Kennedy looked at his trainers. ‘Not at all — although I would be most days. I take medication.’ The admission seemed to diminish him, and he looked younger still. ‘I was outside — by the abattoir actually, watching the street.
‘How did you know Father Martin was in?’ asked Valentine.
‘I’d seen a light earlier, and I’d noticed, because of the power cut. Father Martin has this old lantern, oil fired. I think it’s a family heirloom. The light’s multicoloured.’
Valentine scuffed his slip-ons across the parquet flooring. ‘Where was the light?’
Kennedy swallowed hard. ‘Bedroom.’ He stirred his tea, adding sugars from little paper packages that he’d collected in a dish.
‘We need to find this man — the one called Blanket — Mr Kennedy,’ said Shaw. ‘Can you tell us anything more about him, anything that wasn’t on his form?’
Kennedy sat, composed himself, as if he were a prisoner in the dock. ‘Most of these men are short on words, Inspector. I doubt I heard him string three together. He wouldn’t give us a name, as I said, which is why he got the label he did. Alcohol he didn’t touch, that was clear. His mind was good and he read a lot of the time — we get a travelling library. Good stuff, too. I always try to notice so that there’s something to talk about -
‘And he’d been here how long?’ asked Valentine.
‘Two weeks — I can check the record. But about that.’
‘Description?’
Kennedy laughed. ‘Well, that’s a sore point. Once the men have been here a few days we insist they get their hair cut — it’s a health issue. Most of them have been on the streets for years so there are various skin complaints, lice, that kind of thing. But Blanket said he wasn’t having that — that he’d leave if we made him. We just agreed to differ. I hoped he’d come round. And he was pretty clean — he used the showers at the town baths. But the hair stayed, and the beard. He looked like Ben Gunn.’
Another hidden face, thought Shaw.
‘But Middlesbrough — so an accent?’ said Valentine.
‘Not really. Ask the men — they’ll say the same. One or two are from up north and they said no way was he from Teesside, or Tyneside, for that matter. And there was something else. It was weird.’ He pressed his narrow knees together. ‘The first day he arrived it was mid-morning and we lock the church between ten and four — usually, anyway. But he rang, and I came out. I said he could come back at four, but he could fill in the form now — it saves time, and people get upset when all they want is to grab a bed and some food and they have to fill in a questionnaire. I watched him walk off. He went down the gravel path round the back of the church, there’s a bench there — wrought iron, Victorian. Anyway, the point is you can’t see it from the street. But he went
22
Shaw was standing by the Land Rover, a polystyrene cup of coffee balanced on the roof, when his mobile buzzed; he looked at the incoming ID — it was Tom Hadden, calling on the landline from the Ark. He picked up the call, watching Valentine in the distance briefing the door-to-door teams on what they’d discovered at the Sacred Heart.
‘Peter. Look, I’ve got some tests back on the waste bag found under Judd’s body.’
Shaw didn’t speak, trying to refocus his mind on the scene in the Queen Victoria’s incinerator room, the blackened corpse shivering as it trundled out of the furnace.
‘It’s a human kidney, Peter — or at least what’s left of one.’
Shaw’s hand moved involuntarily to his back.
‘But the real conundrum is that, as far as Justina and I can be sure, this kidney is in no way diseased. It should be working away keeping someone alive. But it isn’t. It’s been discarded — and I don’t think that makes much sense.’
‘Unless…’
‘Well. Let’s take it step by step, backwards. Someone has deliberately falsified the documentation on the waste bag to slip this organ into the incinerator. Either that or they opened a bag on the belt and switched the contents.
The words echoed in Shaw’s head.
‘Bryan Judd died with this thing under his body,’ said Shaw. ‘He was either holding it, and didn’t let go, or it was deliberately put with the body.’ It was a statement, not a question, and Hadden greeted it in silence.
Even in the noonday sun Shaw shivered, the hairs on his neck bristling, because his mind had only just made the big leap. He thought about the stifling smoke in the upstairs bedroom at number 6 Erebus Street, the fumes pouring through the gaps in the bare floorboards, the figure of Pete Hendre, curled in a foetal ball under the window ledge, and his whispered plea to make sure his face stayed hidden; hidden for ever, from the Organ Grinder.
He thanked Hadden, briefed him on what they’d found in the church, and asked if he could get a team on the scene as soon as resources allowed.
Twenty minutes later he was in a lift rising to the eighth floor of the main block of the Queen Victoria. He stepped out when a bell pinged, escaping the piped-in Bach and a trolley on which lay a man heading for theatre, his face mirroring the helpless fear he must have been feeling within. Shaw thought just how trusting you had to be to lie on a stretcher, to let strangers decide where to take you, and then to let them put you to sleep — the definition,
Mrs Jofranka Phillips, head of surgical services, had an office in the executive suite. The whole floor was air- conditioned, and the sudden chill made Shaw feel uneasy. The door was open, the office an uncluttered glass box empty but for a desk, a filing cabinet, and a full-sized skeleton hanging from an aluminium stand. Phillips stood five foot two in — Shaw noticed — her stockinged feet. She shook his hand and he thought that surgeons always had hands like that — the fingers preternaturally long, slender. And that stillness, an ability to remain calm at the very moment when ordinary people would begin to shake, as they made the first incision.
Shaw took a seat, noticing the skeleton had hands like that too.
‘Thanks for seeing me so quickly,’ he said. ‘My CSI team have passed on the details…?’
She nodded. ‘I thought we should talk,’ she said. She looked him squarely in the face and saw the dead eye for the first time, her familiarity with trauma reducing her reaction to the merest flicker of her eyelids.
‘I’m sorry.’ Shaw raised a hand. ‘I realize you have responsibilities in the hospital but we’re dealing with a murder scene here — and now with the discovery of a human organ without the relevant documentation. I’ve talked to my superior at St James’s — Superintendent Warren — and to the chairman of the primary care trust…’
He flipped through his notes but she didn’t have the patience for that.
‘Right. Him. And we’re all agreed that these two issues are now inextricably entwined.’
Phillips looked shocked, and she couldn’t stop a hand rising to cover her mouth.
‘So I’m going to investigate all of these issues in the round, as it were — with your help. I can rely on your assistance?’
He’d been brutal, but it was the only way. There was no point pretending anyone was in charge of this inquiry except him. What he hadn’t said was that Sir John Falcon had made it clear that any inquiry within the hospital would have to involve clinical experts brought in from other hospitals. Phillips would be answering questions, not asking them — although he’d added an encomium to the effect that she was one of the finest surgeons in the NHS and that they were very lucky to have her on the staff. Don’t be fooled by the ‘Mrs’, he’d added — it didn’t mean she was married, it meant she was a surgeon. ‘So don’t call her doctor,’ he’d warned, laughing, ‘because that
‘Of course,’ said Phillips. She touched the phone on her desk and Shaw guessed she’d thought about arguing the toss with Falcon, but decided it was a lost cause. ‘I’ll do anything I can.’ Her accent was heavy — Cypriot, perhaps. Luxuriant black hair was swept back off her face, a contrast to the white clinical coat and pale-olive skin. Her jewellery was black too, a jet stone bracelet, and a black pendant necklace. Black and white, light and darkness
