something Dr Granger will be better able to tell you. Also whether your diabetes would be a factor.’
It scared her that his man she trusted so much suddenly seemed lost and out of his depth.
‘Great,’ she said bitterly. Diabetes was another of the unwelcome souvenirs of her marriage break-up. Late-onset Type-2, which Dr Hunter told her might have been triggered by stress. So she hadn’t even been able to go on comfort-food binges to console herself. ‘Caitlin’s going to have to wait for someone who is the right blood group match to die? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Probably, yes. Unless you have a family member or a close friend who is a match, who would be willing to donate part of their liver.’
Lynn ’s hopes rose a little. ‘That’s a possibility?’
‘Size is a factor – it would need to be a large person.’
The only large person she could immediately think of who would be approachable was Mal. But he was the same blood type as herself – they had found that out some years ago, during a period of trying to be responsible citizens, when they had become regular blood donors.
Lynn did a quick mental calculation. There were 65 million people in the UK. Maybe 45 million of them teenagers or older. So two per cent would be about 900,000 people. That was a lot of people. There must be people with AB negative blood dying every day.
‘We’re going to be in a queue, right? Like vultures? Waiting for someone to die? What if Caitlin freaks out at the thought?’ she said. ‘You know what she’s like. She doesn’t believe in killing
‘I think you should bring her in to see me – if you want to I could have a chat with her later on today. A lot of families find that donating the organs of someone who’s died can give some purpose and value to their death. Do you want me to try to explain this to her?’
Lynn gripped the sides of her chair, trying to put aside her own inner terror. ‘I can’t believe I’m thinking this, Ross. I’m not a violent person – even before Caitlin’s influence, I never liked killing flies in my kitchen. Now I’m sitting here actually
6
The morning rush-hour traffic on Coldean Lane that had been halted by the accident was already backed up almost to the bottom of the hill. To the left was part of the sprawling post-war council housing estate of Moulescoomb, to the right, beyond a flint wall, were the trees marking the eastern boundary of Stanmer Park, one of the city’s biggest open spaces.
PC Ian Upperton cautiously edged the nose of the Road Policing Unit’s BMW out past the rear of the stationary, chuntering bus that was at the end of the queue until he could see the road ahead, then, with the siren flailing the still air, he launched the car up the wrong side of the road.
PC Tony Omotoso sat next to him in silence, scanning the vehicles ahead in case any of them in their impatience tried to do something stupid like pulling out or turning round. Half the drivers on the road were either blind or drove with their music too loud to hear sirens, only looking in their mirrors to do their hair. He felt tight, clenched up with anxiety, the way he always felt on the way to a road traffic collision, as accidents were now officially called in the ever-changing police lexicon. You never knew what you were going to find.
In a bad accident, for many people their car turned from friend to deadly foe, spiking them, slicing them, crushing them and, in some horrific cases, cooking them. One moment they would be cruising along, listening to their music or chatting happily, the next – just a fraction of a second later – they were lying in agony in a tangle of metal with edges as sharp as razors, bewildered and helpless. He loathed idiots on the roads, people who drove badly or recklessly, and the twats who didn’t put their belts on.
They were reaching the crest of the hill now, where there was a nasty dogleg junction, with Ditchling Road joining Coldean Lane from the west and east, and he saw a blue Range Rover at the front of the queue with its hazard flashers blinking. A short distance on was an old-model white 3-Series BMW cabriolet slewed across the road with its driver’s door open and no one inside. There was a massive V-shaped dent behind the door and the rear wheel was stoved in. The rear window was shattered. Just beyond it, a knot of people were standing in the road. Several turned their heads as the police car pulled up and some moved aside.
Through the gap they opened up, Omotoso saw, facing them on the far side of the crest of the hill, a stationary small white Ford van. Spread-eagled, motionless on the ground close to it, was a motorcyclist, a trail of dark crimson blood running from inside his black helmet and pooling on the road. Two men and a woman were kneeling beside him. One of the men appeared to be talking to him. A short distance away lay a red motorcycle.
‘Another Fireblade,’ Upperton said grimly, almost under his breath as he brought the car to a halt.
The Honda Fireblade was a classic born-again-biker machine, one of the motorcycles de choix for blokes in their forties who had ridden in their teens, had now made some money and wanted a bike again. And naturally they wanted the fastest machine on the road, though they had no real understanding of just how much faster – and harder to handle – modern bikes had become during the intervening years. It was a grim statistic, evidenced by what Omotoso and Upperton – and dozens of other Road Policing Officers like them – saw daily, that the highest risk age group were not tearaway teenagers but middle-aged businessmen.
Omotoso radioed in that they were at the scene, and was told that an ambulance and fire crew were on their way. ‘We’d better have the RPU inspector up here, Hotel Tango Three-Nine-Nine,’ he told the controller, giving him the call sign for the duty Road Policing Unit inspector. This looked bad. Even from here he could see that the blood wasn’t the light, bright red of a superficial head wound, but the ominous colour of internal bleeding.
Both men got out of the car, assessing the scene as quickly and as well as they could. One thing Tony Omotoso had learned in this job was never to jump to rapid conclusions about how any accident had happened. But from the skid marks and the positions of the car and the bike, it looked as if the car had pulled out into the path of the motorcycle – which must have been travelling at speed to have caused that kind of damage and spun the car around.
The first priority on his mental checklist was danger from other road users. But all the traffic seemed securely halted in both directions. He heard the wail of a siren approaching in the distance.
‘She pulled out, fucking stupid woman. Just pulled straight out!’ a male voice shouted to them. ‘He didn’t stand a chance!’
Ignoring the voice, they ran up to the motorcyclist. Omotoso edged between the people already beside him and knelt down.
‘He’s unconscious,’ the woman said.
The victim’s dark, tinted visor was down. The police officer knew it was important not to move him if at all possible. As gently as he could, he lifted up the visor, then touched the man’s face, opened his lips, felt inside his mouth for his tongue.
‘Can you hear me, sir? Can you hear me?’
Behind him, Ian Upperton asked, ‘Who is the driver of the BMW?’
A woman walked up to him, clutching a mobile phone, her face sheet white. In her forties, she was brassy-looking, with bleached blonde hair, and was wearing a fur-trimmed denim jacket, jeans and suede boots.
Subdued, she spoke in the gravelly voice of a heavy smoker. ‘Me,’ she said. ‘Shit, oh shit, oh shit. I didn’t see him. He came up like the wind. I didn’t see him. The road was clear.’ She was shaking, in shock.
The officer, long practised, put his face up close to hers, much closer than he needed just to hear her. He wanted to smell her, or, more particularly, smell her breath. He had a keen nose and he could frequently detect last night’s alcohol on someone who had been on a bender. There might be just the faintest trace now, but it was hard to tell, as it was so heavily masked by minty chewing gum and the reek of cigarette tobacco.
‘Would you step into my car, front passenger seat? I’ll be with you in a few minutes,’ Upperton said.
‘She pulled straight out!’ a man in an anorak said to him, almost incredulously. ‘I was right behind him.’
‘I’d appreciate your name and address, sir,’ the PC said.
‘Of course. She just pulled straight out. Mind you, he was travelling,’ the man admitted. ‘I was in my Range Rover.’ He jerked a thumb. ‘He absolutely flew past me.’
Upperton could see the ambulance arriving. ‘I’ll be right back, sir,’ he said, and hurried down to meet the paramedics.
How they handled the scene from here would very much depend on their initial assessment. If in their view it looked likely to be a fatality, then they would have to close the road until the Crash Scene Investigators had carried out their survey. In the meantime he radioed the controller and asked for two more units.
7
Festive parties had started early this year. At just after quarter to nine on Wednesday morning Detective Superintendent Roy Grace was sitting in his office nursing a hangover. He never used to suffer from hangovers, or at least very rarely, but recently they seemed to have become a regular occurrence. Maybe it was an age thing – he would be forty next August. Or maybe it was…
What exactly?
He should be feeling more settled in himself, he knew. For the first time in nine years since his wife, Sandy, had vanished, he was in a steady relationship, with a woman he really adored. He had recently been promoted to head up Major Crime, and the biggest obstacle to his career, Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper, who had never liked him, was moving to the other end of the country to take up a Deputy Chief Constable position.
So why, he kept wondering, did he so often wake up feeling like shit? Why was he drinking so recklessly suddenly?
Was it the knowledge that Cleo, who was about to turn thirty, was subtly – and sometimes not so subtly – angling for commitment? He had already effectively moved in with her and Humphrey, her mongrel rescue puppy – at least on a semi-permanent basis. The reason was in part that he really did want to be with her, but also because his mate and colleague Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson, whose marriage was on the rocks, had become an increasingly permanent lodger in his house. Much though he loved this man, they were too much of an odd couple to live together, and it was easier to leave Glenn to his own devices, although it pained Roy to see the mess he kept the place in – and in particular the mess he had made of Roy ’s prized vinyl and CD music collection.
He drained his second coffee of the morning, then unscrewed the cap of a bottle of sparkling water. Last night he had attended the Christmas dinner of the staff of Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, in a Chinese restaurant on the Marina, and then, instead of doing the sensible thing and going home afterwards, he had gone on with a crowd to the Rendezvous Casino, where he had drunk several brandies – which always gave him the worst hangovers – lost a rapid ?50 on roulette and a further ?100 at a blackjack table, before Cleo had – fortunately for him – dragged him away.
Normally at his desk by seven in the morning, he had just arrived in the office ten minutes ago, and so far the only task he had been able to perform, other than making himself coffee, was logging on to his computer. And tonight he had to go out again, to the retirement party of a chief superintendent called Jim Wilkinson.
He stared out of the window, at the car park and the ASDA supermarket across the road, then at the urban landscape of his beloved city beyond. It was a fine, crisp morning, the air so clear he could see the distant tall white chimney of the power station at Shoreham Harbour, with the blue-grey ribbon of the English Channel beyond, before it blended into the sky on the distant horizon. He’d only been in this office for a short while, after moving across from the other side of the building, where his view had been of the grey slab of the custody block, so this fine view was still something of a novelty and a joy. But not today.
