‘For what reason?’ Nick Nicholl asked.
‘Someone who doesn’t approve of what they are doing?’ Grace replied. ‘He dumped the bodies there, knowing there was a chance they’d get found.’
‘If he didn’t like what they were doing why didn’t he just call the police?’ Glenn Branson asked.
‘Could be any number of reasons. Top of my list would be a pilot or skipper who liked the money but had a conscience. If he shopped them, his nice little earner would stop. This way his conscience was salved. He dropped them in an easy depth to dive. If the dredger didn’t bring them up at some point, he could tip the police off – but not for a good long while.’
The team were quiet for a moment.
‘I accept I may be off beam here, but I want to start a new line of enquiry – starting with Shoreham Harbour, we need to check out all the boats. We can get help from the harbourmaster, the lock operators and the coastguard. The boats we should look at closest are fast cruisers and fishing boats – and all the rental boats. Glenn, you’re on the case on that missing fishing boat, the
Scoob-Eee
. Anything to report?’
The DS raised a padded brown envelope in the air. ‘Just arrived, five minutes ago from O2, the phone company, Roy. It’s a plot of all the mobile phone masts the skipper’s phone made contact with on Friday night. It’s unlikely he crossed the Channel, so with luck we may be able to track his movements along the south coast. Me and Ray Packham are going to work on them straight after this meeting.’
‘Good thinking. But we can’t be sure the Scoob-Eee had any involvement, so we should look at the other boats.’
Grace delegated two detective constables at the meeting to do this. Then he looked at Potting.
‘OK, Norman, I said we might be looking at the wrong people.’
Potting frowned.
‘I asked you to contact all transplant coordinators to see if any of these three were familiar to them, but you’ve still had no positive hit?’
‘That’s right, chief. We’ve spread pretty far on this now.’
‘I have something that might be better. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it. What we need is to check all the people who have been on a transplant waiting list, waiting either for a heart/lung transplant, a liver or a kidney, who did not receive a transplant but dropped off the waiting list.’
‘Presumably there are a number of reasons why people would drop off a waiting list, Roy?’ Potting said.
Grace shook his head. ‘From what I understand, no one on a waiting list for a new kidney or liver gets better by themselves, bar a miracle. If they drop off the list it is for one of two reasons. Either they had the transplant done elsewhere – or they died.’
His mobile phone began ringing. He pulled it out and glanced at the display. Instantly, he recognized the German dialling code, + 49, in front of the number that appeared. It was Marcel Kullen calling from Munich.
Raising an apologetic hand, he stepped out of the briefing room, into the corridor.
‘Roy,’ the German detective said, ‘you wanted me to call us when the organ broker, Marlene Hartmann, arrived back in Munich, yes?’
‘Thank you, yes!’
Grace was amused by how the German constantly confused ‘you’ and ‘us’.
‘She flew back late last night. Already, this morning, she has made three phone calls to a number in your city, in Brighton.’
‘Brilliant! Any chance you could let me have that number?’
‘You don’t reveal its source?’
‘You have my word.’
Kullen read it out to him.
77
At quarter to nine in the morning, Lynn sat in the kitchen, with her laptop open, studying the five emails that had come in overnight. Luke, who had spent some of the night with Caitlin, then had crashed on the sitting-room sofa, sat beside her. All of the emails were testimonials from clients of Transplantation-Zentrale.
One was from a mother in Phoenix, Arizona, whose thirteen-year-old son had received a liver through the organ broker two years ago and she provided a phone number for Lynn to call her on. She was, she said, utterly delighted with the service, and was certain her son would not have been alive today without Marlene Hartmann’s help.
Another was from a man in Cape Town who had received a new heart through the company just eight months ago. He too claimed he was delighted and provided a phone number.
The third was again from America, a particularly touching one, from the sister of a twenty-year-old girl in Madison, Wisconsin, who had received a kidney and said Lynn could call any time. The fourth was from a Swedish woman, in Stockholm, whose thirty-year-old husband had been provided with a new heart and lungs. The fifth was from a woman in Manchester, whose eighteen-year-old daughter had received a liver transplant this time last year. There were home and mobile numbers provided for her.
Lynn, still in her dressing gown, sipped her mug of tea. She had barely slept a wink all night, she had been so wired. Caitlin had come into her room at one stage, crying because she was in agony from where she had scratched the skin on her legs and arms raw. Then when she had settled her, Lynn had just lain awake, trying to think everything through.
The enormity of taking Luke’s money was weighing heavily. So was taking her mother’s nest egg. Taking the contribution from Mal worried her less; after all, Caitlin was his daughter too. But what if the transplant did not work? In the contract she had been through with Frau Hartmann, which the woman had left here, failure of the transplanted liver was covered. In the event of failure or rejection within six months a further liver would be provided at no charge.
But there was still no damn guarantee the transplant would work.
And, assuming it did, there was the further problem of finding several thousand pounds a year to pay for the anti-rejection drugs, for life.
But, more to the point, there wasn’t an alternative. Except for the unthinkable.
What if Marlene Hartmann was a con woman? She would have handed over every penny she could cobble together in the world and still be nowhere. OK, the company checked out from the credit enquiries she had made, surreptitiously, from work yesterday, and now she had the references, which she would contact for sure. But all the same she was worried sick about taking the next step – to sign and fax the contract and transfer 50 per cent of the fee, 150,000 euros, to Munich.
Breakfast
was on the television, with the sound turned down to silent. The host and the hostess were seated on a sofa, chatting and laughing with a guest, some beautiful young woman in her twenties she vaguely recognized but couldn’t place. She had dark hair and was similar in build to Caitlin. And suddenly she had an image of Caitlin sitting there on that sofa, chatting and laughing with those hosts. Telling them about how she nearly died, but beat the system, yeaaaahhhhh!
Maybe Caitlin would become a huge star. It was possible. She was beautiful; people noticed her. She had personality. If she had her health back, she could be anything she wanted.
If.
Lynn glanced at her watch and did a quick calculation.
‘Wisconsin must be six or seven hours behind the UK, right?’
Luke nodded pensively. ‘Phoenix will be about the same.’
‘So it would be the middle of the night. I would particularly like to talk to the mother there – I’ll call her this afternoon.’
‘The one in Manchester has a daughter of a similar age. You should be able to get hold of her. I think you should kick off with her.’
Lynn looked at him and, through her tiredness and her frayed emotions, suddenly felt a deep affection for him.
‘Good thinking,’ she said, and dialled the woman’s home number. After six rings it went to voicemail. Then she tried the mobile.
Almost instantly there was a click, followed by a loud background roar, as if the woman was driving.
‘Hello?’ she said in a thick Mancunian accent.
Lynn introduced herself and thanked the woman for emailing her.
‘I’m just dropping the young ones off,’ she replied. ‘I’ll be home in twenty minutes. Can I call you back?’
‘Of course.’
‘And listen, love, don’t worry. Marlene Hartmann is a star. You can come up here and meet my Chelsey. She’ll chat to you, tell you the nightmare she went through with the National Health. I can show you the photos too. Twenty minutes all right for you, love?’
‘Absolutely fine, thank you!’ Lynn said.
She put the phone down with hope suddenly soaring in her heart.
78
As Glenn Branson drove along the perimeter road of Shoreham Airport, the strong wind buffeted the small Hyundai. He passed a cluster of parked helicopters, then glanced at a small, twin-engined plane that was coming in to land on the grass runway. He turned right, beyond the end of the hangars, and drove up to the converted warehouse, inside a mesh-fenced compound, that housed the Specialist Search Unit. The car clock read 12.31 p.m.
A few minutes later he was in the cluttered conference room, which doubled as the canteen and shared communal office, with a mug of coffee beside him, carefully spreading out the photocopy of an Admiralty chart, which Ray Packham had helped him to prepare, on the large table.
There were charts on the walls, wooden shields, a whiteboard, some framed photos of the team, as well as a bravery award certificate. The view through the window was on to the car park and the featureless grey metal wall of the warehouse beyond. On the windowsill was a goldfish bowl, containing a solitary fish and a toy deep-sea diver.
Smurf, Jonah, Arf and WAFI were already seated. The young woman sergeant wore a black, zippered fleece, embroidered with the word police and the Sussex Police shield above it. The three men wore blue, short-sleeved shirts, with their numbers on the epaulettes.
Gonzo, also wearing a fleece, came in and handed Glenn Branson a stiff paper bag. ‘In case you need it.’
The other four grinned.
Glenn looked puzzled. ‘Need it for what?’
‘To throw up in,’ Gonzo said.
‘It’s quite rough outside!’ Jonah said.
‘Yeah, and this whole building moves a bit on a windy day,’ said WAFI, ‘so we thought – you know – bearing in mind last time you were with us…’
Tania Whitlock gave Glenn a sympathetic smile as her team ribbed him.
‘Yeah, very witty,’ he retorted.
‘Heard you applied for a transfer to this unit, Glenn,’ Arf said. ‘Cos you enjoyed being with us so much last time.’
‘
Mutiny on the Bounty
springs to mind,’ Glenn said.
‘So, Glenn,’ Tania Whitlock said, ‘tell us what you have.’
The chart showed a section of coastline from Worthing to Seaford. There were three crude red ink rings drawn on it, marked A,
B and C
, with a sizeable space between each. A green dotted line plotted a course out to sea from the mouth of Shoreham Harbour, with a childlike drawing of a boat at the end of it, beside which someone had written
Das Boot
. There was also a large blue arc.
‘OK,’ Branson said. ‘The skipper of the Scoob-Eee, Jim Towers, had a mobile phone on the O2 network. These three red circles indicate the O2 base stations and masts covering this section of coast. The phone company has given us a plot, which is all marked on here, of base station signals received from Towers’s mobile phone on Friday evening, between 8.55 p.m., when it was noticed by a harbour pilot and by a shore boatman passing through the lock, and 10.08 p.m., when the last signal was received.’
‘Glenn, are these calls that Jim Towers made?’ Sergeant Whitlock asked.
‘No, Tania. When the phone is in standby mode, once every twenty minutes it sends out a signal to a base station, a bit like the way, when I was with you, you radioed the coastguard from time to time and gave him your position, yeah?’ he explained, pleased with his analogy. ‘It’s like checking in – calling home. It’s called, technically, a location update.’
They all nodded.
‘The signal gets picked up by the nearest base station – unless it’s busy, and then it gets passed to the next one. If there’s more than one base station in range, it could be picked up by two or even three.’
‘Blimey, Glenn,’ said Arf. ‘We didn’t realize you were a telephone scientist as well as a master mariner.’
‘Piss off!’ he retorted with a big grin. Then, continuing, he said, ‘So this is what was happening here. After the boat left Shoreham Harbour, the first location update was picked up by this Shoreham base station and this Worthing one.’ He pointed at the ones marked A and
B
. ‘Twenty minutes later, the second signal home was also picked up by these two. But the third one, approximately one hour after leaving harbour, was picked up by this third one as well, just east of Brighton Marina.’ He pointed at
C
. ‘That tells us Towers was steering a south-easterly course – which we’ve marked, as a best guess, with this green dotted line.’
‘Good film,
Das Boot
,’ Gonzo said.
‘Now here’s where it gets interesting,’ said Glenn, ignoring him.
‘Oh, great!’ WAFI said. ‘We’ve been waiting for it to get interesting, because it’s been pretty boring so far!’
The DS waited patiently for them all to stop laughing.
‘The timing advance can be anything from zero to sixty-three for a given link with a phone,’ Glenn went on, ignoring their barracking. ‘So if the maximum range is about twenty miles, then divide that into sixty-three slots and you can work out distance to within about eighteen hundred feet.’
‘OK,’ Gonzo said. ‘If I’m understanding this correctly, you said this shows the direction the boat was heading. So this is its last known position before it went out of range?’
Glenn Branson shook his head.
‘No, I don’t think it went out of range.’
He looked up. The others all frowned.
‘This is where the fourth and last signal – the last location update – was transmitted from,’ he continued. ‘Now, the seaward range from standard base stations is about twenty miles. But I was told that the mobile phone companies, where possible, build their coastal masts exceptionally high to increase range, so they can pick up lucrative roaming charges from foreign ships passing, so the range here is probably quite a bit further than that – could be as much as thirty miles.’