‘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 we would have heard something by now and we haven’t,’ she said.
I shook my head. She looked up at me sharply.
‘Unless you have heard something?’
I shook my head again – I was turning into one of those nodding dogs you see in the backs of cars. ‘No. All I know is her father gets here tomorrow morning. If they have contacted him, I don’t know about it.’
‘Right,’ she said, not sounding a hundred per cent convinced.
‘He lost his wife to kidnappers, Kirsty,’ I said. ‘She was raped and murdered in front of his daughter. If her abductors have told him not to speak to the authorities, I for one wouldn’t blame him if he just paid what they wanted and took her home. Would you?’
She took another hit of brandy. ‘I guess not.’
‘So where does Private come in?’ I asked. Changing the subject.
‘We’re running a DNA analysis through the system on the second Jane Doe. The first one came back with one nothing, but it took over three weeks to do it. I haven’t got three weeks. Whoever is doing this needs to be stopped. And it seems to me he’s escalating.’
‘You want to use our labs?’
‘Yeah. And in return I’ll get you everything we’ve got on the Hannah Shapiro case. Off the record.’
‘I’d appreciate it.’
‘Chloe means a lot to me too, Dan.’
And she did. Chloe’s father had been my best man and Kirsty had loved him as much as I did. His death had sent me off the rails and I didn’t see at the time that she was grieving too: I’d been too selfish to share my own grief. She hadn’t been to Iraq, she hadn’t seen what I had. I’d been too wrapped up in my own self-pity to see how much I was hurting her. I was destroying our marriage but I didn’t care. Caring meant feeling.
We talked some more. I don’t know for how long. Ten minutes? Twenty minutes? Kirsty drank more brandy and I had a couple more Coronas. I lost count.
I remember opening the fridge door and taking the last bottle off the shelf. I turned round to open it and there she was, in the small kitchen with me, and I had nowhere left to run.
Somehow she was in my arms, our lips were on each other’s. Our breath hot. Her tongue flicking in my mouth. She fumbled loose my belt and undid my trousers so that they pooled around my ankles. She reached in and took hold of me with her familiar, knowing hand. She bit into my neck as I cupped my hands on her perfectly toned buttocks and pulled her against me. I was already rock-hard.
I hadn’t expected to be making love to my ex-wife on our wedding anniversary.
It turned out that was the least of my problems.
Part Four
Chapter 64
I opened my eyes with a start.
The clock on my bedside cabinet read 05:59. I watched it for a few seconds and it clicked over to 06:00. The radio alarm switched on. I tapped the button to turn it off and closed my eyes again.
I did that most mornings. I don’t know why I bothered with the alarm. Since my army days I could pretty much tell myself when I wanted to wake up. And I did.
My head didn’t feel as bad as it should have done. I had drunk far too many beers. Maybe the workout had compensated.
I smiled a little. Little bit guilty. Little bit pleased with myself. Little bit confused about what I was feeling, if I’m honest.
Kirsty had gone at about four o’clock. She had been groaning when she awoke. She didn’t kiss me goodbye when she left. In fact, she didn’t say a word. I remember her picking up her boots and almost tiptoeing out of my bedroom like a naughty adolescent. I smiled briefly again but couldn’t afford the luxury of letting my thoughts linger. I opened my eyes again. Time to go to work.
I swung my legs out of bed and yawned, turning it into a shout and shaking my head as I did so. I wasn’t feeling as bad as I should have been, but there were a few cobwebs to shake loose.
An hour and fifteen minutes later and I was on the treadmill at the gym. I had already done a full workout – weights and cardiovascular – and was warming down.
Sam Riddel was on the treadmill next to me. He hadn’t had as long a workout, but then again he probably hadn’t drunk a shedload of Corona beer. Far as I knew you don’t get hangovers from mineral water. We hadn’t spoken. He’d just nodded at me and gone through his weights routine.
Sam looked across at me now. There was a slight, questioning wrinkle on his forehead.
‘You seem in a particularly good mood this morning,’ he said.