Ken McClure - Tangled Web

‘That should do it,’ said Gordon.

‘Did it for me,’ smiled Mary.

Gordon made to kiss her again but she put her hands on his chest. ‘I’m on duty, and you are going to go straight home to bed.’

‘If I get knocked out again can I come back for more?’

‘Don’t even dream it!’ said Mary. ‘I’ll get your clothes.’

‘Shit, my car’s over in Aberlyn,’ said Gordon.

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Mary. ‘The police brought it over here. It’s in the car park. I think they regard you as one of their own these days... or something like that.’

‘The bone!’ exclaimed Gordon. ‘The saw! They’ll need these as evidence. I didn’t tell Davies where they were exactly! I’d better get over to Aberlyn and...’

‘ No !’ insisted Mary. ‘You told Chief Inspector Davies about these things. His men are perfectly capable of finding them without your help, YOU are going home. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ said Gordon weakly.

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

Gordon drove back over to Felinbach, wondering how Davies was getting on with the Nationwide. It was now eight in the evening. He supposed that someone must have been dragged from his or her home to open up the office in Caernarfon where the account was registered. He wondered idly if they would see this as a nuisance or something to brighten the humdrum existence of working in a building society. Either way, please God, they’d come up with something useful.

Davies rang at nine thirty. Gordon snatched the receiver off its cradle.

‘We’ve got the source,’ said Davies. ‘Both payments were in the form of personal cheques signed by one Sonia Trool.’

‘ Sonia Trool?’ exclaimed Gordon. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘Make any sense?’

‘Her daughter!’ exclaimed Gordon. ‘Her daughter was blinded in a car accident. It was through the accident that she met James Trool. The little girl’s eyes were too badly damaged for a corneal transplant to be of any use but the optic nerve was undamaged so if more material were available and it was a perfect match...’ Gordon paused.

‘Jesus Christ, are you telling me they cloned a kid to steal her eyes?’

‘That’s what it looks like.’

‘I take it you’re on your way to pick up the Trools?’ said Gordon.

‘It’s not as easy as that,’ said Davies. ‘According to a neighbour, they’re not at home. They left last night, saying they’d be away for a few days.’

‘Where the hell did they say they were going?’ exclaimed Gordon.

‘They didn’t. The neighbour doesn’t know and neither does Trool’s secretary. Apparently, he told her that he felt physically and mentally drained after all the strain of the past few weeks so he’d decided to take some time off. He and his wife were going to go away somewhere together.’

‘What about their daughter?’ asked Gordon.

‘No daughter,’ said Davies. ‘The neighbour told us that her mother had taken her into some clinic or other a few days ago for some minor treatment. The clinic would be looking after her until they got back.’

‘Something doesn’t sound right to me,’ said Gordon suspiciously. ‘Their daughter goes into hospital and they go off on holiday? No way! They’re up to something. Chances are, if the kid has gone into hospital, it’s for the main event! God, we’re that close!’

‘We’ve put out an alert for them but it could take some time,’ said Davies.

‘Anne-Marie doesn’t have much of that.’

‘I’ll keep you posted,’ said Davies.

Gordon felt a tremendous sense of frustration and anticlimax. There was nothing worse than just having to sit and wait but there was no alternative if they simply didn’t have a clue where the Trools had gone. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, he thought he should have suspected Trool’s involvement at an earlier stage. He remembered Thomas’s surprise — discomfort even — at finding Trool’s car in the car park on the night he had gone back to get a tissue sample from Anne-Marie. It now seemed highly probable that it had been Trool who had tried to kill him that night and had later gone on to murder Thomas in his office. Come to think of it, he had even heard Thomas arguing with Trool, on an earlier occasion when he’d come close to being caught searching Thomas’s lab. Thomas may have confided his fears in Trool about what Dawes was up to, possibly asking him to take some kind of action in his capacity as medical superintendent of the hospital and then been frustrated by Trool’s reluctance. He couldn’t have suspected that Trool had actually been the instigator of the whole affair — or maybe he had and that was why Trool killed him.

God, what a mess, thought Gordon, and all through the desire to make one child see again. It occurred to him now that maybe some Faustian bargain had been struck between Sonia and James Trool over what could be done for her daughter in the long term. Their marriage had puzzled a great many people, including he himself. Perhaps the beautiful Sonia had agreed to marry James Trool on the understanding that he would restore her daughter’s eyesight? He supposed it made some kind of hellish sense... suddenly it seemed a very long time since he had last had a proper sleep. He was getting into bed when the phone rang. Thinking it might be Davies with more news, he snatched it up.

‘Just checking,’ said Mary’s voice.

‘I’m just on my way to bed, honest.’

‘Good. Any word from the police?’

Gordon told her about Sonia being the source of the payments to Dawes but swore her to secrecy for the moment. There was nothing they could do until the police found out where the Trools had gone.’

‘So it’s possible that Anne-Marie is still alive?’ asked Mary.

‘Just,’ replied Gordon. ‘But if she is it’s going to be a pretty close-run thing. If the Trools’ daughter has been in a clinic for a few days... the chances are frankly, not good.’

‘What kind of people are they?’ exclaimed Mary. ‘How can they see a child as a bag of spare parts? Trool’s a doctor, for God’s sake. He took the Hippocratic oath just like we did. Medicine is supposed to be about helping people, all people, not about the survival of the fittest or the richest?’

‘It is,’ Gordon assured her. ‘That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?’

‘If you can call stitching up the heads of three drunks who had a fight after a football match and extracting an aniseed ball from the nose of a teenager, who “did it for a laugh”, helping people, then I suppose it is,’ replied Mary, summarising her most recent activities.

‘Of course it is. It means you’re one of the good guys,’ said Gordon. ‘And thank God there are still a lot more goodies than baddies in the game.’

‘Sometimes I wonder,’ said Mary.

‘Just a few bad apples.’

‘Get some sleep, Tom.’

Mary had a point, thought Gordon as his head hit the pillow. People expected such a lot of certain professions, doctors, policemen, nurses. Bad apples could do an untold amount of damage in these particular barrels.

Gordon was woken at seven by a call from the police in Caernarfon. It didn’t come from Davies personally — he was off duty — but he had left instructions that Gordon should be informed if there were any developments during the night.

‘We’ve heard from Manchester Airport that Dr and Mrs Trool and their daughter were on a BA flight to Paris two nights ago.’

‘Paris,’ repeated Gordon flatly, not knowing what to make of the news, then it registered that the officer had said their daughter was with them. ‘Are you sure about that?’ he asked.