Peter James: Dead Tomorrow

‘I’m frightened,’ she whispered.

‘In a few days’ time you will not know yourself!’ the broker replied.

The nurse escorted Caitlin from the room, closing the door behind them. Instantly, Marlene Hartmann’s eyes narrowed into a glare of suspicion.

‘What is this photograph that your daughter is talking about?’

Before Lynn could answer, the German woman’s attention was diverted by the sudden clatter of a helicopter, low overhead. She leapt up from her chair, ran across to the window and looked out.

‘ Scheisse !’ she said.

Back in the tiled corridor, the nurse ushered Caitlin into a tiny changing room with a row of metal lockers and a solitary hospital gown hanging on a peg.

‘You change,’ she said. ‘You put clothes in locker 14. I wait.’

She closed the door.

Caitlin stared at the lockers and swallowed, shaking. Number 14 had a key with a rubber wrist-band sticking out of the lock. It reminded her of public swimming baths.

Swimming scared her. She did not like being out of her depth. She was out of her depth now.

Feeling giddy, she sat down, harder than she had intended, on a wooden bench and scratched her stomach. She was feeling tired and lost and sick. She just wanted to stop feeling sick. To stop itching. To stop feeling scared.

She had never felt so scared in her life.

The room seemed to be pressing in on her. Squeezing her. Crushing her. Spinning her around with it. Thoughts came into her head, then went. She had to be quick, to try to grab them before they faded.

Things were being hidden from her. By everyone. Even by her mother. What things? Why? What did everybody know that she did not know? What right did anyone have to keep secrets from her?

She stood up and tugged off her duffel coat, then sat back down, hard, the room spinning even faster. Her stomach was hurting again. She felt as if a thousand mosquitoes were biting her all at once.

‘Fuck off!’ she gasped suddenly, out loud. ‘Just fuck off, pain.’

Fighting the giddiness, she stood up again, then opened the locker and was about to put her coat in, when she hesitated. Instead, she laid it down on the bench seat and opened the door.

The corridor was deserted.

She stepped out unsteadily, closing the door behind her, checked both directions warily, her vision a little blurry, and walked a short distance to her right. On her left she saw a door. A sign on the outside read STRICTLY NO ADMISSION WITHOUT STERILE CLOTHING. She squinted at it until she could read it clearly.

Then she opened it and stumbled through into a narrow, windowless room that looked like it was a store for medical supplies. There was a steel gurney on wheels, which she bumped into, banging her thigh, a floor-to-ceiling cupboard with glass doors, the shelves stacked with surgical equipment, a row of oxygen cylinders on the floor, one of which she knocked over, cursing, and several pieces of electrical monitoring equipment. At the far end was a door with a circle of glass in it, like a porthole. Caitlin made her way across to it.

And froze.

Through it, she could see into a very high-tech-looking operating theatre. It was crowded with people attired in green surgical scrubs, elasticized hats, white masks and flesh-coloured gloves. Most of them were standing around a brightly illuminated steel table, on which lay a naked girl, who looked prepped for surgery. From all the time she had spent in hospital herself, and hours of watching her favourite medical dramas, House and Grey’s Anatomy , she knew what quite a lot of the apparatus connected to the girl was. The endotracheal breathing tube. The nasogastric tube, the central lines cannulated into her neck, the cardiac monitor pads on her chest, the cannulated arterial and peripheral lines, the PiCCO monitor, the pulse oximeter, the urinary catheter.

An elderly-looking man was holding a scalpel, talking to a younger man, tracing lines on the body with a gloved finger, where he was clearly about to make incisions.

Even though the girl’s face was distorted and inert, Caitlin recognized her instantly.

It was the Romanian girl in the photograph the two detectives had brought to the house this morning.

The girl that the German woman said had been killed in a car crash in Romania yesterday. Surely, Caitlin thought, her view of the girl improving as someone moved aside, if you were in a car accident bad enough to kill you, there would be marks on your body, wouldn’t there? Cuts, bruises, abrasions, at the very least.

This girl just looked as if she was asleep.

Caitlin squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again, trying to focus more sharply. She could not detect a mark on her body.

The words of the Detective Superintendent replayed in her head.

Her name is Simona Irimia. So far as we know she is still alive and healthy. She has been trafficked to England and will be killed so that your daughter can have her liver.

And now she realized he had been telling the truth.

The German woman was lying.

Her mother was lying.

They were going to kill this girl. Maybe she was already dead.

Suddenly, behind her, she heard a furious voice, shouting in broken English, ‘What do you think you are doing?’

She turned and saw Draguta lumbering towards her.

Frantically, Caitlin pushed the door, but it would not budge. Then she saw the handle, yanked it open and stumbled in. Anger surged inside her. Anger, and hatred at all these people. At their masked faces.

‘Stop!’ Caitlin croaked, crashing through the two gowned figures immediately in front of her. She lunged at the surgeon and grabbed the scalpel from the startled man’s hand, feeling it cutting into her fingers as she did so. ‘Stop right now! You’re evil!’

Then, standing between him and the younger man, she stared down hard, scrutinizing, in a few split seconds, every visible inch of the girl’s body. There was no sign of any trauma injury at all.

‘Young woman, please leave immediately,’ the older man said, in a very posh voice muffled by his mask. ‘You are contaminating the theatre. Give me that back at once!’

‘Is she still alive?’ Caitlin screamed at him, using every remaining ounce of her strength to power her voice.

Rows of meaningless waveforms travelled across the flat, wall-mounted screen just beyond the table. More symbols and numbers flickered on smaller screens on free-standing monitoring equipment behind the young girl’s head.

‘What the hell does this have to do with you?’ he exploded, the visible parts of his face turning puce.

‘Quite a lot, actually,’ Caitlin said, breathing heavily. She jabbed her chest with her free hand. ‘I’m meant to be getting her liver.’

There was a moment of stunned silence.

Draguta shouted a command for her to come out, as if she were shouting at a dog.

‘She’s alive, at this moment, yes,’ the younger man said enthusiastically, as if this was something Caitlin wanted to hear.

She lunged forward, grabbed at the drip lines that were in Simona’s arm with her left hand and jerked them free, then grabbed the ones out of the neck and tore at the cardiac monitor pads.

The surgeon seized Caitlin by her shoulders. ‘Are you crazy, little girl?’

Caitlin responded by biting his hand, hard. The surgeon cried out in pain and she wriggled free, twisting, staring at pairs of eyes behind masks, all of them in shock, uncertain what to do. Then she saw the nurse marching towards her.

She raised the scalpel, holding it by the handle like a dagger, brandishing it at everyone, beyond caring.

‘Get her off that table!’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘Get her off that table now!’