Body Line dibs-13

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘No, in fact Mr Porson said I can tie up loose ends. As long as I don’t frighten the horses.’

  ‘Loose ends? Horses? No still waters or barn doors in this cliché-fest?’

  ‘It cuts us out, you see,’ Slider said. ‘The big operation. Unless the Dutch courier sings about this end of the chain, and they’re not likely to press him on it when they want to wind it up the other way. And we can’t do anything this end, because we don’t know who the new courier is, or where he’s going out from. They won’t use Windhover again.’

  ‘No,’ said Atherton. ‘Too many eyes watching, now Rogers is a celebrity for being murdered.’

  ‘New courier, new boat, new harbour.’

  ‘Needle in haystack.’

  ‘And I don’t just want the courier. I want the brains behind it.’

  ‘So – what, then?’

  ‘We have to get the whole story, everything, from the beginning. From someone who knows. Someone with the moral courage to do the right thing.’

  It didn’t take Atherton more than a few seconds to work it out. ‘You’re going to see Amanda Sturgess? You think she has moral courage? Or do you think she’s the brains behind it?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘I hope we will. And what do you want me to do? Come with you?’

  ‘No, I think she’ll talk better one to one. I want you to get Frith out of the way.’

  ‘I’m not going to befriend that ass’s arse.’

  ‘You can make it official. Find out how much he really knew about the whole business. That’s something that’s been exercising me. I think he was ignorant of it all, but I’d like to be sure.’

  Atherton considered. ‘But you’ll give the secret signal if you get into trouble, so I can rush to the rescue?’

  Slider raised an eyebrow. ‘What am I, a weakling? She may be tall, but I could take her any time I wanted.’

  Atherton shuddered. ‘Choose another simile.’

  ‘Not that sort of taking.’

  ‘Even the thought of it . . .’

  Amanda Sturgess looked terrible. She had aged ten years in a week. She was grey-faced and drawn and her eyes were haunted. Slider felt an inward quiver of satisfaction that he was on the right track. He had waited across the road in his car until he saw Frith stamp out, looking annoyed, to keep his enforced tryst with Atherton, then made his way through the windy darkness to the lit house. He rang, and she answered the door. The sight of him brought a sort of dread to her expression.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you,’ Slider said, quite gently.

  She rallied. ‘I have nothing to say to you,’ she said, with an attempt at the old, cold arrogance. It almost worked.

  ‘You will talk to me,’ he said. ‘Either here or down at the station.’

  ‘You threatened me once before,’ she said, nostrils quivering. ‘You need to know that I am not a woman to be bullied.’

  ‘Then, in God’s name, how did you get mixed up with all this?’ he cried. Her face flinched as though he had slapped her. ‘They killed your husband!’

  ‘My ex-husband!’

  ‘And his girlfriend – an innocent woman. She had nothing to do with it, but they killed her anyway.’

  ‘Why should I care about her? She was a slut. She got what she deserved.’

  ‘You don’t think that,’ he said, looking at her seriously. She met his eyes, but her own grew nervous again, ‘And two others at least – the secretary and the nurse from Harley Street. How many more have to die?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she cried weakly. ‘Go away and leave me alone!’ She tried to close the door, but he had his hand on it.

  ‘In your own self-interest, then,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think they know you are now the one weak link? How long before they come after you?’ She stared at him, holding on. Perhaps she even thought death would be a relief? No, she didn’t really believe she was in danger. But he had another lever. ‘What do you think will happen to your agency?’

  That hit home. ‘You can’t touch that! You wouldn’t! We do good work. It’s important work.’

  He inched closer and lowered his voice so that she had to stay near to listen. ‘Financed by criminal money? We’ll take it apart, close it down. The publicity will obliterate its reputation and your work.’

  ‘Not my agency! You wouldn’t!’

  ‘I will. Unless—’ Now she was listening. ‘If you help us, I might be able to keep the agency out of it. You could find a new way of financing it, keep it going. I understand you’re an expert fund-raiser. If, that is, you are free to fund-raise.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘If I can arrange an amnesty for you in exchange for your information.’

  ‘Amnesty?’ Pale as she was, she whitened at the implication.

  ‘You are right in the middle of this,’ he said with soft implacability. ‘You are implicated right up to the hilt. You will be arrested, charged with the rest of them. The illegal importation of human organs. Plus at least two murders.’

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone!’

  ‘That’s not the way the law sees it. You don’t have to pull the trigger to be guilty. You knew all about it and you didn’t try to stop it. That makes you guilty.’

  Now she looked appalled. ‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t go to court. I can’t be on trial. It would kill my parents.’

  ‘Then you must help me,’ he said simply. ‘Talk to me, tell me everything. But it has to be now. This is your only chance. After this, it will be out of my hands.’ He watched her for a moment, and then started to turn away with a shrug.

  ‘No, wait!’ She seemed to crumple. ‘Oh God, how did it come to this?’ She swayed, and Slider thought he might have to grab her. But she was made of sterner stuff. She straightened herself, stepped back, and said, with a ghost of the old hostility, ‘You’d better come in.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Organ Involuntary

  He followed her over the threshold and closed the door behind him. There were lights on all through the ground floor, and it seemed they must have been having supper when Atherton rang, because the dining table was only partly cleared and there was a smell of food fading away in the kitchen. She walked straight to a cupboard in the corner of the sitting-room and took out a bottle and two glasses.

  ‘I need a drink,’ she said tersely. ‘You?’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  She did not offer a choice, but poured whisky into both glasses and handed him one, innocent of ice or niceties. This was not a social occasion. It was the cowboy’s slug of hooch before prairie surgery. She shot her slug straight down her throat and refilled, not offering more to Slider. Then she seemed to see the untidiness of the kitchen, took two swift steps and switched off the lights in there. He was glad she still had the spirit to be house-proud. It gave him more to work with.

  They sat in armchairs facing each other. Slider sipped. She looked at him coldly. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘What do you want to know?’

  He didn’t need to think. He had his starting-place long thought out. ‘The Lescroit woman’s accusation. You were there that day. What actually happened?’

  A spot of colour came into her cheeks. ‘What a thing to—! What makes you think I was there?’

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘This is going to take forever if you go the “what makes you think?” route. I know nearly everything. You are going to tell me the rest – for the sake of your clients, remember, if not your own skin. What happened that day?’

  ‘The woman accused David of molesting her,’ she said rigidly.

  ‘But it wasn’t David, was it?’

  She looked at him as if she would have liked to kill him, but she said, through gritted teeth, ‘No.’

  ‘It’s not the sort of thing David would do,’ Slider went on conversationally. ‘He could get all the women he wanted without that. It was Bernard Webber who was the bottom-pincher, the one who brushed up against the secretaries in confined spa
ces.’

  She glared. ‘You don’t have to go on.’

  ‘Webber was out of his room – gone to the lavatory, apparently. But in fact he had slipped into the room where the woman was recovering.’ Her cheeks were scarlet, her eyes bright with mortification, or rage, or something. ‘She woke up, or half-woke. She said, “What are you doing, doctor?” ‘And he said, “Call me David.”’

  ‘I know!’ she cried.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because he told me.’

  ‘You were in his room when he came back in.’

  She nodded, and swallowed, as if it were difficult for her to tell this part. ‘I’d just arrived. I was waiting for him. Then I heard the noise – the woman shrieking. He came in. He said, “There’s the devil to pay.” He said, “We can all still come out of it all right if you go along with whatever I say.”’

  ‘He asked you to cover up for him?’ Slider said. ‘Why did he think you would do that?’

  She squeezed her eyes shut, and said, her lips rigid, ‘We were lovers.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Slider. It was the last piece in his jigsaw. He’d pretty much worked out what it would look like from the space it left, but coming from her, coloured with the shame she still felt, it was bright and compelling.

  She opened her eyes and, as if having got over this hurdle there was nothing more to fear, she sat up straighter and began to talk.

  ‘We’d been lovers for some time. He was – still is – fantastically attractive; and things had been going badly between David and me. I told you before about his women. He couldn’t leave them alone. It wore me down. Bernard was sympathetic – an old friend I could lean on. At first that’s all it was. He was the only person I could really talk to, who knew David too, and liked him. But I was – lonely. And hurt. Sympathy drifted into comforting, the comforting became physical.’ She looked at him. ‘I’m not proud of it. I know I let myself down. I never intended to be unfaithful to David. But—’

  ‘These things happen,’ Slider said neutrally. He knew better than to offer her sympathy. ‘You’d gone there that day to see Webber?’

  ‘I told Stephanie – Bernard’s secretary – it was about fund-raising. Bernard was always generous with charities. I knew David had a procedure, so I’d be able to see Bernard alone. Then all this blew up.’

  ‘What made you go along with blaming David for the trouble?’

  ‘Oh!’ she said in frustration, ‘I know how it looks. But it was the only way. Bernard explained it all logically. He said the Lescroit woman was convinced it was David and wouldn’t change her mind. He said he had the influence and the money, he could get David off, but David couldn’t get him off. He said if he took the blame there would still be people who thought it had really been David all the time, because of his reputation. So they’d both be ruined, and his sacrifice would be for nothing.’

  ‘Sacrifice?’

  She had the grace to blush slightly. ‘You must remember I was angry with David for what he had done. He was out of control around women. Even if he didn’t touch the Lescroit woman, it was only a matter of time before he had some kind of affair with a patient and got struck off.’

  Slider nodded, as if accepting the point. ‘And what did David say to Webber’s arguments?’

  ‘David never knew,’ she said. She looked away from him. ‘He thought the woman had just been confused and imagined it all. He swore to me that he didn’t touch her, but he knew he was in trouble all the same. When Bernard said he believed him and promised to make it all right, David was – grateful.’

  Slider thought she was ashamed of that: perhaps uniquely in the whole mess, was she ashamed that David had been grateful for being stitched up?

  ‘So he got David a lighter sentence from the GMC, and he got him a job,’ he said. ‘What did you get?’

  She hardened her gaze. ‘Money,’ she said in a cold voice. Slider continued to look at her steadily, and she went on, ‘I was divorcing David. The Lescroit business was the excuse but I was going to anyway. I had to get away from him. I hated him by then. Oh, you don’t know, you can’t imagine what it was like for me! David had betrayed me and broken my heart. Bernard was my rock. He helped me through everything. And his money – a friend’s money – meant I didn’t need to take anything from David. I told him I would pay it back. But he laughed and said he wouldn’t hear of it.’

  ‘You were still Webber’s mistress?’

  ‘For a time. But after all the fuss died down, after the divorce came through, Bernard sold the practice, got a government contract and went abroad.’

  ‘How did Robin Frith fit in with all this? Weren’t you involved with him long before the divorce was finalized?’

  She looked annoyed. ‘What business is it of yours?’

  ‘Everything is now my business,’ he said, unmoved. ‘I thought we had established that.’

  ‘I don’t see what it has to do with anything,’ she went on, with extra high dudgeon to compensate for co-operating, ‘but it was Bernard’s idea that I should cultivate Robin. Felicity – Bernard’s wife – was having suspicions about me, and he wanted to divert them. She thought I was divorcing David for him. Bernard had already decided to divorce Felicity and he wanted it to be amicable, otherwise it would have cost him dear. So she mustn’t think there was anything between Bernard and me. Robin was a smokescreen.’ She shrugged. ‘He’d always been in love with me, and I knew I could control him, so it worked very well.’

  God, she was a cold one! Slider thought. ‘So Bernard wasn’t divorcing in order to marry you?’

  ‘God, no. He’d decided on it long before we were involved. And marriage was never on the cards between us. I wouldn’t have wanted it any more than him. He and Felicity separated just before he went abroad and I didn’t see him for almost two years.’

  She stopped, her eyes inward. When he saw she was not going to resume unprompted, Slider said, ‘It was on his tour abroad that he got everything set up, wasn’t it?’

  She came back from her reverie. ‘Yes, of course. His government status opened all sorts of doors. He told me he saw the whole thing, complete, in one single flash, and after that it was just a matter of setting up the processes. It came to him one evening in Beijing. He was talking to some little Chinese government functionary, who told him about the state executions.’ She gave him a defiant look. ‘The Chinese government sells the organs quite openly, you know. They don’t make any bones about it. These are all condemned criminals. Why shouldn’t they repay their debt to society in a practical way?’

  Slider didn’t get sucked into that. ‘He set up the Geneva Foundation. And the numbered Swiss bank account to handle the money. There’d be no questions asked or answered about either. But there had to be a British arm, so that end would look legitimate.’

  ‘The Windhover Trust. It was legitimate. Then he worked out the quickest route for the organs – Hong Kong, then Amsterdam by plane, and then by speed boat to England, exchanging at sea where there was no one to see it happen.’

  ‘And on his other travellings he was working up customers,’ Slider suggested. ‘The Middle East, India, South America . . .’

  ‘Of course. He had to have agents to direct the patients his way.’

  ‘And the last stage was to get the organs from the coast to Stanmore. He offered that job to David.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you know he was going to do that?’

  ‘I was there at the meeting. That would be in the March of 2001. Bernard asked me over to his place one evening – his new place. He and Felicity were divorced by then, and we were seeing each other from time to time. When I got there, David was there too. I thought for one horrible moment he was trying to reconcile us. But it was a business meeting, not a social one. He had the whole network set up by then, except for the last leg. David hated his current job, so he jumped at it. Bernard would pay him a basic salary through Windhover, just enough not to rouse anyone’s suspicions, enough to
pay tax on, and the rest he’d get in cash – lovely, untraceable cash. Plenty of it. David could live the kind of lifestyle he liked, and the work was negligible. Once a week, courier the goods to London, that was all. Later, Bernard asked him to entertain clients as well, but I always thought that was more to keep David occupied than because it was really necessary.’

  ‘Why did he offer the job to David? Was he uniquely qualified for it?’

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ she said scornfully. ‘In fact, Bernard has this chap – a sort of factotum—’

  ‘Jerry McGuinness?’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, you know about him?’

  ‘How did Bernard meet him?’

  ‘Jerry? Oh, he picked him up on his travels when he was doing his tour abroad. Got him out of some kind of trouble with the police in South America. Brought him home. Jerry’s forever grateful. Completely loyal.’

  I am not the butcher, but the butcher’s dog, Slider thought.

  ‘Plus, of course, Bernard pays him well,’ she concluded indifferently.

  ‘So, why David, then?’

  ‘To keep him quiet. Bernard thought that sooner or later he was bound to work out what had really happened that day in Harley Street, and he wanted to have him thoroughly bound by unbreakable ties. I think he was wrong – I don’t think David would ever have suspected. He wasn’t sharp enough – and he loved Bernard, as a friend. He trusted him. But also,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘I think Bernard really wanted to do David a favour. He loved him, too, you know.’

  ‘And you were guaranteed money for your agency for ever.’

  She looked sour. ‘You’re going to blame me for taking the money.’

  ‘Not at all. It’s perfectly understandable.’

  ‘We do good work.’

  ‘And Windhover gets a good cover story.’ She didn’t answer, only gave him a cross look as though he was taking unfair advantage. ‘But didn’t the illegality of the whole thing bother you?’

  ‘Illegality?’

  ‘You must know that it is illegal to import organs in that way.’

  ‘Oh! But that’s just a technicality. Why on earth shouldn’t we import organs? The government could change the law if it wanted to. When you think of the misery of people waiting for transplants . . . What Bernard does is good. He saves lives, and gives people the chance of a decent life.’