Body Line

She hardened her gaze. ‘Money,’ she said in a cold voice. Slider continued to look at her steadily, and she went on, ‘I was divorcing David. The Lescroit business was the excuse but I was going to anyway. I had to get away from him. I hated him by then. Oh, you don’t know, you can’t imagine what it was like for me! David had betrayed me and broken my heart. Bernard was my rock. He helped me through everything. And his money – a friend’s money – meant I didn’t need to take anything from David. I told him I would pay it back. But he laughed and said he wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘You were still Webber’s mistress?’

‘For a time. But after all the fuss died down, after the divorce came through, Bernard sold the practice, got a government contract and went abroad.’

‘How did Robin Frith fit in with all this? Weren’t you involved with him long before the divorce was finalized?’

She looked annoyed. ‘What business is it of yours?’

‘Everything is now my business,’ he said, unmoved. ‘I thought we had established that.’

‘I don’t see what it has to do with anything,’ she went on, with extra high dudgeon to compensate for co- operating, ‘but it was Bernard’s idea that I should cultivate Robin. Felicity – Bernard’s wife – was having suspicions about me, and he wanted to divert them. She thought I was divorcing David for him. Bernard had already decided to divorce Felicity and he wanted it to be amicable, otherwise it would have cost him dear. So she mustn’t think there was anything between Bernard and me. Robin was a smokescreen.’ She shrugged. ‘He’d always been in love with me, and I knew I could control him, so it worked very well.’

God, she was a cold one! Slider thought. ‘So Bernard wasn’t divorcing in order to marry you?’

‘God, no. He’d decided on it long before we were involved. And marriage was never on the cards between us. I wouldn’t have wanted it any more than him. He and Felicity separated just before he went abroad and I didn’t see him for almost two years.’

She stopped, her eyes inward. When he saw she was not going to resume unprompted, Slider said, ‘It was on his tour abroad that he got everything set up, wasn’t it?’

She came back from her reverie. ‘Yes, of course. His government status opened all sorts of doors. He told me he saw the whole thing, complete, in one single flash, and after that it was just a matter of setting up the processes. It came to him one evening in Beijing. He was talking to some little Chinese government functionary, who told him about the state executions.’ She gave him a defiant look. ‘The Chinese government sells the organs quite openly, you know. They don’t make any bones about it. These are all condemned criminals. Why shouldn’t they repay their debt to society in a practical way?’

Slider didn’t get sucked into that. ‘He set up the Geneva Foundation. And the numbered Swiss bank account to handle the money. There’d be no questions asked or answered about either. But there had to be a British arm, so that end would look legitimate.’

‘The Windhover Trust. It was legitimate. Then he worked out the quickest route for the organs – Hong Kong, then Amsterdam by plane, and then by speed boat to England, exchanging at sea where there was no one to see it happen.’

‘And on his other travellings he was working up customers,’ Slider suggested. ‘The Middle East, India, South America . . .’

‘Of course. He had to have agents to direct the patients his way.’

‘And the last stage was to get the organs from the coast to Stanmore. He offered that job to David.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you know he was going to do that?’

‘I was there at the meeting. That would be in the March of 2001. Bernard asked me over to his place one evening – his new place. He and Felicity were divorced by then, and we were seeing each other from time to time. When I got there, David was there too. I thought for one horrible moment he was trying to reconcile us. But it was a business meeting, not a social one. He had the whole network set up by then, except for the last leg. David hated his current job, so he jumped at it. Bernard would pay him a basic salary through Windhover, just enough not to rouse anyone’s suspicions, enough to pay tax on, and the rest he’d get in cash – lovely, untraceable cash. Plenty of it. David could live the kind of lifestyle he liked, and the work was negligible. Once a week, courier the goods to London, that was all. Later, Bernard asked him to entertain clients as well, but I always thought that was more to keep David occupied than because it was really necessary.’

‘Why did he offer the job to David? Was he uniquely qualified for it?’

‘Good Lord, no,’ she said scornfully. ‘In fact, Bernard has this chap – a sort of factotum—’

‘Jerry McGuinness?’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, you know about him?’

‘How did Bernard meet him?’

‘Jerry? Oh, he picked him up on his travels when he was doing his tour abroad. Got him out of some kind of trouble with the police in South America. Brought him home. Jerry’s forever grateful. Completely loyal.’

I am not the butcher, but the butcher’s dog, Slider thought.

‘Plus, of course, Bernard pays him well,’ she concluded indifferently.

‘So, why David, then?’

‘To keep him quiet. Bernard thought that sooner or later he was bound to work out what had really happened that day in Harley Street, and he wanted to have him thoroughly bound by unbreakable ties. I think he was wrong – I don’t think David would ever have suspected. He wasn’t sharp enough – and he loved Bernard, as a friend. He trusted him. But also,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘I think Bernard really wanted to do David a favour. He loved him, too, you know.’

‘And you were guaranteed money for your agency for ever.’

She looked sour. ‘You’re going to blame me for taking the money.’

‘Not at all. It’s perfectly understandable.’

‘We do good work.’

‘And Windhover gets a good cover story.’ She didn’t answer, only gave him a cross look as though he was taking unfair advantage. ‘But didn’t the illegality of the whole thing bother you?’

‘Illegality?’

‘You must know that it is illegal to import organs in that way.’

‘Oh! But that’s just a technicality. Why on earth shouldn’t we import organs? The government could change the law if it wanted to. When you think of the misery of people waiting for transplants . . . What Bernard does is good. He saves lives, and gives people the chance of a decent life.’

‘Only people who can pay large sums of money.’

She positively scowled. ‘Don’t you think rich people have the same right to life as anyone else? Do you measure a person’s worth by how much money they have? It’s not a moral virtue to be poor. It doesn’t make you a saint.’

‘Nor does being rich.’

‘Whoever said it did? But the government could just as well buy these organs if it cared so much about saving the poor. In any case, Bernard’s patients would all be on official waiting lists for organs if he didn’t help them. Taking them off the list moves everyone else up. Everyone benefits. Oh, a man can spend his money destroying his body with drink and cigarettes and overeating, and that’s his moral right! But if he spends it preserving his health he’s some kind of monster!’

She had thought about it, he saw, many, many times in the stilly watches of the night; had justified it to herself so that she could live with it for ten years, and never let out a word to a soul. In spite of her defiant words, she had a conscience, buried deep in there somewhere.

‘Not everyone benefitted,’ Slider said. ‘What about the donors?’

‘Condemned criminals? What would be the good of wasting the perfectly good organs? They would have died anyway.’

‘Are you quite sure of that?’ Slider asked in a deadly small voice.

The implications of the question could not have been new to her, but she must have shut them out in self defence. Now he saw the train of thought flitting through her face, taking the barriers with it. She sat rigidly upright in her chair, but her expression was a cry of desperation.