Dead Tomorrow

103

Shortly after the 8.30 a.m. briefing Roy Grace was sitting at the work station in MIR One, on the phone to one of the two detectives who were on surveillance outside Sir Roger Sirius’s house. They had been there since shortly before midnight and reported that no one had left the house and the helicopter was still on its pad in the grounds. He was in an irritable mood, and while he talked, one of the phones in the room warbled on, unanswered. He clapped his hand over the mouthpiece and shouted for someone to answer it. Someone did, rapidly.

Every Secretary of State had either been abroad or out at dinner somewhere last night. It had been after midnight before one – the Home Secretary himself – had signed the phone-tapping consent, and it was after two in the morning before it was up and running on Lynn Beckett’s home and mobile phone lines.

Grace had grabbed three hours’ sleep at Cleo’s house and been back here since six. He was running on Red Bull, a handful of guarana tablets Cleo had given him, and coffee. He was very concerned that the only real lead they had at this moment was the transplant surgeon, Sir Roger Sirius – and no certainty that he was involved, or would give them anything.

He was also concerned about the news from Glenn Branson of Vlad Cosmescu’s disappearance. Was that connected with his visit to the German organ broker yesterday? Had he been rumbled by Marlene Hartmann? Had he panicked her team into aborting their plans and making a fast retreat? The all-ports alert, not only to watch for the German woman accompanied by a young girl arriving, but to watch for a man answering Vlad Cosmescu’s description leaving, had so far yielded nothing.

Ports of entry and departure would forever be a policing problem on an island like Great Britain, with miles of open coastline and numerous private airports and landing strips. Sometimes you would get lucky, but the resources to monitor everyone arriving on and departing from these shores were beyond any budget the police force had. It didn’t help that the Home Office, in its enthusiasm to comply with government budget cuts, had scrapped passport controls for people leaving the UK. In a nutshell, unless someone positively identified them, the UK law enforcement agencies hadn’t a clue who was here and who wasn’t.

The post-mortem on Jim Towers would now be under way and Grace was anxious to get down to the mortuary to see whether there were any early findings from the pathologist to link his death to Operation Neptune – and of course to see Cleo, who had been asleep when he had arrived at her house and when he had left.

As he stood up and pulled his jacket on, telling the other members of his team where he was going, yet another phone was warbling on, unanswered. Was everyone deaf in here today? Or just too plain exhausted after the long night to pick up the receiver?

He got as far as the door before it stopped. As he turned the handle, Lizzie Mantle called out to him, holding up the receiver.

‘Roy! For you.’

He went back over to the work station. It was David Hicks, one of the phone surveillance operatives.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘we’ve just picked up a call on Mrs Beckett’s landline.’