Slider smiled. ‘A Tasmanian devil doesn’t have plates. It’s furry.’
‘So what’s that giant lizardy thing?’
‘Never mind,’ Slider said, and pushed the plate aside. ‘Look, no hands. Go on with your report.’
‘Well, after all the bitching it wasn’t hard to work them round to specifics, especially as I told them me anty was on a waiting list for a kidney. I had their hearts scalded with her sufferings! Anyway, kidney transplants at the Cloisterwood are done on a Thursday. They start at ten o’clock, and go on through the day, two operating theatres working at the same time, so they’ll do eight or sometimes ten altogether. The op takes about two hours if there’s no complications.’
‘Eight or ten. That sounds like a lot.’
‘I thought so. I wondered about it, eight kidneys a week for the one hospital? But all the nurses said was that rich private patients could always get what they wanted, it was the rest of us eejits that had to queue up and suffer. It was all part of the bitching. When I asked about me anty they said the NHS waiting list is two years minimum, and even then you’ve only a fifty-fifty chance of getting an organ. So you can see their point of view – especially when I asked what it’d cost to jump the queue, and they said these people’d be paying over a million for that one little bit of meat and a few tubes o’ gristle.’
‘And a chance of a normal life.’
‘Well, there is that, I suppose.’
She stopped and looked at him intelligently, and he roused himself from mental arithmetic to say, ‘You did very well. And you’re sure no one suspected you?’
‘God, no. That lot of Miserable Margarets don’t mind who they complain to, as long as they can ride some ferocious crying-shame. By the way, I also found out that the Cloisterwood does corneas of a Friday, same system, non-stop, only it’s a quicker op so they only use the one theatre. But they get through about the same number.’
‘Corneas on a Friday,’ Slider said.
‘Makes you think,’ said Connolly.
They walked downstairs together, and Slider found Atherton in his office.
‘You’re becoming very elusive,’ he complained.
‘I went to the canteen for lunch.’
‘Good luck with that. Did you get any?’
‘Not really.’ He waved at the windowsill. ‘Have a pew. I’ve things to tell you.’
At the end of it Atherton wrinkled his nose and said, ‘I’ve heard of two lips from Amsterdam, but kidneys and corneas? Wouldn’t they go off?’
‘I checked. Properly refrigerated, kidneys can last forty to fifty hours, and corneas ten days.’
‘But where do they come from?’
‘You may well ask.’
‘I did,’ Atherton pointed out. He pondered. ‘Not diamonds?’
‘Porson himself said it sounded more like something perishable. There’d be no need for a regular day for diamonds – in fact, doing diamonds on a schedule would make it more dangerous – more likely to be spotted.’
‘Well, you don’t expect criminals to be intelligent.’
‘IJmuiden is a short distance from Amsterdam airport, by a fast motorway link. Speed would be of the essence.’
Atherton thought a moment. ‘But it’s all supposition. We actually have nothing to connect Rogers with Cloisterwood, apart from Webber being his old pal.’
‘I want you to get on to the Hendon ANPR, see if you can trace Rogers’s car from Southwold the Thursday morning before he was killed. He’d probably use the most direct route, A12 and M25, if he was coming back to London. If he wasn’t—’ He shrugged. That was whole-new-ball-game country.
‘Right,’ said Atherton. ‘But it probably was London. Even if it was fish in that cool box, or an entire mixed grill, where would he go with it but London?’
‘He could have another wife tucked away somewhere for all we know.’
‘You don’t believe that,’ Atherton said. He headed for the door, then turned back. ‘It could still be diamonds.’
‘I know,’ Slider said. ‘In a way, I hope it is.’
Phil Warzynski rang from Notting Hill. ‘I promised you I’d keep you up to date,’ he said, ‘but don’t let Hunnicutt know, or he’ll have my guts for garters. He doesn’t want anyone else muscling in on his ground.’
‘You’re a mate,’ Slider said. ‘Everyone here seems to have forgotten that poor girl.’ He had himself, for a bit, but didn’t let on, of course.
‘Grapevine says you’ve stumbled on to something big,’ Warzynski said hopefully. ‘There’s a certain buzziness in the big brass dining-room – talk of Europol . . .’
‘I can’t say anything,’ Slider said. ‘Sorry, but it wouldn’t just be guts they’d turn into garters.’
‘Oh well. I won’t be hard-nosed about it. You can have my bit of gen for nothing. Two bits, actually. Nothing too exciting, but you’re welcome to them. First off we’ve got a motor seen hanging around before the murder, parked up just past Portobello Mews. It might be nothing, or it might be the villain. You know how these things go. Somebody noticed it because it drove up and parked and no one got out, and after waiting a bit it drove off. If it was chummy, he could’ve been sussing the place out before going to park.’
‘Did they get a number?’
‘No, that’s why I warned you not to get excited. It was a black four-by four – MPV type, not Land-Rover type – with black windows. Sounds like a drug-dealer’s wheels,’ he added, free of charge. ‘Any use to you?’
Slider remembered something. ‘Could it be an Audi Q7?’
‘That sort of thing,’ Warzynski agreed. ‘Witness was a woman so it’s no use asking her for make or model. She was looking out the window on the way to bed. If she’d waited a bit she might’ve seen something useful. Oh well.’
‘It’s better than nothing,’ Slider said encouragingly.
‘Is it? My day hasn’t been wasted then. The other bit of gen is about the victim’s mobile – we checked 1471, and it went to another mobile. It was pay-as-you-go.’
‘Of course,’ Slider said. ‘It’s time they tightened up on that.’
‘Gets my vote. The good news is, we were able to triangulate the signal.’
‘They haven’t chucked it away?’ Gloriosky, they’d made a mistake! Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.
‘Don’t go mad,’ Warzynski warned. ‘The bad news is it’s a hospital, so tracking down the actual individual will be a job and a half, especially when they’re moving about inside.’
‘I don’t mind. In fact, I bet I can guess which hospital.’
‘The Cloisterwood Hospital in Stanmore? You were expecting that?’
‘Hoping for it. It doesn’t give me the answer, but it’s a help. Thanks a lot, Phil.’
‘Welcome,’ Warzynski said, with questions sticking out all over his voice.
‘When I can tell you,’ Slider promised, ‘I’ll give you the whole story, I promise. Over a drink. At least.’
‘I’ll hold you to that.’
Slider put the phone down and thought a moment, then looked up a name in the great file of notes that had been decorating his desk all day. Lonergan. That was it. Detective Sergeant Mick Lonergan. He rang Stanmore nick. With a name like that he was expecting an Irish voice, but it was your basic Middlesex when Lonergan came on.
Slider introduced himself. ‘A couple of my lads were over your way looking at Embry’s yard.’
‘Oh yes. That squatty little toerag! Well, I’ve nothing new on him for you, sir. But it’s building up nicely. We’ll get him. He’ll make a mistake sooner or late. They always do.’
‘Yes,’ said Slider, thinking of the mobile.
‘It’d be nice to clear that blot off our ground. Our intelligence says he’s supplying all the criminals in a wide area – wheels, shooters, information, even false documents – every bloody thing. What we need is a big multi-agency operation to catch him with the goods and close him down.’