by Unknown
In the silence they could hear the uneven whirr of the electric clock over the vestry door.
The blood drained from Kennedy’s face.
‘I gave them to the captain,’ he said in a whisper. ‘He said they needed them – where they’d gone. That’s how they got away – on the Rosa. To the south coast.’ He looked around. ‘That’s what he said.’ His shoulders slumped.
‘Was he lying to me?’ Kennedy asked, though Shaw could see he already knew the answer. It was the moment, Shaw thought, when Liam Kennedy realized he was a holy fool.
He stood, adjusted his jeans, and noticed for the first time the uniformed officers who’d slipped into a pew by the door.
‘I want to speak with Father Martin before I go,’ he said. ‘Can I?’
But Father Martin was already walking away, down the nave, with Ally Judd at his side. He knelt at the altar, crossed himself, then left his church without looking back.
53
On the Rosa Neil Judd was lying on a bunk in one of the crew cabins. It held a single bed, a fitted cupboard and a shower unit, slightly smaller than the one in which he’d squeezed the life out of Juan de Mesquita. He’d collapsed while being helped up the ladder in number 4 hatch. In the end they’d got him in the bosun’s chair and winched him up to the deck. A doctor had given him a sedative and advised a period of rest before trying to transfer him to St James’s. A uniformed woman constable sat at the foot of the bunk. When Neil Judd woke at eleven she brought him to the mess, where Shaw was having breakfast prepared from supplies in the galley: cereal, milk and toast. A pot of black coffee seeped a delicious aroma into the small room. He’d spent an hour running various versions of events through his head, and he was still disturbed by what he didn’t know. He was reluctant to leave the Rosa, sensing that the ship still held more secrets than it had so far revealed.
Shaw put an evidence envelope on the table. He was struggling still to think of Neil Judd as a killer, rather than a victim himself, the baby brother left as a guardian angel for a father he probably didn’t hate but almost certainly despised; haunted by the fact that he’d slept through the trauma which had ripped his own family apart and that he was too young to recall his missing siblings, Norma Jean and Sean. He’d deserve whatever the court decided, but he deserved the truth as well.
Shaw unpopped the envelope seal and slid the delicate skeleton of the fish onto the table.
‘We’ve found your sister’s body. It was buried in the foundations of the electricity sub-station at the foot of Erebus Street. These were with her – and many more like them.’
Judd laid a finger on the delicate tracery of the bones – a dorsal fin, as fine as a scrimshaw comb.
‘We think Jan Orzsak worked as a consultant for the power company in the 1990s. There is other forensic evidence, potential evidence – the body was partly wrapped in a blanket, a roll of carpet. We’ve recovered human hairs. We’re confident we can bring the appropriate charges.’
‘My father…’ said Neil Judd, trying to understand all the implications of this gossamer-thin skeleton.
‘Yes. An innocent man. Not a killer.’
The word made Judd jolt, as if he’d been stung. He drank some coffee Shaw offered him, and then asked a favour Shaw couldn’t refuse. ‘Can I see him? I want him to know that I know. I’m strong enough now – much stronger.’ He cracked the joints of his fingers.
‘He’s in the hold,’ said Shaw. ‘They won’t move him until they’re ready.’
Judd stood. ‘I can climb down. Please.’
The vertical shaft was lit now by a line of halogen lights. Shaw went first, then Judd, then DC Birley. The three of them descended like abseiling mountaineers. The operating theatre looked very different. The plastic screens had been removed, a team of three NHS nurses had been brought in from the hospital, the two patients – as yet still not sufficiently recovered to be winched vertically up the shaft – lay on operating tables at the end. The donor was still unconscious, but he fitted the description of Terry Foster, the man who’d gone missing with Pearmain and Tyler. Andy Judd was awake, his eyes fixed on the girder above. Phillips’s instruments and much of the medical kit had been taken up the shaft. Shaw noticed that the donor’s wrist was still encircled by one of the charity bands.
Neil Judd went to his father’s bedside and took his hand, standing at a slight distance, then stepped closer, pushing back white hair from the old man’s forehead. They put their heads together to talk.
Shaw could see now that the metal container which had held the operating theatre had two internal doors, not one. Three CSIs in SOC suits worked at the other door, one cutting through a padlock with a fine saw, overseen by Tom Hadden.
‘No key?’ asked Shaw, joining them.
‘If anyone’s got it they’re not telling us,’ said Hadden. ‘Which makes me even more determined to get through. It leads into the other containers. My guess is they contain stores, the fridges.’
Shaw thought about that and took a step back, but then the padlock gave and Hadden spun a circular lock. When the door finally gave there was a sound of escaping air, like a Tupperware lid being popped.
It took three of them to swing it out and back and the light flooded in to reveal a corridor, unlit, the steel walls stained with rust, glistening with condensation. An image flashed into Shaw’s head from Run Silent, Run Deep, a Second World War film set aboard a submarine, the crew sweating in the silence under an oily sea or dead in an airless tomb.
It was an eerie image, so that when he saw something move in the shadows it made him flinch, as if from a blow.
Out of the ash-grey shadows came a man, walking towards them, shuffling, a hand to his side where a bloody bandage encircled his flesh. The smell was fetid, the stench of humankind, and, thought Shaw, the sweet smell of rotting fruit. It was an image out of a nightmare, and the thought that broke into Shaw’s mind was that he was relieved that Fran wasn’t there to see it – because it would haunt a child’s mind, as it would his.
‘Sean?’
Neil Judd stood at Shaw’s shoulder. The word seemed to stop the shuffling man in his tracks, and he swayed, then sank to his knees.
Neil Judd ran forward and helped him up, and when their heads were together it became obvious that they were brothers, even now, because Sean Judd had lost his mop of hair.
Shaw and Valentine pushed past, down the corridor, which at first seemed to end in a blank wall. As his vision adjusted to the gloom, however, Shaw could see that the end wall contained another door. Beyond it was a room which doubled back towards the operating theatre.
Inside were six beds, three of them occupied, each occupant held to the bedstead by a single handcuff. The first raised his head from a grimy pillow and held Shaw’s gaze with jaundiced eyes – a look which was both rational and unhinged. ‘Thank God,’ he said simply, and let his lids fall, his body relaxing into unconsciousness.
Standing there, Shaw’s mind locked, as if it was unable to complete a difficult computation. But he knew what he had in his mind – the image of Liam Kennedy, collecting prescriptions for men who should have been long gone. But they’d been here, waiting to fulfil their purpose, a living organ bank. And another image: the sudden darkness on that Sunday when the power had failed. The chaos here in this room, the fear and the anger. Had they been handcuffed then, he wondered, or free?
One of the other two men sat up, then rolled from his bed, tugging the bed frame with him, holding a hand up, trying to cover his face. In the third bed a man lay still, bandages around his head. The man on the floor began to scream, a thin wail, gathering strength. Shaw was still struggling to understand what he was seeing, and in his confusion he tried to find a parallel from his own experience, but all he could call to mind was a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, a nightmare vision of hell. The man in the corner stopped screaming and pointed at the man with the bandaged head.
The heat in the room lay like a second skin. The men were dressed only
in shorts, so that Shaw and Valentine could see the scars. Several on each. And the long, stitched lines along calves and arms where tendon and tissue had been removed.
The man in the corner told them where to go next – not with his voice, but with his eyes, which kept flickering to the other door, into the third container.
Shaw opened it quickly because he knew if he stopped he might not be able to go on. There was no lock. His fingers searched inside for a switch while he stifled a childhood fear that some unseen hand would grab his wrist in the darkness. Neon tubes strobed into life, revealing a line of industrial fridges. He looked at Valentine, unwilling to believe, then flipped the lid of the nearest.
Two men lay in the ice, their many scars a vivid blue, the bodies naked. One had had a leg removed, the stump a dull terracotta. Valentine walked past Shaw and opened the next: a man, ice like a blanket around him through which only lips and hair could be seen, and the toes – breaking through. But the skin looked patched, black in places, and disfigured. Shaw remembered that the Rosa’s power supply, when switched on that night after the generator had been reassembled, had blown the circuits, so that the contents of the fridges had begun to rot and they couldn’t have let the power engineers run a cable aboard – not that night, anyway, because of the chaos on the ship. Eventually these men had been refrozen, but now their flesh was useless.
Shaw wondered if he was in shock. Time seemed to have slowed down, and when Valentine spoke it was like listening to a voice underwater.
‘They kept them alive – for this?’ asked Valentine.
Shaw walked back into the next room. The man in the corner had begun to shake rhythmically, keening softly now. In the corridor he felt the first comforting hint of the cooler air from the operating theatre. And when he got there a sight which halted, for a moment at least, the slide towards trauma: the two Judd brothers, their hands held across their father’s body, the old man’s eyes open, dimmed with tears.
54
Sunday, 19 September
The stock cars circled the arena as if locked together, a screaming high-velocity scrap heap of painted metal wrapped in exhaust fumes. Above rose a cloud of summer dust, like a nuclear mushroom, climbing into a towering column in the hot, windless evening air. The sun was setting through this prism of dirt, so that everywhere the light was red and golden. Valentine watched the last race; or rather, he looked as if he was watching the last race. But his field glasses did not swing as the cars went past. They were fixed instead on a spot in the pits opposite. The man he was watching wore a spotless mechanic’s jacket, reflective glasses, and a baseball cap with a logo Valentine couldn’t read – although he knew what it said: TEAM MOSSE.
The air was soaked with petrol so that he could taste it on his lips – iron, and the astringent kick of gas – so he pulled the third can of beer out of his raincoat pocket. The first had been iced, this one was warm, and as he pulled the tab he let the froth explode in his mouth. He was pleased it was the last race because his back ached, and the noise was making a small bone in his inner ear buzz like a trapped fly.
A chequered flag the size of a picnic blanket waved and he saw Alex Cosyns’s car go past in the leading pack of three, and then a blazing replay screen showed the final yards in slow motion, with a flashing white-on-black tickertape line reading WINNER – TEAM MOSSE. As the chasing pack swept past a piece of chassis span off one of the cars, followed by a few strips of burnt tyre. The crowd, about 8,000 strong, screamed with delight as the disintegrating car failed to pull out of the bend, the offside front wheel crumpling so that the whole vehicle carried on, catching the crash barrier, tipping, then riding ahead on its roof.
But Valentine wasn’t watching. He’d found his target again in the pits opposite: Robert Mosse, standing alone, hands on hips, watching Cosyns bring in the winning car. When the driver got out Mosse stopped clapping and lit a cigar, turning away, and it was a mechanic from the next pit who patted the winner on the back. Valentine wondered again why Robert Mosse was sending Cosyns £1,000 cheques and then cutting him dead in his moment of glory. Cosyns didn’t register the slight, simply accepting a bottle of beer from the man in overalls and calmly sipping it as he watched the replay of the final lap.
Valentine dropped the can, half finished, in a bin and began to thread through the crowd towards the exit gates. There’d be a kind of circus finale, with all the cars circling, but he didn’t need to see that because he was here to find out where they kept the Team Mosse trailer. Cosyns housed the car in the garage beside the undertakers, but there was no room for anything else, and Valentine had executed a drive-by surveillance of Mosse’s tasteless suburban villa – there were three garages, but all standard length, so they couldn’t keep it there. Besides, they already had three cars: Mosse’s BMW, a 4×4, and another stock car, but this one was always up on bricks. That hadn’t been a drive-by observation – he’d had a decent drink at the Artichoke and thought, fuck it. So he’d parked round the corner and had a sniff, put a torch beam through the little window in the garage side door. What harm was in that? He was building up a picture, that was all. Keeping his distance. And this was just one of the bits that didn’t fit, finding the place where they kept the trailer.
Outside the arena it was chaos, like some nightmare version of the Monte Carlo Rally, with people running for their cars, trying to beat the inevitable traffic jam. The sun shone from a thousand windscreens. Valentine found the Mazda, zigzagged to the gates, and slipped into a lay-by next to a mobile tea van. He had the window down so the smell of fat and bacon filled the car.
He kicked open the door but left the engine running.
His mobile rang. He’d changed the ring tone to play the theme from Ghostbusters, and it still made him laugh.
GUILTY PLEA
The text was from Shaw, on his way back to Lynn from an informal meeting in Peterborough with the CPS, who were involved in an international effort to prepare the case against the organ traffickers – a case set to cause an international sensation.
Andy Judd was due before the magistrates the following morning to lodge a plea, and had waited until the last moment before agreeing to the deal on offer to both him and his son Neil. Andy Judd would plead guilty to arson at the electrical sub-station and criminal damage at Orzsak’s house – astonishingly, his only crimes. The prosecution would agree to a non-custodial sentence. In return, Andy Judd would appear as a Crown witness in the trail of those involved in the illegal trafficking of human organs. His own complicity would be overlooked. Neil Judd would also appear for the Crown, and escape prosecution for his part in recruiting donors. However, he would separately stand charged with the murder of his brother once the main case was concluded. Liam Kennedy would not appear at all; the stress of discovering the true consequences of his ‘selection’ process had triggered a crisis in his mental condition. He was being held at a psychiatric unit in Coventry, and had been assessed as unfit to face trial.
The Crown’s case would further be strengthened by testimony from the three men discovered still alive in the hold of the Rosa by Shaw and Valentine – and Terence Foster, the donor in the operating theatre: brave men who, it now seemed, had come close to saving themselves on that Sunday night the power had blown on Erebus Street. In the sudden darkness they’d planned a rebellion, and when Rey Abucajo had opened the door by torchlight to select a replacement for John Tyler they’d coshed him, pushed him out, and barricaded the door. And that was why Neil Judd had been forced to go out on the streets for a fresh donor. When Rey Abucajo eventually returned with the rest of the crew to force his way through the door he’d come armed. The man they’d known as John Pearmain had been shot dead as an example to the rest, then taken away to the operating table to make his final contribution to the market for human organs. His body had gone overboard with Tyler’s as the Rosa sailed out of the Wash, weighted down in the waste bag which had come ashore on Warham’s Hole. All four witnesses lived for the moment they’d take the
stand.
Interpol was making progress in establishing when and where the Rosa’s hold had been adapted to conceal the operating theatre and makeshift ward and organ bank. The complexity of the wider investigation – which had been handed to a specialist cross-border unit at New Scotland Yard – meant that the trial was yet to be allocated a date in the legal calendar. Counsel’s best guess was currently spring 2012. None of the accused had been granted bail. Lawyers for Abucajo had indicated that their client would testify that the dead captain had administered lethal injections to those donors who had outlived their usefulness in the living organ bank. It was a ploy unlikely to save his skin. Jofranka Phillips’s case would be more subtle: a jury would have to decide the extent to which she’d known the secrets of the Rosa. Initial estimates of the number of men who may have died on board the vessel during its two-year career as a floating operating theatre varied between eight and thirteen. The final figure might be far higher.
Valentine sucked the life out of a Silk Cut. Then another. Was there another way out of the Norfolk Arena? He was about to walk back and check with the security guard by the entrance when Mosse’s soft-top BMW came into view, taking the corner onto the main road at 60 m.p.h., purring past, the Limousin leather hood folded back behind the rear seat.
A minute later, less, Cosyns swung out in his own BMW – a second-hand model, the offside wing dented – with the trailer behind carrying the Citroën, a winner’s laurel leaf wreath hung over the bonnet aerial. At the rear window he saw a small dog scrabbling, its nose to the glass.
Valentine slipped the Mazda in behind the trailer, up close, where he wouldn’t be seen too often in the BMW’s side mirror.