Death Watch

Friday, 10 September

Jofranka Phillips joined Shaw in the mess room once she was satisfied with the condition of her patients. She didn’t know the donor’s name, she never asked such questions. Their only mark of individuality was the white wristband, to set them apart from the recipient. De Mesquita’s job was to set up everything – all she did was the operations, assisted by Rey Abucajo, the nurse who had worked alongside Mesquita throughout his ‘career’ – the very word she used, as if there were a certificate awarded for such a crime. She saw the clients – rich, replete, and white. And sometimes the donors – the pallid, mottled bodies of the homeless, or, more often, just the prepared organ or bone or tendon, taken from storage.

Dawn was still an hour away. The night had taken its toll on Phillips, who covered her face with her long fingers.

‘Tell me about your father,’ said Shaw, knowing it was one question she’d feel compelled to answer.

‘He died before I was born. By the time I arrived his life was over, but its shadow was on all of us. And has been ever since.’

Shaw hardened his voice, impatient with the self-pity in her answer. ‘Your brothers?’

‘And the Kircher Institute needs money?’

She laughed, closing her eyes. ‘Millions. My brothers coped, then old age has overtaken them, and then death – only Hanzi now, and he is bedridden. So they turned to me. And I felt helpless, impotent. I’d been to the Kircher, of course, and I’d become involved in the campaign to change the law, to allow the removal of organs from the brain-dead. I was interested in the subject, aware of the market. I thought I could do this, that if we were careful with collecting our donors, if we offered them this’ – she searched the dictionary in her head – ‘this opportunity, then there was nothing evil in this, and that great good would come from it. I posed as a client, and met Juan de Mesquita. The Rosa had already been converted by then, but he had no steady supply of donors, and the surgeon he used was on the edge of the law – in Germany, near Hamburg. It was too dangerous. I solved his problems.’

‘And the money?’

‘Went to the Kircher. All of it.’

‘And you don’t see the irony in that? That your father died of shame because he experimented on prisoners. Innocents.’

‘We pay the donors. They are treated well. Very well.’

Shaw conjured up what he hoped was a cruel smile, seeing again John Pearmain’s body on Warham’s Hole.

She drank more tea, ignoring the question, although he could see that it had troubled her deeply because the blood had drained from her face and her lips were hardening into a murderous line.

‘And Gavin Peploe? Why did he have to die? Because you are his murderer, I’m sure of that. Where was the ultimate good in that? Because he was an innocent, wasn’t he? A playboy, maybe; a man who sold his skills in the private market. But not a bad man.’

She couldn’t keep the revulsion she genuinely felt from disfiguring her face. ‘Neil Judd said he would go to you with everything if we did not do this operation for his father. I had to make time. We can’t change the schedule for the Rosa without the owners’ permission. I thought you might find her here on the quayside – that what was on board, hidden, might be found. A diversion was needed.’ She dropped her eyes, ashamed, Shaw knew, that she’d resorted to such a euphemism. ‘He administered his own poison,’ she said, as if the difference between good and evil came down to a technicality.

‘You switched the pills – knowing that he never looked.’

‘I don’t think you can prove that, and I doubt you ever will.’

Shaw’s mobile, sitting on the table top, buzzed and

EREBUS STREET – POWER SUB-STATION – 187

The code for a suspicious death.

Phillips wouldn’t say another word. She wanted her lawyer.

‘I wish you would talk to us now – because it might be important – it might save lives.’ She watched him. ‘Because, even now, there is so much I don’t understand. Neil said that he didn’t always fetch the donor – that the captain said there was another “source”. And the man we found dead out on the sands – and the one in the docks – they’d given…’ He let that word hang between them. ‘They’d given organs several times – and tissue. Which begs the question, where were they between the operations? Do you see? There’s still something hidden.’

She remained silent, even as Shaw walked her to a squad car on the quay. There she stood with the door open, to take one last look at the ship. ‘He’ll do well,’ she said. ‘Neil’s father. The liver will regenerate, but only if he stops the drinking. There’s a drug, his GP should be told – now. Even if he goes to prison – because of the fire – he needs to take it. It’ll make the alcohol repugnant to him…’ She looked about her. ‘Like ashes.’

Shaw turned and walked away without giving her the comfort of an answer. He moved quickly through the night shadows which still stretched across Berth 4. The gate to the sub-station stood open, the yard crowded with building gear: a cement mixer, a pallet of new bricks,

The roof and walls of the original listed building still stood but the gear within had been removed and the floor broken up. Lumps of reinforced concrete stood in the yard. In the shadows within Shaw could see Tom Hadden, and then, suddenly, the interior was bathed in bright white light, an arc lamp blazing. Shaw stood on the edge of a trench, a slit so dark by comparison that it seemed to suck in the heat as well as the light so that he shivered, staring down, waiting for his eyes to find a line, a shade, a pinpoint – anything to make sense of the absence of shape and meaning.

Flints first, glistening, where they lay in strata amongst the clay. Then at the bottom, many shapes, in pale outlines. A human body. The shock made him fall forward slightly so that he had to suddenly drop to his knees, looking down at the familiar bones of the dead, but turned on one side, the knees up, and the shreds of something wrapping it – a dress as a shroud.

Hadden edged the light nearer so that the grave was lit. The corpse was slight, five feet tall, the skull complete, the teeth still in place, all in place, but ugly in the lipless mouth.

Hadden squatted down beside him. ‘Andersen, the engineer, says they found some bones late yesterday. St James’s rang me – you were on the ship. And she’s not going anywhere. It’s a girl – yes. Early teens.’

‘I think I know her name,’ said Shaw. ‘There’s something on the chest,’ he said. Hadden stepped down beside the body.

Hadden slipped something into a plastic evidence envelope and reached up – laying it on the ground with a kind of reverence that Shaw didn’t understand until he saw what it was.

‘Fish skeleton,’ said Hadden. ‘There’s twenty – twenty-five. I’m no expert but they’re bony fish – tropical.’ He held another in a second bag in his hand. This one was as delicate as a ship in a bottle.

Shaw told him what he knew of Jan Orzsak’s obsession with his tropical fish; the favour he’d asked of Norma Jean that last summer of her life – that she feed them while he was away. How she’d promised she would and how, on the day she died, Orzsak had confronted her with the consequences of her failure to keep that promise: the dead, resplendent fish.

‘I see,’ said Hadden. ‘There was one in her throat. I think he pushed her down, Peter, pushed her head down into the tank of water, amongst the dead fish she’d killed with her neglect. There’s a crack in the jawbone too. That’s typical if she was held under; she’d strain for air until the bone broke.’

Shaw took the envelope and held the tiny skeleton up to the light. ‘It’s a beautiful thing to be buried with,’ he said.