Death Watch Read online

  ‘Good. That’s prompt. Thank you. I’m sorry – two points. I need to sign that approval as well – for entry to the organ banks. Can you make that change? And the press office needs to sit on the news until I say so. I don’t want this aspect of the inquiry made public.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Now, please,’ said Shaw. She flicked through a plastic internal telephone directory and made the calls.

  When she’d finished she held the directory in her hand, shaking her head. Then she sat with it on her lap. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, running a hand into her black hair until it stuck, the fingers lost in the thick plush locks. ‘This is really stupid of me. Stupid of all of us. One of your officers was asking if any of us recognized the initials – MVR.’ She put an unvarnished fingernail on one of the telephone entries, stood, and showed Shaw. Motor Vehicle Repair: MVR. ‘There’s a garage over beyond A&E. I’m sorry, we should have thought.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Shaw. But it wasn’t, and sorry was the most overrated word in the language. They could have had a forensic team in the garage while Judd’s body was still smouldering; now the chances of finding relevant evidence were slim. He stood, walked to the glass wall of the office, and rang Valentine on his mobile, telling him to get over to MVR with back-up. Then he took his seat again.

  ‘The kidney that we’ve found on the incinerator belt,’ he said. ‘To what degree can we be sure a crime has been committed here? What’s the best-case scenario, and the worst?’

  Without knocking, Dr Gavin Peploe joined them. He let a smile begin on one side of his lopsided face and slide to the other, shaking Shaw’s hand. A crumpled figure, in a £500 suit, he folded himself easily into a chair, the crossed legs and folded arms revealing not a trace of anxiety.

  ‘Gavin, thanks,’ Mrs Phillips said, adroitly reinforcing her authority by making it clear she’d summoned him. ‘DI Shaw’s first question is a good one, if he doesn’t mind me saying so. Could this be nothing – a one-off?’

  Peploe’s small feet did a little shuffle. ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said. ‘At this moment we don’t have any other evidence of illegal traffic, unauthorized procedures, or organ or tissue retention against anyone’s wishes. Our records are complete for the disposal of tissue and organs from both live patients and cadaveric supplies.’

  Shaw licked his lips, unsettled by the appalling double euphemism.

  ‘So. Here’s a scenario. What if the kidney is diseased – I think the pathologist is still doing tests – it could be something very difficult to detect in an organ which has been partly incinerated. Glomerulosclerosis, for example. What if an earlier bureaucratic error left such a kidney in the system which could not – retrospectively – be matched to documentation? All the NHS theatres run at near full capacity – everyone makes mistakes. We’ve completed nearly two hundred kidney transplants within the trust this year. Organ and tissue disposal is a priority, but it’s only human nature if people spend a bit more time on caring for the living patient. So – an error. Someone panicked, forged the tag, or switched a bag, and tried to slip it onto the incinerator belt.’

  ‘And what are the chances that actually happened?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Nil,’ said Peploe, smiling, his teeth very white against the expensive tan. ‘One in a billion. Organ tracking is the surgeon’s responsibility, then the theatre manager’s. Senior professionals in both cases. If there’d been an earlier error they could just have reported it. It’s a misdemeanour. Why risk a career by trying to cover it up? It doesn’t make sense unless it’s a panic reaction. The one thing experienced theatre staff don’t do, Inspector, is panic.’

  ‘Worst case?’

  Phillips stood and walked to her filing cabinet, leaving Peploe to answer. Shaw noticed for the first time there was a picture on the top in a gilded baroque wooden frame. A formal portrait of a man, seated, a photographic salon backdrop showing trees and a hillside, a church tower just visible. It looked like Mitteleuropa, before the war. The picture of a man seeking to confirm his respectability. A man who wanted to belong.

  ‘The world,’ said Peploe, spreading his hands, ‘is divided into the rich and poor. The poor supply human organs, and the rich receive.’ He tossed a thick file onto the floor beside Shaw. ‘In 2002 the Washington Post reported from a small village in Moldova that fourteen of the forty men had sold body parts. We’re talking liver parts, kidneys, lung, pancreas, colon, corneas, skin, bones, and tissue such as Achilles tendons – even marrow.

  ‘This is a worldwide trade. The poor selling to the rich. A Turkish peasant can get two thousand seven hundred dollars for a kidney he doesn’t need. Someone who does need one will pay a hundred and fifty thousand. Note the profit margin. In 2000 eBay auctioned a kidney and reached one hundred thousand dollars before the FBI stepped in. There is also plenty of evidence that children were sold for body-part harvesting out of eastern Europe and Russia – largely through orphanages set up to feed a burgeoning black market.

  ‘There are darker corners of this market,’ he added, laughing again. ‘An entire human body is worth about a quarter of a million dollars. It did not take the market long to realize that if people wouldn’t donate parts, or sell them, then systematic murder would provide one source of supply. Tissue brokers, who supply the major bio-med companies, may not be as punctilious as they should be when checking the provenance of body parts.’

  Shaw took a deep breath.

  ‘And one other sophistication…’ added Peploe. ‘The Chinese government uses prisoners on death row as a source for harvesting tissue and organs. Prisoners may undergo several operations before they are deemed of no more use. Until that point they are effectively kept alive to provide fresh body parts. They’re farmed, with regular harvests. Then they are executed. This happens. There is fragmentary – anecdotal – evidence it happens elsewhere, too.’

  Somewhere, a hundred feet below, they heard a car alarm sound.

  ‘I need to read about this,’ said Shaw, picking up the file.

  ‘That’s all I could download this morning,’ said Peploe. ‘UN report, some background stuff from the HTA, and a few case studies from Organ Watch – a pressure group. If you want any more, let me know. It’s my specialist subject – at least, it’s going to be.’

  ‘If we’re talking illegal operations, could they be taking place here? At the Queen Vic?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘It’s unthinkable,’ said Phillips, leaning against the filing cabinet.

  Her voice had been sharp, too sharp, and she knew it. She took a deep breath. ‘It is not possible for an illegal organ transplant to be completed in an NHS hospital without being detected.’ She gave Shaw a list. ‘This is a roll call of all surgeons working within the trust. There are twenty-eight names here. Any one of them could perform this operation. But, as I say, I find it impossible to believe it happened here.’

  ‘If not here, then where?’ Shaw said bluntly. ‘How easy is it to complete a successful kidney transplant in a backstreet operating theatre?’

  Peploe steepled his fingers. ‘Well, a lot easier than it was. New drugs mean you don’t need a blood match, or a tissue match for that matter. And the chances of organ rejection are significantly lower. Plus, you’ve got keyhole surgery for the removal now, so the donor can be up and about in hours. By the way – so you know – when you give someone a new kidney you don’t take out the old one. So if this is a transplant, we’re not missing the diseased organ. The new organ goes in here…’ He indicated a spot in his groin. ‘Joined to the urethra.’

  ‘Well, we have to begin somewhere,’ said Shaw, holding up the paper Phillips had given him. ‘We’ll start by interviewing everyone on this list.’

  Shaw stood. ‘For the record, I am going to have to ask both of you this question. Do either of you have anything to do with illegal organ removal in this hospital, or with the death of Bryan Judd?’

  There ensued what might have been a stunned silence. ‘I’m sorry, but I need an
answer,’ said Shaw.

  ‘Nothing.’ They said it together, in perfect unison.

  23

  The Red House had been the CID’s out-of-office office for nearly thirty years. Its principal original attraction had been the rarity of its public telephone in the corridor leading to the loos – a vital link with the outside world before the advent of the mobile phone. Now it had no attractions at all. There were four drab rooms, a tiny bar in a lobby by the door. Its local trade – mainly stall-holders from the town’s two markets – crowded into the front bar. The CID took the larger of the back two, a room dominated by a lithograph of the Guildhall and an old photo of the city walls before they had been demolished to make way for St James’s police HQ.

  Shaw always got a thrill walking over the threshold, having spent many childhood evenings sitting outside on the kerb, waiting for his father, bought off with crisps and squash. Its interior had been part of his father’s secret world. Now it was his world.

  ‘Mark,’ said Shaw, nodding at the door. DC Mark Birley wedged a stool against it.

  They were crammed into the room. Pints and alcopops bristled on the table tops. No one was on fruit juice, and everyone would drive home; one of the police force’s abiding ironies. Everyone had a single-sheet briefing note from Twine – all the major developments summarized.

  Valentine stood, leaning his back against the nicotine-yellow wallpaper, nursing his second pint.

  Shaw sat on the wide window ledge, his back to the stained-glass picture of the pier at Hunstanton. He took one sip of Guinness, annoyed to find a shamrock doodled in the white head.

  ‘Anything we should know that’s not in the note?’ he asked.

  DC Campbell waved a lime-green bottle of alcopop.

  ‘MVR – Motor Vehicle Repair. The garage appears completely legit, they don’t issue torches. Staff of thirteen. We’re talking to everyone who was on duty yesterday, nothing yet.’

  ‘OK. But we don’t have an alternative, Fiona, so let’s dig deeper. What about the vehicles themselves? All accounted for? Any out over the weekend – that happens. Nice little sideline. Bit of pocket money. They rent out the hospital vans for forty-eight hours and no one’s the wiser – as long as someone’s fiddling the mileage. Really dig – OK?’

  ‘We’ll check it,’ said Campbell.

  Check-It. A few of them grinned into their drinks.

  Twine stretched his legs under a round iron table, leather boots screeching on the wooden floor. ‘Door-to-door picked up plenty of gossip on the Judds’ marriage. Tongues wag – mainly because Ally Judd seems to spend most of her spare time dusting Thiago Martin’s bedroom furniture.’ That got a laugh.

  ‘I’ve got a file getting fatter on the priest – he’s right about not being welcome in his own country. There’s a police record. He’s been telling fibs about his medical degree as well. He was struck off in 1994 – a decision which, incidentally, means he can’t practise in the UK.’

  ‘Why was he struck off?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘He tried to prove that a contaminated water supply in one of the shanty towns was causing lead poisoning in children. He ran a study based on blood and urine samples. The parents worked for the company that supplied the water. He didn’t get their permission. When he tried to publish there was a legal action. Big money talks – he got struck off. The church wasn’t too pleased either. His own parish, in one of the up-market suburbs, hadn’t seen him for eight months.

  ‘We’re checking his movements yesterday. He helped someone move house early evening, out of council care, but he was back by seven. He says he’s doing an MA with the Open University and was upstairs studying. He says he was alone. Ally Judd says she went to the presbytery to sweep and wash the floors while the light lasted early evening. She says she left her gear there, thinking the power cut would end and she could go back and carry on. When it didn’t she went and got her stuff. Says she called up the stairs to the priest both times – once at 7.30, then about 10.30. Which is convenient as it provides a neat alibi.’

  He leant forward, elbows on the table. ‘And just to say we got hold of Norma Jean’s medical records. Her baby was due in early 1993. So we tracked down abandoned babies for the Eastern Counties – nothing even close. And certainly no record of a regular registered birth in hospital. There’s also a blank on bank accounts, driving licence, and passport – she didn’t have one in 1992. She’s gone,’ he finished, his palms open.

  A thunderstorm had been brewing for an hour and now it broke, rattling the windows, chugging in the downpipes. The room got darker, the wall lights warmer, and they could smell the sea.

  ‘And one loose end,’ added Twine. ‘Bill Creake says the floater who fetched up on the storm grid down in the docks looks like a suicide from Cleethorpes. Wife says he went for a walk four days ago along the beach, didn’t come back. Left his dog tied to a post in the dunes, his shoes and socks neat and tidy. Age is about right – mid-fifties. He’d just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. They’re getting the dental records down.’

  Shaw thought about the body in the mortuary at the Ark – the single arm protruding from the shroud, the marks at the wrist. ‘OK – thanks.’

  Then he stopped himself going on, annoyed that he hadn’t tracked down that detail. ‘Just one thing – ask Bill to ask the wife if he wore a watch. Perhaps he left that on the sands too? Only there’s a mark on his wrist – odd. Maybe one of those copper bands to guard against rheumatism. Just let me know.’

  Twine made a note, the Mont Blanc’s nib scratching on notepaper.

  The chatter in the room had begun to rise so Shaw pitched his voice just a little louder. ‘Right. George and I have just interviewed Aidan Holme at the hospital,’ said Shaw. ‘He was brimful of pain-killers, but he was compos mentis. He understood that we’d found his fingerprints at the murder scene. I think he’s told us the truth – so here it is…’

  The room in intensive care had been like one of Jan Orzsak’s fish tanks. Tubes bubbled, air tanks hissed, and the light was a sickly low-spectrum blue. Holme looked like he’d been smuggled out of the Valley of the Kings: bandages around his chest, throat, and one half of the skull – the right. The left half was red with the heat in the room, the visible eye encrusted with sleep.

  Holme’s voice was a whisper, but clear enough, if Shaw sat with his head bowed down to his lips, like a priest. Valentine had sat opposite, trying to take a note, and hadn’t asked a question.

  ‘I’m going to die,’ said Holme, before Shaw could speak. They’d been briefed in the corridor outside by the consultant who said the patient’s vital signs were poor. The burns had put a burden on his heart which had not responded to medication. He had a lung infection, septicaemia, and internal bleeding inside his skull where he’d struck his head on the road. He was too ill to survive an operation to relieve the pressure on the brain.

  ‘You’re in good hands here, the best,’ said Shaw, resisting the urge to take his hand. On the side table by the bed were two cards, stiff and slightly formal, both asking the recipient to ‘Get Well Soon’. There was a bowl of fruit and a bottle of Lucozade, unopened.

  Shaw outlined what they knew. Holme listened with his eyes closed, each swallow making his Adam’s apple creak.

  When Shaw had finished he realized that Holme had been saving his strength, because when he opened his eye it was clearer, brighter.

  ‘It wasn’t difficult – at the furnace,’ he said. ‘That’s my subject, right? Chemistry. I used to teach it. I’d make a package for each drug to swap for the canister. I’d know what was on the belt because Bry got to see a note telling the engineers what would be in the consignment. Take crack. The chemical signature is hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. But the key would be traces of sodium from the bicarbonate of soda used to make the rock.’ He smiled, and winced with the pain of moving the flesh on his face. His throat started to spasm and it was only after a few seconds that Shaw realized he was laughing.

  ‘Yo
u put it together in the basement of the house…’ said Shaw, recalling the chemistry lab equipment. He got his lips close to his ear. ‘But how did you do the swap?’

  ‘I got inside. Inside the machine. There’s a maintenance door, you can slide in by the belt, so you’re right there, just before the inner doors of the furnace. It’s hot – too hot to touch anything. But it only takes a few seconds. When the stuff came through I’d take a stash; not all – just one canister, maybe two. That’s the trick – don’t be greedy. Then I’d put the package I’d made up on the belt. Straight swap. Once the last batch was on the belt the coppers were off anyway – so I’d only be inside for two, three minutes, max. Bry would knock and I’d slip out. I never told him how easy it was – best that way.’ He tried to wink, the encrusted eye jerking open.

  ‘How’d you get into the hospital?’

  ‘Up the ladder, where Bry smoked. Foolproof – you just walk in off the street into the goods yard and wait until they take a break. You don’t have to wait long. They brew up in a hut by the gate. You can’t see the ladder from the yard.’

  He closed his eyes.

  ‘But then Bry wanted out? Like the family says?’

  The eye came open, angry. ‘Shit. No.’ He shook his head despite the pain. ‘That’s Bry’s story because they all wanted him to stop. But Bry – he was happy. Happy as he’d ever be. No. I wanted to stop. We’d fought over it; I’d been telling him for months. But this big shipment was coming in and he wanted to do it. And he wanted some serious money back – a full share: fifty-fifty. I went up there that last day to tell him I wouldn’t do it.

  ‘I had a life once. I wanted it back. I stopped using about eighteen months ago. So I was looking for a new start – a bit of cash to get me out, and up. So I tried a couple of deals, and got caught. I was going down, whatever the lawyers say. I know enough people who’ve been down. If you supply it’s OK. But you use too – no one can resist that. I thought, if I go in it’ll kill me.’