Death Watch

Sunday, 19 September

The stock cars circled the arena as if locked together, a screaming high-velocity scrap heap of painted metal wrapped in exhaust fumes. Above rose a cloud of summer dust, like a nuclear mushroom, climbing into a towering column in the hot, windless evening air. The sun was setting through this prism of dirt, so that everywhere the light was red and golden. Valentine watched the last race; or rather, he looked as if he was watching the last race. But his field glasses did not swing as the cars went past. They were fixed instead on a spot in the pits opposite. The man he was watching wore a spotless mechanic’s jacket, reflective glasses, and a baseball cap with a logo Valentine couldn’t read — although he knew what it said: TEAM MOSSE.

The air was soaked with petrol so that he could taste it on his lips — iron, and the astringent kick of gas — so he pulled the third can of beer out of his raincoat pocket. The first had been iced, this one was warm, and as he pulled the tab he let the froth explode in his mouth. He was pleased it was the last race because his back ached, and the noise was making a small bone in his inner ear buzz like a trapped fly.

A chequered flag the size of a picnic blanket waved WINNER — TEAM MOSSE. As the chasing pack swept past a piece of chassis span off one of the cars, followed by a few strips of burnt tyre. The crowd, about 8,000 strong, screamed with delight as the disintegrating car failed to pull out of the bend, the offside front wheel crumpling so that the whole vehicle carried on, catching the crash barrier, tipping, then riding ahead on its roof.

But Valentine wasn’t watching. He’d found his target again in the pits opposite: Robert Mosse, standing alone, hands on hips, watching Cosyns bring in the winning car. When the driver got out Mosse stopped clapping and lit a cigar, turning away, and it was a mechanic from the next pit who patted the winner on the back. Valentine wondered again why Robert Mosse was sending Cosyns?1,000 cheques and then cutting him dead in his moment of glory. Cosyns didn’t register the slight, simply accepting a bottle of beer from the man in overalls and calmly sipping it as he watched the replay of the final lap.

Valentine dropped the can, half finished, in a bin and began to thread through the crowd towards the exit gates. There’d be a kind of circus finale, with all the cars circling, but he didn’t need to see that because he was here to find out where they kept the Team Mosse trailer. Cosyns housed the car in the garage beside the undertakers, but there was no room for anything else, and Valentine had executed a drive-by surveillance of Mosse’s tasteless suburban villa — there were three garages, but all standard

Outside the arena it was chaos, like some nightmare version of the Monte Carlo Rally, with people running for their cars, trying to beat the inevitable traffic jam. The sun shone from a thousand windscreens. Valentine found the Mazda, zigzagged to the gates, and slipped into a lay-by next to a mobile tea van. He had the window down so the smell of fat and bacon filled the car.

He kicked open the door but left the engine running.

His mobile rang. He’d changed the ring tone to play the theme from Ghostbusters, and it still made him laugh.

GUILTY PLEA

The text was from Shaw, on his way back to Lynn from an informal meeting in Peterborough with the CPS, who were involved in an international effort to prepare the case against the organ traffickers — a case set to cause an international sensation.

Andy Judd was due before the magistrates the following morning to lodge a plea, and had waited until the last moment before agreeing to the deal on offer to both him and his son Neil. Andy Judd would plead guilty to arson

The Crown’s case would further be strengthened by testimony from the three men discovered still alive in the hold of the Rosa by Shaw and Valentine — and Terence Foster, the donor in the operating theatre: brave men who, it now seemed, had come close to saving themselves on that Sunday night the power had blown on Erebus Street. In the sudden darkness they’d planned a rebellion, and when Rey Abucajo had opened the door by torchlight to select a replacement for John Tyler they’d coshed him, pushed him out, and barricaded the door. And that was why Neil Judd had been forced to go out on the streets for a fresh donor. When Rey Abucajo eventually returned with the rest of the crew to force his way through the door he’d come armed. The man they’d known as John Pearmain had been shot dead as an example to the rest, then taken away to the operating table to Rosa sailed out of the Wash, weighted down in the waste bag which had come ashore on Warham’s Hole. All four witnesses lived for the moment they’d take the stand.

Interpol was making progress in establishing when and where the Rosa’s hold had been adapted to conceal the operating theatre and makeshift ward and organ bank. The complexity of the wider investigation — which had been handed to a specialist cross-border unit at New Scotland Yard — meant that the trial was yet to be allocated a date in the legal calendar. Counsel’s best guess was currently spring 2012. None of the accused had been granted bail. Lawyers for Abucajo had indicated that their client would testify that the dead captain had administered lethal injections to those donors who had outlived their usefulness in the living organ bank. It was a ploy unlikely to save his skin. Jofranka Phillips’s case would be more subtle: a jury would have to decide the extent to which she’d known the secrets of the Rosa. Initial estimates of the number of men who may have died on board the vessel during its two-year career as a floating operating theatre varied between eight and thirteen. The final figure might be far higher.

Valentine sucked the life out of a Silk Cut. Then another. Was there another way out of the Norfolk Arena? He was about to walk back and check with the security guard by the entrance when Mosse’s soft-top BMW came into view, taking the corner onto the main road at 60 m.p.h., purring past, the Limousin leather hood folded back behind the rear seat.

53

Valentine slipped the Mazda in behind the trailer, up close, where he wouldn’t be seen too often in the BMW’s side mirror.

Following, he felt fleetingly happy, with the local radio giving out a forecast for the beaches, the heat making the plastic seats soft with that smell that brought back a memory of childhood holidays.

They hit the ring road, went east, then skirted the town, so that Valentine was beginning to think they’d pick up the coast road, but then one roundabout short they cut back into town, round the Magnox power station, and into the Westmead Estate. Valentine’s breathing became painfully shallow, because in all the years since the Tessier case he’d never found a single line of evidence which linked Robert Mosse back to his childhood home and the scene of the crime — except for the disputed fur glove. In fact all the members of Mosse’s little gang had put as much distance as they could between the estate and their adult lives. Cosyns had moved away, Voyce had gone to New Zealand, Robins to the Midlands, then prison and a string of psychiatric hospitals. But here Valentine was, following Cosyns right back to where it had all begun.

He dropped the Mazda back a hundred yards as they drove past the triangle of ground worn down to mud by kids’ football, the pitch where Tessier had been playing

He walked down the alley, clocking the numbers on most of the lock-ups: some just painted, others broken. The garages were built in pairs, each sharing a centre wall of breeze blocks and each pair separated by a narrow gap. Keeping the front of Cosyns’s lock-up in sight he edged closer, then slipped into one of the gaps opposite. A goods train went past on the old railway line, but when the silence returned he could hear something in it: the low rumble of an engine, throaty and visceral, coming from the lock-up. He noted the number: 51. He backed further down the narrow gap, behind some rubbish — two old pushbikes and an ancient rusted pram. Behind him he had an exit if he got spotted. He’d wait for Cosyns to go, then check out the lock-up. The engine rumbled on. The noise was subterranean, but rhythmic, oiled, and flawless.

Shaw watched the holiday traffic creeping west as he approached the outskirts of Lynn. His mobile buzzed in its holder on the dashboard. He pressed a key to open a picture message: Fran on the beach holding the string of a kite. Out to the north, over the sea, the sky was a vivid stretched blue. As he reached the ring road he fought and won against the temptation to return to St James’s. He had a fortnight’s holiday, and it started now. Lena had obtained planning permission for an extension to the cottage: a shower room and bathroom, utility room, and a