Very popular, of course, because you can have a live donor, not a cadaver. LDLT — live donor liver transplant.’

‘So three different procedures?’ asked Shaw. ‘The corneas, the kidney, and the liver graft. At least three. Timings?’

She smiled, looking at Shaw as she might have looked at a favourite son. ‘The question. The corneas postmortem, the kidney before that — maybe two weeks, but the liver… I’d say that happened between six to eight months ago. The liver has partially regenerated itself at

Shaw thought about the timescale. They thought Pearmain had been taken off the streets about six months earlier. That’s when the liver op would have taken place. Then he returns to the operating table for a kidney transplant. Then he dies and the corneas are removed before the body is dumped. Where had he been between the operations?

Meanwhile the other victim — possibly Foster or Tyler — has had several procedures as well, and then dies after a botched kidney removal. An operation which had taken place in the last few days. That didn’t make sense either.

‘Can we match either of these two to the organ we found on the incinerator with Bryan Judd — the kidney?’

‘We can try,’ said Kazimierz. ‘It’s not Pearmain’s — the blood group is wrong. The other one — Rigby’s floater — is a match for blood, but the rest of the tests will take time. At this stage all I can say is that we can’t rule him out.’

Finished, Kazimierz made notes, walking back out into the CSI office on the far side of the partition. On a desktop was a bagged plaster cast of the knife Shaw had taken from Father Martin’s bloodwood chest.

‘As for this, it’s possible the wound in Bryan Judd’s chest was produced with this weapon. Possible. Nothing more.’

They broke for coffee. Valentine took his mug outside with a cigarette.

Kazimierz took Shaw to her desk. There was a pile of thin manila files.

‘These are the parish records your team collected from

Shaw butted in, aware that he should have asked this question at the start of the inquiry. ‘Is that usual, that a church would have copies of medical records, other documents?’

‘No. I asked. It all goes back to the priest…’ She consulted her notes. ‘Dr Martin? The GP admin people said he’d made a request to copy over the files and other information to aid his research work on the impact of poverty on health — particularly bone structure. That was his specialist area — rickets. He’d written academic papers on the work he’d done in Brazil — the Sao Paulo shanty towns. I’ve checked the references: reputable journals, important work.’

‘Right,’ thought Shaw. ‘Unfortunately he was struck off in ’94, which might explain why he failed to flag up his interest in the files to me. Even if it was a lie by omission. He said Kennedy, the hostel manager, looked after the files. He didn’t mention his own interests. That’s the innocent explanation — that he was trying to carry on his work, but knew we might check back on his record.’

Kazimierz thought about that, and then picked up three files, weighing them in her hand. Valentine came

The pathologist dropped the files and used both hands to massage her neck.

‘Hendre is the odd man out,’ she said. ‘It’s bizarre — he’s the only one of these men with a history of alcohol abuse. Long term, from early teenage years. The reported mental problems — paranoia, anxiety — may well be related to that. In contrast, look at Tyler, for example. Council care, reform school, recidivist. Nicotine was his addiction; two hundred a day at one point.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Valentine. ‘Human kipper.’

‘Indeed. But not a drop of alcohol, according to the records. Which means his kidneys were in perfect condition.’

She pushed the coffee mug aside.

‘Which was all in the files…’ said Valentine.

‘All in the parish files.’

Her grey eyes pulsed with light. ‘I cross-checked. The GP files are held at the hospital because the funding comes from the primary care trust. They are a decent match with the parish files except in the case of Hendre. The file on him up at the Queen Vic is completely wrong — he’s listed as forty-six years of age, for example. He’s thirty-three. So I checked through and found the obvious

Shaw and Valentine looked at each other, then back at the pathologist. ‘Where are both sets kept and who has access?’ asked Shaw.

‘The parish ones were, I understand, under lock and key in the presbytery. The hospital records are held in the usual way and accessible to doctors on a case-by-case basis.’

‘Which doctors?’

‘Good question. GPs at the community health centre — and those with sufficient seniority on the hospital staff.’

Hadden thudded through the Ark’s main doors. Shaw knew that in major inquiries the CSI man hardly slept, setting up a makeshift bed in the organ loft above the lab. He looked ill, his eyes puffy, with the ghost of a sunburn across his freckled forehead.

‘Sodding sands,’ he said. ‘No shade.’ He caught Shaw’s eye. ‘Wait — I’ve got something for you.’

He booted up the PC, then tapped his way into his e-mail basket, then leant back so that Shaw could read the note from the Forensic Science Service at Birmingham. The milk bottle used for the firebomb attack on the electricity sub-station had been drunk from by the neck, so they’d matched the DNA extracted from saliva against all those whose samples had been taken in the inquiry so far and they’d got a direct match, high-probability, with

‘So Andy Judd set out that Sunday to inflict a little more exquisite pain on Jan Orzsak,’ said Shaw. ‘Either because he believed he’d murdered his daughter, or because the vendetta deflected attention from the fact that he himself had been the killer.’

But was that his only motive for cutting the power, thought Shaw. They knew a bit more about Andy Judd now and it made him increasingly wary about brushing him aside as some kind of disturbed vigilante. First, there was the eighteen-year-long feud with Bryan Judd about the death of his twin sister, Norma Jean. That, surely, was the definition of bad blood. Second, while Andy Judd had an alibi for the time of his son’s death, it was underpinned by his network of friends in the street — hardly witnesses beyond reproach. And now they knew he was a regular outpatient at the hospital. A man in desperate need of a liver transplant, an operation he couldn’t get because of his addiction to alcohol, and his inability to overcome that addiction. Was there another reason that Andy Judd — or someone who had power over him — wanted darkness in Erebus Street the day Bryan Judd died? A darkness which had also shrouded the abduction of the homeless Blanket from the Sacred Heart?

36

Andy Judd was in the lairage, the covered area at the back of Bramalls’ abattoir, where the cattle were held before being sent down the metal-screened race into the slaughterhouse, the corridor in which the cattle got their first scent of death. But Valentine couldn’t smell it, just the sour aroma of singed bone from the saws. Shaw raised a hand to Judd, who was edging a cow towards the sinuous metal entrance to the race using a metal prod. He was dressed in a white overall, one quarter of which was stained a vivid red. Shaw thought what a dead metaphor ‘blood-soaked’ really was.

The cow kicked, suddenly jittery, and the noise began, the idyllic lowing of the field taking on an edgy urban panic. Judd whacked the animal with a metal prong, and sent it careering into the metal barriers, which flexed with the weight. Somewhere a circular saw cut through flesh and bone.

‘Go there! Go there!’ shouted Judd, making the cow skitter and run behind the curtain wall, followed by the next, and the next.

Judd stood still, waiting for Shaw and Valentine to cross the yard, the white overalls and cap he wore making his skin look butter-yellow. Again, Shaw was struck by how diminished he looked, like a man wasting away, to leave

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