Dead Tomorrow

75

Sometimes, Roy Grace thought, it was easy to become over-confident and forget the most elementary stuff. It was good, occasionally, to go back to basics.

Seated in his office at quarter to seven in the morning, drinking his second cup of coffee of the day, he pulled down from his bookshelves the Murder Investigation Manual, a massive but definitive tome, compiled by the Centre for Policing Excellence for the Association of Chief Police Officers.

Updated regularly, it contained every procedure for every aspect of a murder investigation, including a well-mapped-out Murder Investigation Model, which he turned to now. The Fast Track Menu, which he read through again now to refresh himself, contained ten points which were ingrained in every homicide detective’s brain – and precisely because they were so familiar, some of them could easily be overlooked.

The first on the list was Identify Suspects. Fine, he could tick that box. That was in progress.

Second was Intelligence Opportunities. He could tick that one too. They had Norman Potting’s man in Romania, his own contact, Kriminalhauptkommissar Marcel Kullen in Munich, DS Moy and DC Nicholl intelligence gathering in the brothels, Guy Batchelor trawling through struck-off surgeons and the HOLMES analyst’s scoping operation.

Scene Forensics was third on the list. The bottom of the Channel didn’t give them much to go on there. The plastic sheeting was their best hope, as well as the new fingerprint technology on the outboard, and the long-shot of the cigarette butts Glenn had sent to the DNA labs.

He moved on to Crime Scene Assessment. They had the dump site, but as yet no crime scene. Fifth was Witness Search. Who would have seen these three teenagers? Staff at whatever hospital or clinic they had been operated on? Passengers and staff at whichever airport, or seaport, or station through which they had entered the UK? They would probably have been picked up on CCTV cameras at their point of entry, but he had no idea how long they had been in the UK. It could have been days, weeks or months. Impossible at this stage to start looking through that amount of footage. Another thought he noted down, under this heading, was Other Romanians working here who might have known them? The e-fits had been circulated widely and been featured in the press, but no witnesses had come forward.

Sixth was Victim Enquiries. His best source on those was DS Potting’s man in Romania. And perhaps Interpol, but he wasn’t holding his breath on them.

Possible Motives, the seventh point on the list, was where he stopped to think long and hard. He was fond of telling his teams that assumptions were the mothers and fathers of all fuck-ups. As he had mulled over last night, was there a danger they were they being led down a blind alley by assuming human trafficking for organs was behind these three murders? Was there some sicko out there who enjoyed filleting people?

Yes, possibly, but less so if he applied the principles of Occam’s Razor. There was a world shortage of human organs. Fact. Romania was a country involved in human traffficking for, among other purposes, the international trade in human organs. Fact. Skilled medical and surgical work had been carried out on these three victims. Fact. Supporting that was the information that an eminent British surgeon, Dr Raymond Crockett, had at one time been struck off for illegally purchasing four kidneys from Turkey for patients. Against was that there was no other history of human organ trafficking in England.

But there was always a first time.

And, it occurred to him, Dr Crockett had been caught. Was he a lone maverick, or had he just been unlucky to be found out? Were there dozens of other specialists like him in the UK who were using illegal organs and had not yet been caught? Was Crockett working again? He needed to be interviewed and eliminated.

Media was next. They were using the media as best they could, but the most important resource, the television programme Crimewatch, did not air for almost a week – even assuming they could get on it.

Then there was Post-mortems. At the moment he had all the information he required from these. If they found the surgical instruments, then further work might be required. For the moment, the bodies were being held in the mortuary.

He yawned, shaking off his tiredness and took another long sip of his coffee. When he had woken, at half past five, his brain had been whirring. He should have gone for his early-morning run, which always helped him to think clearly, but he was feeling guilty that he hadn’t finished his work last night, so instead had come in even earlier than usual.

Last on the list was Other Significant Critical Actions. He thought for some moments, then read through the list he had already noted in his policy book. Then he added, in his notebook, Outboard? Missing Scoob-Eee?

He leaned back in his chair until it struck the wall. Dawn was starting to break outside his window. The storm had died down overnight and it was a dry morning. But the forecast was bad. Red and pink streaks speared the dark grey sky. How did that old adage go? Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning!

What do I need to take warning of? What am I missing? he challenged himself. There must be something. What? What the hell is it?

He stared silently into his coffee cup, as if the answer might lie there in the steaming blackness.

And then, suddenly, it came to him.

Sandy used to like pub quiz nights. She was brilliant at general knowledge – far better than he was. He remembered a quiz they had attended, eleven or twelve years ago, and one of the questions had been to guess the size of the English Channel in square miles. Sandy had won, with a correct answer of 29,000.

He clicked his finger and thumb.

‘Yes!’