30
A breeze stirred and he forced himself to take a step forward, his boot crunching on a broken beer bottle, so that she looked up, and he saw her eyes were red rimmed, her flesh puffy and without shape, as if it had been hastily fashioned out of Plasticine. He sat easily on the hot grass, leaving her the space on the bench alone, his legs crossed like a Buddha.
‘Father Martin is in the vestry,’ she said. ‘There’s a meeting, about rebuilding the hostel. It’s going to be thousands, but the insurance will pay.’ She tried a smile that went horribly wrong.
‘If you’re not telling us the truth it will unravel — lies always do,’ said Shaw. A blackbird flew into the dust which had collected in the ditch at the root of the wall, flapping, shrieking as it took a bath.
She looked straight ahead, focused on the mid-distance.
‘Neil doesn’t know, I’m sure of that,’ said Shaw. ‘That’s because he’s an outsider. And an innocent, in an odd way, despite the tattoos and the martial arts. And he’s all about
They heard a klaxon sound on the distant docks, marking a change of shift. The noise made her jump, so that she had to rearrange her hands on her knees, then curl one of her feet up and under herself. Shaw noticed that on her lap was an apple, green, with a single ice-white bite mark.
‘But Bryan? That’s the real question,’ said Shaw. ‘Did Bryan know you were having an affair with Thiago Martin?’
She stood then, and looked around, trying to see if there was a way out, not just out of the sun but away from the question. She turned and walked to the graveyard wall, within which were set some headstones. With her back to Shaw she picked up a cypress leaf, examined it, then turned.
She looked into Shaw’s eyes and he was sure she was concentrating on the moon-like one, knowing it was blind. ‘Not until a few days before he died,’ she said. Her voice had become oddly formal, as if she was giving evidence from a witness box. ‘The water main burst up on the main road and we lost our supply. A woman comes in to help, she was there and didn’t know what to do. She rang me, but I’d left the mobile in the launderette. So she rang Bry. He got someone to take half a shift and he cycled back. He found me, us, together, upstairs at number 14. It was the end of everything.’
‘An end to the affair?’
‘Yes. Bry was in pieces. He was trying to put his life back together. Trying to stop the drugs.’ Shaw wondered
‘Which you broke on Sunday night?’ asked Shaw.
‘That was a mistake.’
‘What time was this “mistake”?’
She bent her head back, and Shaw wondered if she was calculating.
‘At six. We always met at six. But not at the house — I came here. I left Martha in the launderette. She’s a friend,’ she added. ‘She’s there now.’
‘Thank you,’ said Shaw, standing. ‘Six until…?’
‘Until you saw me in the street.’ She sat back on the bench and pulled her legs up, embracing them for comfort. But Shaw thought the movement was oddly relaxed, and he wondered if she was better at concealing the truth than he’d thought. This woman was the still heart of the Judd family, around which the turbulent men seemed to revolve. Shaw could see that she was someone used to keeping secrets, and he wondered how many others she kept.
‘Do you have to speak to Thiago?’ she asked.
‘Yes. I have to speak to Father Martin. Of course. And I have to ask you this: are you lying to me, to us, again? Did Father Martin really stay with you on Sunday night or did he go up to the hospital? Did he want to confront Bryan, perhaps? Because if Bryan had let you go…’
‘No he didn’t,’ said Shaw, angry that he’d let his sympathy for this woman cloud his judgement of her. ‘You were — if we believe you both — in bed together when he died. What kind of respect is that?’
She shrunk back at that, the eyes focusing again on the mid-distance. Valentine’s footsteps echoed down the tarmac path, and as Shaw turned to him the DS’s mobile rang. Valentine listened, mouthed the word ‘Twine’, then rang off, walking away so that Shaw had to follow, out of earshot of Ally Judd.
‘Hospital says Andy Judd’s a regular outpatient at the liver unit; he’s on a programme of steroids and was diagnosed in the initial stages of cirrhosis last May. He’s on a dietary regime. He is
Shaw thought about the gods, and the trip into the underworld of Erebus — a land of shadow on the banks of the river of the dead. To cross into Hell you had to pay the ferryman. But this was a dusty street on a summer’s day in Lynn, not a legend. Perhaps, in this world, you could pay to avoid the trip. ‘Unless,’ he said, looking up and down the street, at the paint peeling from the window frames, an ugly stain of damp on the side wall of the Crane. ‘Unless he can find a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. That was the price, right? If he had that kind of money he could buy himself a second life.’
31
The latticework of the old gasometer stood against the evening sky like the bones of a dinosaur, the neat criss-cross of the steel ribs framing the drifting moon. A star shone through as well, low over the rooftops of the town’s North End. Valentine left the Mazda in Adelaide Street behind a skip but under a street light, checked the car locks, then led the way through a gap in the fence, out onto the wasteland beyond, a few acres of shadowless abandoned concrete, stained with rust.
Shaw followed. He didn’t like following, but this was Valentine’s big moment, the break that just might blow open the case. They’d put out a description of the man they’d found on the sands through TV and radio that afternoon. But George Valentine hadn’t just waited for someone to call in; he’d hit the phones, working his way through his old contact book, then gone out on the street, tracking low life down to the old haunts. On a street corner outside a pawn shop that had closed fifteen years ago he was approached by a tramp, offering a name. But not there, not then. He had to turn up in person to collect. And there’d be a payment. Not just cash.
‘Wait,’ said Valentine, pushing forward through some thorns, out of sight.
Shaw watched Venus creeping across a steel-framed square of evening sky, on the coat-tails of the moon. For
Peploe had repented of his earlier fit of bad temper. Charm itself, he showed Shaw the pre-op facilities, the scrub room, the electronic screen which rolled back to create a double op theatre. Shaw had news too — the HTA audit team had completed the examination of the first three organ banks: the NHS facility. No signs of any illegal activity. That left Theatre Seven’s bank D.
‘But it is inconceivable,’ said Peploe, both hands laid flat and down on the operating table itself. He was smart enough to avoid patronizing the DI. So he tried to explain just how inconceivable it was that a black-market organ transplant had been performed here, at the heart of an NHS hospital.
‘It’s the scale of the necessary conspiracy which makes it unthinkable,’ he said. ‘For an operation — all right, maybe a surgeon, anaesthetist, a nurse. Three people. But that’s not the point; you need the recipient. They could walk in, but they aren’t going to walk out. Where are they cared for? If it’s an op with the donor present they need to be prepared — and then they need to recover. So, they go back to a ward. Which ward? Where’s their records? The GP referrals? And don’t forget, the key piece of evidence here is the human kidney found on the incinerator belt. It was placed in a waste bag from the children’s ward. That means — that
Venus slipped behind a girder. So Shaw was left with a question: if not in Theatre Seven — or any of the NHS
