She shook her head. ‘No, I have a feeling he was a tennis player originally, but I may be wrong.’ She went out again.
He read through his notes from the briefing, marking up significant new developments for his MSA, from which she would amend the
Lines of Enquiry
, prior to tomorrow morning’s briefing meeting.
They still had no suspect, he thought. Feedback from the United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre was that there was no evidence of any persons being trafficked into the UK for their organs – something that had been confirmed, so far at any rate, from the HOLMES analyst’s scoping.
Trafficking of humans for organ transplantation was one of the major lines of enquiry on the list. But in the absence of any evidence that this practice had happened before in the UK, Grace was concerned not to throw all his resources into this one line, despite all the pointers to it.
It could simply be some kind of maniac killer.
Someone with surgical skills.
But then why would that person have just stopped with those four organs. The high-value ones?
What would Brother Occam have done? What is the most obvious explanation here? What would the great philosopher monk cut through with his razor?
Then Cleo cut through his thoughts. Dinner, she called up sweetly to him, was on the table.
74
Lynn heard the sound of music blasting out from the living room as she arrived home, shortly before nine. She slammed the door behind her against the icy wind and unwound the Cornelia James shawl she had bought on eBay – where she bought most of her accessories – a few weeks earlier.
Then, with her coat still on, she peered around the living-room door. Luke was lounging on the sofa, drinking a can of Diet Coke, his hair looking even more stupid than ever, most of it hanging in one big, gelled, lopsided spike over his right eye. But he did not look as stupid as the two slender girls dancing on the screen, in the pop video that was playing.
Clad only in black bras and briefs, wearing silver boxes on their heads, they were gyrating in jerky, mechanical movements to a hard, repetitive beat. Various phrases were stencilled in crude black letters on different parts of their arms, legs and midriffs. do it! make it! work harder! ever better!
‘Daft Punk?’ Lynn said.
Luke nodded. ‘Yeah.’
Jabbing the remote, she turned the volume down. ‘All OK?’
He nodded. ‘Caitlin’s sleeping.’
With this fucking racket?
she nearly said. Instead she thanked him for looking after her, then asked, ‘How is she?’
He shrugged. ‘No change. I checked on her a few minutes ago.’
Still with her coat on, Lynn hurried up the stairs and went into her daughter’s bedroom. Caitlin was in bed with her eyes closed. In the weak glow of the bedside lamp, she was looking even more yellow. Then she opened one eye and peered at her mother.
‘How are you, angel?’ Lynn leaned down and kissed her, stroking her hair, which felt damp.
‘I’m quite thirsty actually.’
‘Would you like some water? Fruit juice? Coke?’
‘Water,’ Caitlin said. Her voice was small, and reedy.
Lynn went to the kitchen and poured out a glass of cold water from the fridge. She noticed, to her dismay, a build-up of ice at the back of the fridge – a sure sign, she knew from past experience, that the appliance was on its last legs. Yet another expense looming up which she could not afford.
As she closed the door, Luke came in, barefoot, in a grey cardigan over a ragged shirt and baggy jeans.
‘How did you get on today, Lynn?’
‘Raising money?’
He nodded.
‘My mother’s come up with some. And Caitlin’s father has offered his life savings. But I still need to find one hundred and seventy-five thousand.’
‘I’d like to help,’ he said.
Surprised, she said, ‘Well, thank you – that’s – that’s very kind of you, Luke. But it’s an impossible sum.’
‘I’ve got some money. I dunno if Caitlin ever told you about my dad – not my stepfather – my real father.’
Holding the glass of water in her hand, and anxious to take it up to Caitlin, she said, ‘No.’
‘He was killed in an accident at work. On a building site – a crane toppled on to him. My mum got a big compensation payment, and she gave most of it to me, because she didn’t want my stepdad getting it – he has a gambling habit. I’d be happy to contribute it.’
‘That really is very kind of you, Luke,’ she said, genuinely touched. ‘All contributions are more than welcome. How much could you spare?’
‘I’ve got one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. I want you to have it all.’
She dropped the glass.
75
Sometimes, Roy Grace thought, it was easy to become over-confident and forget the most elementary stuff. It was good, occasionally, to go back to basics.
Seated in his office at quarter to seven in the morning, drinking his second cup of coffee of the day, he pulled down from his bookshelves the
Murder Investigation Manual
, a massive but definitive tome, compiled by the Centre for Policing Excellence for the Association of Chief Police Officers.
Updated regularly, it contained every procedure for every aspect of a murder investigation, including a well-mapped-out Murder Investigation Model, which he turned to now. The Fast Track Menu, which he read through again now to refresh himself, contained ten points which were ingrained in every homicide detective’s brain – and precisely because they were so familiar, some of them could easily be overlooked.
The first on the list was Identify Suspects. Fine, he could tick that box. That was in progress.
Second was Intelligence Opportunities. He could tick that one too. They had Norman Potting’s man in Romania, his own contact, Kriminalhauptkommissar Marcel Kullen in Munich, DS Moy and DC Nicholl intelligence gathering in the brothels, Guy Batchelor trawling through struck-off surgeons and the HOLMES analyst’s scoping operation.
Scene Forensics was third on the list. The bottom of the Channel didn’t give them much to go on there. The plastic sheeting was their best hope, as well as the new fingerprint technology on the outboard, and the long-shot of the cigarette butts Glenn had sent to the DNA labs.
He moved on to Crime Scene Assessment. They had the dump site, but as yet no crime scene. Fifth was Witness Search. Who would have seen these three teenagers? Staff at whatever hospital or clinic they had been operated on? Passengers and staff at whichever airport, or seaport, or station through which they had entered the UK? They would probably have been picked up on CCTV cameras at their point of entry, but he had no idea how long they had been in the UK. It could have been days, weeks or months. Impossible at this stage to start looking through that amount of footage. Another thought he noted down, under this heading, was Other Romanians working here who might have known them? The e-fits had been circulated widely and been featured in the press, but no witnesses had come forward.
Sixth was Victim Enquiries. His best source on those was DS Potting’s man in Romania. And perhaps Interpol, but he wasn’t holding his breath on them.
Possible Motives, the seventh point on the list, was where he stopped to think long and hard. He was fond of telling his teams that assumptions were the mothers and fathers of all fuck-ups. As he had mulled over last night, was there a danger they were they being led down a blind alley by assuming human trafficking for organs was behind these three murders? Was there some sicko out there who enjoyed filleting people?
Yes, possibly, but less so if he applied the principles of Occam’s Razor. There was a world shortage of human organs. Fact. Romania was a country involved in human traffficking for, among other purposes, the international trade in human organs. Fact. Skilled medical and surgical work had been carried out on these three victims. Fact. Supporting that was the information that an eminent British surgeon, Dr Raymond Crockett, had at one time been struck off for illegally purchasing four kidneys from Turkey for patients. Against was that there was no other history of human organ trafficking in England.
But there was always a first time.
And, it occurred to him, Dr Crockett had been caught. Was he a lone maverick, or had he just been unlucky to be found out? Were there dozens of other specialists like him in the UK who were using illegal organs and had not yet been caught? Was Crockett working again? He needed to be interviewed and eliminated.
Media was next. They were using the media as best they could, but the most important resource, the television programme Crimewatch, did not air for almost a week – even assuming they could get on it.
Then there was Post-mortems. At the moment he had all the information he required from these. If they found the surgical instruments, then further work might be required. For the moment, the bodies were being held in the mortuary.
He yawned, shaking off his tiredness and took another long sip of his coffee. When he had woken, at half past five, his brain had been whirring. He should have gone for his early-morning run, which always helped him to think clearly, but he was feeling guilty that he hadn’t finished his work last night, so instead had come in even earlier than usual.
Last on the list was Other Significant Critical Actions. He thought for some moments, then read through the list he had already noted in his policy book. Then he added, in his notebook, Outboard? Missing Scoob-Eee?
He leaned back in his chair until it struck the wall. Dawn was starting to break outside his window. The storm had died down overnight and it was a dry morning. But the forecast was bad. Red and pink streaks speared the dark grey sky. How did that old adage go? Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning!
What do I need to take warning of? What am I missing? he challenged himself. There must be something. What? What the hell is it?
He stared silently into his coffee cup, as if the answer might lie there in the steaming blackness.
And then, suddenly, it came to him.
Sandy used to like pub quiz nights. She was brilliant at general knowledge – far better than he was. He remembered a quiz they had attended, eleven or twelve years ago, and one of the questions had been to guess the size of the English Channel in square miles. Sandy had won, with a correct answer of 29,000.
He clicked his finger and thumb.
‘Yes!’
76
‘We are looking in the wrong place,’ Roy Grace announced to his team. ‘And we might be looking at the wrong people. That’s what I think.’
Instantly, he had the full attention of all twenty-eight police officers and support staff at the morning briefing. Then he tapped the side of his head.
‘The wrong place, mentally, not geographically.’
Twenty-eight pairs of curious eyes locked on to his.
It was the fourth item on the Fast Track menu of the
Murder Investigation Manual
that had sparked him.
‘I want you all to stop thinking about your own lines of enquiry, for a moment, and focus on Crime Scene Assessment. OK? Now, we’ve been assuming that this choice of dump site was an unlucky or an ignorant one. But think about this. The English Channel covers twenty-nine thousand square miles. That licensed dredge area is a hundred square miles.’
He looked at Glenn, Guy Batchelor, Bella, E-J and several others.
‘Anyone here good at maths?’
The HOLMES analyst put up her hand.
‘What percentage of the Channel is that dredge area, Juliet?’ he asked.
She did some fast mental arithmetic. ‘Approximately 0.34 per cent, Roy.’
‘Small odds,’ Grace said. ‘A third of 1 per cent. We’re talking needle in a haystack percentages. If I was going to dump a body at random out in the Channel, I’d consider myself pretty unlucky to dump it on the dredge area. Actually, I’d rate the chances of that happening to be so slim as to be not worth worrying about. Unless of course I chose that area deliberately.’
He paused to let this sink in.
‘Deliberately?’ Lizzie Mantle queried.
‘Hear my reasoning,’ he said. ‘If we take the line that we are dealing with international human trafficking – the fastest-growing criminal business in the world – we can be reasonably sure of one thing: the calibre of the criminals we are dealing with. If they’re sufficiently well organized to be able to bring teenage kids into this country, and to have an effective medical organ transplant facility here, they are likely to be as professional about disposing of the bodies. They wouldn’t just go out to sea in a rubber dinghy and lob them over the side.’
He saw a general nod of approval.
‘I know we’ve been over this ground before, and we concluded the bodies were taken by either private boat or private plane or helicopter. But whatever the perps used, they would have hired a professional skipper or pilot. That person would have had charts, and been aware of the different depths of the Channel, and in all probability would have known these waters like the back of their hand. The dredge area may not be marked on all charts, but even so it is relatively shallow. If you are going to dump bodies, and you’ve got the whole of the Channel, wouldn’t you go for depth? I would.’
‘What’s the deepest point, Roy?’ Potting asked.
‘There are plenty of places where it is over two hundred feet. So why dump them in sixty-five?’
‘Speed?’ Glenn Branson suggested. ‘People panic with bodies sometimes, don’t they?’
‘Not the kind of people we’re looking at here, Glenn,’ the Detective Superintendent said.
‘Maybe they genuinely didn’t see it on their chart,’ Bella Moy said.
Grace shook his head. ‘Bella, I’m not ruling that out, but I’m postulating they might have been put there deliberately.’
‘But I don’t get why, Roy,’ DI Mantle said.
‘In the hope that they would be found.’