Branson nodded gloomily.
‘Know what Winston Churchill said about appeasement?’ said Roy.
‘Tell me?’
‘An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.’
36
The two bodies had been dumped in the sea in an identical way to Unknown Male, trussed up in plastic sheeting tied with blue cord and weighed down with breeze blocks.
They arrived at the mortuary parcelled in two further layers, the white plastic forensic bags in which they had been brought to the surface by the police divers, and the heavier-duty black plastic body bags in which they had been hauled up on to the dive boat, and in which they had remained until arriving at the mortuary.
The first to be unwrapped, in a tediously slow process, was a young teenage boy, perhaps a year or two older than the previous body, Nadiuska estimated. Less good-looking, with a beaky nose and a face badly pockmarked from acne, Unknown Male 2 was also missing his heart, lungs, kidneys and liver. They had been surgically removed in the same meticulous way.
Nadiuska was now working on the layers around the body of a young girl, also in her mid-teens, she estimated. Death took away the personality from a face, Grace always thought, leaving it a blank, which made it difficult to tell what people had
really
looked like when they were alive. But even with her pale, waxy skin and her long brown hair, tangled and matted, he could see she had been quite beautiful, if far too thin.
The pathologist was of the opinion that these two bodies had been in the water for the same length of time as Unknown Male. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist, Grace figured, to work out the probability that all three of them had gone into the sea together.
Which raised the stakes from the initial discovery of a single body considerably. In his mind, he had now dismissed any possibility that these were formal burials at sea that had drifted from the official seabed grave area. So who were these three teenagers? Where had they come from? Who were their parents? Who was missing them? Had they been dumped overboard from one of the dozens of foreign-registered merchant ships that travelled down the English Channel around the clock, from just about every country in the world?
There were no marks on Unknown Male 2’s body to suggest death from an accident or a blow to the head. There were puncture marks on his skin, just like the earlier body, consistent, as Nadiuska had just repeated, with organ removal for transplant.
A dark shadow was moving across Grace’s mind. For most of the time, he stood in the corridor that led into the now very crowded post-mortem room, mobile phone to his ear, making one call after another. His first had been to his MSA, Eleanor Hodgson, getting her to clear his diary for the immediate days ahead. There were just two dates he hoped to be able to keep. One, tonight, was his promise to a colleague to visit a football game at the Crew Club in White-hawk. He might be able to make that if DI Mantle took the 6.30 briefing meeting instead of him.
The second, was the CID dinner dance tomorrow night, which, with over 450 attending, was going to be quite a bash. It had been a tough year and he was looking forward to taking Cleo, now that their relationship was out in the open, and relaxing with his colleagues. And maybe getting an opportunity to improve on the poor impression he reckoned he had made with the new Chief Constable on Wednesday night.
Cleo, who had spent weeks fretting about what she was going to wear, and an amount equal to the GDP of an emerging African nation buying a dress, would be deeply disappointed if they now did not make it.
After going through his diary, Grace had then made a series of calls expanding his Outside Inquiry Team from the original six, to twenty-two. Now, as he stood talking to Tony Case, the Senior Support Officer at Sussex House, organizing space for his new team in one of the building’s two Major Incident Rooms, he watched Nadiuska at work, carefully taping the high-tensile cords around the breeze blocks, in the hope of finding a tell-tale skin cell or glove fibre from whoever had tied them. When each strip lost its tackiness, she bagged it for microscopic inspection later.
Michael Forman, the Coroner’s Officer, stood beside her, observing carefully and occasionally making notes, or checking his BlackBerry. David Browne, the Crime Scene Manager, was in attendance, along with two of his SOCOs. One of them, the forensic photographer, James Gartrell, was once more taking photographs of every stage of the post-mortem, while the other was dealing with the packaging in which the two corpses had arrived. At the next table along, Cleo and Darren were tidying up Unknown Male 2, suturing the incision once more.
Every time you thought you had seen it all, Roy Grace mused, some new horror would surprise you. He had read about people in Turkey and South America who got talking to beautiful women in bars and then woke up hours later in bathtubs full of ice, with sutured incisions down one side of their body and missing a kidney. But until now he had dismissed such stories as urban myths. And he knew the importance of never jumping to conclusions.
But three young people at the bottom of the sea with their vital organs professionally removed…
The press would have a field day. The citizens of Brighton and Hove would be worried when this news came out, and he already had two – as yet unreturned – urgent messages on his mobile phone to call the
Argus
reporter, Kevin Spinella. He would need to orchestrate the press carefully, to maximize public response in helping to identify the bodies, without causing any undue distress. But equally, he knew that the best way to grab the public’s attention was with a sensational headline.
Press conferences were not popular at weekends, so he could buy himself some time until Monday. But he was going to have to throw a few titbits to Spinella – and as a starting point the
Argus
, with its wide local circulation, could be the most helpful in the short term.
So what was he going to tell him? And, equally importantly, what was he going to conceal? He had long learned that in any murder inquiry you always tried to hold back some information that would be known only to the killer. That helped you eliminate time-waster phone calls.
For the moment, he put the press out of his mind, concentrating on what he could learn from the three bodies recovered so far. In his notebook, he jotted down Ritual killings? and ringed the words.
Yes, a very definite possibility.
Could they possibly have been organ donors who had all wanted to be buried at sea? Too unlikely to be considered seriously at this stage.
A serial killer? But why would he – or she – bother with the careful suturing after removal of the organs? To put the police off the scent? Possible. Not to be dismissed at this stage.
Organ trafficking?
Occam’s razor he wrote next, as the thought suddenly came into his mind. Occam was a fourteenth-century philosopher monk who used the analogy of taking a razor-sharp knife to cut away everything but the most obvious explanation. That, Brother Occam believed, was where the truth usually lay. Grace was inclined to agree with him.
Grace’s favourite fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, held to the dictum: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
He looked at Glenn Branson, who was standing in a corner of the room with a worried expression on his face, talking on his mobile phone. It would do him good to have a challenge, Grace thought. Something to get his teeth into and distract him from all his nightmarish legal problems with Ari, who, privately, Grace had never liked.
Walking over to him, and waiting for him to finish a call, Grace said, ‘I need you to do something. I need you to find out everything you can about the world of trafficking in human organs.’
‘Need a new liver, do you, old-timer? I’m not surprised.’
‘Yeah, yeah, very funny. Get Norman Potting to help you. He’s good at researching obscure stuff.’
‘Dirty Pretty Things!’ Branson said. ‘See that movie?’
Grace shook his head.
‘That was about illegal immigrants selling kidneys in a seedy hotel in London.’
Suddenly he had the Detective Superintendent’s attention. ‘Really? Tell me more.’
‘Roy!’ Nadiuska called out. ‘Look, this is interesting!’
Grace, followed by Glenn Branson, walked over to the corpse and stared down at the tiny tattoo she was pointing to. He frowned.
‘What’s that?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
He turned to Glenn Branson. The DS shrugged and then, stating the obvious, said, ‘It’s not English.’
37
Romeo clambered down the steel ladder, holding a huge grocery bag under one arm. Valeria was sitting on her old mattress, leaning against the concrete wall, rocking her sleeping baby. Tracy Chapman was singing ‘Fast Car’ yet again. Again. Again. The fucking song was starting to drive him crazy.
He noticed three strangers, in their mid-teens, on the floor, slouched against the wall opposite Valeria. They were just sitting there, looking strung out on Aurolac. The tell-tale squat plastic bottle with its broken white seal and the yellow and red label bearing the words
LAC Bronze Argintiu
lay on the floor in front of them. The rank smell of this place hit him, as it did each time, and with particular force now in contrast to the fresh, windy, rainy air outside. The mustiness, the fetid body smells, dirty clothes and the soiled-nappy stench of the baby.
‘Food!’ he announced breezily. ‘I got some money and I bought amazing food!’
Only Valeria reacted. Her big, sad eyes rolled towards him, like two marbles that had run out of momentum. ‘Who gave you money?’
‘It was a charity. They give money to street people like us!’
She shrugged her shoulders, uninterested. ‘People who give you money always want something back.’
He shook his head vigorously. ‘No, not this person. She was beautiful, you know? Beautiful inside!’ Then he walked over to her and opened up the bag for her to inspect the contents. ‘Look, I bought you stuff for the baby!’
Valeria dug her hand in and pulled out a tin of condensed milk. ‘I’m worried about Simona,’ she said, turning it around and reading the label. ‘She hasn’t moved all day. She just cries.’
Romeo walked over and squatted down beside Simona, putting an arm around her. ‘I bought you chocolate,’ he said. ‘Your favourite. Dark chocolate!’
She was silent for some moments and then she sniffed. ‘Why?’
‘Why?’
She said nothing.
He pulled out a bar and put it under her nose. ‘Why? Because I want you to have something nice, that’s why.’
‘I want to die. That would be nice.’
‘You said yesterday you wanted to go to England. Wouldn’t that be nicer?’
‘That’s a dream,’ she said, staring bleakly ahead. ‘Dreams don’t come true, not for people like us.’
‘I met someone today. She can take us to England. Would you like to meet her?’
‘Why? Why would she take us to England?’
‘Charity!’ he replied brightly. ‘She has a charity to help street people. I told her about us. She can get us jobs in England!’
‘Yeah, sure, as erotic dancers?’
‘Any kind of jobs we want. Bars. Cleaning rooms in hotels. Anything.’
‘Is she like the man I met at the station?’
‘No, she is a nice lady. She is kind.’
Simona said nothing. More tears trickled down her cheeks.
‘We can’t stay like this. Is that what you want, to stay like this for all our lives?’
‘I don’t want to be hurt any more.’
‘Can’t you trust me, Simona? Can’t you?’
‘What is trust?’
‘We’ve seen England on television. In the papers. It’s a good country. We could have an apartment in England! We could have a new life there!’
She started crying. ‘I don’t want a new life any more. I want to die. Finish. It would be easier.’
‘She’s coming by tomorrow. Will you at least meet her, talk to her?’
‘Why would anybody want to help us, Romeo?’ she asked. ‘We’re nothing.’
‘Because there are some good people in the world.’
‘Is that what you believe?’ she asked bleakly.
‘Yes.’
He unwrapped the chocolate bar and broke off a section, holding it in front of her. ‘Look. She gave me money for food, for treats. She’s a good person.’
‘I thought the man at the railway station was a good person.’
‘Can you imagine being in England? In London? We could live in an apartment in London. Making good money! Away from all this shit! Maybe we’ll see rock stars there. I’ve heard that a lot of them live in London!’
‘The whole world is shit,’ she replied.
‘Please, Simona, at least come and meet her tomorrow.’
She raised a hand and took the chocolate.
‘Do you really want to spend another winter down here?’ he asked.
‘At least we are warm here.’
‘You don’t want to go to London because it is warm here? Right? How great is that? Maybe it’s warm in London too.’
‘Go fuck yourself!’
He grinned. She was perking up. ‘Valeria wants to come too.’
‘With the baby?’
‘Sure, why not?’
‘She’s coming tomorrow, this woman?’
‘Yes.’
Simona bit one square off the chocolate strip. It tasted good. So good she ate the whole bar.
38
Roy Grace stood on the touchline of the football pitch, beneath the glare of the floodlights, and jammed his gloveless hands deep into his raincoat pockets, shivering in the biting wind high up here in Whitehawk. At least the rain had stopped and there was a clear, starry sky. It felt cold enough for a frost.
It was the Friday night football league and tonight the Crew Club’s teenagers were playing against a team from the police. He had just made the last ten minutes of the game, in time to see the police being hammered 3-0.