Life and Limb (27 page)

K
iki killed the car engine and listened to the silence. It was late, and it was dark for the time of the year. A dense layer of cloud blocked out the moonlight, making trees, bushes and cars look like shadows in the night.

An ambulance with no flashing lights arrived and pulled up in front of the after-hours surgery. The Falck crew got out. She heard the sound of sliding doors and was reminded of the black van.

She felt a tingling sensation down her spine as she opened her bag, grabbed the pistol and put it in her coat pocket, together with a small flashlight not much bigger than a pencil.

His instructions had been very detailed and she had memorised the map of the tunnel system so that she would be able to find her way blindfolded. She also knew exactly where to enter without being seen.

She quickly found the entrance and before she knew it she was back in the underground world she remembered from her childhood. It was easy. Any outsider could do it: sneak around the belly of the tunnel system which branched out and connected the hospital buildings. Some of the tunnels were old and led to dead ends. Others were as wide as country roads and used heavily during the day, but now it was close to midnight and quiet. A main corridor stretched more than half a kilometre through the whole building complex.

She reached a crossroads where give-way lines warned drivers of other traffic. Every now and then she would see a chipped corner where someone had driven a truck or Mini Crosser too fast. Down here in the underworld, staff moved stock, linen and medicines around. The building maintenance department was located here and staff used bicycles and scooters to get around quickly.

Kiki's trainers made no sound on the yellow-tiled floor, but she was highly conspicuous in the fluorescent light and walked as quickly as she could. She had spent hours trying to work out how to execute his plan and had finally concluded that she wouldn't be able to anticipate every possible outcome. Nothing was certain. Anything could happen and she was fine with that.

But, of course, she intended to survive. Not so much because of the life she would be returning to as for the sake of sport. It was like running a marathon: a long distance stretched out before her and she would have to force the pace. On the other side of the finishing line, the medal beckoned.

At last she reached her first stop, passing stacks of discarded computers, parked Mini Crossers and signage for the patient hotel, shower rooms and the canteen.
Hospital Uniforms
it said on the open door. According to his information, the office closed at midnight. The time was half past eleven and the place was deserted. She entered. Piles of work clothes lay on the shelves. Green and white hospital coats. There was a smell of detergent, and she knew that everything was fresh from the laundry and waiting to be worn by nurses, doctors, healthcare assistants and anyone else who happened to work here.

She found a white nurse's uniform on a shelf. She unfolded several before finding the right size. She took off her coat, bundled it up and stuffed it in between two piles of clothes, and placed another pile in front of it. She held the pistol in her hand before putting it in the pocket of her uniform with the flashlight. Then she listened, heard nothing and slipped back out into the corridor.

Further along, she met a healthcare assistant driving a truck with a trailer. On the back were various aids: a couple of wheelchairs and some Zimmer frames and crutches lying in a messy pile. She nodded amicably to the driver, who nodded back before disappearing around the corner.

She followed the coded directions in the book, moving along the deep corridors and underground from building to building. The corridors reminded her of old Soviet films of underground command centres built in case of nuclear war. She had started at Building 10 and was due to end up in Building 4, right across from the Institute of Pathology and the chapel. It felt as if the corridors had been dug further and further down into a secret, sunken valley. If she had dropped a ball, it would have carried on rolling without any help.

On her way she met two nurses and two hospital porters pushing empty beds, but none of them stopped or asked her questions. Nor did they notice the pistol bulging in the right-hand pocket of her uniform.

At last she reached Building 4 and started looking for the place indicated by the cross on the map. She could hear no voices or see any other human beings. Perhaps he wasn't here after all, in which case her information must be wrong. Though you would expect a certain level of accuracy when it was a matter of life and death.

For a moment she wondered whether he might suspect she was on her way. It was a possibility, but she considered it unlikely.

Nonetheless, she had to be careful.

Shortly afterwards she found the place she was looking for. The room had an extra-wide door with a green border and
Morgue
written on it. This was where the dead were kept for the statutory six hours before being taken to the chapel. She hoped there were no dead bodies in there now.

She pushed down the handle and opened the door. The air was sweet with the smell of dead flesh and spent life. She tried to switch on the light but the switch didn't work, and only light from the corridor spilled into the room. There was a trolley with a figure under a white sheet. Above it, from the ceiling, hung a cord that you could pull if it transpired you weren't dead after all. She stood there for a moment looking at what she presumed to be a body under the sheet. The dead would not harm anyone. It was the living she feared.

Nevertheless, she spent several seconds convincing herself before she let the door glide shut behind her and the darkness swallow her up. She fumbled in the pocket of her uniform for the flashlight, but her hands were shaking too much. She couldn't believe it when she detected movement in the room and sensed that the figure on the trolley had sat up. She heard, and yet didn't hear, her own screams stick in her throat.

‘Make a noise and you're dead.'

Every muscle in her body tensed. She couldn't see clearly but she knew that the dead body was upright now.

She heard the sheet fall to the floor with a quiet sigh.

The pistol.
She groped for it in her pocket, except the other person's eyes were more accustomed to the darkness than hers and before she knew what was happening strong arms pinned her down, thwarting any movement. Then came the injection, quick and practised, into her shoulder and she knew she had collapsed, knew she was being carried out like a sack of potatoes and dumped on the trolley where the body had been lying a moment before. Darkness was added to darkness when she was covered with a sheet.

‘Stupid bitch. I knew you'd be trouble.'

She registered the voice and knew whose it was. But she couldn't react; she couldn't make a noise or move. The paralysis had her in its grip. He opened the door and pushed the trolley in front of him. She felt the descent as the tunnel continued, it felt like free fall. He's going to let go of me, she thought. He'll let me crash, send me over the edge, down a steep staircase. I'm about to die.

She tried as best she could to follow the many turns and the long, straight passages. Then she heard a completely different sound. A door opened and noises came from outside: a car starting and driving off, voices in the night. She summoned all her energy but her own voice was gone. She was the living dead.

The van.

That was her first thought when she heard the noise of a vehicle door sliding open. She recognised that sound. She felt the trolley being pushed up and over the opening and, as in an ambulance, slipped onto the brackets at the rear. A mobile coffin, she thought. He uses it to move dead bodies.

Only a minute later the door was shut and she heard him getting in on the passenger side. During all this time he had not said one word. Now he turned around and spoke through the partition that separated them.

‘I'm taking you where you belong.'

She tried to swallow but her muscles refused to obey and saliva and mucus ran down her throat. She thought she would choke.

Perhaps she was already dead.

‘H
uman tissue. Not organs, but human tissue.'

She stared at the screen where Bill number 273, dated 01/04/2006, was listed with all its sections in convoluted legalese.

‘Then what the hell is human tissue? How is it different from organs? Mmm, I've missed you.'

Bo leaned over her shoulder. He had just come back from Poland and was clearly far more interested in the tissue round her neck and the smell of her perfume.

‘You smell nice. Good enough to eat.'

His kiss was greedy, and there was a real risk of leaving a visible mark – which might well have been his intention, she thought. Men liked marking their territory; especially when they hadn't been around to ensure it hadn't fallen into enemy hands.

‘Human tissue,' Dicte lectured, having swotted up on the subject late the night before, ‘is everything. Everything in the human organism that's made up of cells.'

‘But not organs?' Bo kissed her.

‘Organs, too.'

Her heart beat a little faster when she felt his lips on her skin. She had barely had time to realise that she had missed him too. She wondered briefly what effect kissing had on her other organs. If the heart beat faster, perhaps the kidneys worked overtime, and when she gasped it was the lungs that had to step up. The thought of giving away just a little bit of her body suddenly seemed very remote.

‘However, organs are subject to a separate piece of legislation,' she said, gently pushing him away which only made him more keen.

‘The
Human Tissue Act
covers bones, skin, tendons and cells – bits that are easier to deal with and which no one would suspect.'

She turned to him. He had flown back that morning and gone straight to the office where, from early in the morning, she had resumed her previous night's reading – peering at her screen, buried in sections and subclauses in her attempt to understand. This understanding had gradually sunk in over the last few hours.

‘Human tissue is used for all sorts of things we never think about. It's not big, headline-grabbing heart or kidney transplants – no, we're talking minor surgery such as skin grafts, jaw operations, knees and hip surgery, that kind of thing.'

Bo's face expressed disgust.

‘So if I bust a tendon playing football, there's a chance I might be fitted with a dead person's tendon? Or skin if I suffer burns?'

She nodded.

‘Something like that. I don't know how widespread it is in Denmark, but it happens abroad in places where the legislation is more lax. Think about Lublin and the virulent infections.'

‘Virulent what?'

It was then that she realised she hadn't had time to tell him about her phone call with the widow of the murdered doctor. She gave him a quick update as the other journalists started turning up and switching on their computers.

‘Infected tissue,' she concluded, lowering her voice to prevent any of the other reporters earwigging. One should always keep a good story close to one's chest.

‘In other words, tissue that isn't subject to health regulations and is thus exempt from the official registration program, which exists to identify donors so that you can trace the origin of skin or bones to ensure they're healthy. Tissue obtained without permission from the Danish Medicines Agency.'

Bo still looked mystified. He perched on the edge of her desk.

‘Let me remind you,' he stage-whispered, ‘I'm not a journalist. Tell me again, this time in plain Danish so that a simple-minded photographer like me can understand.'

She stopped and took a deep breath.

‘Someone is stripping dead bodies of tissue, smuggling it abroad and making an absolute fortune,' she declared with the clarity of a newspaper headline. ‘Someone – possibly a ring of people – connected to hospitals or private clinics has been making money for years by removing bones, tendons, corneas and so on from dead people without getting permission from their next of kin.'

Bo nodded slowly as disgust spread across his face.

‘Bloody hell.'

‘I agree.'

‘But there's a market for everything, so why not?'

‘Yes, why not? There must be a global black market, or grey.'

‘Human tissue being traded across borders,' Bo said, chewing on the words. ‘A smuggling industry on a par with heroin and women trafficked for prostitution, but easier to operate. How is it easier?'

‘Easier than organs which have to be removed from living donors, which is a complicated process that requires a completely different set-up,' Dicte said. ‘The dead feel nothing and they don't tell tales.'

Bo was silent for a moment. ‘But that's
exactly
what they do'.

She got up to stretch her legs and he followed her to the kitchenette, where she poured them both a coffee. He was right, she thought, looking for the biscuit tin in the cupboard.

‘Yes. Mette Mortensen's mutilated body told tales. As did those of the victims in Kosovo and Lublin.'

They sat down at a canteen table and continued their conversation there so that they wouldn't be overheard.

‘But then why take bones and tissue from those three people,' Bo objected. ‘They were different. They weren't already dead.'

‘To deter others.'

It was the only explanation she had.

‘All three of them suspected what was going on. In different ways. The manner of their death would remind those in the know of what might happen if they didn't keep their mouths shut. It had to be as horrifying as possible and, besides, the gang already had someone who knew how to do that kind of thing.'

Bo smiled wryly.

‘This is pure Jack the Ripper stuff.'

She nodded.

‘Macabre, but true.'

‘An expert!' Bo said, his voice dripping with irony. ‘Someone who had already done it hundreds of times, perhaps? Are you saying he was used as a kind of contract killer? Isn't that just a little far-fetched?'

Dicte popped a biscuit in her mouth and shrugged.

‘Possibly not if you're already steeped in that kind of thing,' she said. ‘And definitely not if someone is threatening your business. You certainly wouldn't want anyone else to get the same idea.'

‘But who?' Bo asked, slurping his coffee. ‘Who could it be?'

She looked at him. She was about to reply that
that
was the million-dollar question when she heard her phone ring.

She reached it just in time.

‘Dicte Svendsen.'

The voice was so distorted she didn't recognise it straight away.

‘We used to play football there. We lived nearby, you see.'

‘Frederik Winkler?'

‘The football clubs used the pitch as well and every Sunday we would go there to watch the games.'

No other words were necessary. The father's battle with his son had finally reached its conclusion.

‘Where? Where did you find him?'

‘I had just gone out for a walk,' Winkler said. ‘I do that from time to time. To remember the good times, you understand.'

She did. She didn't quite know why, but she understood it all.

‘Where is he? Where is your son?'

He told her everything.

‘Have you called the police? Do you want me to?'

He hung up and she called Wagner as she left the office with Bo.