Dead of Winter Tr (26 page)

‘We didn’t know that then. It wasn’t a world we knew about.’ She looked at him. ‘You stay inside the law, otherwise you risk being part of the problem instead of
the answer. We are doing everything, I promise you. I give you my word. Go back to your farm and wait.’ She looked quickly to her side; there was no one else around.

‘I waited last time and nothing happened. I’m not sitting this one out. You made mistakes then and you could make them now.’

‘There are lots of regrets. I promise you I’m going to do my very best to get justice for Louise and Sophie this time round.’

‘How do I know you won’t just protect your pals? You know people high up in the medical world. It takes that type of people to perform transplants.’ He stepped between her and
the car. ‘Someone is performing these operations.’ She stopped, stared up at him, shoulders back. ‘A surgeon leaves his mark the way a killer does, the way he cuts – the
butcher with his knife. You could take a guess at who you would get to do a heart and lung transplant, who you would choose to graft part of a healthy liver onto your pickled one, who you would
choose to give you new kidneys.’

‘Nobody with ethics would condone such a practice.’ She tried to get past him. He stood in her way, hand on her car door.

‘But they might not know where the organs were coming from.’

She shook her head, flustered. She opened the car door. He stopped it from opening more than a few inches.

‘What about my wife? What did they take from her? What didn’t you tell me all those years ago?’

She bowed her head. ‘They took her heart. We had no idea why.’

‘From Chrissie?’

‘The same.’

‘Is there any way of finding out who had them? Can you find out who was waiting that matched my wife’s blood group?’

‘No . . . It has to be a match with blood, tissue, age.’ She looked up at him. His face was full of anguish. She shook her head but her hands were trembling. Her eyes full of
sympathy for Carmichael who stood a lonely figure. Deeply violent, dark. ‘We had no leads then. Whoever they were they came and went just as fast. Look, Carmichael . . . I’m sorry to
say it but Louise had a common blood group. She would have been useful for transplanting organs into a wide sector of waiting recipients.’

Carmichael bowed his head, turned and walked away.

Harding got into her car and sat for a few minutes, leaning her head back on the seat as she watched him go. She had to wait for her eyes to clear.

‘Working nine to five!’ Tina sang along with Dolly Parton as she reached in behind the shower curtain and switched the shower on full blast.

Before she got into the shower, Tina pulled the string that switched the small fan heater on in the bathroom. She knew she wasn’t supposed to use it every time but tonight was a special
occasion. She placed her large glass of Pinot Grigio, from the bottle Ebony had bought her for her birthday, on top of the toilet cistern and turned her music up; she’d got her music library
on her phone. The quality wasn’t that good but it didn’t matter in the bathroom.

As she stepped in beneath the hot water she giggled to herself. She was so excited. She had finally been asked out by one of the men from the dating sites. At long last one of them had made the
effort. She promised herself she would not make the mistake she’d made in the past of giving it away too soon. She’d done a lot of that after Don had left her. She’d wanted
reassurance that she was desirable. She’d thought the more men she screwed the better she would feel about herself but she was wrong. She would also not make the mistake of talking about how
Don had been a bastard and really hurt her. That was another thing people said she’d done and they didn’t like. She’d had a year off the sites. A year of soul-searching and a year
of finding friends like Ebony and feck! it was a year since she’d had sex. She was practically a virgin again. Tina giggled again as she scoured her body with the scratchy sponge. ‘I
deserve to be a size ten after this,’ she said to herself as she hummed away to the music and rubbed her fat bits vigorously with the exfoliator.

Two hours and most of the bottle of Pinot Grigio later, Tina sneaked a look at her date as they left the cab and walked towards the hotel entrance.
Thank God I wore my Spanx
pants!
Her heart hammered beneath the chunky sweater dress.
Shit . . . how lucky am I . . . friggin’ gorgeous.
She couldn’t help but smile to herself.

The receptionist watched them enter. It was the graveyard shift at the Brunswick Hotel. She looked at the clock in the lobby above the dried flower arrangement. The time was 3.20 a.m. All the
other residents were tucked up in bed. The hotel was a small one in King’s Cross. It wasn’t full. It wasn’t the best value or the best position for seeing the sights. It took the
overspill from the better ones.

The receptionist smiled at the couple, nodding cordially. They crossed the empty lobby, their feet silent on the carpet.

Justin caught Tina’s glance and squeezed her around the waist. She was so glad he couldn’t feel the spare tyre that she’d put on since the break-up. It had been hard. She had
been battling with low self-esteem. It had nearly broken her. She had had to leave her home, move into shared accommodation again. She had had to start from scratch. But now this man had done
wonders for her since they’d begun emailing each other. He had made her feel alive again.

They stopped and she melted as his blue eyes met hers; with his gorgeous long blond hair and masculine shoulders he looked like a god.

She felt self-conscious. What was the receptionist thinking? That he was too good for her? The receptionist was beautiful, her glossy black hair pinned back elegantly, her lipstick in place.
Maybe it was true – he was every woman’s dream man. They made their way up to the room. Justin slid his hand to her bottom and he squeezed. He seemed pleased with what he touched, she
thought, but then again, she could tell he had also been watching the receptionist. She wasn’t kidding herself; something about this date seemed too good to be true. Now that Tina was on the
way up to a hotel room to have the first sex since her husband went off with the girl from his work, she was thinking maybe she wasn’t ready.

Justin seemed to feel her tension, caught her looking back down the corridor as they neared the room. He gave her another squeeze.

‘You look beautiful. We’ll take our time, shall we? I’m looking forward to us getting to know one another.’ He stopped and held her close. ‘That’s what I miss
most since losing my wife in the car accident, just holding someone close like this. Let’s just have a drink and a chat this time.’

Ahhhh.
Her heart melted a little. He’d just touched on the subject of his wife’s death. It was really sweet the way he trusted her. He wasn’t pushing her at all but now
that he put it like that she realized she’d be disappointed if nothing happened.

Once inside the room he went to the bathroom to get a couple of glasses. Then he returned and poured her a Bacardi and Coke.

He handed her the glass. Tina took the drink from him and clashed her glass against his as they said cheers.

‘Thank you for just being you, Tina.’

‘Ahhh. How sweet.’ She moved up a little on the bed to encourage him to sit next to her.

Justin went round the room and turned down the lighting and an orange glow filled the room. He placed his phone by the side of the bed and switched on some music. Michael Bublé was
singing. Tina thought it couldn’t get much better.

She woke up with the mother of all hangovers. Her head was pounding. She couldn’t remember a thing beyond Bublé. She lay there for a few minutes looking around the
room and trying hard to make sense of the situation. The pillow beside her was empty. The bathroom door was open, light off. She seemed to be alone in the room. She felt beneath the covers; she was
naked. Her clothes were neatly folded on the chair next to the bathroom. That was weird. She never folded her clothes. She lay there thinking about how her body felt. They’d definitely had a
shag: she was sore. They must have done it a few times to have to make her this sore. It didn’t make any sense. What had she drunk? Nearly a bottle of Pinot Grigio and two Bacardis. It was
possible then, just. Jesus! She sat up in bed, resting on her elbows and looking around the room. She must have been drunker than she thought. He was definitely gone. The room was hardly touched.
It looked strangely orderly: no dirty glasses, no sign of the night before. She looked across to the tea tray on the dressing table. Her mouth was drier than the Sahara. She slipped out of bed and
crossed to the dressing table to make herself a cup of tea. As she waited for the kettle to boil she picked at the packets of biscuits and flinched. There was a small but deep cut at the tip of her
forefinger.

Carmichael sat in the darkness of the Velvet Lagoon looking at the spot of light on the dance floor. He dropped another corner from his ham sandwich for the rats.

He phoned Micky.

Micky picked up straight away. ‘You okay?’

‘What did you find out about Bloodrunners?’

Micky paused: ‘You sure you want to hear it?’ Carmichael didn’t answer so Mickey continued. ‘Okay. If I wanted to buy a heart and lungs in this country and pay for an
operation it would set me back a hundred and twenty thousand pounds. In China or India I’d pay a tenth of that but it would be more dangerous and difficult to find a good match. Poland would
be your best bet. A good match and cheap. Kidney, eight thousand. Three thousand gets me a cornea. The liver, that’s a quarter section, is three thousand or a whole one for ten thousand.
Foetal stem cells will set you back a thousand per twenty mil. A new pancreas is fifteen hundred. Bone marrow two thousand, heart seventy-five thousand and lungs fifty thousand.’

‘You missed out the brain.’

‘Used for research . . . a thousand. The total value of a human being is between three hundred and fifty and four hundred thousand pounds. That’s in Europe and the USA. It would be a
tenth of that in China, India.’

Carmichael put the phone down to Micky and called Digger.

Digger was sitting in the kitchens at Cain’s.

‘Is it my imagination, Digger, or are you attracting a lot of police attention at the moment? How are you managing to make any money with them breathing down your neck?’

Digger sighed irritably. He glanced across at Ray. The barman was sweating now, breathing in small gasps. Digger’s face was red with anger but his voice stayed creepily calm.

‘It is a nuisance but nothing I can’t handle. Seems like your appearance has coincided with a spell of bad luck for me, Mr Hart. And not just me. Sonny was a friend of mine. Tyrone
tells me that you proclaim to be his successor. You are ambitious, to say the least. Sonny built up his reputation over years. You have been here a few days and you step into Sonny’s very wet
shoes. You must be either extremely clever or very stupid.’

Carmichael smiled. ‘Anyone could have killed Sonny; could have been an accident even; he was off his face when I saw him.’

‘Yes. Perhaps. Tyrone is finding it difficult to answer me in full. He does say you have the wherewithal to do the job. He says you have girls arriving soon.’

‘Yes, but I’m not happy to hand them over to you if they’re going to end up on the M25 motorway. Tyrone told me you sold her on to a specific client. That person messed up. He
has to pay.’ Carmichael threw a crumb across to the rats. ‘Seems like everyone’s getting sloppy. Sonny wasn’t the only one to make mistakes.’ There were a few seconds
of silence as Digger’s face flushed with anger before he took a breath and calmed himself. He didn’t enjoy being made to feel incompetent. ‘I merely passed her on to someone; I
had no choice: she was already bought. Hands were tied . . . you understand.’ Digger looked across at Ray, who had both of his hands nailed to the table sitting in pools of blood. He was
shaking violently, his face twitching in agony. ‘Don’t worry, people are being punished. Things are getting rather tricky here. The police are persistent. They are ruining my business
and, ultimately,
all
of our businesses.’ Digger listened hard; he heard nothing. He leant across and banged his fist on the top of the nail. Ray screamed. ‘I don’t like
things to get out of hand. I will be happier when everything calms down. I don’t need the aggravation. I am handing that side of the business over to you. You want Sonny’s job, you got
it. Sonny wasn’t ambitious. He never wanted more than being a supplier. I sense that you would like a bigger stake so I am passing over part of mine to you. You bring the girls in and you
manage them. I will introduce you to the other men in the chain and you can deal directly with them. You just keep supplying me and I’ll be happy.’

‘Okay . . . I think we can do a lot of business in the future. I look forward to meeting the club owners.’

Digger got off the phone and made another call and then he waited impatiently as he tapped his fingers on the table and watched Ray sweat. A small whimpering sound trickled continuously from
Ray’s mouth as he tried to control the pain.

‘Here you are at long fucking last,’ Digger said to the man entering the kitchens. Digger banged his hand on the table. ‘Thank God for that.’

‘Sorry, boss. I was on a job.’ Deano stood six foot seven. He was in proportion except for his head, which was much too small for his body. One of his own hands could completely
engulf it.

Deano looked at Ray as Digger talked. Since the man known on the street as DD, short for Deano the Death, had come to stand by him Ray had started crying openly. He knew there was a worse fate
than having your hands nailed to a table.

‘This man.’ Digger showed Deano a photo of Carmichael. ‘Hart. Follow him and be ready to move on him if I say.’ Deano took his time studying the photo and then he nodded.
He went to leave. Digger called him back and pointed at Ray. ‘And take out the trash on your way.’

Sandford was making a brief appearance at Fletcher House to chase up some results; he had washed down the shelves of the spice cupboard at Blackdown Barn, collected the liquid
and sent it away to be analysed. Now he had to find someone who liked cooking to tell him what it meant. His back was aching from unscrewing the entire kitchen. Halfway through standing up he had
felt his back seize. He leant one hand on the top of a desk as he answered his phone.