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.
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 boot room so they could come straight off the beach without leaving a ton of sand in the cottage. He’d been nominated site manager, which meant two weeks on the beach watching someone else work.
He accelerated to 70 m.p.h., testing out his latest toy – £17,000 worth of second-hand Porsche 911. The car was a fifteen-year-old oddity he’d tracked down on the internet through a specialist car dealer. He’d seen a recommendation for the model on a website run by the Partially Sighted Society. It was one of the few relatively modern cars with a narrow ‘A’ bar – the strut between the windscreen and the side window. In new cars these ‘A’ bars were inches thick because they disguised a roll-bar. And they’d been edged forward for strength. The result was that any monocular driver had a serious restriction on visibility. The Porsche had an elegant, thread-like ‘A’ bar, set back, giving Shaw excellent vision on both sides. This was his new code, to deal with his disability
He thought about driving straight home to the beach but decided there was one thing he needed to do first. On the dashboard there was a Post-It note with a number in black felt pen: 51. At the last roundabout on the ring road he pulled off to the left and ran into the North End, then round to the edge of town and onto the Westmead Estate. He drove past Valentine’s Mazda without recognizing it because the DS had put it through the car-wash that morning. Down by the community centre there was a telephone box under a security CCTV camera, so Shaw parked there. As soon as he’d robbed himself of the forward motion of the car the heat crowded back in. There was something about the architecture of housing estates which made the sun unbearable – the scorched grass, the reflecting windows, the blank concrete. But it was more than that. It was the way the estate captured the idea of being trapped. The sound of a lone ice-cream van seemed to make it worse, the reedy call-sign horribly harsh: the whistled theme from The Great Escape. He thought about staying in the car and going home, running to the cottage, getting back in the sea – leaving this until he was back at work. But Lena had been right, he needed to exorcize the ghost of Jonathan Tessier. This was a loose end, and he could tie it up in ten minutes. It didn’t cross his mind to ring Valentine for back-up, despite the fact he’d promised himself he would.