They passed on their right the imposing front of the Four Seasons hotel, then Kullen made a U-turn and pulled over, outside a posh café with an enticing window display of cakes, and a clientele that seemed to consist exclusively of women in long fur coats. Some were seated outside in the colonnade, smoking.
The German detective pointed at a brass doorbell panel on a marble pillar and the door next to it.
‘There is the company,’ he said. ‘Good luck. I will wait for us.’
‘You don’t need to do that. I can take a cab back to the airport.’
‘You were very kind when I was in England. Now I am – how you say – at your service?’
Grace grinned and patted him on the arm.
‘Thank you. I appreciate it.’
‘And perhaps afterwards, we have time for a little lunch – and I think maybe there will be things we need to talk about.’
‘I hope so.’
As he climbed out of the car into the bitterly cold air, a fleck of sleet tickled Grace’s cheek. He took his briefcase from the back seat, then walked up to the entrance door and looked at the names on the paneclass="underline" Diederichs Buchs GmbH. Lars Schafft Krimi and then, the third one down, Transplantation-Zentrale.
His nerves seemed to have settled since leaving the airport, and he was feeling quite relaxed as he pressed the bell, if a little tired from his early start. Immediately a bright light shone in his face from a small lens above the panel. A female German voice asked his name, then told him to come to the third floor.
Moments later the door release clicked. He pushed it and stepped into a narrow hall, plushly carpeted in red, with a burly security guard behind a desk, who requested Grace to sign his name in a register. He wrote Roger Taylor and faked a signature beneath. Then the guard pointed him to the old-fashioned cage lift. He rode it up to the third floor and stepped out into a large, sumptuously appointed reception area, carpeted in white. A number of scented white candles were burning, filling the air with a pleasant aroma of vanilla.
A young woman, chicly dressed with short black hair, sat behind an ornate, antique desk.
‘Guten Morgen, Herr Taylor,’ she said, with a cheery smile. ‘Frau Hartmann will see you shortly. Please take a seat. May I get you something to drink?’
‘Coffee would be great.’
Grace sat on a hard white sofa. On a glass table in front of him was a stack of the company’s brochures. On the walls were framed photographs of happy-looking people. They ranged in age from a small child playing on a swing to an elderly, smiling man in a hospital bed. No captions were needed. They were all clearly satisfied customers of Transplantation-Zentrale.
He picked up one of the brochures and was about to start reading it when a door opened behind the secretary and out stepped a strikingly handsome and confident-looking woman. She was in her early to mid-forties, he guessed, with beautifully groomed, shoulder-length blonde hair, wearing a slinky black trouser suit, shiny black boots and several big rocks on her fingers, including her wedding one.
‘Mr Taylor?’ she said, in a warm, guttural accent, striding towards him in a cloud of her own perfume, with her hand outstretched. ‘Marlene Hartmann.’
He shook it, feeling the bite of her rings cutting into his flesh.
She stood for a moment, staring at him with bright, inquisitive grey eyes, as if appraising him. Then she gave him what appeared to be a smile of approval.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s nice that you came here to see me. Please come to my office.’
Her mixture of considerable physical beauty and sexiness, combined with an element of professional coldness, reminded him of Alison Vosper. This woman definitely had a hard, don’t mess with me edge to her.
She ushered him through into a room that made him realize, for the first time, just how similar Cleo’s and Sandy’s taste in furniture was. This could be a room that had been decorated by either of them. It was carpeted in white and the walls also were in the purest white, relieved only by a triptych of white abstract paintings in black frames. There was a curved black lacquered desk, on which sat a computer terminal and some personal artefacts, a few fine plants and, strategically placed around the room, tall, abstract sculptures rose from plinths. In several places, white scented candles were burning here too, the same vanilla, but it was almost drowned out by the pungency of the woman’s perfume. He liked it, but it smelled masculine to him.
In front of the desk there were two high-backed upright chairs that looked as if they had come from a museum of modern art, and he sat down, as bidden, in one of them. It was marginally more comfortable than it looked.
Marlene Hartmann sat opposite him, behind her desk, opened a leather-bound notepad and picked up a black fountain pen.
‘So, first would you please tell me, Mr Taylor, how Transplantation-Zentrale may be of assistance to you? And perhaps, first, how it is you have heard of us?’
Being careful not to fall into an elephant trap, Grace said, ‘I found you on the Internet.’
From the way she nodded, approvingly, the answer seemed to satisfy her. ‘Gut.’
‘The reason I’ve come to see you is that my nephew – my sister’s son – who is eighteen years old, is suffering from liver failure. My sister is afraid that he will not get a transplant in time to save his life.’
He paused as the assistant brought him a cup of coffee and a jug of what he thought was milk but, when he poured, realized was cream.
‘You are based where, Mr Taylor?’
‘In Brighton, in Sussex.’
‘You have a system, I think, in your country that is – how do you say it in English? – a little arborary. No, arbitrary.’
‘You could say that,’ he agreed enthusiastically, doing all he could to bond with this woman and gain her trust.
Then, leaning across her desk towards him, she placed her elbows on the surface, interlocked her finely manicured hands and cradled her chin on them, peering, almost seductively, deep into his eyes.
‘Tell me, does your nephew have chronic or acute liver failure?’
Suddenly, to his horror, Grace found himself completely thrown. The bloody researcher had not differentiated between the two for him. Acute seemed the obvious answer to him. Acute smacked of urgency. Chronic, he knew, meant a disease that you lived with for years.
‘Acute liver failure,’ he replied.
She noted this down. Then she looked up at him. ‘So, what time frame do you think your nephew has?’
‘A month, maybe,’ he replied. ‘After that he may not even be strong enough to cope with transplant surgery.’
‘He is in which hospital?’
‘He has been treated at the Royal South London, but at the moment he’s back home.’
‘And what is the condition that the boy has?’
‘Auto-immune hepatitis,’ he said. ‘This is now causing severe cirrhosis.’
She marked this down, too, with a grimace, as if to show she understood the severity.
‘Can you tell me what service your company is able to provide?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘we are approaching the Christmas holiday period, so I think we need to move quickly. Normally the transplant and aftercare are effected at a clinic somewhere within comfortable reach of the recipient’s home. If budget is a problem, there are certain cheaper alternatives, to have the operation in China, India and one or two other countries, for example.’
‘What is the price for a liver transplant in the UK?’