Too many to feel shocked any more.
But not too many not to care.
15
Lynn hated this drive at the best of times, the long slow crawl up the A23 through suburban south London. They were heading for the Royal South London Hospital, in Crystal Hill, where Caitlin was going to spend the next four days being assessed by the pre-transplant team there.
The last time Lynn had come up this way was back in April, when she had taken Caitlin to IKEA to choose some new furnishings for her bedroom. At least that had been fun – inasmuch as battling through the Sunday afternoon crush at IKEA could be any sane person’s idea of fun.
But they did have a treat at the end of the ordeal – in fact, a double treat so far as Lynn was concerned, because Caitlin did something she very rarely did. She had not just eaten something she would normally have turned her nose up at for being
unhealthy, but had totally pigged out on it.
It was after they had finally got through the checkout queue, with their purchases of a bedside table, lamp, bedcover, wallpaper and curtains. They had gone to the restaurant area and eaten meatballs and new potatoes, followed by ice cream. Even naughtier, they’d bought two hotdogs as well, swamped in mustard and ketchup, as a treat for their supper, but had eaten them in the car long before they had reached home. Lynn had half expected Caitlin to want to stop and throw them up at any moment, but instead her daughter had sat there with a grin on her face, licking her lips from time to time and proclaiming, ‘That was wicked! Totally wicked!’
It was one of the few occasions in her life that Lynn could ever remember seeing Caitlin actually enjoy her food, and she had hoped at the time – a hope that was later dashed – that it might herald the start of a new and more positive phase of her daughter’s life.
They were passing IKEA now, the tall, floodlit smokestacks with the blue and yellow bands near the top, on their left. She glanced at Caitlin in the passenger seat beside her, hunched over her mobile phone, engrossed in texting. She had been texting non-stop for the past hour since they had left Brighton. The glare of oncoming headlights lit up her face, a ghostly, yellow-tinged white.
‘Fancy some meatballs, darling?’
‘Yeah, right,’ Caitlin said sleepily, without looking up, as if her mother was offering her poison.
‘We’re just passing IKEA – we could stop.’
She worked the keypad for some moments, then said, ‘They wouldn’t be open now.’
‘It’s only quarter to eight. I think they’re open until ten.’
‘Meatballs? Yuck. Do you want to poison me or something?’
‘Remember when we came here in April, to get the stuff for your room? We had some then and you really enjoyed them.’
‘I read about meatballs on the Net,’ Caitlin said, suddenly becoming animated. ‘They’re full of fat and crap. You know, some meatballs – they’ve even got bits of bone and hooves in. It’s like some burgers – they literally put the whole cow in a crushing machine. Like, everything, right? The head, skin, intestines. That way they can say it is pure beef.’
‘Not IKEA’s.’
‘Yeah, I forgot, you worship at the altar of IKEA. Like their stuff is blessed by some Nordic god.’
Lynn smiled, reached out a hand and touched her daughter’s wrist. ‘It would be better than the hospital food.’
‘Yeah, well, don’t worry. I’m not going to eat
anything
while I’m in that fucking place.’ She tapped her keypad again. ‘Anyhow, we just ate supper.’
‘I ate, darling. You didn’t touch your food.’
‘Whatever.’ She texted some more. Then she said, ‘Actually, that’s not true. I had some yoghurt.’ She yawned.
Lynn halted the Peugeot at traffic lights, removed her hand for a moment to put the gear lever into neutral, then put it back again on Caitlin’s wrist. ‘You must eat something tonight.’
‘What’s the point?’
‘To keep up your strength.’
‘I’m being strong.’
She squeezed her daughter’s wrist, but there was no response. Then she dug the map out of the door pocket and briefly checked it. The exhaust pipe banged on the underside of the car as the engine idled. The lights turned green. She jammed the map back into the pocket, wrenched the sticky gear lever into first and let out the clutch.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m scared. And I’m so tired.’
Following the traffic, she changed gear again, then up into third, and squeezed Caitlin’s wrist once more.
‘You’re going to be fine, darling. You are in the best possible hands.’
‘Luke’s been on the Internet. He just texted me. He said that nine out of ten people on the liver transplant waiting list in the USA die before they get one. That three people die every day in the UK waiting for a transplant. And there’s 140,000 people in the USA and Europe waiting for transplants.’
In her fury, Lynn did not notice the brake lights on the vehicles ahead were glowing and she had to stamp on the brakes, locking up the front wheel to avoid rear-ending a van.
The Internet!
she thought. Sod the fucking Internet. Sod that jerk, Luke. Has that brainless twerp not got anything better to do than spook my daughter?
‘Luke’s wrong,’ she said. ‘I discussed it with Dr Hunter earlier. It’s just not true. What happens is that some very sick people get put on the waiting list far too late. But that’s not your situation.’
She tried to think of something else to say that would not sound patronizing. But her mind was suddenly a blank. The consultant, Dr Granger, had said they would try to get her a priority position on the waiting list. But, equally candidly, he’d said that he could not guarantee it. And there was the added problem of Caitlin’s blood group.
She drove on in silence, to the sound of the steady
click-click-click
of Caitlin’s phone keys and the occasional
ping-ping
of an incoming text.
‘Do you want some music on, darling?’ she said finally.
‘Not the crap stuff that you have in this car,’ Caitlin retorted, but at least she said it good-humouredly.
‘Why don’t you try to find something on the radio?’
‘Whatever.’ Caitlin leaned forward and switched the radio on. An old Scissor Sisters song was playing: ‘I don’t feel like dancin’’.
‘That’s me,’ Caitlin said. ‘No dancing today.’
Lynn gave her a wry smile. In the sudden flare of a street light, a thin, scared ghost in the passenger seat smiled wistfully back.
16
‘Well, well, guess who’s here! And you’ve even beaten the blowflies to this one!’ Roy Grace said, as, followed by DI Mantle, he walked past the scene guard at the bottom of the gangway and reluctantly acknowledged the reporter from the local Brighton newspaper, the
Argus.
It did not seem to matter what time of the day or night, Kevin Spinella always turned up ahead of all other reporters, particularly when there was a whiff of a suspicious death.
Or perhaps it was the whiff of death itself. Perhaps the young reporter’s razor-sharp nose could smell death from the same four-mile distance as blowflies.
Either that or he had found some way of cracking the latest secure police radio network. Grace always suspected he had an insider in the police and was determined, one day, to find out, but at this moment his thoughts were on something else entirely. He needed to get to the party for Chief Superintendent Jim Wilkinson as quickly as possible and find out just what Cleo had meant when she’d said coldly, I want to tell you face to face, not over the phone.
Just what did this woman he loved so much want to tell him? And why had she sounded so off? Was she going to dump him? Tell him she had found someone else? Or that she was going back to her previous boyfriend, her born-again Christian barrister jerk?
OK, her ex was an Old Etonian, and Grace knew he could never compete with that. Cleo came from a different background from his own, a wholly different class league. Her family were rich, she had been educated at a private boarding school and she was ferociously intelligent.
By comparison, he was just a dumb, middle-class copper, the son of a middle-class copper. And he had no aspirations beyond that; that was all he wanted to be and all he would ever be. He loved his work and he loved his colleagues. He would happily admit that if he could just freeze time, he would like to remain in his job forever.
Had Cleo now realized that?
Despite all his attempts to keep pace with her Open University degree studies in philosophy, he was falling way behind. Had she decided he was simply not bright enough for her?
‘Nice to see you, Detective Superintendent Grace, Detective Inspector Mantle.’
The reporter flashed a big smile and stepped right into their path. For a moment, their faces were so close he could smell Spinella’s spearmint chewing gum.
‘So what brings two senior detectives to the harbour on a chilly night like this?’
The reporter had a thin, keen-eyed face and a short, modern haircut. He was wearing a beige, gumshoe mackintosh with the collar turned up, over a thin, summer-weight suit and a carefully knotted tie. His tasselled black shoes looked cheap and loud.
‘You don’t look like you’re dressed for fishing,’ Lizzie Mantle quipped.
‘Fishing for facts,’ he retorted, with a quizzical raise of his eyebrows. ‘Or perhaps dredging them up?’
Behind him, the mortuary van began driving off. Spinella turned to glance at it for a second, then he looked back at the two detectives.
‘Could either of you give me a comment?’
‘Not at this stage,’ Grace said. ‘I may hold a press conference after the post-mortem tomorrow.’
Spinella pulled out his notepad, flipping it open. ‘Might be just another floater, then. Can I quote you on that, Detective Superintendent?’
‘I’m sorry, I’ve no comment,’ Grace said.
‘A burial at sea, perhaps?’
Grace walked on past him towards his car. Spinella padded along beside him, keeping pace.
‘Bit odd, isn’t it, that it was weighted down with concrete breeze blocks?’
‘You’ve got my mobile number. Call me tomorrow around midday,’ Grace said. ‘I might know something by then.’
‘Such as what that incision on the body is?’
Grace stopped in his tracks. Then, restraining himself with great difficulty, he remained silent.
Where the hell had he got that from?
It had to be one of the crew members. Spinella was a past master at wheedling information from strangers.
Spinella grinned, knowing he had wrong-footed the detective. ‘Some kind of ritual killing, perhaps? A black magic rite?’
Grace thought quickly, not wanting some sensational headline appearing in the morning edition that would frighten people. But the truth was Spinella might be right. That incision was very strange. It was, as Graham Lewis said, very much like the kind of incision made during a post-mortem. During a ritual too?
‘OK, here’s the deal. If you hold back writing anything other than just the basic facts, that a dredger pulled up an unidentified body, I’ll give you clear water on the story tomorrow as soon as the PM is done. Fair enough?’
‘Clear water!’ Spinella nodded approvingly. ‘Very appropriate, considering where we are. I like it! Nice one, Detective Superintendent! Nice one indeed!’
17
Simona was hungry and she was wet. She had been walking for hours through the dark city streets in the pelting rain. This was always a bad time of year, the cold weather keeping people indoors, the lack of tourists. Hopefully there would be richer pickings in the weeks to come, as Christmas got nearer and the shopping crowds started.
She trudged past a bank that was closed, its windows dark, and wondered what people did inside banks. Important people. Rich people. Then a hotel: a doorman eyed her warily, as if signalling he was guarding the important people inside from her. Next she passed a closed mini-mart, glancing ravenously through its windows at the cans of food and jars of pickles.
She didn’t even have any metallic paint to inhale to take away the hunger pangs. Earlier in the evening she’d had an argument with Romeo and they’d fought over the last bottle and dropped it, and the paint had poured down a gutter. He’d stomped off with the dog and the remnants of the bottle, saying he was going home to get out of the rain. But she was hungry and hadn’t wanted to go back to the underground hole until she had found some food. Besides, the crying of the baby had been worse than ever.
The only thing she had eaten since yesterday was a couple of French fries, thin as matchsticks, which she had scavenged from a discarded carton on the pavement near a McDonald’s. For a while she stood, begging, outside an expensive-looking restaurant, tantalized by the smells of sizzling garlic and roasting meats, but all the dry, satisfied-looking people who had come out and climbed into their cars had ignored her, as if she was invisible.
Cars and taxis and vans sluiced past her now. She walked on, her trainers sodden, splashing through one puddle after another and not caring. Ahead of her was the Gara de Nord railway station – it would be dry inside. Some of her friends would probably be there, until the police threw them out at midnight, and they might have some food. Or she might be able to steal a chocolate bar from the station shop, which would still be open.
She climbed up the steps and went inside Bucharest’s vast, dimly lit main railway terminus. Puddles lay on the floor, glinting eerie reflections of the white, overhead sodium bulbs that stretched away, in pairs, to the far end of the building. Directly ahead, above her, was a large electronic noticeboard that read: PLECARI DEPARTURES. The round clock set into the board said 23.36.
There destinations were listed, with departure times for later that night and the next morning. Some were cities and towns she knew by name, but there were plenty she had never heard of. People talked about other places sometimes. Jobs you could get in other countries where you could earn good money and live in a nice house, and where it was always warm. She heard the clanking, rolling sound of railway carriage wheels. Maybe she could just get on a train and go to wherever it went, and maybe it would be warm there, with lots of food and no babies crying.