and stared out of the dusty window at the blank sky. Speed is of the essence. And always the same day of the week.
Norma came in and made her report, and was disappointed that her boss seemed so distracted, he wasn’t even moved by the revelation that Windhover was behind the agency. She eyed him curiously. ‘You knew that already, didn’t you?’
Slider roused himself. ‘No. No, I didn’t. But I’m not surprised. I
She nodded. ‘Are we going after her?’
‘Not now. Not yet. There are other things going on. We have to be careful. And I don’t know yet—’
She waited but he didn’t finish the sentence. ‘You look tired, boss,’ she said eventually.
‘Didn’t sleep much last night.’
‘Have you had lunch?’
He looked at the clock in surprise. ‘Is it that time?’
‘Want me to get you a sandwich?
He roused himself. ‘No, thanks, I’ll go up to the canteen. I need a change of scene.’ Maybe it would create a change of thinking.
Connolly found him there, toying with a portion of moussaka. He looked up at her resentfully.
‘Aubergines,’ he said. ‘I mean, what’s that all about? It’s not a shepherd’s pie and it’s not a lasagne.’
‘It’s an abomination,’ she said, to humour him.
‘And look at this salad. It’s all frisee.’
‘I hate that yoke. You’d cut your mouth on it. And it tastes like shit.’
‘It’s the astroturf of lettuce,’ Slider said. ‘All right, gripes satisfied. Did you get anything? I see you did. Sit down.’
‘Piece o’ cake,’ Connolly said modestly, sitting down opposite him. ‘I shared a flat with two nurses for six months so I can talk a good talk. And I’ve a friend who’s an agency nurse. I borrowed one of her dresses and just walked in.’
‘Into the Cloisterwood?’ Slider asked in alarm, remembering Porson’s final warning.
‘No, no, not there,’ Connolly said in a tone that implied the words ‘you eejit’ had been left out. ‘The Royal Orthopod. I’d a stuck out like a sore mickey in the private hospital. I wouldn’t know what agency they use, if they use one at all. But in an NHS hospital the trick is to find two nurses wearing the same thing. So anyway, seeing as I got there about lunchtime, I went up to the staff canteen and got talking to some o’ the nurses.’
‘No trouble getting them to open up?’
‘Are you kidding? They wore the ear offa me. The Cloisterwood is all they talk about. Mostly it’s the money – how much the patients pay and how much the staff are paid and why couldn’t they get a piece of it and the wickedness altogether of the private sector. And when I got on to kidneys! It was all, the queue-jumping, and the rich foreigners getting in ahead of our people. It’d make your head bleed. Nurses are the great levellers.’ She eyed the cold moussaka with which he was fiddling, despite the defensive crust it had grown. ‘Would you not leave that? It’d break your teeth. It’s like the horny plates on a Tasmanian devil.’
Slider smiled. ‘A Tasmanian devil doesn’t have plates. It’s furry.’
‘So what’s that giant lizardy thing?’
‘Never mind,’ Slider said, and pushed the plate aside. ‘Look, no hands. Go on with your report.’
‘Well, after all the bitching it wasn’t hard to work them round to specifics, especially as I told them me anty was on a waiting list for a kidney. I had their hearts scalded with her sufferings! Anyway, kidney transplants at the Cloisterwood are done on a Thursday. They start at ten o’clock, and go on through the day, two operating theatres working at the same time, so they’ll do eight or sometimes ten altogether. The op takes about two hours if there’s no complications.’
‘Eight or ten. That sounds like a lot.’
‘I thought so. I wondered about it, eight kidneys a week for the one hospital? But all the nurses said was that rich private patients could always get what they wanted, it was the rest of us eejits that had to queue up and suffer. It was all part of the bitching. When I asked about me anty they said the NHS waiting list is two years minimum, and even then you’ve only a fifty-fifty chance of getting an organ. So you can see their point of view – especially when I asked what it’d cost to jump the queue, and they said these people’d be paying over a million for that one little bit of meat and a few tubes o’ gristle.’
‘And a chance of a normal life.’
‘Well, there is that, I suppose.’
She stopped and looked at him intelligently, and he roused himself from mental arithmetic to say, ‘You did very well. And you’re sure no one suspected you?’
‘God, no. That lot of Miserable Margarets don’t mind who they complain to, as long as they can ride some ferocious crying-shame. By the way, I also found out that the Cloisterwood does corneas of a Friday, same system, non-stop, only it’s a quicker op so they only use the one theatre. But they get through about the same number.’
‘Corneas on a Friday,’ Slider said.
‘Makes you think,’ said Connolly.
They walked downstairs together, and Slider found Atherton in his office.
‘You’re becoming very elusive,’ he complained.
‘I went to the canteen for lunch.’
‘Good luck with that. Did you get any?’
‘Not really.’ He waved at the windowsill. ‘Have a pew. I’ve things to tell you.’
At the end of it Atherton wrinkled his nose and said, ‘I’ve heard of two lips from Amsterdam, but kidneys and corneas? Wouldn’t they go off?’
‘I checked. Properly refrigerated, kidneys can last forty to fifty hours, and corneas ten days.’
‘But where do they come from?’
‘You may well ask.’
‘I did,’ Atherton pointed out. He pondered. ‘Not diamonds?’
‘Porson himself said it sounded more like something perishable. There’d be no need for a regular day for diamonds – in fact, doing diamonds on a schedule would make it more dangerous – more likely to be spotted.’
‘Well, you don’t expect criminals to be intelligent.’
‘IJmuiden is a short distance from Amsterdam airport, by a fast motorway link. Speed would be of the essence.’
Atherton thought a moment. ‘But it’s all supposition. We actually have nothing to connect Rogers with Cloisterwood, apart from Webber being his old pal.’
‘I want you to get on to the Hendon ANPR, see if you can trace Rogers’s car from Southwold the Thursday morning before he was killed. He’d probably use the most direct route, A12 and M25, if he was coming back to London. If he wasn’t—’ He shrugged. That was whole-new-ball-game country.
‘Right,’ said Atherton. ‘But it probably was London. Even if it was fish in that cool box, or an entire mixed grill, where would he go with it but London?’
‘He could have another wife tucked away somewhere for all we know.’
‘You don’t believe that,’ Atherton said. He headed for the door, then turned back. ‘It could still be diamonds.’
‘I know,’ Slider said. ‘In a way, I hope it is.’
Phil Warzynski rang from Notting Hill. ‘I promised you I’d keep you up to date,’ he said, ‘but don’t let Hunnicutt know, or he’ll have my guts for garters. He doesn’t want anyone else muscling in on his ground.’
‘You’re a mate,’ Slider said. ‘Everyone here seems to have forgotten that poor girl.’ He had himself, for a bit, but didn’t let on, of course.
‘Grapevine says you’ve stumbled on to something big,’ Warzynski said hopefully. ‘There’s a certain buzziness in the big brass dining-room – talk of Europol . . .’
‘I can’t say anything,’ Slider said. ‘Sorry, but it wouldn’t just be guts they’d turn into garters.’
‘Oh well. I won’t be hard-nosed about it. You can have my bit of gen for nothing. Two bits, actually. Nothing
