‘How are you doing? All OK?’ he said, in Romanian.
They beamed and jigged their colourful balloons. Tilling had no idea where the balloons had come from, but he knew one thing for sure. Apart from the clothes they stood up in, these were the only possessions they had in the world.
The residents of Casa Ioana ranged in age from a seven-week-old baby, with her fourteen-year-old mother, to an eighty-two-year-old woman who had been tricked out of her home and her life savings by one of the many monsters who exploited Romania’s ill-thought-out laws. There was no welfare for the homeless in this country – and few shelters. The old woman was lucky to be here, sharing a dormitory room with three other elderly inmates who had met the same fate.
‘Mr Ian?’
He turned at the voice of Andreea, one of the social workers, who had stepped out of his office behind him. A slim, pretty twenty-eight-year-old, who was getting married in the spring, Andreea had a deep warmth and compassion, and tireless energy. He liked her a lot.
‘Telephone call for you – from England.’
‘England?’ he said, a little surprised. He rarely heard from England these days, except from his mother, who lived in Brighton, and to whom he spoke every week.
‘It is a policeman. He says he is old friend?’ She said it as a question. ‘Nommun Patting.’
‘Nommun Patting?’ He frowned. Then suddenly his eyes lit up. ‘Norman
Potting
?’
She nodded.
He hurried back into his office.
54
Lynn cursed as she saw two flashes from the speed camera in her rear-view mirror. She always drove slowly past that sodding camera opposite Preston Park, but this afternoon it had gone completely out of her mind. She was concentrating on getting home to Caitlin as quickly as possible and on nothing else. Now she faced a fine to add to her financial woes, and another three points on her licence, but she carried on without slowing down, a steady fifty-five in the thirty limit, desperate to get to her child.
Five minutes later she pulled into her driveway, jumped out of her car, jammed her key in the front door and pushed it open. Luke was standing in the hall, limp hair slanted across one eye, wearing a baggy top and trousers that looked like they might have come from the rear of a pantomime horse. His mouth was open and he had an even more gormless expression than usual on his face, like a man on a railway platform watching the last train of the night disappearing and not sure what to do next. He raised his arms by way of a greeting to Lynn, then let them drop again.
‘Where is she?’ she said.
‘Oh – er – right – Caitlin?’ he said.
Who the fuck do you think? Boadicea? Cleopatra? Hillary Clinton? Then she saw her daughter, standing at the top of the stairs, in a dressing gown over her nightdress, swaying as if she were drunk.
Dumping her handbag on the floor, Lynn threw herself up the stairs just as Caitlin stepped out into space, missing the top stair altogether, and tumbled forwards. Somehow, Lynn caught her, grabbing her thin frame in one arm and the banister rail in the other, and, clinging for dear life, managed to stop herself plunging backwards.
She stared into Caitlin’s face, inches from her own, and saw her eyes roll. ‘Darling? Darling? Are you OK?’
Caitlin slurred an incomprehensible response.
Using all her strength, somehow Lynn managed to push her back and up on to the landing. Caitlin tottered against the wall. Luke followed them, stopping halfway up the stairs.
‘Have you been doing drugs?’ Lynn screamed at him.
‘No, no way, Lynn,’ Luke protested, the shock in his voice sounding genuine.
Slurring her words, Caitlin said, ‘I’m like – I’m – I’m like…’
Lynn steered her back into her room. Caitlin half sank, half fell backwards on her bed. Lynn sat down beside her and put an arm around her. ‘What is it, my darling? Tell me?’
Caitlin’s eyes rolled again.
Lynn thought, for one terrible moment, that she was dying.
‘If you’ve given her anything, Luke, I’ll kill you. I swear it. I’ll tear your fucking eyeballs out!’
‘I haven’t, I promise. Nothing. Nothing. I don’t do drugs. I wouldn’t, wouldn’t give her nothing.’
She put her nose to her daughter’s mouth to see if she could smell alcohol, but there was only a warm, faintly sour odour. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’
‘I just feel giddy. I’ve got the roundabouts. Where am I?’
‘You’re home, darling. You’re OK. You’re at home.’
Caitlin stared blankly around the room, without any recognition at all, as if she was in a totally unfamiliar place. Lynn followed her eyes as she stared at the dartboard with the purple boa hanging from it, then at the photograph of the rock star hunk, whose name Lynn had momentarily forgotten, as if she was looking at them for the first time.
‘I – I don’t know where I am,’ she said.
Lynn stood up, gripped by a terrible panic. ‘Luke, stay here with her for a moment.’ Then she ran downstairs, grabbed her handbag and went into the kitchen. She pulled her address book out of her bag, then dialled the mobile phone number of the Royal South London transplant coordinator.
Please God, be there.
To her relief, Shirley Linsell answered on the third ring. Lynn told her Caitlin’s symptoms.
‘It sounds like encephalopathy,’ she said. ‘Let me speak to a consultant and either I or he will get straight back to you.’
‘She’s in a really bad way,’ Lynn said. ‘Encephalopathy? How do you spell that?’
The coordinator spelled it out. Then, promising to get back to her within minutes, hung up.
Lynn ran back up the stairs, holding the cordless phone. ‘Luke, can you look up “encephalopathy” on the Net?’ She spelled it out for him.
Luke sat down at Caitlin’s dressing table, opened her laptop and began clicking on the keypad.
Five minutes later, Shirley Linsell rang back. ‘You need to get Caitlin to move her bowels. Would you like to bring her back up here?’
‘Have you found a liver for her?’
There was a hesitation that Lynn did not like.
‘No, but I think it would be a good idea for her to come in.’
‘For how long?’
‘Until we’ve stabilized her.’
‘When will you have a liver?’
‘Well, as I said this morning, I cannot answer that. You could treat her at home for this.’
‘What do I have to do?’
‘Give her an enema. Usually with this condition, evacuating the bowel will regularize her.’
‘What kind of enema? Where do I get one?’
‘Any chemist.’
‘Terrific,’ Lynn said.
‘Why don’t you try that? Give it a few hours, then see how she is and call me. There is someone here all the time and she can come in at any hour.’
‘Yes,’ Lynn said. ‘Fine, I’ll do that.’
She hung up.
Caitlin was lying back on her bed, eyes opening and closing.
‘I think I’ve found what you’re looking for!’ Luke announced.
Lynn peered over his shoulder. His hair smelled unwashed.
Reading aloud off the webpage he said, ‘Encephalopathy is a neuropsychiatric syndrome which occurs in advanced liver disease. Symptoms are anything from slight confusion and drowsiness to change in personality and outright coma.’
‘How fucking great is that?’ Lynn said. Then she turned to Caitlin, whose eyes were now closed. Afraid, suddenly, that she might be slipping into a coma, she shook her. ‘Darling? Keep awake, darling.’
Caitlin opened her eyes. ‘You know what?’ she slurred. ‘Liver disease rocks.’
‘Rocks?’ Lynn said, astounded.
‘Yeah, why not?’ Luke retorted.
‘Why does it rock?’ Lynn stared quizzically at Luke, as if somehow she was going to find the answer in his inane face.
‘This transplant waiting list, yeah?’
‘What about it?’
‘There’s a way around it.’
‘What way?’
‘Yeah, well, I’ve been looking on the Net. You can buy a liver.’
‘Buy a liver?’
‘Yeah, it’s whack.’
‘Whack? I’m not sure I’m on your planet. How do you mean,
buy a liver
?’
‘Through a broker.’
‘A what?’
‘An organ broker.’
Lynn stared at him, thinking for a moment this was his idea of humour. But he looked deadly earnest. It was the first time she had ever seen him remotely animated.
‘What do you mean by an organ broker?’
‘Someone who will get you whatever organ you want. On the Net. They’re selling anything you could want for a transplant. Hearts, lungs, corneas, skin, ear parts, kidneys – and livers.’
Lynn stared at him in silence for some moments. ‘You are serious? You can buy a liver on the Internet?’
‘There’s a whole bunch of sites,’ Luke went on. ‘And – this’ll interest you – I found a forum about waiting lists for organs. It says the waiting list for liver transplants in some countries is even worse than in the UK. Something like 90 per cent of people on the list in the USA will die before they get a new liver. Sort of puts our 20 per cent into the shade.’
Unless one of that 20 per cent happens to be your daughter, Lynn thought, staring hard at Luke. One of the three people a day in the UK who die waiting for a transplant.
She was sick with worry and all twisted up inside with rage. Thinking. Thinking about Shirley Linsell. Her change from warmth to coldness. Caitlin was just another patient to her. In a year or two’s time, she probably wouldn’t even remember her name – she would just be a statistic.
Lynn was not going to take that chance.
‘I’m going to the chemist. When I get back, I’d like you to show me about these organ brokers,’ she said.
*
On the way, she stopped at a newsagent’s, went inside and scanned the
Argus
for any further news on the story about the three bodies. On the third page was a long article, headlined police remain baffled by channel bodies. She stared at the sanitized photographs of the three dead teenagers’ faces. Read the speculation that they might be organ donors. Read the quotes from Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, whoever he was.
Something dark stirred inside her. Leaving the paper on the rack, not wanting Caitlin to see it, she bought a packet of ten Silk Cut cigarettes, then went back out to her car and smoked one, thinking again, hard, her hands shaking.
55
Some years ago, when he was a detective sergeant, Roy Grace had attended a break-in at a small wine merchant’s premises up on Queens Park Road, close to the racecourse and the hideous edifice of Brighton and Hove General Hospital.
The proprietor, Henry Butler, a drily engaging, shaven-headed and impeccably spoken young man, appeared more upset at the quality of the wines the thieves had taken than at the break-in itself. While the SOCOs went about their business, dusting and spraying for fingerprints, Butler bemoaned the fact that these particular specimens of Brighton’s broad church of villainy had no taste at all.
The Philistines had taken several cases of his cheapest plonk, leaving all the fine wines, which in his view would have been far better drinking, untouched. Grace had liked him instantly, and whenever he needed a bottle for a special occasion, he had always returned to this shop.
At four o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, taking a quick, late lunch break, he pulled up the unmarked Ford Focus on double yellow lines outside the small, unassuming shop front of the Butler’s Wine Cellar and dashed inside. Henry Butler was in there now, head still shaved, sporting a gold earring and a goatee beard, dressed in dungarees and a collarless shirt, as if he had just been out picking grapes.
The door pinged shut behind him and Roy instantly breathed in the familiar, sour, vinous smell of the place, mixed with the sweeter scent of freshly sawn timber from the wooden cases.
‘Good afternoon, Detective Superintendent Grace!’ Butler said, putting down a copy of
The Latest
. ‘Very nice to see you. All crimes solved now, so you’re free to partake of my libations?’
‘I wish.’ Grace smiled. ‘How’s business?’
Butler gave a shrug at the empty shop. ‘Well, with your arrival, I would say the day just got better. So what can I tempt you with?’
‘I need a rather special bottle of champagne, Henry,’ he said. ‘What’s the most expensive bottle you have?’
‘Good man! That’s what I like to hear!’ He disappeared through a doorway into a tiny, cluttered back office and then clattered down some stairs.
Grace checked a text that just pinged in, but it was nothing important, a reminder about his haircut appointment tomorrow at the Point, the hair salon his self-appointed style guru, Glenn Branson, insisted he go to for his monthly close-crop. He stared around at the displays of dusty bottles flat on their sides on shelves and stacked in wooden boxes on the floor. Then he glanced at the headline of the
Argus
: BRIGHTON REGAINS DRUG DEATH CAPITAL OF ENGLAND STATUS.
A grim statistic, he thought, but at least it kept his case off the front page today.
A couple of minutes later, Henry Butler reappeared, reverently cradling a squat bottle in his arms. ‘Got this rather seductive Krug. One sip and anybody’s knickers will hit the ground.’
Grace grinned.
‘Two hundred and seventy-five quid to you, sir, and that’s with 10 per cent discount.’
Roy’s smile fell into a black hole. ‘Shit – I didn’t actually mean
quite
that expensive. I’m not a Russian oligarch, I’m a copper, remember?’
The merchant gave him a quizzical, mock-stern look. ‘I have a luscious Spanish cava at nine quid a pop. It’s what we drink at home in summer. Gorgeous.’
‘Too cheap.’
‘There you go, Mr CID – ’ which he pronounced Sid – ‘I never did take you for a cheapskate. I do have a rather special house champagne, seventeen quid for you, sir. A massive, buttery nose, long finish, quite a complex, biscuity style. Jane MacQuitty did her tonsils over it in the
Sunday Times
a while ago.’