Who really knew Gavin Peploe? Within six hours they’d built a picture of the man, a picture not entirely consistent with that of the carefree high-living bachelor. Peploe’s ex-wife collapsed when informed of his death by a WPC on her doorstep in Virginia Water, Surrey. She’d remarried but had maintained regular contact with her former husband. She told a DI from Windsor CID that they’d simply married too young. Peploe was an epileptic, she said, who had taken AEDs – anticonvulsants – since adolescence. He also had a mild marijuana habit – a well-known recreational means of controlling seizures. His harelip had been corrected by surgery at the age of thirteen. Up until then he had had a severe facial deformity the removal of which, his wife said, enhanced a tendency to personal vanity and a need to prove himself as a man who could attract women. It was a vice she’d grown to understand, but could never forgive.
Initial forensics from the yacht were inconclusive. Justina Kazimierz’s examination of the victim in situ found no wounds. The burning of the skin under the lights and the sun had been post-mortem. She suggested either an accidental or deliberate overdose as a possible cause of death. Some of the pills from the dragon dispenser had been sent for analysis at the Forensic Science Service. Hadden’s CSI team had found no evidence in
‘If Peploe was running a black-market trade in illegal transplants, where are his customers?’ Shaw asked Valentine. They were at the Costa Coffee stall in the entrance to A&E at the Queen Vic, in the queue, taking a break from the murder incident room which was running at full tilt. Shaw had just briefed the team on the discovery of Gavin Peploe’s body. Outside night had fallen and a revolving emergency light on an ambulance lit the forecourt. ‘The rest I can see, George. But how do you get your clients? You can’t advertise – or perhaps you can. Online? We should check that out.’
Through a side door was a small concrete patio with picnic tables, each surrounded by a few hundred cigarette butts. They took a seat, enjoying the cool air.
‘Find your waiting list first,’ said Valentine.
Shaw sipped the coffee, listening now.
‘You’re rich, you’re dying, you need a kidney. Local hospital says maybe a year. But you’re rich, you don’t do waiting. You go private, they say six months because there’s a list there too. And even if you’ve got the money, they’re regulated, so you need to meet requirements: weight, diet, lifestyle. Then someone suggests there’s another way. You can jump the queue – all the queues.’
Shaw crushed his paper cup and laid both his hands,
Valentine sighed; he hated this kind of rationalization, treating a crime like a textbook example. ‘We don’t know whether Peploe killed himself because he knew what we were about to find in the organ bank, or whether his death was an accident, or even murder. We don’t know who the Organ Grinder is – the man on the street, finding and collecting the donors. We don’t know who Peploe’s accomplices were. And we don’t know who killed Bryan Judd or why – which is where we came in. That do you?’
Shaw licked the chocolate off the lid of his coffee.
‘Doesn’t mean we can’t try and think it through.’
Valentine spat in the dust.
‘Bryan Judd fits in to the organ trade,’ said Shaw. ‘He makes sure the waste from the ops gets nicely disposed of. That’s vital. They could burn it domestically, but they’d have to get it off the site, which is dangerous – stupid – if you can do it right here.’
Above them a thin line of smoke from the incinerator chimney caught the moon.
‘But then, on the day he dies, things get worse. Holme goes up to the hospital to spell it out for the last time. He’s going down; there won’t be any more Green Dragon.’ Shaw pinged the corner of the paper cup. ‘Holme was going to be out of the picture – pretty much permanently as far as Judd was concerned. So Judd had to face up to the fact he’d have to get his gear somewhere else – and he needed the cash to get it. What are we talking about, George? A hundred pounds a week, one-fifty?’
Valentine nodded. ‘Depends on how much he got through, but the cases I’ve seen – they’re heavy users. So at least that.’
‘So Judd’s facing a crisis. He needs extra cash. What if he asked Peploe or the Organ Grinder for it? Perhaps he even added in a threat – that he’d blow the lid on the organ trade if he didn’t get it. Because this isn’t some little two-bit money earner, is it? We’re talking organized crime, even if it isn’t exactly the Mafia.’
Valentine, drawn into the analysis, took Shaw’s crunched cup and turned it over, tapping the top. ‘One
Shaw smiled. ‘So there’s two of them right there – one selects, one collects.’ A bat, attracted by the insects circling in the light spilling from the glass door, swung round their heads.
DC Twine had tracked them down to the café. He took a seat, unscrewing the top on a bottle of still water. ‘Bit of luck. Peploe’s secretary at the hospital seems to know her boss pretty well – she’s up to speed on his pills, anyway. She says he was on a course of anticonvulsants, like the wife said. The dragon’s head dispenses lamotrigine. He told the kids they were sweets if he had to take one in public. He always carried a bag of boiled sweets too, so they got one as well.’ He looked at a note he’d taken in a neat pocket book. ‘He also took carbamazepine as a syrup – probably each morning – and gabapentin as an emergency measure. They were in a plastic bottle in his pocket.
‘Problem is, Tom says the pills in the dispenser aren’t lamotrigine. We’ll have to wait for the official analysis from the FSS. The colour and shape are very close, but he thinks it’s definitely something else. He showed the pharmacist at the hospital and she spotted them straight away. He thinks they’re sodium nitroprusside. The A&E department holds them for use in emergencies to produce a sharp drop in blood pressure. One pill – never more. Even one, given to a patient with normal blood pressure, could be fatal. Two – and Peploe always took two as a dose – would be fatal.’
‘It could have been suicide,’ said Twine. ‘He’d know the effect.’
Shaw shook his head. ‘Think it through. It doesn’t make sense. Why were the pills in the dispenser? You don’t decide to commit suicide and then dream up ways to make it look like an accident. Unless it’s an insurance scam – and I think we can rule that out. If he wanted to top himself he’d have just taken them. No – I think someone swapped them. Then left him to administer his own poison. Someone who didn’t want Gavin Peploe to talk.’
Lena was asleep in the cottage, so Shaw let himself into the small office behind the Beach Café and switched on the iMac. He wouldn’t sleep yet, so he might as well do something. The likelihood that Gavin Peploe had been murdered meant the inquiry had to be reappraised. The whole squad had been paged and told to attend a briefing at 6.30 the following morning on Level One. Outside he could hear the tide washing in, and a night breeze in the tall grass in the dunes.