Peter James - Dead Tomorrow

Then Caitlin threw up violently.

To her utter horror, Lynn saw it was not vomit that was spattering the sink and the tiled splash-back and the draining board. It was bile specked with bright red blood.

As she cradled her heaving, choking daughter, she knew then, in that moment, that she did not care about anything else. Did not care if Detective Superintendent Grace was telling the truth. Did not care if that girl he had brought the photograph of had to die. Did not care who had to die. If she needed to, she would kill them herself, with her own bare hands, to save the life of her child.

Simona sat on a chair in a small, windowless room, crying and drinking a glass of Coca-Cola. The room reminded her of the prison cell she had spent a night in when she and Romeo had been arrested a couple of years ago for stealing from a shop. The same smell of disinfectant. There was nothing in here except cupboards full of medical supplies. She was so hungry her stomach was aching.

‘I want Gogu,’ she sniffled.

The big Romanian nurse, who had gripped Simona’s arm so hard it was now bruised and hurting, stood with her arms folded in front of the door, watching her drink.

‘I dropped him outside.’

‘I’ll fetch it later,’ the nurse replied.

Simona felt a little better about that and nodded appreciatively. She stared at her glass, then back at the woman.

‘Please may I have something to eat?’ she asked for the third time in the quarter of an hour or so that she had been here. ‘Anything?’

‘Drink,’ the woman commanded.

Obediently, Simona drank some more. Maybe when she had finished this second glass, then she would get something to eat, and the woman would get Gogu for her.

‘What kind of work will I be doing here?’ she asked.

The nurse frowned. ‘Work? What kind of work?’

Simona smiled dreamily. ‘I would like to do bar work!’ she said. ‘I would like to learn to make drinks. You know, fancy drinks. What do they call them? Cocktails! I think that would be nice work, to make drinks and talk with people. I would think they have a nice bar here in this hotel, don’t they?’ Seeing the continued frown, she added hastily, ‘But of course I don’t mind what work. Anything. I could clean. I’m happy to clean. I’m just happy to be here. I will be even happier when Romeo comes! Do you think that might be soon?’

‘Drink,’ the woman replied.

Simona drained the glass. Then she sat in silence, while the woman continued to stand, with her arms folded, like a sentry.

After a few more minutes, Simona began to feel sleepy. She had a sudden wave of giddiness, then lost focus on the woman. Lost focus on the walls, on the cupboards. They were sliding past in front of her eyes, faster, then faster.

The nurse stood impassively, watching as Simona’s eyes closed and she fell sideways on to the floor and lay still, breathing hard.

She then hoisted the girl over her shoulder, carried her out a short distance along the corridor into the small pre-op room and laid her on the steel trolley. Then she removed all her clothes, checking greedily that Simona had no valuables on her. Sometimes, street vermin like this girl secreted stolen valuables in their bodies, hoping to get cash for them in England.

Hastily pulling on a rubber glove before anyone else came in, she checked inside the girl’s mouth, then carefully probed her vagina and anus. Nothing! Useless little bitch.

Then, on her intercom phone, she called the anaesthetist and told him, barely masking the disgust in her voice, that the girl was ready.

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.