Then, on her intercom phone, she called the anaesthetist and told him, barely masking the disgust in her voice, that the girl was ready.
110
Roy Grace was just walking back in through the door of MIR One when Romeo Sierra Zero Eight Alpha Mike Lima pinged an ANPR camera. The information was radioed through to him immediately. He stopped in front of the crowded work station and wrote down the information. Sir Roger Sirius’s Aston Martin was heading north from the Washington roundabout on the A24.
Instantly he called the Air Operations Unit and requested Hotel Nine Hundred, the police helicopter, airborne. They estimated seven minutes’ time to be over the roundabout, which was four miles north of Worthing and eight miles from their base at Shoreham Airport.
He did a quick calculation. Hotel Nine Hundred’s maximum ground speed, depending on any head or tail winds, was about 130 mph. The A24 at this point was largely fast, open dual carriageway, but Sirius was unlikely to want to risk being pulled over for speeding. Assuming he was travelling at 80 mph and continuing on this road, the helicopter should have the car in sight in about fifteen minutes.
Assuming he had not turned off on to a minor road.
Although the sky was overcast this morning, there was a high cloud ceiling, giving the chopper plenty of visibility. Raising his hand in acknowledgement at a couple of his team members who were trying to get his attention, he walked over to the map that had been pinned up on the whiteboard. It showed Sussex and parts of its neighbouring counties, with the positions of Lynn Beckett’s and Sir Roger Sirius’s houses ringed in red. Ringed in purple were the locations of all the private hospitals and clinics in the area. There were a large number, including sports injuries clinics, diagnostic centres and skin clinics, and Grace knew that most of them could be ruled out as too small to house the kind of facilities they were looking for.
He quickly found the A24 and the roundabout, then traced his finger up the road northwards. There were any number of places the car could be heading to. The conurbations of Horsham or Guildford were possibilities, but Grace’s hunch was that a private clinic with the kind of facilities needed for transplants, and all its support staff, would more likely be concealed somewhere in the countryside.
He glanced at his watch, anxiously waiting for the car to ping another ANPR camera, or for word from the chopper, and regretting his decision to keep the rural surveillance team outside Sirius’s gates rather than have them follow the car.
He did not know how much time they had, but from the call they had intercepted, Lynn Beckett and her daughter were due to be picked up shortly. His guess was that they had a few hours, at most.
They had not intercepted any calls since his visit and he considered that a bad sign. It meant she wasn’t panicked by his visit and was still going ahead. It was, of course, possible she had another phone, a pay-as-you-go one that didn’t show up on her records, but if that had been the case, she would surely have used that instead of her landline earlier, wouldn’t she? Or her daughter’s phone, assuming she had one.
Wherever she or Sirius went, and he was certain it was going to be to the same place, he was going in hard. During the night he’d been assembling the units and he had all the vehicles and crews on standby. Fortunately, so far it had been a quiet morning in Sussex and he had the full team he needed.
‘Sir!’ Jacqui Phillips, one of the researchers, called to him.
He went across to her. Yesterday he had tasked her with listing all manufacturers and wholesale suppliers of operating theatre materials, instruments and drugs in the country. But as she showed him now, it was an impossibly long list. One that would take weeks to work through.
Next, Glenn Branson wanted him. The DS had some feedback from the all-ports alert they had put out and the photographs of Marlene Hartmann and Simona they had circulated. There had been a number of potential sightings during the night and early morning, including a mother and daughter from Romania who had been held by Gatwick police for an hour, before being cleared, and another couple with a young girl, from Germany, who had been interrogated after arriving by Eurostar.
‘I think we have to assume she’s already here now,’ Grace said.
‘Want me to cancel the alert?’
‘Give it another hour, just in case,’ he said.
His radio crackled again. Another ANPR had been pinged by Sirius. He was still on the A24 – this time heading past Horsham, still travelling north. Grace glanced at his watch again. Sirius was going like the wind. At this rate, he would shortly be out of the county and into Surrey, which meant the police there would need to be informed of their pursuit.
He radioed the helicopter and relayed this information, asking where they were.
The observer replied they were just approaching Horsham themselves. Within seconds of ending the call, Grace’s radio crackled again and he heard the observer’s excited voice.
‘We have contact with Romeo Sierra Zero Eight Alpha Mike Lima! In slow traffic approaching roadworks, still proceeding northbound on A24.’
Grace went back to the map and made a wide east, west and north arc from the car’s position. There were seven purple rings within that arc, all existing clinics.
But ten anxious minutes later, the helicopter reported that the Aston Martin was still travelling north. If it kept on this route, Grace thought, staring at the map again, feeling vexed, it would soon reach the M25 London orbital road.
‘Where the hell are you bloody going?’ he said out loud.
None of the twenty-two members of his inquiry team in this room at the moment, hunched in front of their screens, or with phones to their ears, or poring over printouts, had any better idea than he did.
111
Lynn was in her room, zipping shut her overnight bag, when the doorbell rang.
The sound shrilled through her veins. Shrilled through her soul. She froze in total, blind panic.
Was it the police again?
Then she stepped across to the window and peered cautiously down. Outside was a turquoise and white Streamline taxi estate car.
Relief flooded through her. She had not been expecting a taxi, but that was fine, that was good, she realized as her thoughts clarified. A taxi! Yes, very good! A taxi meant that Marlene Hartmann had nothing to hide. A taxi was open. If she was happy for them to be picked up in a taxi, then everything had to be absolutely fine.
Sod you and your damn scaremongering, Detective Superintendent Grace, she thought. Then she rapped hard on the window. The driver, a man in his forties in a bomber jacket, who was standing outside the front door, looked up and Lynn signalled to him that they were coming.
Then she carried hers and Caitlin’s bags downstairs with a sudden burst of optimism in her heart. It was going to be all right. It was going to be fine. Everything would be brilliant. She was going to give Caitlin the best Christmas ever!
‘OK, darling!’ she called out. ‘This is it!’
Caitlin was sitting at the kitchen table, cradling Max on her lap and stroking him, staring at the face of the Romanian girl in the photograph. The glass of glucose water and the antibiotic pills from Ross Hunter lay untouched in front of her.
‘Have you done Max’s food and water, darling?’ Lynn asked.
Caitlin looked at her blankly.
‘Darling?’
Suddenly, Lynn’s optimism dipped as she saw the confusion in her daughter’s face.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it!’
She quickly filled up the water bowl, topped the food up in the dispenser, lifted Max gently from Caitlin’s arms, gave him a nuzzle and a kiss and set him down.
‘Guard the house, Max, OK! Remember what you’re descended from!’
Normally Caitlin would grin whenever she said that. But there was no reaction. Lynn touched her arm gently.
‘OK, angel, drink up and take your pills, and let’s rock and roll.’
‘I’m not thirsty.’
‘It’ll make you feel better. You can’t eat anything this morning, before the op, remember?’
Reluctantly, Caitlin drank. Holding the glass, she half stood up, then crashed back down heavily in the chair, slopping some of the liquid over the rim.
Lynn stared at her for a moment, panic rising again. She held the glass, helping Caitlin get the rest of the fluid and the pills down, then she ran outside and asked the taxi driver to help her.
Two minutes later, with their luggage in the boot, Lynn sat holding Caitlin’s hand in the back of the cab as it pulled away.
*
A hundred yards behind them, the green Volkswagen Passat radioed that Target Two was on the move and read out the index of the taxi.
From his desk in MIR One, Grace ordered them to follow and keep them in sight.
*
‘Where are we going?’ Lynn asked the driver.
‘It’s a surprise!’
She caught his grin in his mirror.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not allowed to tell you.’
‘What?’
‘It’s all a bit cloak and dagger. James Bond stuff.’
‘
Die Another Day
,’ murmured Caitlin, through half-closed eyes. She was now scratching her thighs, harder and harder and harder.
They turned left into Carden Avenue, then left again on to the London Road, heading south towards the centre of Brighton.
Lynn looked at the driver’s ID card mounted on the dash. Read his name.
Mark Tuckwell.
‘All right, Mr Bond,’ Lynn said. ‘Are we in for a long journey?’
‘Not this part of it. I-’ He was interrupted by his phone ringing. He answered curtly, ‘I’m driving. Call you back in a bit.’
‘Want to give me any clues?’ Lynn asked.
‘Chill, woman!’ Caitlin murmured.
Lynn sat in silence as they headed down towards Preston Circus, then turned right at the lights and went up New England Hill, under the viaduct. Then they turned sharp left. Moments later they crested the hill and began descending, down towards Brighton Station. The driver stopped at a junction, then carried on down the hill and suddenly pulled over sharply and halted by a row of bollards recently installed to prevent cars dropping off here.
A short man, about fifty years old, in a cheap beige suit, with greasy hair and a beaky nose, hurried over and opened Lynn’s door.
‘You come with me,’ he said in broken English. ‘Quickly, quickly, please! I am Grigore!’ He gave a servile, buck-toothed smile.
Staring at him in bewilderment, Lynn said, ‘Where – where are we going?’
He almost yanked her out of the car in his agitation, with an apologetic smile, into the bitterly cold noon air.
The taxi driver removed their bags from the boot.
None of them noticed the green Passat driving slowly past.
*
In the Incident Room, Grace’s radio beeped.
‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.
‘They’re getting out at Brighton Station,’ the surveillance officer informed him. ‘In the wrong place.’
Roy was thrown into total confusion. Brighton Station?
‘What the fuck?’ he said, thinking aloud.
There were four trains an hour to London from there. Romeo Sierra Zero Eight Alpha Mike Lima was still heading towards the M25. All his theories about a clinic in Sussex were suddenly down the khazi. Were they going to a clinic in London?
‘Follow them on foot,’ he said, in sudden total panic. ‘Don’t lose them. Whatever you do, don’t sodding lose them.’
*
With Grigore holding one bag and Lynn holding the other, dragging a stumbling Caitlin between them, they hurried across the concourse of Brighton Station. Every few seconds the man threw a nervous glance over his shoulder.
‘Quick!’ he implored. ‘Quick!’
‘I can’t go any bloody quicker!’ Lynn panted, totally bewildered.
They hurried beneath the clock suspended from the glass roof, past the news stall and the café, then along, past the far platform.
‘Where are we going?’ Lynn asked.
‘Quick!’ he replied.
‘I need to sit down,’ Caitlin said.
‘In minute you sit. OK?’
They stumbled out into the drop-off area beside the car park exit, past several waiting cars and taxis, and reached a dusty brown Mercedes. He popped open the boot, hefted their bags in, then opened a rear door and manoeuvred Caitlin inside. Lynn clambered in on the far side. Grigore jumped into the driver’s seat, started the car and drove like a demon away from the station.
*
The surveillance officer, DC Peter Woolf, stood and watched in horror, sensing his promotion prospects disappearing down that ramp, and frantically radioed his colleague in the Passat to get round to the car park exit.
But the Passat was stuck on the far side of the station in a queue of frustrated drivers, waiting for the imbecile in an articulated lorry that was blocking the entire street to complete his reversing manoeuvre.
112
Marlene Hartmann anxiously paced her office on the ground floor of the west wing of Wiston Grange, one of the six clinics that Transplantation-Zentrale quietly owned around the world. Most of the pampered clientele who came here for its spa, as well as surgical and non-surgical rejuvenation facilities, were wholly unaware of the activities that went on behind the sealed doors, marked PRIVATE NO ACCESS, to this particular wing.
There was a fine view towards the Downs from her window, but whenever she came here she was normally too preoccupied to notice it. As she was today.
She looked at her watch for the tenth time. Where was Sirius? Why were the mother and daughter taking so long?
She needed Lynn Beckett here to fax instructions to her bank to authorize the transfer of the second half of the funds. Normally she would wait for confirmation that the cleared funds were in her account, in Switzerland, before proceeding, but today she was going to have to take a risk, because she wanted to get the hell out of here as quickly as possible.