Dead Tomorrow

76

‘We are looking in the wrong place,’ Roy Grace announced to his team. ‘And we might be looking at the wrong people. That’s what I think.’

Instantly, he had the full attention of all twenty-eight police officers and support staff at the morning briefing. Then he tapped the side of his head.

‘The wrong place, mentally, not geographically.’

Twenty-eight pairs of curious eyes locked on to his.

It was the fourth item on the Fast Track menu of the Murder Investigation Manual that had sparked him.

‘I want you all to stop thinking about your own lines of enquiry, for a moment, and focus on Crime Scene Assessment. OK? Now, we’ve been assuming that this choice of dump site was an unlucky or an ignorant one. But think about this. The English Channel covers twenty-nine thousand square miles. That licensed dredge area is a hundred square miles.’

He looked at Glenn, Guy Batchelor, Bella, E-J and several others.

‘Anyone here good at maths?’

The HOLMES analyst put up her hand.

‘What percentage of the Channel is that dredge area, Juliet?’ he asked.

She did some fast mental arithmetic. ‘Approximately 0.34 per cent, Roy.’

‘Small odds,’ Grace said. ‘A third of 1 per cent. We’re talking needle in a haystack percentages. If I was going to dump a body at random out in the Channel, I’d consider myself pretty unlucky to dump it on the dredge area. Actually, I’d rate the chances of that happening to be so slim as to be not worth worrying about. Unless of course I chose that area deliberately.’

He paused to let this sink in.

‘Deliberately?’ Lizzie Mantle queried.

‘Hear my reasoning,’ he said. ‘If we take the line that we are dealing with international human trafficking – the fastest-growing criminal business in the world – we can be reasonably sure of one thing: the calibre of the criminals we are dealing with. If they’re sufficiently well organized to be able to bring teenage kids into this country, and to have an effective medical organ transplant facility here, they are likely to be as professional about disposing of the bodies. They wouldn’t just go out to sea in a rubber dinghy and lob them over the side.’

He saw a general nod of approval.

‘I know we’ve been over this ground before, and we concluded the bodies were taken by either private boat or private plane or helicopter. But whatever the perps used, they would have hired a professional skipper or pilot. That person would have had charts, and been aware of the different depths of the Channel, and in all probability would have known these waters like the back of their hand. The dredge area may not be marked on all charts, but even so it is relatively shallow. If you are going to dump bodies, and you’ve got the whole of the Channel, wouldn’t you go for depth? I would.’

‘What’s the deepest point, Roy?’ Potting asked.

‘There are plenty of places where it is over two hundred feet. So why dump them in sixty-five?’

‘Speed?’ Glenn Branson suggested. ‘People panic with bodies sometimes, don’t they?’

‘Not the kind of people we’re looking at here, Glenn,’ the Detective Superintendent said.

‘Maybe they genuinely didn’t see it on their chart,’ Bella Moy said.

Grace shook his head. ‘Bella, I’m not ruling that out, but I’m postulating they might have been put there deliberately.’

‘But I don’t get why, Roy,’ DI Mantle said.

‘In the hope that they would be found.’

‘For what reason?’ Nick Nicholl asked.

‘Someone who doesn’t approve of what they are doing?’ Grace replied. ‘He dumped the bodies there, knowing there was a chance they’d get found.’

‘If he didn’t like what they were doing why didn’t he just call the police?’ Glenn Branson asked.

‘Could be any number of reasons. Top of my list would be a pilot or skipper who liked the money but had a conscience. If he shopped them, his nice little earner would stop. This way his conscience was salved. He dropped them in an easy depth to dive. If the dredger didn’t bring them up at some point, he could tip the police off – but not for a good long while.’

The team were quiet for a moment.

‘I accept I may be off beam here, but I want to start a new line of enquiry – starting with Shoreham Harbour, we need to check out all the boats. We can get help from the harbourmaster, the lock operators and the coastguard. The boats we should look at closest are fast cruisers and fishing boats – and all the rental boats. Glenn, you’re on the case on that missing fishing boat, the Scoob-Eee. Anything to report?’

The DS raised a padded brown envelope in the air. ‘Just arrived, five minutes ago from O2, the phone company, Roy. It’s a plot of all the mobile phone masts the skipper’s phone made contact with on Friday night. It’s unlikely he crossed the Channel, so with luck we may be able to track his movements along the south coast. Me and Ray Packham are going to work on them straight after this meeting.’

‘Good thinking. But we can’t be sure the Scoob-Eee had any involvement, so we should look at the other boats.’

Grace delegated two detective constables at the meeting to do this. Then he looked at Potting.

‘OK, Norman, I said we might be looking at the wrong people.’

Potting frowned.

‘I asked you to contact all transplant coordinators to see if any of these three were familiar to them, but you’ve still had no positive hit?’

‘That’s right, chief. We’ve spread pretty far on this now.’

‘I have something that might be better. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it. What we need is to check all the people who have been on a transplant waiting list, waiting either for a heart/lung transplant, a liver or a kidney, who did not receive a transplant but dropped off the waiting list.’

‘Presumably there are a number of reasons why people would drop off a waiting list, Roy?’ Potting said.

Grace shook his head. ‘From what I understand, no one on a waiting list for a new kidney or liver gets better by themselves, bar a miracle. If they drop off the list it is for one of two reasons. Either they had the transplant done elsewhere – or they died.’

His mobile phone began ringing. He pulled it out and glanced at the display. Instantly, he recognized the German dialling code, + 49, in front of the number that appeared. It was Marcel Kullen calling from Munich.

Raising an apologetic hand, he stepped out of the briefing room, into the corridor.

‘Roy,’ the German detective said, ‘you wanted me to call us when the organ broker, Marlene Hartmann, arrived back in Munich, yes?’

‘Thank you, yes!’

Grace was amused by how the German constantly confused ‘you’ and ‘us’.

‘She flew back late last night. Already, this morning, she has made three phone calls to a number in your city, in Brighton.’

‘Brilliant! Any chance you could let me have that number?’

‘You don’t reveal its source?’

‘You have my word.’

Kullen read it out to him.