He wished they could have travelled together, but the German woman had been adamant. Ilinca first, then him. There were reasons why they could not travel together, good reasons, the German woman had assured them. They had trusted her.
And now they were here!
The two men in front were silent, but that was fine. They were his saviours. It was good to be quiet, to have time to think, to look forward.
The road narrowed. Tall, green hedgerows on either side. Music played on the car radio. A woman singer he recognized. Feist.
He was free!
In a short while they would be together again. They would earn the good money they had been promised. Live in a nice apartment, perhaps even with a view of the sea. With every passing tree, hedge, road sign, his heart beat faster.
And the car was slowing now. It made a left turn through a grand, pillared gateway, past a sign which read WISTON GRANGE SPA RESORT. Rares stared at the name, wondering how it was pronounced and what it meant.
They were winding up a narrow tarmac driveway, past several warning signs, which he could not read:
PRIVATE PROPERTY
NO PARKING
NO PICNICKING
STRICTLY NO CAMPING
The hills lay ahead of them. One of them had a clump of trees on the summit. They wound past a large lake on the left, then entered a long, straight avenue of overhanging trees, the verges covered in fallen leaves. The car slowed, went over a sharp bump, then accelerated. Rares could see manicured grass to the left of them, with a flag on a pole in the centre. Two women were standing on the grass, one of them holding a metal stick, about to tap a small white ball. He wondered what they were doing.
The car slowed again, went over another sharp bump, then accelerated again. Finally, at the end of the drive they stopped outside an enormous, grey-stone house, with a circular tarmac driveway in front. Rares had no concept of architecture, but it looked old, and very grand.
All kinds of smart cars were parked here. He wondered if it was a very expensive hotel. Was this where Ilinca was working? Yes, he decided, that must explain it, and he would be working here too.
It seemed isolated, but that would not matter so long as he was with Ilinca, and they had a place to sleep and be warm and food to eat, and no police threatening them.
The Mercedes turned sharply right, passing under an archway, then pulled up at the rear of the house, which looked less smart, beside a small white van.
‘Is Ilinca here?’ Rares asked.
Cosmescu turned his head. ‘She’s here, waiting for you. You just have to have a quick medical and then you will meet her again.’
‘Thank you. You are so kind to me.’
Uncle Vlad Cosmescu turned back in silence. Grigore looked over his shoulder and smiled, revealing several gold teeth.
Rares pressed down on the door handle, but nothing happened. He tried again, feeling a sudden stir of panic. Uncle Vlad climbed out and opened the rear door. Rares stepped out and was then steered by Uncle Vlad up to a white door.
It was opened, as they reached it, by a big slab of a woman in a white medical tunic and white trousers. She had a square, unsmiling face with a flat nose and her black hair was cut short, like a man’s, and gelled back. Her name tag read
Draguta
. She looked at him with stern, cold eyes, then her tiny, rosebud lips formed the thinnest of smiles. In his native Romanian tongue she said, ‘Welcome, Rares. You had a good journey?’
He nodded.
Flanked by the two men, he had no option but to step forward, into a clinical-feeling, white-tiled corridor. It smelled of disinfectant. And he felt a sudden, deep unease.
‘Ilinca?’ he said. ‘Where is she?’
The puzzled look in the woman’s small, dark, hooded eyes instantly deepened his unease.
‘She is here!’ Uncle Vlad said.
‘I want to see her now!’
Rares had lived by his wits on the streets of Bucharest for years. He had learned to read expressions in faces. And he did not like the exchange of glances between this woman and the two men. He turned, ducked under Cosmescu’s arms and ran.
Grigore grabbed the collar of his denim jacket. Rares wriggled free of it, then was felled, unconscious, by a single chop on the back of his neck from Cosmescu.
The woman hoisted his limp body over her shoulders and, followed by the two men, carried him on down the corridor a short distance, then through double doors into the small, pre-op room. She laid him out on a steel trolley.
A young Romanian anaesthetist, Bogdan Barbu, who had graduated five years ago from medical school in Bucharest, on a salary of 3,000 euros a year, was waiting to receive him.
Bogdan had thick black hair, brushed forward into a fringe, and designer stubble. With his tanned, lean features, hecould have passed for a tennis pro, or an actor. He already had the syringe, filled with a bolus of Benzodiazepine, prepared. Without needing instructions, he injected the pre-med into the upper arm of the unconscious Rares. It would be enough to keep him out for several more minutes.
Between them, they used the time to remove all of the young Romanian’s clothes and insert an intravenous cannula in his wrist. They then connected it to a drip-line of Propofol, fed by a pump.
This would ensure that Rares did not regain consciousness – but without causing any harm to his precious internal organs.
In the adjoining room, the main operating theatre of the clinic, an anaesthetized twelve-year-old boy, with a liver so diseased he had only weeks to live, was already being opened up by the junior surgeon, a thirty-eight-year-old Romanian liver transplant specialist, Razvan Ionescu. In his home country, Razvan could take home just under 4,000 euros a year – augmented a little with bribes. Working here, in this clinic, he was taking home more than 200,000. In a few minutes, dressed in green surgical scrubs, with magnifying glasses over his eyes, he would be ready to start removing the boy’s failed liver.
Razvan was assisted by two Romanian nurses, who placed the clamps, and every step was scrutinized, in microscopic detail, by one of the most eminent liver transplant surgeons in the UK.
The first rule of medicine which this surgeon had learned many years ago as a young student was,
Do no harm
.
In his view at this moment, he was doing no harm.
The Romanian street kid had no life ahead of him. Whether he died today or in five years’ time from drug abuse was of little consequence. But the English teenager who would receive his liver was altogether different. He was a talented musician, he had a promising future ahead of him. Of course, it was not up to doctors to play God, to decide who lived and who died. Nor was it up to them to value one human life over another. But the stark reality was that one of these two young men was doomed.
And he would never admit to anyone that the £50,000, tax-free, deposited into his Swiss bank account for each transplant he performed swayed his judgement in the slightest.
67
Shortly after half past twelve – half past one in Munich, Grace calculated – Kriminalhauptkommissar Marcel Kullen returned his call.
It was good to speak to his old friend and they spent a couple of minutes catching up on the German detective’s family and career news, from when they had last seen each other, all too briefly, in Munich.
‘So, no more information you have of Sandy?’ Kullen said.
‘Nothing,’ Grace replied.
‘Her photographs are still in every police station here. But so far, nothing. We are keeping trying.’
‘Actually, I’m starting to think it is time to wind down,’ Grace said. ‘I’m beginning the legal process to have her declared dead.’
‘
Ja
, but I am thinking – your friend who has seen her in the Englischer Garten. We should look longer, I think, no?’
‘I’m getting married, Marcel. I need to move on, to have closure.’
‘Married? You have a new woman in your life?’
‘Yes!’
‘OK, good, so – I am happy for you! You want now that us stop to look for Sandy?’
‘Yes. Thank you for all you’ve done. But that’s not why I called you. I need help in a different direction.’
‘
Ja
, OK.’
‘I need some information on an organization in Munich called Transplantation-Zentrale GmbH. I understand it is known to your police force.’
‘How are you spelling this?’
It took Grace several minutes, working patiently with the German detective’s broken English, to get the name across correctly.
‘Sure, I will check,’ Kullen said. ‘I call us back, yes?’
‘Please, it’s urgent.’
*
Kullen called him back thirty minutes later. ‘This is interesting, Roy. I am talking with my colleagues. Transplantation-Zentrale GmbH is under observation by the LKA for some months now. There is a woman who is the boss, her name is Marlene Hartmann. They have links with the Colombian mafia, with factions of the Russian mafia, with organized crime too in Romania, with the Philippines, with China, with India.’
‘What does the LKA know about them?’
‘Their business is the trafficking, internationally, of humans, and in particular in human organs. So it would seem.’
‘What action are you taking against them?’
‘At this stage, we are just information gathering, observing. They are on the LKA radar, you would say. We are looking to connect them with specific offences in Germany. Do you have information about them you can give to me for my colleagues?’
‘Not at the moment – but I’d like to interview Marlene Hartmann. Perhaps I could come over and do that?’
The German sounded hesitant. ‘OK.’
‘Is there a problem with that?’
‘Only – at this moment, according to the surveillance file, she is not in München – she is travelling.’
‘Do you know where?’
‘Two days ago she flew to Bucharest. We don’t have more information.’
‘But you will know when she is back in Germany?’
‘Yes. And we do know that she goes regularly to England.’
‘How regularly?’ Grace asked, his suspicions suddenly rising.
‘She flew into München from London last week. And also the week before.’
‘Presumably she was not on a winter-break holiday.’
‘Perhaps. Is possible,’ the German said.
‘No one in their right mind comes to England at this time of year, Marcel,’ Grace said.
‘Not to see the Christmas lights?’
Grace laughed. ‘She doesn’t sound the type.’
He was thinking hard. The woman was in England last week, and the week before. At some point in the past week to ten days three teenagers had been killed and their organs harvested.
‘Is there any possibility of obtaining this woman’s phone records, Marcel?’ he asked.
‘Her fixed lines or handy?’
Handy
, Grace knew, was the German word for a mobile phone.
‘Both?’
‘I will see what I can do. Do you want all calls, or just those to the UK?’
‘Those to the UK would be a very good starting point. Do you have any plans to arrest her any time soon?’
‘Not just now. They want to keep watching her. There are other German human trafficking connections that she is linked to.’
‘Shame. It would have been good to have her computers looked at.’
‘I think on this we can help you.’ Grace could almost feel the Kriminalhauptkommissar smiling down the phone.
‘You can?’
‘We have a warrant issued by an Ermittlungsrichter for phone and computer records.’
‘By who?’
‘It is an investigating judge. The warrant is – how is it you say –
in camera
?’
‘Yes – without the other party knowing.’
‘Exactly. And you know now in the LKA we have good technology for computer surveillance. I understand we have duplicates of all computer activity, including laptop away from the office, of Frau Hartmann and her colleagues. We have implanted a servlet.’
Grace knew all about servlets from his colleagues, Ray Packham and Phil Taylor in the High-Tech Crime Unit. You could install one simply by sending a suspect an email, provided he or she opened it. Then all activity on the suspect’s computer would be automatically copied back to you.
‘Brilliant!’ he said. ‘Would you let me see them?’
‘I would not be permitted to send them to you, despite the EU cooperation treaty – it will be a long process of bureaucracy.’
‘Any way of short-circuiting that?’
‘For my friend Roy Grace?’
‘Yes, for him!’
‘If you are coming over – perhaps I could leave copies of them by accident – on a restaurant table? But they are for information only, you understand? You must not reveal their source, and you will not be able to use the information in evidence. Is that OK?’
‘That is more than OK, Marcel!’
Grace thanked him and hung up with a real lift of excitement.
68
Subcomisar Radu Constantinescu had a swanky office in Police Station No. 15 in Bucharest – at least, swanky by Romanian police standards. The four-storey building had been put up in 1920, according to an engraved plaque on the wall, and did not appear to have been dusted or redecorated since. The staircases were bare stone and the floors covered in cracked linoleum. The pastel-green walls were chipped and scored, with plaster crumbling from some of the cracks. It always reminded Ian Tilling of his old school in Maidenhead.
Constantinescu’s room was large, dark and dingy, and shrouded in a permanent blue-grey fug of cigarette smoke. It was starkly furnished, with a wooden desk that was bland and old, but almost as big as his ego, and a conference table of indeterminate vintage, surrounded by mismatched chairs. Proudly displayed, high up, beneath the nicotine-stained ceiling, were the policeman’s hunting trophies – the mounted heads of bears, wolves, lynxes, deer, chamois and foxes. Framed certificates and photographs of Constantinescu rubbing shoulders with various dignitaries filled a little of the wall space, along with a couple of photographs of him in hunting kit, kneeling by a dead boar in one and holding up the horned head of a stag in the other.