Death Watch

by Unknown

  ‘Wait,’ said Valentine, pushing forward through some thorns, out of sight.

  Shaw watched Venus creeping across a steel-framed square of evening sky, on the coat-tails of the moon. For him, in contrast to his DS, it had not been a productive afternoon. He’d met Dr Gavin Peploe in Theatre Seven – half-lit, mothballed for the afternoon. An oddly threatening room, full of the dull glints of surgical trays, unlit lights, and the dead eyes of electronic monitors.

  Peploe had repented of his earlier fit of bad temper. Charm itself, he showed Shaw the pre-op facilities, the scrub room, the electronic screen which rolled back to create a double op theatre. Shaw had news too – the HTA audit team had completed the examination of the first three organ banks: the NHS facility. No signs of any illegal activity. That left Theatre Seven’s bank D.

  ‘But it is inconceivable,’ said Peploe, both hands laid flat and down on the operating table itself. He was smart enough to avoid patronizing the DI. So he tried to explain just how inconceivable it was that a black-market organ transplant had been performed here, at the heart of an NHS hospital.

  ‘It’s the scale of the necessary conspiracy which makes it unthinkable,’ he said. ‘For an operation – all right, maybe a surgeon, anaesthetist, a nurse. Three people. But that’s not the point; you need the recipient. They could walk in, but they aren’t going to walk out. Where are they cared for? If it’s an op with the donor present they need to be prepared – and then they need to recover. So, they go back to a ward. Which ward? Where’s their records? The GP referrals? And don’t forget, the key piece of evidence here is the human kidney found on the incinerator belt. It was placed in a waste bag from the children’s ward. That means – that demands – that everything else is clandestine too, without records or documentation. Believe me, Shaw, this is a backstreet black-market operation. It didn’t happen here.’

  Venus slipped behind a girder. So Shaw was left with a question: if not in Theatre Seven – or any of the NHS theatres – where? His mobile vibrated on silent mode. He looked at the number: Lena, ringing from the cottage. He was going to take the call but something made him stop – she’d want to know where he was because he’d forgotten to send her a text at five – a daily ritual. But he’d planned to go back to St James’s before going home, for one last run-through of the CCTV of the Castle Rising crash. He was still tussling with the decision whether to take the call when Valentine came back, summoning him with a cursory beckoning movement of a hand, pale now in the gathering dusk. Shaw pocketed the phone, promising himself he’d ring when they were done.

  ‘Why’s this character called Pie?’ asked Shaw, picking his way over a decade’s worth of fly-tipping – a fridge, a pram, the innards of a mattress. It was all Shaw knew about Valentine’s informant, that and the fact he’d been channelling information to St James’s for the best part of fifteen years.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Valentine.

  Shaw didn’t like the idea that Valentine was in control, and wondered if that was what was strangely unsettling about this sudden twist in the inquiry. He thought about demanding an answer, then let the moment pass.

  ‘Did Dad know this guy?’ asked Shaw instead, wishing instantly he’d kept the question to himself. And he should have used his name and rank. ‘Dad’ was too personal, an invitation to be intimate.

  ‘Sure. We ran him together.’ Valentine stopped, breathing heavily. ‘But the deal tonight is as always – we’ve never met – OK? He’s a stranger. Last thing he wants is us reminiscing about his days as a copper’s nark.’

  Shaw thought just how impossible it would be to take orders from George Valentine on a daily basis. And, for the first time, he wondered if Valentine felt the same way about him, and that if he did, then what a nightmare his life must be from the inside.

  Soon a path appeared in the rubbish, trodden through the weeds and teasel heads, crushed glass catching the moonlight. It led to a break in the steel retaining wall at the foot of the old gas holder. They climbed through to find themselves looking down twenty feet into the circular base. A perfect O, eighty yards across, a rubble floor dotted with fires. Shaw thought of a Bronze Age encampment, the flames the only human light within a thousand miles. There was something about the homeless that always made him feel like the ultimate outsider. It wasn’t just a world he couldn’t enter, it was a world that frightened him, because it was the antithesis of home.

  Cardboard-box sleeping shacks dotted the perimeter. There was a smell on the air: cider and warm dog. The nearest group – four tramps sitting on beer crates – stood, and one whistled a single, vibrating note. A terrier barked wildly until one of the men cuffed it with a rope. They listened while Valentine explained that they’d had a message from someone called Pie saying that they should come tonight, when the sun was down. They were alone. Valentine lifted his arms out, his raincoat over one.

  ‘I don’t know which one he is,’ Valentine lied, looking round.

  They were ushered on, across the circle, to the ruins of a single-storey brick building. The roof and one wall had gone, but within the sheltered room which remained a large fire had burnt down to glowing embers. Shaw tried not to peer at the faces, a chiaroscuro world of watching eyes. And like the Mona Lisa’s, all of them following him.

  The man Shaw took for Pie sat in what looked like the front seat cut out of a wrecked car, his legs out straight. His name was in his face. Black skin, Afro-Caribbean features, but marred by splodges of white, mottled flesh. One of the pale patches extended into his hairline, and there the black hair was streaked white too. The piebald man. A human magpie.

  Shaw shook his hand, aware of the odd symmetry of their asymmetrical faces. His with one blue eye, one moon-blind; Pie’s with one eye surrounded by black skin, the other by white.

  Valentine pulled up a crate and Shaw sensed that the exaggerated sense of ease was only partly manufactured – the DS was genuinely at home here, amongst the rootless. From his raincoat pocket he pulled out a full bottle of Johnnie Walker, twisted off the top, and put it on the warm ground by the fire.

  Five tin mugs were filled – one each, and another for a man who sat back on the edge of the shadows, long hair covering his face. Only his legs were in the light, in pinstripe trousers, frayed, and stained.

  Pie hadn’t said a word. He held a hand up against the light still lingering in the sky, and Shaw saw his fingers were cluttered with rings. ‘The finger gone here,’ he said, pointing at the index on the right, just below the knuckle. His voice was subterranean, a rumble like a tube train.

  Shaw nodded.

  ‘The paper didn’t say much,’ said Pie.

  Shaw thought about what more he could say. They’d kept the details of the corpse they’d found on Warham’s Hole guarded for good reasons, principally to make sure they weren’t led astray in the inquiry by the usual telephone calls claiming responsibility or giving false information. ‘The body had been in the water some time – maybe forty-eight hours.’ Shaw took a breath, calculating that a risk should be taken. ‘He’d lost both his eyes.’ There was an intake of air around the little camp fire, a drawing back of feet from the heat. ‘We’ll have to wait for the pathologist’s report, but there’s every chance his corneas were surgically removed.’

  Pie looked behind him into the shadows and the hidden man drew in his legs.

  ‘Pearmain,’ said Pie, then spelt it out. ‘That was his name. P-E-A-R-M-A-I-N. We called him John ’cos he was London, not ’cos it was his name.’

  ‘When was this?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Six months ago. He disappeared overnight. He just wasn’t there any more.’

  Shaw looked around. ‘Isn’t that what’s good about this life – that you can just disappear?’

  ‘He left stuff – a dog, a bag with boots. People don’t do that, even people like us,’ said Pie.

  But that didn’t work, thought Shaw. The body was fresh. Where had he been for six months? ‘Got any theories?’ he asked.

>   ‘We don’t need the-o-ries,’ said Pie, stretching the word out. ‘We know what happens.’ Shaw watched as a line of whisky trickled from his lower lip. Valentine leant forward and put a £50 note under the bottle.

  ‘Every six, eight months,’ said Pie. ‘He goes out and finds them – two, maybe three. With Pearmain there were two more: one they called Foster, the other…’ He looked back into the shadows for help. The voice of the man in the tattered pinstriped suit said, ‘Tyler.’

  ‘Right. Three of them that time. The same night. We don’t know how they…’ He searched for the word. ‘Select. They’re offered cash. Fifty pounds there and then. A promise of the rest after the thing’s done.’

  Shaw felt a desperate need to spell this out, to stop trading in euphemisms. ‘They’re being propositioned – to sell body parts. Organs? For cash?’

  ‘It’s a buyer’s market,’ said Pie. The man in the shadows laughed. ‘The promise is a thousand. A kidney. Bits of liver…’ He licked his lips. ‘Slices. That’s fifteen hundred. Skin grafts. Tendons. Veins. There’s a list. It’s big money – for us, a fortune.’

  ‘And these other two – we know they really did disappear, like Pearmain. They didn’t just move on?’

  ‘They hung out, the three of them. And they left stuff as well, in their shack. A Thermos, a wallet. Stuff you never leave, anywhere, unless you’re asleep, right there.’

  ‘Did they come back?’

  Pie used a boot to rearrange the ashes in the fire. ‘No one does. That’s part of the deal.’ Pie thought about that. ‘Part of what they said was the deal. But if Pearmain can turn up on the sands… But the story they were given was straight-up: they get the money – cash; they get to recover, then a free trip to a new town. And they don’t come back – ever.’

  ‘Not ever?’ asked Valentine, offering Pie a Silk Cut which he turned down. ‘So how do you know what happens?’

  Pie ignored him. ‘I’ve given you info. It’s good info. There were no strings, but I want a favour. I’d like a favour. For him…’ he nodded into the shadows. ‘Because he said we should tell you.’

  The man in the shadows stood, shuffled into the light, then sat comfortably on his haunches, like a cowboy on the Great Plains. His hair was drawn back in a ponytail. Shaw recognized the man he’d rescued from the upstairs bedroom at number 6 Erebus Street, the man he’d seen curled in a bundle of fear on the floorboards as the house burnt beneath him, the man who’d walked out of the Queen Vic two days ago.

  ‘Mr Hendre,’ Shaw said. ‘We’ve been looking for you.’

  ‘I can discharge myself, I just didn’t fill in the forms. I understand that you’d like to interview me – well, this is it.’ The voice was modulated middle class, and Shaw recalled Hendre’s original profession – accountancy. ‘You saved my life. This is the payback. Then that’s it.’ Hendre held the lapels of the pinstripe jacket together despite the heat of the fire. ‘I don’t go on the stand, and I don’t ID anyone. I’ll tell you what happened – you do what you like with that. By noon tomorrow I can leave. I’ll tell you where I’m going, but I’m leaving.’

  Hendre felt inside the jacket for a quarter-bottle of Scotch, then drank, keeping that for himself. He took two inches off the level in the bottle. Shaw recalled Liam Kennedy’s character sketch of Peter Hendre, and the observation that he was clean on drugs and alcohol.

  ‘I can’t promise,’ said Shaw. ‘But there’s a good chance. Your best chance.’ He looked around. ‘Your only chance.’

  Hendre put a knee down, folded himself forward, and took a piece of wood out of the fire to light a roll-up. At first Shaw thought he was nodding, but now he saw it was a tremor, the whole skull vibrating at a high frequency.

  ‘I was at the Sacred Heart of Mary a year ago. Out in the day, in the nave at night. They didn’t like anyone drinking so I kept it secret, drinking in the day, then I’d sober up in time for the free food. I give it a bash sometimes, but I don’t need it every waking hour. If they caught you boozing they’d put you on those drugs that make you throw up with it. I didn’t want that. So I played the game.’ He swigged at the bottle again. ‘It worked. It still works. That’s the problem with good people – they want to believe the best of you.’

  A laugh ran round the circle. Hendre looked at his feet. ‘Maybe I fooled them, maybe they didn’t give a fuck. Anyway, I was out on the rough lots by the abattoir sleeping one off last summer when I woke up. There’s a grass bank, and I’d curled up on it. I’d got a book off the travelling library – Anna Karenina – and I’d opened it up and put it over my face. The first thing I knew there was this pain, searing, in my thigh.’ He touched the bunched muscle just below his groin. ‘There was someone there, I just remember a shadow leaning over. And a car ticking over – on the track there. Then I blacked out.’ Hendre shook his head, the ponytail jiggling at the nape of his neck.

  Pie threw a broken crate on the flames, which reared up, the air shimmering in the sudden blast of heat.

  Hendre stood, opened the jacket, and pulled a T-shirt free of the belt so that they could see his skin, the edge of the pubic hair, the navel, and to one side a scar.

  ‘I woke up with this.’ An incision. From Peploe’s description Shaw was confident it was the result of a kidney removal – keyhole surgery, two small scars, six inches apart, one for each surgical tool, like the mechanical hands in a seaside arcade machine, fishing for a cuddly toy.

  ‘Where did you wake up?’

  ‘A room. Blank concrete walls, pipes in the ceiling. There was a kind of hum, like a machine. A metal door with rivets. Just the bed, linen, a neon light. I was shitting myself, and I could feel the pain in my side. We’d talked at the hostel about the Organ Grinder. Rumours, gossip. Some stories had trickled back on the grapevine.’ They all laughed at a private joke. ‘But nobody really knew shit – though they knew someone was out there, and what they wanted. So I had to just lie there, knowing what they’d done to me.’

  ‘Did you see anyone?’

  ‘I waited. It was really quiet, except for that hum. Nothing outside. Then I heard someone coming. First off, I heard voices – through the wall. Really low, almost just a murmur.’ Hendre closed his eyes, conjuring up the scene. ‘There were two locks, then he came in. He looked foreign – a tanned face, but not like a summer holiday tan, a natural one. Good looking, smooth, black hair.’ He searched for other details. ‘A gold ring on one finger. When he spoke there was a strong accent, with a sibilance. Spanish, I guess, or something like it.’

  ‘Portuguese?’ asked Valentine, unable to keep the insistence out of his voice.

  Hendre shrugged. ‘He said I’d agreed to donate a kidney, that they’d offered a thousand pounds.’ He laughed. ‘That’s crap. But I guess it made him feel better. Anyway, it’s academic, because there wasn’t going to be any money ’cos they couldn’t use my kidney. He didn’t say why, even when I asked. But, you know, it’s kind of obvious.’ He took another two inches off the whisky level in the bottle. ‘I stayed a few days, then they gave me two hundred – two hundred fucking quid; drugged me up again and dumped me back at the Sacred Heart of Mary. I had a week to get out. Find somewhere new. If they ever saw my face again in Lynn they’d pick me up. If I talked about what had happened I’d pay a price. He had a knife, this bloke, and he got it out, pressed it right up here…’

  Hendre pressed an index finger into the soft flesh under his right eye.

  ‘Eyes. He said they could get a fortune for those. But no donors – unless they’re dead. Pissed himself laughing at that. He said I’d have trouble reading Tolstoy after that.’

  ‘Tell me more about the room,’ said Shaw.

  He shrugged. ‘What’s to tell? It was hot. Always, like a constant heat, but there was nothing in the room, no radiator, and the pipes were in the ceiling. The lights never went off – no, they did once, like a quick power cut, but there was emergency lighting outside ’cos even in the dark I could see a light through the keyhol
e. When they opened the door to bring in food and drugs – it was always the dago – I could see out into a corridor. Narrow, lit – but, like, not a lot. Darker than the room. Bare concrete walls. And pipes again – services, I guess – taped up on the ceiling.’

  Shaw caught Valentine’s eye, knowing they were both thinking the same thing: the hospital basement, Level One, with its maze-like corridors. ‘And the hum?’

  ‘Yeah. Always, like you were inside something.’

  Pie retrieved a large plastic bottle of white cider from under his crate and drank. Over by the edge of the gas holder they heard shouts, two figures fighting, locked in a dance. Dogs barked, and shadows ran to break them apart.

  ‘Why’d you come back to Lynn?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Bit of luck. Unfinished business. Before this life.’ He looked around the fire at the faces. ‘I had another life. I fleeced a couple of old dears of their money. I thought they’d die. They didn’t. It was just bad luck. I got barred, started living on the streets. It’s not much of a qualification, right – dishonest accountant. Well…’ He laughed, swigging at the bottle. ‘Actually, you can make a good living at it, but you’re not supposed to advertise the fact.’ He stood. ‘After they dumped me back at the church, after the op, I got the warden – that kid Liam – to try and find me a place to go. I needed a fresh start. I’d done some work for the church – legal advice, nothing fancy, you’d get better off the CAB, but this way it was discreet. So they knew me. They got me a billet up the coast at Hunstanton – there’s a church and some sheltered housing. It’s OK. I’ve done a bit more work. Then I got a letter, the warden again. Guess what? Another old biddy I’d been working on really did peg out, and she’s left me something to remember her by. Legit. Sweet. I don’t have a bank account. I have to face up tomorrow at ten at White & Angel, in Queens Street. Then I’m out of this dump. I could be a rich man. Or maybe not – she had cats, so perhaps I get to feed the fuckers.’