on the hoist when he got back. Also, he needed to take a look at the shocks, the car didn’t seem to be riding as well as it should over bumps. Could be the front shock absorbers needed replacing.
But, as he entered the Portakabin and signed his name in the log, exchanging pleasantries with the security guard, other things were starting to occupy his mind. The starboard engine of the Arco Dee was coming up to 20,000 hours, which was the company’s limit for an overhaul. He needed to do some calculations to pick the optimum time for that to happen. Dry docks would be shut down over the coming Christmas holiday period. But the owners of the Arco Dee weren’t concerned about holidays. If he’d spent £19 million on a boat, he probably wouldn’t be either, he reckoned. Which was why they liked to keep it working 24/7 for as much of the year as possible.
As he headed jauntily along the quay, towards her black hull and orange superstructure, he was happily unaware of the cargo that would accompany them back from his next voyage, scheduled to start in just a couple of hours’ time, and the trauma it would bring to his own life.
5
Dr Hunter’s office was a long, high-ceilinged room, with sash windows at the far end giving a view of a small, walled garden and, minimally screened by barren, wintry trees and shrubs, the stark metal fire escape of the building beyond. Lynn had often thought that in grander days, when this had been all one house, this office was probably the dining room.
She liked buildings, particularly interiors. One of her biggest joys was visiting country houses and stately homes that were open to the public – and there had been a time when Caitlin had quite enjoyed that too. It had long been her plan that when Caitlin was off her hands, and the need to earn money was not so pressing, she would do a course in interior design. Maybe then she’d offer to give Ross Hunter’s surgery a makeover. Like the waiting room, it could do with a spruce-up in here. The wallpaper and the paint had not aged anything like as well as the doctor himself. Although she had to admit to herself that there was something reassuring about the fact that the room had barely changed in all the years she had been coming here. It had a learned feel about it that always – until today at least – made her feel comfortable.
It just appeared a little more cluttered on every visit. The number of grey, four-drawer filing cabinets against one wall seemed to keep increasing, as did the index boxes in which he kept his patients’ notes stacked on the top, along, incongruously, with a plastic drinking-water dispenser. There was an eye-test chart inside a light box on one wall; a white marble bust of some ancient sage she did not recognize – perhaps Hippocrates, she thought – and several family photographs above a row of crammed, old-fashioned bookshelves.
One side of the room, behind a free-standing screen, contained the examination couch, some electrical monitoring equipment, an assortment of medical apparatus and several lights. The flooring here was a rectangle of linoleum inset into the carpet, giving this area the appearance of a mini operating theatre.
Ross Hunter motioned Lynn to one of the pair of black leather chairs in front of his desk and she sat down, putting her bag on the floor beside her, keeping her coat on. His face still looked tight, more serious than she had ever seen him, and it was making her nervous as hell. Then the phone rang. He raised an apologetic hand as he answered it, signalling with his eyes to her that he would not be long. While he spoke, he peered at the screen of his laptop.
She glanced around the room, listening to him talking to the relative of someone who was clearly very ill and about to be moved into the local hospice, the Martletts. The call made her even more uncomfortable. She stared at a coat stand with a solitary overcoat – Dr Hunter’s, she presumed – hanging from it and puzzled over an array of electrical equipment that she had not seen, or noticed, previously, wondering absently what it did.
He finished the call, scribbled a note to himself, peered at his screen once more, then focused on Lynn. His voice was gentle, concerned. ‘Thanks for coming in. I thought it would be better to see you alone before seeing Caitlin.’ He looked nervous.
‘Right,’ she mouthed. But no sound came out. It felt as if someone had just swabbed the insides of her mouth and her throat with blotting paper.
He retrieved a file from right at the top of one pile, put it on his desk and opened it, adjusted his half-moon glasses, then read for a few moments, as if buying himself time. ‘I’ve got the latest set of test results back from Dr Granger and I’m afraid it’s not good news, Lynn. They’re showing grossly abnormal liver function.’
Dr Neil Granger was the local consultant gastroenterologist who had been seeing Caitlin for the past six years.
‘The enzyme levels in particular are very elevated,’ he went on. ‘Particularly the Gamma GT enzymes. Her platelet count is very low – it has deteriorated quite dramatically. Is she bruising a lot?’
Lynn nodded. ‘Yes, also, if she cuts herself the bleeding takes a long time to stop.’ She knew that clotting agents were produced by the liver, and with a healthy liver they would immediately be dispatched to cause clotting and stop the bleeding. ‘How elevated are the enzyme levels?’ After years of looking up everything Caitlin’s doctors had told her on the Internet, Lynn had accumulated a fair amount of knowledge on the subject. Enough to know when to be worried, but not enough to know what to do about it.
‘Well, in a normal healthy liver the enzyme level should be around 45. The lab tests that were done a month ago showed 1,050. But this latest test shows a level of 3,000. Dr Granger is very concerned about this.’
‘What is the significance, Ross?’ Her voice came out choked and squeaky. ‘Of the rise?’
He looked hard at her with compassion showing in his eyes. ‘Her jaundice is worsening, he tells me. As is her encephalopathy. In lay terms, her body is being poisoned by toxins. She’s suffering increasingly from episodes of confusion, is that right?’
Lynn nodded.
‘Drowsiness?’
‘Yes, at times.’
‘The itching?’
‘That’s driving her crazy.’
‘The truth is, I’m afraid Caitlin is no longer responding to her treatments. She has irreversible cirrhosis.’
Feeling a deep, dark heaviness inside her, Lynn turned for a moment and stared bleakly through the window. At the fire escape. At a wintry, skeletal tree. It looked dead. She felt dead inside.
‘How is she today?’ the doctor asked.
‘She’s OK, a bit subdued. Complains that she’s itching a lot. She was awake, scratching her hands and her feet, most of the night. She said her urine’s very dark. And her abdomen is swollen, which she hates most of all.’
‘I can give her some water tablets to help get rid of the fluid.’ He made a note on Caitlin’s index card and suddenly Lynn found herself feeling indignant. Surely this warranted something more than a sodding index-card note? And why didn’t he have such things on a computer these days?
‘Ross, when – when you say deteriorated quite dramatically – how – what – I mean how – how is that stopped? You know, reversed? What has to happen?’
He jumped up from his desk, went over to a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, then came back holding a brown, wedge-shaped object, cleared a space on his desk and set it down.
‘This is what an adult human liver looks like. Caitlin’s would be just a little smaller.’
Lynn looked at it, the w
ay she had looked at it a thousand times before. On a plain pad he started drawing what looked like a lot of broccoli. She listened as he explained, patiently, how the bile ducts worked, but when he had finished the diagram she knew no more than she already knew about the way the bile ducts worked. And besides, there was only one question that mattered to her now.
‘Surely there must be some way to reverse the failure?’ she asked. But her voice carried no conviction. As if she knew – as if they both knew – that after six years of hoping against hope, they were finally arriving at the inevitable.
‘I’m afraid that what’s going on here is not reversible. In Dr Granger’s view we are in danger of running out of time.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She hasn’t responded to any medication and there aren’t any other drugs out there that we can give her.’
‘There must be something you can do? Dialysis?’
‘For kidney failure, yes, but not for liver failure. There’s no equivalent.’
He fell silent for some moments.
‘Why not, Ross?’ she probed.
‘Because the liver’s functions are too complex. I’ll draw you a cross-section and show—’
‘I don’t want another fucking diagram!’ she shouted at him. Then she started crying. ‘I just want you to make my darling angel better. There must be something you can do.’ She sniffed. ‘So what will happen, Ross?’
He bit his lip. ‘She’s going to have to have a transplant.’
‘A transplant? Shit, she’s only fifteen years old! FIFTEEN!’
He nodded, but said nothing.
‘I’m not shouting at you – I’m sorry – I . . .’ She fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief, then dabbed her eyes. ‘She’s just been through a lot in her life, poor angel. A transplant?’ she said again. ‘That is really the only option?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid it is.’