Dead of Winter

Chapter 36

‘Bloodrunners. They’re gangs who sell human organs. .’

A photo of a good-looking lad with his family came up on the screen. Robbo was in charge of the briefing; all of the murder squad were crowded into the conference room at ten the next morning.

‘. . several countries have had scandals where people have had organs stolen. Profit is always behind it. This lad went on his gap year. . to find long-lost relatives in Poland.’ The next shot was of his body wrapped in a sheet. ‘His body came back to the UK minus his organs and with a full denial of wrongdoing. . just no one knew how he died or where the organs had gone. Bloodrunners harvest organs and tissue and body parts such as hands, limbs, hearts, livers, kidneys, faces even. People wake up minus a kidney.’ Photos of a hotel room and a woman’s dissected body. ‘In the current economic climate organ-harvesting has become a very profitable business.’ Robbo talked over the images. ‘Although it is not usually associated with the UK.’

‘I’ve heard of Bloodrunners but I’ve never seen gangs in action,’ said Carter.

Robbo continued the slideshow: the bodies of three children were being displayed; each one with a neat incision that cut the torso in half. ‘Because we have a system set up which means we trust the medical experts in this country to do the best job they can with the resources available. If they say your child is too weak for an organ transplant or we don’t have one suitable. . then the child dies and that’s it. In other countries where you can buy human life much more easily, doctors are more likely to say: we can do it at a price.’

‘Can we find out what happened to Tanya’s organs? Is there any way we can access lists of people waiting that would match her?’

‘We can try,’ answered Harding. ‘But I doubt if these were sent to people waiting on the national register. More than likely her organs were sold on the black market. But it would all have to happen very quickly. Somewhere there will be patients recovering now.’

‘How long does the heart last from donor to receiver?’ Davidson asked Harding.

‘They must be a slick operation,’ said Harding. ‘It takes time to harvest someone on this scale. It must have taken more than one person to get it all done at the same time and end up with usable organs. With the heart, you have a small window of use conventionally, but there are other methods available now. There are a few ways of doing it. You can inject the heart with potassium chloride: that stops the heart beating before they take it out and then they pack it in ice. It can last four to six hours depending on starting condition. Or there is also a new machine which keeps the heart beating like it would in the body and it could last a relatively long time in that state, twelve hours even. Or they can perform a “beating” heart transplant, where the donor is still alive, technically, and their organs are transplanted directly into another. All of these operations would have to be done in a hospital.’

‘What about Blackdown Barn? Could they have operated in the house?’ asked Ebony.

‘In the master bedroom with the plastic on the floors and walls?’ Carter said.

Harding thought for a few seconds.

‘In theory, yes. But, the smaller the team of people around the surgeon the more equipment he will need to help him. It would have taken a lot of equipment and would have been a big task getting it all up to that floor. You’d be creating an intensive care unit in there. . very tricky. The patient would need twenty-four-hour specialized care. Better to have made it on the ground floor, converting one of the rooms there to an operating theatre.’

‘Maybe the operation was done in a hospital and the recovery period took place in the house,’ said Carter. ‘What about the van, Robbo?’

‘If that’s the kind of van we’re looking at then it’s tall enough to stand up in,’ said Robbo. ‘Yes, it’s the right size and type to be an ambulance.’

‘You might be able to do emergency surgery in it,’ said Harding. ‘You could use it to transport a patient and keep them alive. You would need it to move a recovering patient. But not a heart and lung transplant.’

‘So if the operation was done in a hospital,’ said Davidson, ‘they could move the patient in the ambulance and put them into the sterile room in Blackdown Barn to recover.’

‘To recover or to wait,’ said Carter. ‘And not just the patient. Patient and donor. Blackdown Barn had it all — recovery room and holding pens. That’s why they picked that house. They really thought it through. Location-wise it’s close to London, close to the M25 to get to airports small and big. It’s a place where people don’t bother to talk to neighbours and it had an owner who never came near it.’

‘What was it the letting agent said Chichester wanted, Ebb?’ asked Jeanie.

‘He wanted semi-remote but near a major road. The manager remembered that Chichester said he’d pay a lot to be left alone. It didn’t matter about the house being in poor cosmetic shape.’

‘So basically he paid a lot of money for a house that wasn’t worth it. He must have been a dream client.’ Jeanie answered.

‘So before Chichester the house had been empty for a few months?’ Robbo asked.

‘Nearly a year. It must have been hard to let,’ said Ebony. ‘Then Chichester had the work done to it; that took two months.’

‘So we’re not looking at a snap decision here, are we?’ said Davidson. ‘Chichester took a few months to find this place, another two to make it ready. This was no heat-of-the-moment thing. He planned it meticulously for a predetermined purpose. That was to harvest kidnapped victims and sell the organs to wealthy clients. So why did he leave there? Did he talk about staying on there to the estate agent?’

‘Apparently there was an option on it, sir. Chichester hadn’t decided. The estate agent was waiting to hear.’

‘He wasn’t in a hurry?’

‘The agent said he knew he wouldn’t be able to let it again till after Christmas. He thought Chichester would stay. That was his impression.’

‘Maybe he intended to.’

‘Think everything Chichester does is intentional, sir. If he left early it was because it fitted with his agenda; it was for a reason.’

‘A holding pen keeping them till when? What about Silvia and her pregnancy? asked Davidson. ‘Why allow her to carry the child at all if they didn’t harvest it?’

‘I can answer that,’ said Harding. ‘I had the results back for the section of skin above Silvia’s left eye. It has traces of the rubber from the treadmill. She fell whilst she was running on it.’

‘Why would she be running at eight months pregnant?’ asked Jeanie.

‘When you’re pregnant the heart and lung size increases to cope with the demands of the unborn child.’Answered Harding, ‘they are a muscle like others; they respond to demand. You can train them and make them even bigger. So maybe they were waiting till they were at their peak condition. The gym could have been part of preparations and perhaps the baby was “an option”.’

‘Option?’ Davidson looked at Harding and shook his head. ‘I don’t follow.’

‘Well, it’s insurance for later, isn’t it? They could harvest the mother and keep the baby as part of the family, bring her up as their own, in case other organs failed later in life. In case they needed to harvest her.’ She shrugged. ‘Why not? If you’re that ruthless and calculating?’

‘What about thirteen years ago?’ asked Jeanie. ‘What about Rose Cottage?’

‘The piece of hospital gauze that the gardener found by the gatepost?’ said Robbo. ‘That must mean thirteen years ago Louise Carmichael was carried back into Rose Cottage from having been operated on somewhere else.’

‘Yes. . has to be,’ said Carter. ‘The bodies of Chrissie Newton and Louise Carmichael had a large amount of anaesthetic in their bodies.’

‘It would answer a lot of questions,’ replied Harding.

‘The cross-contamination theory, for example.’ said Ebony. ‘Maybe there was no mistake made, after all. Chrissie and Louise were taken away to be operated on and brought back so that their bodies could be discovered at the house. That’s why they had each other’s DNA on their backs. They had both lain on the same place after death. That must also be why the lividity had a small discrepancy; they had been moved but then laid down again in the same position.’

‘And their organs were missing.’ said Jeanie.

‘Not all their organs; they only removed their hearts,’ Harding corrected.

‘Are we sure they didn’t harvest anything else?’ Carter said and glanced nervously Davidson’s way. ‘I mean, samples got contaminated, reports had sections missing from them. I’m not being funny but how do we know?’

‘I know,’ said Harding, about to lose her rag. ‘At the time we didn’t make the full report public because we didn’t want the panic that would ensue but it didn’t mean to say that a full and accurate report wasn’t written, because it was.’

‘I meant no disrespect.’ Carter held his hands up in a surrender gesture. ‘Thirteen years ago the gang may have worked differently, been inexperienced, who knows?’

Harding composed herself. ‘Three hours passed between first Chrissie and then Louise dying. There was definitely time to remove their hearts.’

‘Then we need to find a hospital near Rose Cottage where they could have taken them.’ Davidson moved to the front of the room to wrap things up.

‘There are hundreds of private hospitals within range,’ said Robbo. ‘They could have driven to an airstrip and taken the organs a long way. We know there are illegal immigrants coming in by small aircraft on makeshift landing strips around the UK. They could easily take something like organs out on a small plane.’

‘Or someone could have been waiting here for the organ,’ said Ebony.

‘Yeah. . I think that’s most likely,’ said Harding. ‘There are many hospitals within reach. I’ll look into it for you. I’ll find out who was working in them at that time and who was the kind of surgeon to do it.’

‘I want a list of all aircraft activity after Tanya’s death. If those organs were flown out of the country they would have gone minutes after her death.’

Ebony had been watching Harding for some time. It was the first time she’d ever seen her really nervous.