Dead Tomorrow

by Peter James

  The puzzled look in the woman’s small, dark, hooded eyes instantly deepened his unease.

  ‘She is here!’ Uncle Vlad said.

  ‘I want to see her now!’

  Rares had lived by his wits on the streets of Bucharest for years. He had learned to read expressions in faces. And he did not like the exchange of glances between this woman and the two men. He turned, ducked under Cosmescu’s arms and ran.

  Grigore grabbed the collar of his denim jacket. Rares wriggled free of it, then was felled, unconscious, by a single chop on the back of his neck from Cosmescu.

  The woman hoisted his limp body over her shoulders and, followed by the two men, carried him on down the corridor a short distance, then through double doors into the small, pre-op room. She laid him out on a steel trolley.

  A young Romanian anaesthetist, Bogdan Barbu, who had graduated five years ago from medical school in Bucharest, on a salary of 3,000 euros a year, was waiting to receive him.

  Bogdan had thick black hair, brushed forward into a fringe, and designer stubble. With his tanned, lean features, hecould have passed for a tennis pro, or an actor. He already had the syringe, filled with a bolus of Benzodiazepine, prepared. Without needing instructions, he injected the pre-med into the upper arm of the unconscious Rares. It would be enough to keep him out for several more minutes.

  Between them, they used the time to remove all of the young Romanian’s clothes and insert an intravenous cannula in his wrist. They then connected it to a drip-line of Propofol, fed by a pump.

  This would ensure that Rares did not regain consciousness – but without causing any harm to his precious internal organs.

  In the adjoining room, the main operating theatre of the clinic, an anaesthetized twelve-year-old boy, with a liver so diseased he had only weeks to live, was already being opened up by the junior surgeon, a thirty-eight-year-old Romanian liver transplant specialist, Razvan Ionescu. In his home country, Razvan could take home just under 4,000 euros a year – augmented a little with bribes. Working here, in this clinic, he was taking home more than 200,000. In a few minutes, dressed in green surgical scrubs, with magnifying glasses over his eyes, he would be ready to start removing the boy’s failed liver.

  Razvan was assisted by two Romanian nurses, who placed the clamps, and every step was scrutinized, in microscopic detail, by one of the most eminent liver transplant surgeons in the UK.

  The first rule of medicine which this surgeon had learned many years ago as a young student was, Do no harm.

  In his view at this moment, he was doing no harm.

  The Romanian street kid had no life ahead of him. Whether he died today or in five years’ time from drug abuse was of little consequence. But the English teenager who would receive his liver was altogether different. He was a talented musician, he had a promising future ahead of him. Of course, it was not up to doctors to play God, to decide who lived and who died. Nor was it up to them to value one human life over another. But the stark reality was that one of these two young men was doomed.

  And he would never admit to anyone that the £50,000, tax-free, deposited into his Swiss bank account for each transplant he performed swayed his judgement in the slightest.

  67

  Shortly after half past twelve – half past one in Munich, Grace calculated – Kriminalhauptkommissar Marcel Kullen returned his call.

  It was good to speak to his old friend and they spent a couple of minutes catching up on the German detective’s family and career news, from when they had last seen each other, all too briefly, in Munich.

  ‘So, no more information you have of Sandy?’ Kullen said.

  ‘Nothing,’ Grace replied.

  ‘Her photographs are still in every police station here. But so far, nothing. We are keeping trying.’

  ‘Actually, I’m starting to think it is time to wind down,’ Grace said. ‘I’m beginning the legal process to have her declared dead.’

  ‘Ja, but I am thinking – your friend who has seen her in the Englischer Garten. We should look longer, I think, no?’

  ‘I’m getting married, Marcel. I need to move on, to have closure.’

  ‘Married? You have a new woman in your life?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘OK, good, so – I am happy for you! You want now that us stop to look for Sandy?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you for all you’ve done. But that’s not why I called you. I need help in a different direction.’

  ‘Ja, OK.’

  ‘I need some information on an organization in Munich called Transplantation-Zentrale GmbH. I understand it is known to your police force.’

  ‘How are you spelling this?’

  It took Grace several minutes, working patiently with the German detective’s broken English, to get the name across correctly.

  ‘Sure, I will check,’ Kullen said. ‘I call us back, yes?’

  ‘Please, it’s urgent.’

  *

  Kullen called him back thirty minutes later. ‘This is interesting, Roy. I am talking with my colleagues. Transplantation-Zentrale GmbH is under observation by the LKA for some months now. There is a woman who is the boss, her name is Marlene Hartmann. They have links with the Colombian mafia, with factions of the Russian mafia, with organized crime too in Romania, with the Philippines, with China, with India.’

  ‘What does the LKA know about them?’

  ‘Their business is the trafficking, internationally, of humans, and in particular in human organs. So it would seem.’

  ‘What action are you taking against them?’

  ‘At this stage, we are just information gathering, observing. They are on the LKA radar, you would say. We are looking to connect them with specific offences in Germany. Do you have information about them you can give to me for my colleagues?’

  ‘Not at the moment – but I’d like to interview Marlene Hartmann. Perhaps I could come over and do that?’

  The German sounded hesitant. ‘OK.’

  ‘Is there a problem with that?’

  ‘Only – at this moment, according to the surveillance file, she is not in München – she is travelling.’

  ‘Do you know where?’

  ‘Two days ago she flew to Bucharest. We don’t have more information.’

  ‘But you will know when she is back in Germany?’

  ‘Yes. And we do know that she goes regularly to England.’

  ‘How regularly?’ Grace asked, his suspicions suddenly rising.

  ‘She flew into München from London last week. And also the week before.’

  ‘Presumably she was not on a winter-break holiday.’

  ‘Perhaps. Is possible,’ the German said.

  ‘No one in their right mind comes to England at this time of year, Marcel,’ Grace said.

  ‘Not to see the Christmas lights?’

  Grace laughed. ‘She doesn’t sound the type.’

  He was thinking hard. The woman was in England last week, and the week before. At some point in the past week to ten days three teenagers had been killed and their organs harvested.

  ‘Is there any possibility of obtaining this woman’s phone records, Marcel?’ he asked.

  ‘Her fixed lines or handy?’

  Handy, Grace knew, was the German word for a mobile phone.

  ‘Both?’

  ‘I will see what I can do. Do you want all calls, or just those to the UK?’

  ‘Those to the UK would be a very good starting point. Do you have any plans to arrest her any time soon?’

  ‘Not just now. They want to keep watching her. There are other German human trafficking connections that she is linked to.’

  ‘Shame. It would have been good to have her computers looked at.’

  ‘I think on this we can help you.’ Grace could almost feel the Kriminalhauptkommissar smiling down the phone.

  ‘You can?’

  ‘We have a warrant issued by an Ermittlungsrichter for phone and computer records.’

  ‘By
who?’

  ‘It is an investigating judge. The warrant is – how is it you say – in camera?’

  ‘Yes – without the other party knowing.’

  ‘Exactly. And you know now in the LKA we have good technology for computer surveillance. I understand we have duplicates of all computer activity, including laptop away from the office, of Frau Hartmann and her colleagues. We have implanted a servlet.’

  Grace knew all about servlets from his colleagues, Ray Packham and Phil Taylor in the High-Tech Crime Unit. You could install one simply by sending a suspect an email, provided he or she opened it. Then all activity on the suspect’s computer would be automatically copied back to you.

  ‘Brilliant!’ he said. ‘Would you let me see them?’

  ‘I would not be permitted to send them to you, despite the EU cooperation treaty – it will be a long process of bureaucracy.’

  ‘Any way of short-circuiting that?’

  ‘For my friend Roy Grace?’

  ‘Yes, for him!’

  ‘If you are coming over – perhaps I could leave copies of them by accident – on a restaurant table? But they are for information only, you understand? You must not reveal their source, and you will not be able to use the information in evidence. Is that OK?’

  ‘That is more than OK, Marcel!’

  Grace thanked him and hung up with a real lift of excitement.

  68

  Subcomisar Radu Constantinescu had a swanky office in Police Station No. 15 in Bucharest – at least, swanky by Romanian police standards. The four-storey building had been put up in 1920, according to an engraved plaque on the wall, and did not appear to have been dusted or redecorated since. The staircases were bare stone and the floors covered in cracked linoleum. The pastel-green walls were chipped and scored, with plaster crumbling from some of the cracks. It always reminded Ian Tilling of his old school in Maidenhead.

  Constantinescu’s room was large, dark and dingy, and shrouded in a permanent blue-grey fug of cigarette smoke. It was starkly furnished, with a wooden desk that was bland and old, but almost as big as his ego, and a conference table of indeterminate vintage, surrounded by mismatched chairs. Proudly displayed, high up, beneath the nicotine-stained ceiling, were the policeman’s hunting trophies – the mounted heads of bears, wolves, lynxes, deer, chamois and foxes. Framed certificates and photographs of Constantinescu rubbing shoulders with various dignitaries filled a little of the wall space, along with a couple of photographs of him in hunting kit, kneeling by a dead boar in one and holding up the horned head of a stag in the other.

  The Subcomisar sat behind his desk, dressed in black trousers, a white shirt with braided epaulettes, and a slack green tie. He busied himself for a moment, lighting a fresh cigarette from the stub of the previous one, which he then crushed out, ineffectually, in a huge overflowing crystal ashtray. Several screwed-up balls of paper, which had clearly missed the waste bin, littered the floor around the desk.

  Constantinescu was forty-five years old, short and wiry, with a gaunt face, jet-black hair and piercing dark eyes with dark, heavy rings beneath them. Ian Tilling had got to know him when the officer had started to visit Casa Ioana on a regular basis.

  ‘So my friend, Mr Ian Tilling, Member of the British Empire for services to the homeless of Romania!’ Constantinescu said, through a fresh cloud of noxiously sweet blue smoke. ‘Yes? You have met your queen, no?’

  ‘Yes, when I got my gong.’

  ‘Gong?’

  ‘Slang,’ Tilling said. ‘It’s English slang for a medal.’

  Constantinescu’s eyes widened. ‘Gong!’ he said. ‘Gong! Very good. Maybe we should drink! To celebrate?’

  ‘It was a few months ago.’

  The police officer reached under his desk and produced a bottle of Famous Grouse whisky and two shot glasses. He filled them both with a clear liquid and handed one to Tilling.

  ‘Spaga!’ he said, indicating shamelessly that he had been given the whisky as a bribe. ‘Good whisky, yes? Special?’

  Tilling did not want to disillusion him that it was a basic blended whisky. ‘Special!’ he agreed.

  ‘To your – gong!’

  Reluctantly, but understanding the protocol, Ian Tilling drained his glass, the alcohol hitting him almost instantly on his empty stomach, sending his head reeling.

  The police officer set his empty glass down. ‘So, how can I help my important friend? All the more important now that Romania and England are partners in the EU together!’

  Ian Tilling placed the three sets of fingerprints, the three e-fit photographs and the close-up of a primitive tattoo of the name Rares on the man’s desk.

  Looking at them, Constantinescu suddenly asked, ‘And how, by the way, are all your pretty girls working for you?’

  ‘Yep, they are fine.’

  ‘And the beautiful Andreea, she is still working with you?’

  ‘Yes, but she’s getting married in a month’s time.’

  His face fell. ‘Ah.’ He raised his head, looking disappointed.

  The Subcomisar occasionally popped into Casa Ioana on some pretext or another. But Tilling always knew the real reason was to chat up the girls – the man was an inveterate womanizer, and every time he came, he tried, unsuccessfully, to hassle one or other of them for a date. But being good diplomats, they were always polite to him, always leaving a faint window of hope open, just to keep him onside for the hostel.

  Trying to steer the meeting on to business, Ian Tilling pointed at the E-Fit and fingerprint sets, then explained their provenance. The Romanian was distracted twice by internal calls, and once by what was a clearly personal call from his current squeeze, on his mobile.

  ‘Rares,’ he said, when Tilling had finished. ‘Romanian, sure. Interpol have the fingerprints?’

  ‘Would you do me a favour and run them yourself? It will be quicker.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And could you get copies of these photos of the three kids circulated to your other police stations in Bucharest?’

  Constantinescu lit his third cigarette since the meeting had started and then had a bout of coughing. When he finished, he poured himself another slug of whisky and offered the bottle to Tilling, who declined.

  ‘Sure, no problem.’

  He burst again into a series of deep, racking coughs, then, when he had finished, he slipped the photographs and fingerprints into a large brown envelope and, to Tilling’s dismay, slid them into a drawer in his desk.

  From long experience dealing with the man, Tilling knew he had a habit of forgetting things very quickly. He sometimes suspected that once something entered that drawer it never came out again. But at least Constantinescu was a man who actually did care about the plight of the city’s street kids – even if his motivation was to try and bed the women who looked after them.

  And hey, better safe in that drawer than lying, screwed up, amid those other balls of paper littering the floor in front of his desk.

  In seventeen years of battling the authorities in this country, Ian Tilling had learned to be grateful for small mercies.

  69

  Mal Beckett never found it easy talking to his ex-wife, and sitting opposite her now, in the quiet café on Church Road, despite the new shared bond of their daughter’s plight, he felt as awkward as ever.

  The problem went back to the early days of their separation, when he had left her for his then mistress – and now wife – Jane. Out of guilt, and concerned for her mental stability, he had made a point of seeing Lynn every few months for lunch. And she would always begin with the same question, Are you happy?

  It left him in a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t situation. If he told her that yes, he was happy, he sensed that would make her even more miserable. So during those first meetings he would reply that no, he was not happy. Whereupon Lynn would immediately relay this to her friends. With Brighton being both a big city and a tiny village at the same time, word would rapidly get back to Jane tha
t he was not happy being with her.

  So he had learned to parry the question by replying with a very neutral, I’m OK. But now, as he spooned the creamy froth from his cappuccino into his mouth and stared across the plastic table, he realized they had both outgrown this game. He felt genuinely sorry for Lynn, still being alone, and was shocked by how much weight she had lost since they had last seen each other, a couple of months ago.

  Lynn never found it easy seeing Mal either. Looking across at him, dressed in a faded blue sweatshirt, with a chunky anorak slung over his seat back, she saw he was ageing well; if anything, he was getting even better-looking, more rugged and manly with every passing year. If he asked her to come back to him, she would have done so in a blink. That was not going to happen, but God, how she needed him!

  ‘Thanks for making the time, Mal,’ she said.

  He glanced at his watch. ‘Of course. I need to be away at one sharp to catch the afternoon tide.’

  She smiled wistfully, and without any malice said, ‘Gosh, how many times did I hear you say that over the years. Off to catch the tide.’

  Their eyes met, in a moment of genuine tenderness between them.

  ‘Maybe I should have that on my gravestone,’ he said.

  ‘Wouldn’t that be a bit difficult? I thought you were going to be buried at sea?’

  He laughed. ‘Yeah, that was . . .’

  Then he suddenly halted in mid-sentence. She would not be impressed to know that Jane had talked him out of that. Lynn had tried to do the same herself, unsuccessfully, for all the years of their married life.

  It was quiet in the café. Just past midday, the lunchtime rush had not yet started. They waited for a moment as the waitress brought them over their food, a doorstep of a hot corned beef sandwich for Mal and a small tuna salad for Lynn.

  ‘Two hundred and fifty-two thousand pounds?’ he said.

  Lynn nodded.

  ‘You know we pulled up a dead body – caught in the drag head – the one that is in all the papers right now?’

  ‘I read about it,’ she said. ‘That must have been a shock for you.’