Peter James: Dead Tomorrow

Today was the last Sunday before Christmas and he knew he should be feeling free, and looking forward to some time off with the woman he loved. But inside he felt as churned up as the roiling, spuming, grey Channel water to his right.

They were both wrapped up warmly. Cleo had her arm comfortably looped through his and he wondered, suddenly, if they would still be doing this walk as wrinkly old people in fifty years’ time.

Humphrey trotted along on his extended lead, holding a large piece of driftwood proudly in his mouth, like a trophy. A small brown dog bounded towards them, yipping, its owner some distance away yelling its name. Cleo broke free for a moment and knelt to stroke it. But it backed away nervously when Humphrey dropped the driftwood and growled. Hushing him, she took a step towards it and it bounded back again. They both laughed. Then, recognizing its name, it suddenly raced away.

‘So, Great Detective, how do you feel?’ she asked, placing her arm back through his.

‘I don’t know,’ he said truthfully. He watched Humphrey struggling to pick up the wood again.

‘Tell me?’

‘Was it the Duke of Wellington who said that the only thing worse than losing a battle is winning one?’

She nodded.

‘That’s how I feel.’

‘Something I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘How were all those medical people kept silent for so long?’

‘A surgeon in Romania earns 4000 euros a year. Other medical staff even less. That’s how. They were all making a fortune at Wiston Grange, so they were happy as hell.’

‘And tucked safely away in the countryside.’

‘Most of them not able to speak English. So no gossiping with the locals. It was a smart set-up. Ship them in, let them all make a bundle, then ship them out again. They’re members of the EU, so no cross-border work restrictions, no questions asked.’

‘And Sir Roger Sirius?’

‘Big money. And he had his own moral justification.’

They walked on in silence for a while.

‘Tell me something, Grace – if that had been our child – that girl, Caitlin. What would you have done?’ With her free arm she patted her belly. ‘If it were to happen to this little person, sometime in the future?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘In the same circumstances, if our only option was to try to buy a liver to save our child, what would you have done – do?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m a policeman. My duty is to enforce the law.’

‘That’s what scares me about you sometimes.’

‘ Scares you?’

‘Uh huh. I think I would take a bullet for my child. And I think I would be capable of killing for my child. Isn’t that what being a parent means?’

‘You think I was wrong, doing what I did?’

‘No, I suppose not. But I can understand why the mother did what she did.’

Grace nodded. ‘In one of the philosophy books you gave me, I read something Aristotle said: The gods have no greater torment than for a mother to outlive her child.’

‘Yes. Exactly. So how do you think that woman feels now?’

‘Is a Romanian street kid’s life less valuable than a middle-class Brighton kid’s? Cleo, darling, I’m not God, I don’t play God, I’m a copper.’

‘Do you ever wonder if sometimes you are too much a copper?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Enforcing the law at any cost? Hiding behind the human cost? Are you so constricted by your policeman’s view of the world that you can’t see outside it?’

‘We saved the life of that Romanian kid. That matters a lot to me.’

‘Kind of, job done, move on to the next?’

He shook his head. ‘No, never. That’s not how I work – or feel – ever.’

She held him tighter. ‘You’re a good man really, aren’t you.’

He smiled wistfully. ‘In a shitty world.’

She stopped and stared at him, smiling that smile that he truly would die for. ‘You make it a little less shitty.’

‘I wish.’

Lynn stood in Caitlin’s room, which had remained untouched for almost two and a half years. Now, amid all the mess of her daughter’s things, there was a stack of cardboard boxes from the removals firm.

What the hell did she keep and what did she throw away? There wasn’t much space in the tiny flat she was moving into.

With tears rolling down her cheeks, she stared around at the impenetrable tangle of clothes, soft toys, CDs, DVDs, shoes, make-up containers, the pink stool, the mobile of blue perspex butterflies, shopping bags and the dartboard with the purple boa hanging from it.

The tears were for Caitlin, not for this place. She wasn’t sorry to be leaving. Caitlin had been right all along, in her way. It had been their house but not their home.

She walked through into her bedroom. The bed was piled high with the contents of her wardrobe and cupboards. On the very top was her blue coat, still in the plastic zipper where she had sealed it after her first ‘date’ with Reg Okuma. Although it was her favourite coat, she had felt it was sullied, and had never worn it again. But Reg Okuma was all in the past now. Denarii had been good to her after Caitlin died, and had promoted her to manager. That had enabled her to write off his debt and adjust his credit rating on the computer system. No one had been any the wiser.

She slung the coat over her arm, went downstairs and out into the fine spring morning. Then she crammed it into the dustbin.

She was paying back Luke and Sue Shackleton from the money from the sale of the house. And some of Mal’s money, and her mum’s. There wouldn’t be much left after that, but she didn’t care. She needed to put the past behind her somehow.

And some of it nearly was. Her prison sentence, at any rate. Two years, suspended, thanks to an Oscar-winning performance by a barrister, or the luck of coming up in front of a judge with a heart – or maybe both.

The life sentence of grief for Caitlin was another thing. People said that the first two years were the worst, but Lynn was finding it didn’t really get any better. Several nights a week she would wake, in a cold sweat, crying bitterly over the decisions she had made and for the beautiful girl she had lost.

She would curse and kick herself that the legitimate transplant for Caitlin had been so close and she’d blown it out of sheer panic, out of sheer stupidity.

And the only thing that would calm her down and comfort her was the purring of Max, the cat, on the end of the bed, and remembering the smile of her daughter and those words she used to say that would so annoy her.

Chill, woman.

This book is a work of fiction, as are all my Roy Grace novels. But it is a sad truth that three people die every day in the UK because there are not sufficient organs for transplant available. It is also sad and true that there are over a thousand children living rough in Bucharest – some of them third-generation street kids – and over five thousand adults, a legacy of Ceauşescu’s monstrous regime. Some of these children do get trafficked for their organs.

There are many people who have given me so much help in creating this book, and without their immensely kind and generous support it would have been impossible to write with any sense of authenticity.

My first thank you is to Martin Richards, QPM, Chief Constable of Sussex, who has been immensely generous in his support for my work, and who has made so many helpful suggestions and opened so many avenues for me.

My good friend, former Detective Chief Superintendent David Gaylor, has, as ever, played an invaluable role, reading the manuscript as I go along, not just checking facts, but contributing constantly and wisely to every aspect of the story. I can genuinely say it would have been a much poorer book without his input.