Jofranka Phillips’s life story had been defined by her father – Kalo Kircher. A surgeon at a private hospital in Neustadt, western Germany, in the 1930s, he was a pioneer in early operations to remove cataracts. At the outbreak of the Second World War he had been rounded up and transported to a Jewish holding centre at Mannheim, and then sent to the death camp at Chelmno in Poland. He was not a Jew. He was a member of the Roma, the once-footloose people who had dispersed across Europe; the true cultural forebears of the gypsies. He was a Roman Catholic. Like many Roma, he’d simply taken on one of the religions of his adopted country.
For the Nazis the Roma were as eligible for extermination as the Jews. Kalo’s medical qualifications enabled him to escape the mobile gas vans of Chelmno. Instead, he was forced to assist staff under the command of Dr Eduard Wirths. A series of barbaric experiments were
Kalo returned to Neustadt, then part of West Germany, and helped reorganize surgical services in the city. In 1958 an application was made by the State of Israel for Kircher’s extradition to stand trial for war crimes committed at Chelmno. Kircher was found hanging in his holding cell where he had been awaiting interview. The noose had been fashioned from the stethoscope in the medical bag he’d been carrying when picked up outside his surgery. This time he was successful. His daughter was born posthumously in early 1959. She moved with her mother – a GP – and her three elder brothers to London in 1962. A private school, a degree in medicine at Bristol, and a series of positions at major hospitals followed. Phillips was divorced, with no children. The brothers had all taken medical degrees and practised in the US – two in California, one in Maine. All the brothers supported a charity which provided free medical care for the poor in Israel.
Shaw folded the two sheets of paper inside his jacket. It was one of the oddities of police work; that you got to meet people, then strip down their lives without them knowing. He’d never got over the sense of intrusion. He swigged back the last of the double espresso.
DC Birley had been waiting for Shaw to finish reading. ‘Sir,’ he said, nodding towards the bank of CCTV
The main screen flickered, then showed a sunlit car park.
‘The camera’s over the entrance to the Bluebell – that’s the maternity hospital. I left it till last – big mistake.’ The Bluebell shared the site with the main hospital, a single covered walkway linking the two main buildings.
A man and a woman came into view from beneath the camera position and shared a cigarette. Then a large figure in what looked like a set of workman’s overalls walked surprisingly quickly into shot, then into the hospital. Movement was jerky, the figure seeming to disappear, then reappear, with each small laboured step.
‘This is the best image after we’d run it through the clever stuff,’ said Birley.
The image cleared, then reappeared, sharper, the grey edged out by black and white. It was Jan Orzsak, glancing up at the sky as he stepped into the shadows of the Bluebell maternity wing.
‘Time and date?’ asked Valentine.
‘That’s the really good news. Seven thirty on the target day – Sunday evening.’
They’d already checked out Jan Orzsak’s alibi and they’d been able to track his movements throughout Sunday except for the two hours before he’d arrived at the Polish Club at nine. Now they knew why.
‘Let’s get him in,’ said Shaw. He leant back in his seat, looking up at the neon strip above. ‘No, forget that. We’ll
‘Orzsak plays the organ at the church,’ said Valentine, their thoughts marching side by side. ‘Maybe he’s the man – the man on the street, the collector, bringing in the donors.’ Valentine thought about the crushed slippers, the weight on the shoes. ‘Maybe he needs special shoes – he’s bad on his feet. You get those built-up ones, they’d make a noise.’
‘I’m going to check the organ bank audit,’ said Shaw. ‘Then we’ll see Orzsak. Meantime, get over to MVR, George. Inch by inch – it’s got to be the place we’re looking for. Paul, when we’ve got the resources get started on the staff checks. And I want everything you can find on Orzsak: employment records, family, the Polish Club – check it all. Then get anything relevant to George, fast as you can.’ He stood. ‘Because we know one thing about Jan Orzsak,’ he said, laying a hand on top of the CCTV monitor. ‘He’s a liar.’
The organ bank was at the far western perimeter of Level One. Shaw walked alone, telling himself that the gentle echo of footsteps behind him was just that – an echo. And that the soft footfall contained no hint of a metallic click. He started listing the turnings in his head, following the little red direction arrows for A5, the code for the bank. Left, left, right, left, right. The full lighting petered out, to be replaced by the occasional neon tube on half power. Lines of tugs and trucks were stored in the wide corridors. He passed a single maintenance man working on a water-pipe junction, the irregular percussion of a hammer on metal. And then, bizarrely out of place, a line of tug trucks decorated with Disney-style characters, a float for some long-forgotten parade, a platform on the back for a carnival queen.
Eventually there was just one corridor, a hundred yards long, with a single light-bulb at the far end where a uniformed PC sat on a chair in front of an unmarked door. The sight was bizarre, surreal, like a snapshot from some Cold War movie. For the first time Shaw had to look over his shoulder. Nothing – and the echo stopped too, instantly. The PC stood and opened the door. Another corridor, twenty feet, with four doors. Shaw suddenly realized he had no idea what to expect to find in an organ bank. It was a semantic cliché without a
He pushed open door ‘A’ and stepped into a floodlit room, about the size of a railway carriage, with one long wall lined with what looked like standard supermarket freezers except the tops were opaque, not glass. But the electrics were sophisticated – each white box attached to a panel of blinking lights. LCD screens showed flickering temperatures in blue light.
One of the freezer boxes was open, like a white coffin, cold air spilling over. The contents had been laid out on a plastic sheet on the top of the next freezer. Phillips was watching two orderlies repack the open box; she was dressed in white, spotless trousers, white forensic gloves, the black hair under a white cap, although a strand hung down by her cheek in a coal-black corkscrew. The frozen plastic bags of tissue provided the only colour in the room – the lifeless blood-red of a supermarket meat counter.
Phillips smiled, her face flooded with what looked like genuine relief, and those extraordinary eyes, which were a living contradiction of electric grey. The chill in the room made her look paler, an even starker contrast to the black hair, the jet bangles. She shook Shaw’s hand. ‘So far, so good,’ she said. ‘The audit team’s in B now. But this one’s been cleared. They’ve matched all the stored material with operations listed in the six NHS theatres. They’ve taken one out of every ten specimens away for analysis –
Shaw told her what they’d found on Warham’s Hole.
She brushed the back of her hand against her cheek, and Shaw noticed again the long flexible fingers.