Shaw sipped the coffee, listening now.
‘You’re rich, you’re dying, you need a kidney. Local hospital says maybe a year. But you’re rich, you don’t
Shaw crushed his paper cup and laid both his hands,
Valentine sighed; he hated this kind of rationalization, treating a crime like a textbook example. ‘We don’t know whether Peploe killed himself because he knew what we were about to find in the organ bank, or whether his death was an accident, or even murder. We don’t know who the Organ Grinder is — the man on the street, finding and collecting the donors. We don’t know who Peploe’s accomplices were. And we don’t know who killed Bryan Judd or why — which is where we came in. That do you?’
Shaw licked the chocolate off the lid of his coffee.
‘Doesn’t mean we can’t try and think it through.’
Valentine spat in the dust.
‘Bryan Judd fits in to the organ trade,’ said Shaw. ‘He makes sure the waste from the ops gets nicely disposed of. That’s vital. They could burn it domestically, but they’d have to get it off the site, which is dangerous — stupid — if you can do it right here.’
Above them a thin line of smoke from the incinerator chimney caught the moon.
‘But then, on the day he dies, things get worse. Holme goes up to the hospital to spell it out for the last time. He’s going down; there won’t be any more Green Dragon.’ Shaw pinged the corner of the paper cup. ‘Holme was going to be out of the picture — pretty much permanently as far as Judd was concerned. So Judd had to face up to the fact he’d have to get his gear somewhere else — and he needed the cash to get it. What are we talking about, George? A hundred pounds a week, one-fifty?’
Valentine nodded. ‘Depends on how much he got through, but the cases I’ve seen — they’re heavy users. So at least that.’
‘So Judd’s facing a crisis. He needs extra cash. What if he asked Peploe or the Organ Grinder for it? Perhaps he even added in a threat — that he’d blow the lid on the organ trade if he didn’t get it. Because this isn’t some little two-bit money earner, is it? We’re talking organized crime, even if it isn’t exactly the Mafia.’
Valentine, drawn into the analysis, took Shaw’s crunched cup and turned it over, tapping the top. ‘One
Shaw smiled. ‘So there’s two of them right there — one selects, one collects.’ A bat, attracted by the insects circling in the light spilling from the glass door, swung round their heads.
DC Twine had tracked them down to the cafe. He took a seat, unscrewing the top on a bottle of still water. ‘Bit of luck. Peploe’s secretary at the hospital seems to know her boss pretty well — she’s up to speed on his pills, anyway. She says he was on a course of anticonvulsants, like the wife said. The dragon’s head dispenses lamotrigine. He told the kids they were sweets if he had to take one in public. He always carried a bag of boiled sweets too, so they got one as well.’ He looked at a note he’d taken in a neat pocket book. ‘He also took carbamazepine as a syrup — probably each morning — and gabapentin as an emergency measure. They were in a plastic bottle in his pocket.
‘Problem is, Tom says the pills in the dispenser aren’t lamotrigine. We’ll have to wait for the official analysis from the FSS. The colour and shape are very close, but he thinks it’s definitely something else. He showed the pharmacist at the hospital and she spotted them straight away. He thinks they’re sodium nitroprusside. The A amp;E department holds them for use in emergencies to produce a sharp drop in blood pressure. One pill — never more. Even one, given to a patient with normal blood pressure, could be fatal. Two — and Peploe always took two as a dose — would be fatal.’
‘It could have been suicide,’ said Twine. ‘He’d know the effect.’
Shaw shook his head. ‘Think it through. It doesn’t make sense. Why were the pills in the dispenser? You don’t decide to commit suicide and then dream up ways to make it look like an accident. Unless it’s an insurance scam — and I think we can rule that out. If he wanted to top himself he’d have just taken them. No — I think someone swapped them. Then left him to administer his own poison. Someone who didn’t want Gavin Peploe to talk.’
39
Lena was asleep in the cottage, so Shaw let himself into the small office behind the Beach Cafe and switched on the iMac. He wouldn’t sleep yet, so he might as well do something. The likelihood that Gavin Peploe had been murdered meant the inquiry had to be reappraised. The whole squad had been paged and told to attend a briefing at 6.30 the following morning on Level One. Outside he could hear the tide washing in, and a night breeze in the tall grass in the dunes.
As the iMac screen blossomed he tried to push Peploe’s face from his mind: the saliva in a colourless line across the tanned skin, the crowded eyes. He tapped into Google, then to the local council website, following the links to the Burney Housing Association which now ran the Westmead Estate. Garage rental was outsourced to a private company called OffStreet. It had an online register listing the sixty-three lock-up garages on the Westmead. Eight were empty and available for rental at an annual fee of?40. Management of the service on the ground was provided by a warden — Mr D. Holden. An address in the nearby Shinwell Flats was listed, together with a telephone number.
Shaw checked his watch: low tide, and 10.36 p.m. It was late, but patience wasn’t his strong suit. He rang and a woman answered, who said Don wouldn’t mind the
Don Holden’s voice was a surprise; high and reedy, happy to help. Shaw had four names and wanted to know if any of them matched the tenants on the current roll. Four names: the three Askit apprentices he suspected were on the CCTV of the crash at Castle Rising, and Robert Mosse. Don said he’d be a minute and came back with the register. It was all on paper, always had been, because he’d been on a course for the computer but his fingers were too big for the keys. Shaw waited.
No match.
Did he have the register for past years? Yes — back to 1995. Before that he’d burnt the lot because it was a small flat and they had a cat to swing. Could he check back? Shaw sat, breathing in the sea air through the open window, as Holden went over the old registers.
No match.
Shaw laughed, thanked him, and rang off. He walked out on the sand and watched the distant white line of surf breaking out towards the horizon. He took a small rubber ball from his pocket and began to bounce it up against the wooden side of the cafe, catching it despite his one-eyed vision by gently moving his head a few inches from side to side — a technique which effectively gave his brain two images of the moving ball from which he could build a 3D image. He caught the ball three times perfectly, but missed the fourth by a good foot. It was a skill he’d have to hone.
He pocketed the ball and glanced up at the small sign set over the entrance to the cafe. It had been a big step
Everything to do with the business was in her name — and she’d never taken his. He went back to his desk and found the file he wanted in the top drawer. The records on a juvenile court case from 1996, a case he’d been drawn to because of its links to the death of Jonathan Tessier. Three young men — Bobby Mosse’s gang — had admitted terrorizing a small boy called Giddy Poynter. The boy’s mother had tried to set up a Neighbourhood Watch scheme on the Westmead to try and curb vandalism on her floor of Vancouver House. The gang locked Giddy in a rubbish bin overnight, having tossed in half a dozen rats to keep him company, just to teach his mum a lesson.
Shaw read through the note on the proceedings until he got to a section in which each of the three gang members had been given the chance to produce an adult to speak on their behalf. They’d admitted the charges, but this was in mitigation. Two had produced fathers but the third — Alex Cosyns — had called his mother, a woman
