by Peter James
*
The rear door of the taxi opened and the woman alighted, her chic dark glasses shielding her eyes from the wintry glare. She paid the driver, giving him a small tip, and, towing her wheeled overnight bag, headed off into the departures hall of the domed terminal building.
An attractive woman in her late-thirties, she was dressed smartly and warmly in a long camel-hair coat over suede boots, a cashmere shawl and leather gloves. After years of dyeing her hair brown and keeping it cropped short, she had recently let it lighten of its own accord, and it was almost back to her natural, fair, not-quite-blonde colour. She had read in a magazine that when a woman is seeking a new man, she will often change her hair. Well, that was right in her case.
She went across to the Lufthansa section and joined the queue for the Economy check-in desks for Miami, a city she had last visited fifteen years ago, in a former life.
The woman behind the counter went through the routine questions with her. Had she packed her own bags? Had her bags been out of her sight? Then she handed her back her passport, her ticket and her frequent-flier card.
‘Ich wünsche Ihnen ein guten Flug, Frau Lohmann.’
‘Danke.’
She spoke perfect German now. That had taken a while, because, as everyone had correctly told her, it was a difficult language to learn. Towing her bag, she followed the signs to the gate, knowing from all her many experiences at this airport that it was a long journey.
Riding up the moving staircase, her phone rang. She pulled it out of her handbag and brought it to her ear.
‘Ja, hallo?’
The voice at the other end was crackly and indistinct. It was her colleague, Hans-Jürgen Waldinger, calling her from his Mini Cooper on a bad line. She could barely hear him. Stepping off the top of the escalator, pulling her bag over the lip and raising her voice, she said again, ‘Hallo?’
Then the line went dead. She walked along a short distance, following the signs for the Departure Gate in zone G, heading towards the first section of the moving walkway that could take her to the hall. Then her phone rang again. She answered.
Hans-Jürgen, barely audible for the crackling, said, ‘Sandy? Sandy?’
‘Ja, Hans!’ she said, and stepped on to the walkway.
*
Eight hundred yards away, at the arrivals section of zone G, Roy Grace, clutching his thick briefcase, and approaching from the opposite direction, stepped on to the parallel carriageway of the same moving walkway.
84
To Glenn’s relief the sea was calm, or at least about as calm as the English Channel was ever going to get. Even so, the powerboat was still pitching and rolling quite enough in the gentle swell. But so far he felt fine. The breakfast of two boiled eggs and dry toast that Bella had recommended was still safely inside his digestive system rather than becoming part of the boat’s colour scheme, and he hadn’t yet experienced any attack of the roundabouts that had done for him on his last voyage.
It was a cold but glorious day, with a steely-blue sky and bottle-green sea. A gull circled low overhead, on the scrounge and out of luck. Glenn breathed in the rich smells of salt and varnish, and the occasional waft of exhaust fumes, and watched a jellyfish the size of a tractor tyre drift past, deciding he was very happy not to be one of the team going into the water, despite all their protective clothing. He had never experienced any desire to jump out of an aeroplane, or to explore the bottom of the ocean. He’d figured out, a long time ago, that he was definitely a terra-firma kind of a guy.
The tiny red smudge in the distance grew closer as they powered steadily further out to sea, at a diagonal angle to Brighton’s long seafront, on the exact course he and Ray Packham had charted. As they approached closer still, the smudge sharpened into focus and he saw it was in fact a triangle of bobbing pink marker buoys, which the Specialist Search Unit team had placed there yesterday evening.
At the helm, PC Steve Hargrave – Gonzo – throttled back, and their speed dropped from eighteen knots to less than five. Glenn gripped the handrail in front of him, as the sudden loss of motion pushed him forwards. This boat, a thirty-five-foot Sunseeker, was a much more upmarket vessel than the Scoob-Eee. It had been chartered in a hurry from a local nightclub owner and was a proper gin palace, with leather chairs and padding all around, teak decking, an enclosed bridge and a luxurious saloon down below, not that any of those on board were using it other than as a storeroom for some of their kit.
Arf, in the SSU team uniform of black baseball cap, with the word police across the front, red windcheater, black trousers and black rubber boots, removed the microphone of the ship-to-shore radio from its cradle and spoke into it.
‘Hotel Uniform Oscar Oscar. This is Suspol Suspol on board MV Our Current Sea, calling Solent Coastguard.’
He heard a crackled response. ‘Solent Coastguard. Solent Coastguard. Channel sixty-seven. Over.’
‘This is Suspol,’ Arf repeated. ‘We have ten souls on board. Our position is thirteen nautical miles south-east of Shoreham Harbour.’ He gave the coordinates then announced, ‘We are over our dive area and about to commence.’
Again the crackly voice. ‘How many divers with you, Suspol, and how many in the water?’
‘Nine divers on board. Two going in.’
Gonzo pushed the twin throttle levers into neutral. Tania, standing beside him, made some adjustments on the controls to the right of the Humminbird scanner screen.
Glenn looked at the display on the left of the screen: 98ft. 09.52am. 3.2mph.
‘If you watch now, Glenn, we should just be coming over,’ Tania said, pointing at what looked like a straight, black tarmac road, divided by a white line, running vertically down the centre of the screen. On either side of it was a bluish tinted moonscape.
‘There!’ she called out excitedly.
In the left-hand lane of the black section he saw clearly a boat-shaped shadow, even darker, about half an inch long.
‘You think that’s her? The Scoob-Eee?’ he asked.
‘There’s one way to find out,’ Arf said. ‘Coming in with us?’
A flaccid, murky-looking object drifted past. Glenn wasn’t immediately sure if it was another jellyfish or a plastic bag.
‘Nah, think I’d better stay on deck and keep a lookout for pirates. But thanks all the same.’
Arf pointed at the sea. ‘If you change your mind, there’s plenty of room down there.’
85
‘Someone told me your father used to play tennis for Sussex, E-J,’ Guy Batchelor said. ‘I’m a bit of a player myself – well – used to be – but not that kind of standard. What’s his name?’
‘Nigel. He played for the under-sixteens – but he hasn’t played seriously for years. He could probably drink for Sussex now. Or, more likely, talk for Sussex.’ She grinned.
‘Gift of the gab?’
‘You could say.’
They were heading west, away from the village of Storrington, with the softly undulating South Downs to their left. She peered at the map on her knees.
‘Should be the next right.’
They turned into a narrow country lane, barely wider than the car and bounded by tall hedgerows. After a quarter of a mile, Emma-Jane directed him to turn left, into an even narrower lane. Police cars, Batchelor thought, were going to be the last vehicles on the planet without SatNav – and the ones that needed it the most. He was about to comment on that to E-J when he heard a muffled call-sign on his radio. Although he was driving, he lifted it to his ear, but it was a request for assistance in a different part of the county, not remotely near them.
‘Should be coming up on the left,’ Emma-Jane said.
He slowed the blue unmarked Mondeo down. Moments later they saw a pair of imposing wrought-iron gates between two pillars topped with stone balls. Written in gold letters on a black plate was the name, THAKEHAM PARK.
They pulled up in front of the gates, under the cyclops gaze of a security camera mounted high up. On th
e opposite pillar was a yellow sign, with a grinning face, beneath which was written the legend SMILE, YOU ARE ON CCTV.
The young DC climbed out and pressed the button on the speakerphone panel beneath. Moments later, she heard a crackly, broken-English, female voice.
‘Hello?’
‘Detective Sergeant Batchelor and Detective Constable Bout-wood,’ she announced. ‘We have an appointment with Sir Roger Sirius.’
There was a sharp crackle from the speakerphone, then the gates began to open. She climbed back into the car and they drove through, along a tarmac drive, lined by mature trees on either side, which wound steadily for about half a mile up an incline. Then a huge Jacobean mansion came into view, with a circular driveway in front, in the grassed-in centre of which was a lily pond.
Several cars were parked in front of the house including, Guy recognized, a black Aston Martin Vanquish. To their right, on a large concrete circle in the middle of a manicured lawn, sat a dark blue helicopter.
‘Seems like there’s money in medicine!’ he commented.
‘If you are in the right area of it,’ she retorted.
‘Or maybe the wrong area,’ he corrected her.
Emma-Jane did not even bother trying to count the number of windows. This place must have twenty or thirty bedrooms – maybe more. It was on the scale of a stately home.
‘I think we chose the wrong career,’ she said.
He drove slowly around the pond and pulled up almost directly in front of the grand front door. ‘Depends what you want out of life, doesn’t it? And the moral code by which you choose to live.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Have you ever met Jack Skerritt?’
‘A few times,’ she said. ‘But only briefly.’
Jack Skerritt was the Chief Superintendent of HQ CID – the most senior detective in Sussex. And the most respected.
‘I had a drink with him a couple of years ago,’ Batchelor said. ‘In the bar at Brighton nick, when he was Commander of Brighton and Hove. We were talking about what coppers earned. He told me he was on seventy-three thousand pounds a year, plus a couple of grand more in allowances. That might sound a lot, he said, but it is less than a school headmaster earns – and I’m in charge of the entire city of Brighton and Hove. He then said something I’ll never forget.’
She looked at him inquisitively.
‘He said, In this job, the riches come from within.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘And true. Being a copper, doing this job, makes me feel like a millionaire, every day of my life. I never wanted to be anything else.’
They climbed out of the car and rang the doorbell.
Moments later the huge oak front door was opened by a slight, unassuming-looking man of about seventy. He had a trim figure, a kindly, bird-like face, with a small, crooked nose and alert, wide blue eyes filled with curiosity. His thinning head of hair was grey, going on white, and tidy, and he was dressed in a beige cardigan over a gingham shirt, with a paisley cravat around his neck, rust-coloured corduroy trousers, which looked like they were used for gardening, and black leather slippers. The only hint from his appearance that he was a rich man was the faint, but distinct, glow of a tan.
‘Hello,’ he said in a cheery, cut-glass voice that belonged in a 1950s film.
‘Sir Roger Sirius?’ Batchelor asked.
‘That’s me.’ He held out a slender, hairy hand, with long, immaculately manicured fingers.
The detectives shook hands with him, then Batchelor pulled out his warrant card and held it up. Sirius gave it only the most cursory of glances and stepped aside with a theatrical wave of his hand.
‘So, do come in. I’m intrigued to know how I can be of help. Always fascinated by you chaps. Read a lot of crime novels. I quite like The Bill. Ever watch it?’
Both officers shook their heads.
‘Morse. Used to like him. Didn’t care too much for that John Hannah in Rebus, but thought Stott was a lot better. D’you watch them?’
‘Don’t get a lot of time, sir,’ Batchelor said.
They followed the distinguished transplant surgeon across a grand oak-panelled hall. It was filled with antique furniture, as well as several gleaming suits of armour. On the walls was a mix of antique swords, firearms and oil paintings, some of which were portraits, some landscapes.
Then they entered a magnificent study. The walls in here were panelled in oak, too, and hung with certificates evidencing the surgeon’s qualifications. All around were framed photographs of him with numerous famous faces. One was Sirius with the Queen. In another, at a black-tie function, he was with Princess Diana. Others showed him with Sir Richard Branson, Bill Clinton, François Mitterrand and the footballer George Best. Batchelor peered at that photograph with particular interest – Best, famously, had had a private liver transplant.
The two police detectives sat on a studded red leather sofa, while a raven-haired beauty, whom Sirius introduced as his wife, brought them coffee. Sirius was briefly distracted by his BlackBerry buzzing, and Batchelor and E-J used the opportunity to exchange a brief glance. The surgeon was clearly a complex character. Modest in appearance and manner, but not in ego – nor in his taste in women.
‘So, how can I help you?’ Sirius asked, after his wife had left the room, settling down into an armchair opposite them, across the oak chest that served as a coffee table.
Guy had already rehearsed this with E-J on the way over. Suddenly he was feeling badly in need of a cigarette but knew, from the fresh smell of the room and the total absence of ashtrays, that he had no chance. He would have to sneak one later, something he had become used to these days.
Watching the surgeon’s eyes carefully, he said, ‘This is a very beautiful house, Sir Roger. How long have you lived here?’
The surgeon reflected for a moment. ‘Twenty-seven years. It was a wreck when I bought it. My first wife never liked it. My daughter loved it here.’ His eyes went misty, suddenly. ‘It’s just a shame that Katie was never able to see it finished.’
‘I’m sorry,’ E-J said.
The surgeon shrugged. ‘A long time ago, now.’
‘You’ve been quoted many times in the press over your views on the UK organ donor system,’ Guy Batchelor went on, still watching his face intently.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, nodding vigorously, instantly animated by the subject. ‘Absolutely!’
‘We thought that you might be able to help us.’
‘I’ll do my best.’ He leaned towards them and, looking even more bird-like, smiled eagerly.
‘Well,’ Emma-Jane cut in almost on cue, ‘it’s true, isn’t it, that around 30 per cent of patients in the UK who are waiting for a liver transplant will die before they get one?’
‘Where did you get that figure from?’ he asked with a frown.
‘I’m quoting you, Sir Roger. That was what you wrote in an article in the Lancet in 1998.’
Frowning again, he said defensively, ‘I write a lot of stuff. Can’t remember it all. Particularly not at my age! Last I heard, the official figure is 19 per cent – but, as with everything, that depends on your criteria.’ He leaned forward and picked up a silver milk jug. ‘Either of you take milk?’
‘Can’t remember it all. Particularly not at my age.’ But you still hold a private helicopter licence, so your memory can’t be that crap, Guy Batchelor thought to himself.
When he had sorted their coffees out, the DC asked, ‘Do you remember the article you wrote for Nature, criticizing the UK organ donor system, Sir Roger?’
He shrugged. ‘As I said, I’ve written a lot of articles.’
‘You’ve also worked in a lot of places, haven’t you, Sir Roger?’ she pressed. ‘Including Colombia and Romania.’
‘Gosh!’ he said, with what looked like genuine excitement. ‘You chaps have certainly boned up on me!’
Batchelor handed the three e-fit photographs of the dead teenagers across to the surgeon.
�
�Could you tell us if you’ve ever seen any of these three people, sir?’
Sirius studied each of them for some moments, while Batchelor watched him, intently. He shook his head and handed them back.
‘No, never,’ he said.
Batchelor replaced them in the envelope.
‘Is it just coincidence that you chose those two countries to work in? The fact is that they are high on the list of known countries involved in human trafficking for organ transplantation.’
Sirius appeared to think carefully before answering. ‘You’ve both clearly done your homework on me, but I wonder – tell me something. Did your research show up that my darling daughter, Katie, died just over ten years ago, at the age of twenty-three, from liver failure?’
Shocked by this revelation, Batchelor turned to E-J. She looked equally taken by surprise.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry – sorry to hear that. No, we didn’t know that.’
Sirius nodded, looking sad and bleak suddenly.
‘No reason why you should. She was one of those 30 per cent, I’m afraid. You see, even I couldn’t get around the donor system we have here in this country. Our laws are extremely rigid.’
‘We are here, Sir Roger,’ Emma-Jane said, ‘because we have reason to believe some members of the medical profession are flouting those laws in order to provide organs for people in need.’
‘And you think I may be able to help you to name them?’
‘That’s what we are hoping,’ she said.
He gave a wan smile. ‘Every few months you read on the Internet about some chap or other who gets drunk in a bar in Moscow and wakes up minus a kidney. These are all urban myths. Every organ supplied for donor surgery in the UK is governed by UK Transplant. No hospital in the UK could obtain an organ and transplant it outside this system. It’s a complete impossibility.’
‘But not in Romania or Colombia?’ Batchelor asked.
‘Indeed. Or China, Taiwan or India. There are plenty of places you can go to get a transplant if you have the cash and are willing to take a risk.’