and was wearing a flouncy white skirt, too short, some kind of peasant blouse laced open at the front and a denim jacket. She was also wearing black Doc Marten boots with blue boot socks and her hair was tied back. The whole outfit should have looked ridiculous.
It didn’t.
‘I want your help, Dan,’ she said simply.
It surprised me more than finding her in my flat in the first place.
‘That so?’ I replied, master of ready wit that I was, and took another pull on the Corona. Registering that it was nearly empty, I tilted the bottle and finished the job. ‘I get the feeling I’m going to need another one of these.’
I headed back into the kitchen, pulled another bottle from the fridge shelf and held the cold bottle against my forehead for a moment before popping the cap. I went back to the lounge.
‘Okay, doll face,’ I said recovering some of my legendary savoir faire. ‘Spit it out.’
Chapter 62
Kirsty put the brandy snifter down on a small table that she had placed next to my couch.
The sofa itself was positioned under the window that looked down on Dean Street below, and across to Meard Street – which had once been a favoured haunt of drug addicts and prostitutes but had gone downmarket now and was favoured by media types.
The lounge was small and contained a three-seater sofa that converted into a double-sprung bed, a thirty- two-inch Sony Bravia HD television which I very rarely watched, and an original Victorian fireplace which, though unused, was stacked with wooden logs. An art deco drinks cabinet which Kirsty had raided. A Moroccan rug on the floor and a bookcase by the television housing most of the books I was supposed to have read when I’d been studying English at Reading University – Dickens, Hardy, Shakespeare, lots of poetry – and which had hardly been glanced at since. When I did read anything nowadays it was most likely in paperback form, and the kind of book that once read you gave away to a friend or dropped off in a charity shop.
So that’s my lounge, bijou but comfortable and with everything just as I liked it – apart from the dark-haired woman with dangerously come-to-bed eyes that was sitting on the sofa.
‘I’ve applied for a job in Manchester,’ she said.
I nodded, although I had absolutely no idea where she was going with this.
‘I figured, get out of town,’ she continued. ‘You and me won’t keep bumping into each other. Take a spade and bury the past where it belongs.’
‘You always were the romantic one.’
‘Yeah – it wasn’t me taking text messages from your girlfriend when you were supposed to be marrying me.’
I took another slug of beer. Kept me from talking, at least, and this was one argument I was never going to win. I swallowed and said, ‘So you’re going to move to Manchester. What do you want me to do, help you pack?’ I was being a regular Jack Benny that night.
‘It’s a new position. They’re setting up a serial-killers unit. Worldwide coordination. Profiling. The whole shebang. Bit like the FBI have out at Quantico.’
I gestured with the beer bottle for her to continue.
‘I’m in with a chance, but there’s a lot of competition.’
‘So why do you need my help, Kirsty?’
‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I need Private’s.’
Chapter 63
I guess that put me back in my box.
‘Lay it out for me,’ I said.
‘We’re working on a couple of cases. May or may not be linked. Private have already given a forensic assist on one of them. The Jane Doe we found last night in King’s Cross.’
‘Yeah, Adrian Tuttle and Wendy Lee were on it.’
‘Two women. Both killed. Both had organs removed. Both had half of their wedding-ring fingers removed.’
She ran the fingers of her right hand over her own now bare wedding-ring finger. She had bounced the ring that used to adorn it off my face quite a few years ago. Nearly blinded me. I wasn’t sure if she was aware what she was doing with her fingers. Either way she stopped doing it.
‘We thought there was a pattern. A serial monster preying on women.’
‘Seems a fair deduction.’
‘Except we were wrong.’
‘Go on.’
‘Earlier today I had a shout. Called out to Stoke Mandeville hospital over in Aylesbury. Division thought it was a waste of time. Turned out it wasn’t.’
‘Another woman?’
‘No. This breaks the pattern. It was a man in his late twenties. Colin Harris. A primary-school teacher. His car was parked on the railway line and an InterCity express hit it full tilt.’
‘Ouch.’
‘Exactly. The train was travelling at well over one hundred miles an hour. Weighed four hundred metric tonnes. And even if the driver had slammed on the brakes as soon as he saw the car – it would have taken the train a mile and a half to stop. The Honda Accord had no chance and neither did Colin Harris.’
I took another swallow of my beer.
‘He was choppered into Stoke Mandeville hospital where a transplant patient was waiting. The incident had left him brain-dead. He was on the organ-donor register so when he had been certified as officially so, his heart was removed, transplanted and the life-support mechanisms were switched off.’
‘Suicide by Network Rail?’
Kirsty shook her head. ‘Somebody wanted us to think that. He had taken sleeping medication, left a note. But it turns out he didn’t commit suicide. He was put there and left to die.’
‘So what’s the connection with your Jane Doe times two?’
‘The third finger of his left hand was cut off at the second knuckle. Post-mortem.’
‘Which means it was done at the hospital?’
‘Yes.’
‘The same guy?’
‘Or group of them. It was a group who took Hannah Shapiro remember, Dan. What if the two cases really are connected?’
I shook my head. Given the exchange that was scheduled for tomorrow morning I thought it extremely unlikely.
‘It doesn’t feel connected to me. Seems like two different things going on here.’
‘What if someone is harvesting organs? People rich enough not to want to go on a waiting list?’
‘The old urban myth.’
Kirsty shrugged. ‘If people think of things, Dan, it can usually be done. You know that.’
I did know that but I didn’t want to think about it.
Kirsty finished her brandy and poured herself another healthy slug. By my reckoning, you got fourteen ordinary pub doubles out of a seventy-centilitre bottle of spirits. The one she had just poured was probably double that again. So I guessed that so far she had helped herself to about five hundred bucks’ worth of my brandy.
‘Hannah has disappeared into the ether. It’s been over twenty-four hours. If it was a kidnapping for ransom
