Dead Tomorrow

by Peter James

  They pulled to a halt beside an unpretentious back entrance. Before Lynn had climbed out of the Mercedes, a massive beefcake of a woman emerged from the door, wearing a white nurse’s tunic and gym shoes.

  Grigore sprang around to open Caitlin’s door, but, with considerable effort, she slid over to her mother’s side, following her out unaided.

  ‘Mrs Lynn Beckett, Miss Caitlin Beckett?’ The woman’s formal voice and broken English accent made it sound like an interrogation.

  Lynn nodded meekly, holding an arm around her daughter, and read the woman’s name tag: Draguta.

  She looked like a dragon, she thought.

  ‘You will follow me, please.’

  ‘I bring your bags,’ Grigore said.

  Lynn gripped Caitlin’s hand as they followed the woman along a wide corridor with white tiled walls which smelled strongly of disinfectant, passing several closed doors. Then the woman stopped at a locked door at the end and punched in a security code.

  They walked through into a carpeted area, with pale grey painted walls, which had the feel of an office suite, then the woman stopped at a door and knocked.

  A female voice from the other side called out, ‘Reinkommen!’

  Lynn and Caitlin were ushered into a large, plush office, and the nurse closed the door behind them. Marlene Hartmann rose up from behind a bare desk to greet them. Behind her was a window giving a panoramic view across towards the Downs.

  ‘Gut! You are here! I hope you had a pleasant journey – please sit down.’ She pointed to the two armchairs in front of the desk.

  ‘We had an interesting journey,’ Lynn said, a hard knot in her stomach and her throat feeling so tight she could barely get the words out. Her legs were shaking.

  ‘Ja. We have problems.’ Marlene Hartmann nodded seriously. ‘But I have never let a customer down.’ She smiled at Caitlin. ‘All is good, mein Liebling?’

  ‘I’d quite like the surgeon to have Feist playing during the operation. Do you think he’d sort of like do that?’ Caitlin asked quietly.

  She sat, scratching her left ankle, hunched up on the chair.

  ‘Feist?’ The woman frowned. ‘What is Feist?’

  ‘She’s cool. A singer.’

  Now she started scratching her distended stomach.

  The German woman shrugged. ‘OK, sure, we can ask. I don’t know.’

  ‘There’s kind of like one other thing I want to know,’ Caitlin said.

  Lynn stared at her in alarm. She seemed to be having breathing difficulties when she spoke.

  ‘Tell me?’

  ‘This liver I’m getting – who is it coming from?’

  Without any flicker of hesitation, the woman responded, ‘From a poor little girl about your age who was killed in car accident yesterday.’

  Lynn glanced anxiously at her daughter, signalling with her eyes not to probe further.

  ‘Where was she killed?’ Caitlin asked, ignoring her mother. Her voice suddenly sounded stronger.

  ‘In Romania – outside a town called Brasov.’

  ‘Tell me more about her, please,’ Caitlin said.

  This time, Marlene Hartmann shrugged defensively. ‘I’m afraid I have to protect donor confidentiality. I cannot give you any more information. Afterwards, you may write, through me, to thank her family, if you wish. I would encourage this.’

  ‘So it’s not true what the police—’

  ‘Darling!’ Lynn interrupted hastily, sensing what was coming. ‘Frau Hartmann is right.’

  Caitlin was silent for some moments, looking around, her eyes searching as if they were having difficulty focusing. Then, speaking weakly, she said, ‘If – if I’m going to agree to have this liver, I need to know the truth.’

  Lynn looked at her, bewildered.

  Suddenly, the door opened and the nurse called Draguta came back in.

  ‘We are ready.’

  ‘Please, Caitlin, you go now,’ the broker said. ‘Your mother and I have business to conclude. She will be with you in a few minutes.’

  ‘So the photograph the police brought round – that’s not true?’ Caitlin persisted.

  ‘Darling! Angel!’ Lynn implored.

  Marlene Hartmann looked at them both stonily. ‘Photograph?’

  ‘It was a lie!’ Lynn blurted, close to tears. ‘It was a lie!’

  ‘What photograph is this, Caitlin?’ the broker asked.

  ‘They said she was not dead. That she was going to be killed for me.’

  Marlene Hartmann shook her head. Her lips formed into a rigid, humourless line and there was astonishment in her eyes.

  Very gently, she said, ‘Caitlin, this is not how I do business. Please believe me.’ She smiled warmly. ‘I don’t think your English police are happy with anyone doing something to – how do you say it? – buck their system. They would rather people died than obtain an organ by paying for it. You have to trust me on this.’

  Behind them, the nurse said, ‘Now you come, please.’

  Lynn kissed her daughter. ‘Go with her, darling. I’ll follow you in a few minutes. I just have to make the final payment. I’ll fax the bank while you’re getting ready.’

  She helped Caitlin to her feet.

  Swaying unsteadily, her eyes looking very unfocused, Caitlin turned to Marlene Hartmann.

  ‘Feist,’ she said. ‘You’ll ask the surgeon?’

  ‘Feist,’ the German woman said, with a broad smile.

  Then she took a step towards her mother, looking scared. ‘You won’t be long, Mum, will you?’

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can, darling.’

  ‘I’m frightened,’ she whispered.

  ‘In a few days’ time you will not know yourself!’ the broker replied.

  The nurse escorted Caitlin from the room, closing the door behind them. Instantly, Marlene Hartmann’s eyes narrowed into a glare of suspicion.

  ‘What is this photograph that your daughter is talking about?’

  Before Lynn could answer, the German woman’s attention was diverted by the sudden clatter of a helicopter, low overhead. She leapt up from her chair, ran across to the window and looked out.

  ‘Scheisse!’ she said.

  115

  Back in the tiled corridor, the nurse ushered Caitlin into a tiny changing room with a row of metal lockers and a solitary hospital gown hanging on a peg.

  ‘You change,’ she said. ‘You put clothes in locker 14. I wait.’

  She closed the door.

  Caitlin stared at the lockers and swallowed, shaking. Number 14 had a key with a rubber wrist-band sticking out of the lock. It reminded her of public swimming baths.

  Swimming scared her. She did not like being out of her depth. She was out of her depth now.

  Feeling giddy, she sat down, harder than she had intended, on a wooden bench and scratched her stomach. She was feeling tired and lost and sick. She just wanted to stop feeling sick. To stop itching. To stop feeling scared.

  She had never felt so scared in her life.

  The room seemed to be pressing in on her. Squeezing her. Crushing her. Spinning her around with it. Thoughts came into her head, then went. She had to be quick, to try to grab them before they faded.

  Things were being hidden from her. By everyone. Even by her mother. What things? Why? What did everybody know that she did not know? What right did anyone have to keep secrets from her?

  She stood up and tugged off her duffel coat, then sat back down, hard, the room spinning even faster. Her stomach was hurting again. She felt as if a thousand mosquitoes were biting her all at once.

  ‘Fuck off!’ she gasped suddenly, out loud. ‘Just fuck off, pain.’

  Fighting the giddiness, she stood up again, then opened the locker and was about to put her coat in, when she hesitated. Instead, she laid it down on the bench seat and opened the door.

  The corridor was deserted.

  She stepped out unsteadily, closing the door behind her, checked both directions warily, her visi
on a little blurry, and walked a short distance to her right. On her left she saw a door. A sign on the outside read STRICTLY NO ADMISSION WITHOUT STERILE CLOTHING. She squinted at it until she could read it clearly.

  Then she opened it and stumbled through into a narrow, windowless room that looked like it was a store for medical supplies. There was a steel gurney on wheels, which she bumped into, banging her thigh, a floor-to-ceiling cupboard with glass doors, the shelves stacked with surgical equipment, a row of oxygen cylinders on the floor, one of which she knocked over, cursing, and several pieces of electrical monitoring equipment. At the far end was a door with a circle of glass in it, like a porthole. Caitlin made her way across to it.

  And froze.

  Through it, she could see into a very high-tech-looking operating theatre. It was crowded with people attired in green surgical scrubs, elasticized hats, white masks and flesh-coloured gloves. Most of them were standing around a brightly illuminated steel table, on which lay a naked girl, who looked prepped for surgery. From all the time she had spent in hospital herself, and hours of watching her favourite medical dramas, House and Grey’s Anatomy, she knew what quite a lot of the apparatus connected to the girl was. The endotracheal breathing tube. The nasogastric tube, the central lines cannulated into her neck, the cardiac monitor pads on her chest, the cannulated arterial and peripheral lines, the PiCCO monitor, the pulse oximeter, the urinary catheter.

  An elderly-looking man was holding a scalpel, talking to a younger man, tracing lines on the body with a gloved finger, where he was clearly about to make incisions.

  Even though the girl’s face was distorted and inert, Caitlin recognized her instantly.

  It was the Romanian girl in the photograph the two detectives had brought to the house this morning.

  The girl that the German woman said had been killed in a car crash in Romania yesterday. Surely, Caitlin thought, her view of the girl improving as someone moved aside, if you were in a car accident bad enough to kill you, there would be marks on your body, wouldn’t there? Cuts, bruises, abrasions, at the very least.

  This girl just looked as if she was asleep.

  Caitlin squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again, trying to focus more sharply. She could not detect a mark on her body.

  The words of the Detective Superintendent replayed in her head.

  Her name is Simona Irimia. So far as we know she is still alive and healthy. She has been trafficked to England and will be killed so that your daughter can have her liver.

  And now she realized he had been telling the truth.

  The German woman was lying.

  Her mother was lying.

  They were going to kill this girl. Maybe she was already dead.

  Suddenly, behind her, she heard a furious voice, shouting in broken English, ‘What do you think you are doing?’

  She turned and saw Draguta lumbering towards her.

  Frantically, Caitlin pushed the door, but it would not budge. Then she saw the handle, yanked it open and stumbled in. Anger surged inside her. Anger, and hatred at all these people. At their masked faces.

  ‘Stop!’ Caitlin croaked, crashing through the two gowned figures immediately in front of her. She lunged at the surgeon and grabbed the scalpel from the startled man’s hand, feeling it cutting into her fingers as she did so. ‘Stop right now! You’re evil!’

  Then, standing between him and the younger man, she stared down hard, scrutinizing, in a few split seconds, every visible inch of the girl’s body. There was no sign of any trauma injury at all.

  ‘Young woman, please leave immediately,’ the older man said, in a very posh voice muffled by his mask. ‘You are contaminating the theatre. Give me that back at once!’

  ‘Is she still alive?’ Caitlin screamed at him, using every remaining ounce of her strength to power her voice.

  Rows of meaningless waveforms travelled across the flat, wall-mounted screen just beyond the table. More symbols and numbers flickered on smaller screens on free-standing monitoring equipment behind the young girl’s head.

  ‘What the hell does this have to do with you?’ he exploded, the visible parts of his face turning puce.

  ‘Quite a lot, actually,’ Caitlin said, breathing heavily. She jabbed her chest with her free hand. ‘I’m meant to be getting her liver.’

  There was a moment of stunned silence.

  Draguta shouted a command for her to come out, as if she were shouting at a dog.

  ‘She’s alive, at this moment, yes,’ the younger man said enthusiastically, as if this was something Caitlin wanted to hear.

  She lunged forward, grabbed at the drip lines that were in Simona’s arm with her left hand and jerked them free, then grabbed the ones out of the neck and tore at the cardiac monitor pads.

  The surgeon seized Caitlin by her shoulders. ‘Are you crazy, little girl?’

  Caitlin responded by biting his hand, hard. The surgeon cried out in pain and she wriggled free, twisting, staring at pairs of eyes behind masks, all of them in shock, uncertain what to do. Then she saw the nurse marching towards her.

  She raised the scalpel, holding it by the handle like a dagger, brandishing it at everyone, beyond caring.

  ‘Get her off that table!’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘Get her off that table now!’

  The entire theatre team stood motionless, staring at her in shock.

  Except the big nurse, who pushed through, grabbed Caitlin’s free arm and yanked her so hard she almost fell over. Then she jerked her back across the room to the door, Caitlin’s trainers sliding on the tiled floor as she tried, with her failing strength, to resist.

  ‘Let me go, you ugly fucking cow!’ she hissed.

  The nurse stopped to push open the door, then jerked Caitlin hard again. She stumbled forward, falling, and as she shot out her arm to cushion herself, the blade of the scalpel, still gripped tightly in her hand, sliced through the top of the woman’s cheekbone, cleanly through her right eye and the bridge of her nose.

  The woman let out a terrible howl, her hands shooting to her face, blood jetting in every direction. She staggered against someone, wailing like a banshee, and several of the team rushed over to help and to stop her falling.

  In the commotion, no one noticed Caitlin stumbling out.

  116

  Marlene Hartmann was striding anxiously down the tiled corridor, her normal steely composure already shot to pieces, when she heard the screams. She broke into a run, then saw what looked like utter mayhem spilling out of the operating theatre.

  She stormed through the supplies room and saw her theatre team frantically trying to restrain the massive nurse, who had blood gouting from her face and spurting all over her white tunic. She was lashing out with all her considerable strength and screaming hysterically as, blood-spattered, Sir Roger Sirius and two junior surgeons, the anaesthetists and the scrub nurses all wrestled with her. Simona lay on the operating table, wires and lines all around her, oblivious to everything.

  ‘Gottverdammt, what is happening?’

  ‘The girl went crazy,’ Sirius said, panting.

  Then, before he could say anything further, Draguta’s meaty fist smashed into his cheek, sending him reeling backwards and crashing on to the hard floor.

  Marlene ran over to him, knelt and helped him to his feet. He looked dazed.

  ‘There’s a police helicopter here!’ Marlene yelled at him. ‘We need to do a lock-down! Pull yourselves together! Do you understand?’

  Draguta fell, with several green-gowned members of the team crashing down on top of her.

  ‘I’m blind!’ she screamed in Romanian. ‘God help me, I’m blind!’

  ‘Get her sedated!’ commanded Marlene. ‘Shut her up! Quickly!’

  A junior anaesthetist grabbed a syringe, then scrabbled around on the trolley and picked up a vial.

  One of the nurses said, ‘We need to get Draguta to an eye hospital.’

  ‘Where’s the English girl? Caitlin? Where is
she?’

  Blank, dazed eyes stared at her.

  ‘WHERE IS THE ENGLISH GIRL?’ Marlene Hartmann shouted.

  117

  The roundabouts were getting worse. Caitlin, freezing cold, sleet tickling her face every few seconds, bumped against the wall, pushed herself away and almost fell over. It was an effort to move her feet. She dragged one, then the other. She was almost at the front of the building now. She could see a car park. Rows and rows of vehicles.

  They came in and out of focus.

  She stumbled through a flowerbed and nearly fell. Her iPod, dangling from a wire, tapped against her knee. She itched terribly.

  They’re going to be angry with me. Mum. Luke. Dad. Gran. Shit, they’re going to be angry with me. Shit. Angry. Shit. Angry.

  Above her was a terrible, loud, clattering roar.

  She looked up, furiously scratching her chest. A few hundred feet above her head she saw a dark blue and yellow helicopter, like a huge mutant insect. And she saw the word police along its side.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. They were coming to arrest her for stabbing the nurse.

  She pressed against the wall, gulping air, fighting for every breath. The wall was moving, swaying. She inched forward. Saw the circular driveway. The helicopter swept away, making a wide arc. Then she saw a taxi, the same turquoise and white colours as the one that had brought them here.

  A woman in a fur coat and silk headsquare was standing by the driver’s door, paying the driver. Then she turned and walked towards the front door, towing her bag behind her. The driver was getting back into his cab.

  Caitlin ran, stumbling, towards him, waving her arms.

  ‘Hello!’ she called. ‘Hello!’