Dead Tomorrow

110

Roy Grace was just walking back in through the door of MIR One when Romeo Sierra Zero Eight Alpha Mike Lima pinged an ANPR camera. The information was radioed through to him immediately. He stopped in front of the crowded work station and wrote down the information. Sir Roger Sirius’s Aston Martin was heading north from the Washington roundabout on the A24.

Instantly he called the Air Operations Unit and requested Hotel Nine Hundred, the police helicopter, airborne. They estimated seven minutes’ time to be over the roundabout, which was four miles north of Worthing and eight miles from their base at Shoreham Airport.

He did a quick calculation. Hotel Nine Hundred’s maximum ground speed, depending on any head or tail winds, was about 130 mph. The A24 at this point was largely fast, open dual carriageway, but Sirius was unlikely to want to risk being pulled over for speeding. Assuming he was travelling at 80 mph and continuing on this road, the helicopter should have the car in sight in about fifteen minutes.

Assuming he had not turned off on to a minor road.

Although the sky was overcast this morning, there was a high cloud ceiling, giving the chopper plenty of visibility. Raising his hand in acknowledgement at a couple of his team members who were trying to get his attention, he walked over to the map that had been pinned up on the whiteboard. It showed Sussex and parts of its neighbouring counties, with the positions of Lynn Beckett’s and Sir Roger Sirius’s houses ringed in red. Ringed in purple were the locations of all the private hospitals and clinics in the area. There were a large number, including sports injuries clinics, diagnostic centres and skin clinics, and Grace knew that most of them could be ruled out as too small to house the kind of facilities they were looking for.

He quickly found the A24 and the roundabout, then traced his finger up the road northwards. There were any number of places the car could be heading to. The conurbations of Horsham or Guildford were possibilities, but Grace’s hunch was that a private clinic with the kind of facilities needed for transplants, and all its support staff, would more likely be concealed somewhere in the countryside.

He glanced at his watch, anxiously waiting for the car to ping another ANPR camera, or for word from the chopper, and regretting his decision to keep the rural surveillance team outside Sirius’s gates rather than have them follow the car.

He did not know how much time they had, but from the call they had intercepted, Lynn Beckett and her daughter were due to be picked up shortly. His guess was that they had a few hours, at most.

They had not intercepted any calls since his visit and he considered that a bad sign. It meant she wasn’t panicked by his visit and was still going ahead. It was, of course, possible she had another phone, a pay-as-you-go one that didn’t show up on her records, but if that had been the case, she would surely have used that instead of her landline earlier, wouldn’t she? Or her daughter’s phone, assuming she had one.

Wherever she or Sirius went, and he was certain it was going to be to the same place, he was going in hard. During the night he’d been assembling the units and he had all the vehicles and crews on standby. Fortunately, so far it had been a quiet morning in Sussex and he had the full team he needed.

‘Sir!’ Jacqui Phillips, one of the researchers, called to him.

He went across to her. Yesterday he had tasked her with listing all manufacturers and wholesale suppliers of operating theatre materials, instruments and drugs in the country. But as she showed him now, it was an impossibly long list. One that would take weeks to work through.

Next, Glenn Branson wanted him. The DS had some feedback from the all-ports alert they had put out and the photographs of Marlene Hartmann and Simona they had circulated. There had been a number of potential sightings during the night and early morning, including a mother and daughter from Romania who had been held by Gatwick police for an hour, before being cleared, and another couple with a young girl, from Germany, who had been interrogated after arriving by Eurostar.

‘I think we have to assume she’s already here now,’ Grace said.

‘Want me to cancel the alert?’

‘Give it another hour, just in case,’ he said.

His radio crackled again. Another ANPR had been pinged by Sirius. He was still on the A24 – this time heading past Horsham, still travelling north. Grace glanced at his watch again. Sirius was going like the wind. At this rate, he would shortly be out of the county and into Surrey, which meant the police there would need to be informed of their pursuit.

He radioed the helicopter and relayed this information, asking where they were.

The observer replied they were just approaching Horsham themselves. Within seconds of ending the call, Grace’s radio crackled again and he heard the observer’s excited voice.

‘We have contact with Romeo Sierra Zero Eight Alpha Mike Lima! In slow traffic approaching roadworks, still proceeding northbound on A24.’

Grace went back to the map and made a wide east, west and north arc from the car’s position. There were seven purple rings within that arc, all existing clinics.

But ten anxious minutes later, the helicopter reported that the Aston Martin was still travelling north. If it kept on this route, Grace thought, staring at the map again, feeling vexed, it would soon reach the M25 London orbital road.

‘Where the hell are you bloody going?’ he said out loud.

None of the twenty-two members of his inquiry team in this room at the moment, hunched in front of their screens, or with phones to their ears, or poring over printouts, had any better idea than he did.