Sacrifice

by Sharon Bolton

  ‘Those tests. Your sperm tests. They were all normal. How did you do it?’

  ‘Oh Christ, is it really important?’

  ‘Yes, it’s important. How?’

  ‘It was just a matter of timing. Desogestrel wears off pretty quickly if you stop taking it. When I knew I had a sperm count, I just avoided going near you when you were ovulating.’

  He moved closer, sat down on the bed next to me.

  ‘Women can love adopted babies. The maternal bond doesn’t rely upon a blood link. Neither does the paternal one.’

  ‘Oh, because you and your folks are just so close.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not a good example. I know a lot of adoptees. They’re adored, precious children. They bring huge happiness.’

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you? It wasn’t just any baby, it was your baby. A little boy with dark-blue eyes and long limbs and hair that will never lie flat, no matter how much I comb it. I used to talk to that baby, tell him stories about his parents, his cousins, what we would all do together when he was born. He even had a name.’ There was a lot more I needed to say but it just wasn’t possible.

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It matters. What was his name?’

  ‘Duncaroony,’ I managed.

  For a moment I thought Duncan was laughing. Then I realized he wasn’t. We sat together, side by side, as the night got darker.

  34

  THE NEXT DAY I went to work. Before leaving the night before, Kenn had asked me to come in if I felt up to it, my suspension having expired with the knowledge that the hospital was in the clear. I was still smarting from the indignity of it all but, when it came down to it, I didn’t have anything I’d rather do that morning.

  Some time in the night, Duncan and I had declared a truce. There remained a lot of unfinished business but neither of us had the energy to resume hostilities just yet. We were having some time out.

  As to the future, I wasn’t sure. Duncan had told me that the fight I’d overheard on Unst had been about his desire to leave Shetland, that Elspeth had been referring to me when she’d said he was in love. He’d declared that no power on earth would make him leave me. The jury was still out, though, on whether I was staying – with him, in the job, on the islands; I didn’t know. I was taking it one day at a time. Because, in spite of all the lies, in spite of everything he’d kept from me, I still loved him.

  I did the ward-round, ignoring the curious looks I was getting from the staff. When I’d been forced to admit (but only to myself) that the unit had been functioning perfectly well without me, I went upstairs to prepare for afternoon clinic.

  I phoned my friend in Voe and learned that Charles and Henry were fine. I thanked her for taking care of them and fielded her few curious questions as to how and why they were there. I made arrangements to collect them that evening.

  I wondered about what was happening at home. As Duncan and I were leaving that morning, the police had arrived in force. As Helen had promised, they were carrying out another sweep of our fields but I no longer believed they’d find anything. Maybe one day I’d have another look at the islands’ female mortality statistics, get someone else’s opinion. One day at a time. But there was one thing I really had to do that day. I picked up the phone, dialled a London number and asked to be put through to a woman I’d worked with at my last hospital; the consultant anaesthetist.

  ‘Diane?’ I said when we were finally connected. ‘It’s Tora.’

  ‘My goodness, stranger, how are you?’

  Well, there was no truthful short answer to that so I gave the usual lie. ‘Fine. You?’

  ‘Great. Will we see you in September?’

  ‘Of course, we’re looking forward to it,’ I said, having not thought about it in weeks. A wedding in a picture-book Buckinghamshire village; I’d forgotten that normal life was still going on, somewhere out there. ‘Look, I’m sorry about this, but I need some information and I don’t have much time. Is that OK?’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘What do you know about untraceable drugs?’

  Diane wasn’t easily fazed. She paused only a second before replying. ‘Well, ultimately, there aren’t any. If you know what to look for, you can find anything.’

  ‘Thought so. But if you were trying to knock someone out, not necessarily kill them, just incapacitate them, just for a short while, is there anything you could use that a pathologist wouldn’t normally test for?’

  ‘Has Duncan been playing you up again?’ There was an edge to her voice now but I could hardly blame her. It wasn’t exactly a run-of-the-mill question.

  ‘I’m sorry, I wish I had time to explain. I’ll call you soon, I promise. Can you think of anything? Something unusual, that they wouldn’t test for unless they were specifically asked.’

  ‘Well, I’d need to check, but I’m pretty certain they don’t routinely check for things like Benzodiazepines – you know, Nitrazepam or Temazepam. Does that help?’

  ‘Yes, it does. I promise I’m not planning anything illegal.’

  ‘I believe you. Oh, by the way, I got the dress.’

  She named a hideously expensive London bridal designer and wittered away happily for a few more minutes. I was happy to let her, but I wasn’t really listening.

  Dunn might be a dab hand with the old hypnosis, but it still didn’t seem likely that someone as sensible and smart as Dana could be hypnotized into killing herself. Hypnotized for long enough to allow herself to be drugged, maybe. Once unconscious, it would be a relatively simple matter to carry her to the bath and cut through both wrists, probably using her own hands to do it. If Stephen Renney hadn’t found anything in Dana’s system, it was because he hadn’t known what to look for. I wasn’t going to accept what Gifford had said last night. Dana was not going to her grave a suicide; not if I had anything to do with it.

  ‘Hey!’

  I looked up. ‘Hey yourself!’

  Helen stood in the doorway. She was wearing the same suit as last night but had changed her blouse for a ruby-red one. She still looked great. I wondered if Dana had taken her shopping, supervised her wardrobe. Or maybe it had been the other way round. Maybe Dana owed her sense of style to this lady. I’d probably never know. I felt a pang of regret that I’d never be able to know them as a couple.

  She came in. I realized I was ridiculously pleased to see her.

  ‘Coffee?’ I offered. She nodded and I got up to pour it out. We sat together for a while.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, and from the way she was looking at me, just a little too intently, I started to think that she might have something to tell me.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, stalling for time, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear whatever it was. ‘Better than fine, actually. Duncan and I sorted a few things out and here I am, back at work.’

  ‘Things that seemed impossible just twenty-four hours ago?’

  I nodded. ‘Is Duncan . . . I mean . . .’

  ‘Is he in the clear? I think so. His story about being a shareholder checks out and he doesn’t seem to have set foot on Tronal for years. The Franklin Stone and Mr Gifford seem out of it as well. You heard about Dunn, I take it.’

  ‘I did. Is that bad?’

  ‘Bad as it gets. When a copper’s your villain, there’s no happy ending.’

  ‘Is he still missing?’

  She finished her coffee and got up to pour a refill. ‘Yep. He was seen catching a ferry to the mainland on Tuesday evening. We’ve alerted all the air and ferry ports but . . .’

  ‘Could be well away by now?’

  She nodded. ‘Right, the good news is, your fields have been thoroughly swept this morning. You won’t be uncovering any more nasty surprises should you decide to plant a few spring bulbs.’

  ‘And it was all properly done? The instruments were switched on and everything?’ Well, I had to ask.

  Helen didn’t take offence. She almost laughed.<
br />
  ‘OK, let me tell you what they did, as far as I understand it. First of all, they flew over in the chopper this morning and took a whole load of aerial photographs. Apparently – and I admit I didn’t know this – when soil has been disturbed at any depth, it shows up on the surface: either as marks on the soil or as crop marks. Also, you might get an increase in vegetation – a rush of spring flowers, for example. Aerial photographs can pick that up.’

  ‘Did they see anything?’

  ‘Nothing. But apparently they didn’t really expect to. The method works best for larger sites, such as prehistoric burial grounds. Individual graves rarely show up; but it has been known, so they were being thorough to check.’

  ‘So what then?’

  ‘The next step was to use ground-penetrating radar. They have instruments that send electromagnetic pulses into the ground. When the pulses hit a soil surface that differs in water content from that around it, the signals bounce back. The team plot all these signals on a graph and, if anything has been buried, the pattern of reflections will show it up on the graph. It’s even possible to estimate how deep a burial might be, based on the time delay for the reflections to come back. We’ve done that across the length and breadth of the field.’

  ‘Clever stuff.’

  ‘Oh it’s amazing. Course, it’s not foolproof. It works best, apparently, on sandy, high-resistivity soil, of which there’s very little in your field. So they did one further sweep. This time using soil analysis. Want me to go on?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Soil analysis depends upon measuring the amount of phosphate in the soil. Phosphate is present in all soils, but where a body – human or large animal – is buried, the phosphate levels increase quite considerably.’

  That certainly made sense to me. Bodies are particularly rich in phosphorus which, along with calcium, gives bone its strength and hardness. It’s also found in other tissues of the body.

  ‘Decomposition of human bodies after burial enriches the phosphorus content of the surrounding soil,’ continued Helen. ‘The team took hundreds of soil samples from your field. If any strong pockets of phosphorus are found, that could indicate more burials.’

  ‘How long will it take to test them all?’

  ‘A few more days. But they’re already well under way and nothing has been found so far. I really don’t think there’s anything down there, Tora.’

  I said nothing for a moment.

  ‘So, no more worries about little grey men with a silver fixation?’ said Helen.

  I had the grace to look bashful. ‘Guess the stress was getting to me the other night.’

  She smiled back. I looked at her carefully. The slightly wary, nervous look was still there.

  ‘There’s something else, isn’t there? Something not so good?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. It looks like Stephen Gair isn’t going to be facing justice after all. Not in this life anyway.’

  Helen broke eye contact first. She stood up and walked to the window.

  ‘What happened?’ I managed, wondering why I was feeling so cold. It wasn’t as if he’d got away or anything.

  ‘He hanged himself,’ she replied, still enjoying my view of the staff car park. ‘He was found shortly after five this morning.’

  She gave me time to think about it. I thought about it. I would never have the chance to face him in court, to say I know what you did and have people believe me. I would never be able to look him in the eyes and say Got you, you bastard; I bloody well got you! How did I feel about that? Pretty damned pissed off, to be frank. I stood up.

  ‘How could that have happened? What did you do, give him some rope to practise tying knots with?’

  At last she turned round. She held up her hand. ‘Take it easy. It will be fully investigated. I can’t give you details, I’m afraid. These things happen. I know they shouldn’t, but they do. He just wasn’t considered a suicide risk.’

  ‘Unlike Dana, of course, who you dismissed as a suicide without a shred of evidence.’

  As soon as I said it, I knew I’d gone too far. Helen’s face had hardened. She started to move. I stepped in front of her.

  ‘I’m sorry, that was totally uncalled for.’

  She relaxed a little.

  ‘I guess it’s really over then?’ I said.

  ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you? This Tronal business will keep us going for years.’

  I found myself wanting to sit down again. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That place is an unholy hotchpotch of medical work, social services, legitimate business and the illegal trading of infants. A few dozen people are connected with it; they all need to be checked out. And, of course, we obviously have to trace all the babies that have been adopted from Tronal.’

  ‘All that could take a while.’

  ‘Quite. Trouble is, we can see the money coming in but they’re all cash transfers that will be hellishly hard to trace to source. We may suspect which adoption agencies were involved, but without proof they’re hardly going to admit it.’

  ‘What about at this end? There would be birth records, adoption papers, passports prepared.’

  ‘Maybe, but we can’t find them yet. Well, apart from the half-dozen or so a year that get adopted locally, but they seem to be completely in order. Everyone we’ve spoken to so far, including George Reynolds at social services and his team, are denying any knowledge of overseas adoptions – whether for money or not.’

  ‘Well, they would, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but the fact is, there’s no evidence of any significant number of babies being born there – less than a dozen a year by all accounts. On the surface, it seems a pretty low-key operation; which, when you come to think of it, you’d expect. How many babies are put up for adoption these days?’

  She had a point. ‘But he admitted it. He said he was selling babies over the Internet.’

  ‘True, but apart from the money and the word of a now-dead man, we really have no evidence.’

  She walked over to the coffee table, put her mug down. ‘I’m on my way up there now.’

  ‘Long trip,’ said a voice from the doorway. We both turned. Kenn Gifford stood there. Neither of us had heard him approach. ‘No helicopter pad on Tronal,’ he explained. ‘You need to go by road and boat.’

  ‘I’ll call you later, Tora,’ said Helen. She nodded at Gifford and left the room.

  ‘DCI Rowley?’ he asked me. I nodded.

  ‘Every bit as gorgeous as they say.’

  I felt the need for something to do. I picked up Helen’s mug and my own and took them over to the sink. ‘Take it from me, you’re wasting your time.’

  He laughed. ‘I’d heard. How you doing?’ He came closer, looked carefully at me. It’s so bloody unfair, this ability big men have to intimidate others; they don’t have to be smart, they don’t have to threaten, they just have to be there. I side-stepped round him and walked over to the window.

  ‘Fine,’ I answered for what felt like the tenth time that morning.

  ‘Good to have you back.’ He glanced at the coffee pot, noticed it was empty and helped himself to a digestive biscuit.

  ‘Says the man who suspended me in the first place.’

  ‘Says the woman who’s never going to let me forget it.’ He moved towards me again and I retreated behind the desk.

  He made an exasperated face. ‘Will you keep still? I’m not about to hypnotize you. I never really managed it anyway; you’re a particularly tricky subject.’

  And yes, as I was meant to, I felt a surge of pride at that. I also felt a bit daft. I decided to risk looking him in the eyes – green, they were, a deep, mossy green this morning – but if he put his hands on my shoulders I was yelling.

  ‘I didn’t get a chance to congratulate you last night,’ he said.

  I searched his face for sarcasm, but didn’t see any.

  ‘I’d be tempted to say you picked the wrong profession but I really don’t want to lose
you from this one.’

  ‘You’re only saying that because the hospital has come up smelling of lavender. If there were any dirt still clinging to you and yours you’d be patting me on the head, making worried noises and murmuring about sedatives.’

  He fixed me with a stare. ‘Richard is still in custody.’

  Shit, I’d walked right into that one. Would I ever learn to engage my brain before my mouth opened?

  ‘Sorry. I should have thought of that.’

  And then that big warm hand was on my upper arm and I wasn’t making a sound.

  ‘You’ve dealt with more this past week than most do in a lifetime. Richard can look after himself.’ He turned to leave and there was a cold space on my arm.

  ‘Kenn . . .’

  He turned in the doorway.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He raised one eyebrow.

  ‘About suspecting you,’ I added.

  ‘Accepted. And I’m still thinking about it.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About what I’m going to do with you.’ He grinned at me and left the room.

  I sat down. ‘Shit!’ I said out loud. And there I’d been thinking all my problems were solving themselves.

  I went downstairs. A couple of my third-trimester ladies were kind enough to say they’d missed me at the last clinic. But the Tronal business was still preying on my mind, so as soon as we broke for lunch, I grabbed a sandwich and went back up to my room. From my bag I dug out the pieces of paper that had started it all: the record of deliveries for the Shetland District Health Authority.

  Let it go, Tora, said a voice in the back of my head; the faint, slightly wistful voice that speaks for the sensible, grown-up part of me. Unfortunately, I’d never really learned to pay attention to that voice and I wasn’t about to start now. Once again, I counted up the Tronal deliveries. Four. Four in a six-month period meant around six to ten a year. If around half a dozen were adopted locally, that just didn’t leave enough to sell overseas and make any sort of money.

  Where the hell had Stephen Gair been getting his babies from? And how on earth could the sort of state-of-the-art maternity facility that had been described to me be feasible for just eight births per annum? The equipment and the staff would be standing around doing nothing for most of the year. There must be more babies being born at Tronal than were recorded on my stats. But how could a birth not be registered?