It took Shaw a minute to give him the bare burnt bones. The case in a nutshelclass="underline" Judd’s death at the hospital,
‘You mean like this?’ asked Galloway, extending his wrist out from a shirt cuff. On it was a white band, and he turned it to reveal the tell-tale letters MVR. ‘Crew’s been flogging these for about six months. They’re raising cash for Mercy Ships – you know? Charity ships. They sail into some godforsaken port in Africa and start offering cataract ops for free, vaccination, that kind of thing.’ He jiggled the band. ‘It’s a good cause.’
‘It’s guilt,’ said Shaw. ‘Crooks can surprise you just like honest people do.’
Galloway opened a drawer on his desk and retrieved a bottle of whisky. The label was Dutch. He poured it into three tea mugs and divvied them up.
‘So,’ concluded Shaw, sipping. ‘What I want to do is watch, see what happens. They may just keep their heads down – I would. They don’t know we’ve got the torch or the wristbands – although they may well know we’ve picked up the two floaters, so perhaps they’ve guessed. But they won’t know we’ve made the link. And I guess they have to come back, right? They haven’t got a lot of choice.’
‘None. She’s run by the owners. Contracts are in place. They want her in Lynn, she’s in Lynn.’
Unless, of course, the owners were in on the game, thought Shaw. He made a mental note to check back on
‘They’ll know we’re up at the hospital turning the place over,’ said Shaw. ‘And the death of one of the surgeons – Peploe – has given us a conveniently silent prime suspect. If they’re greedy, or desperate, they might just think they’re in the clear. I don’t want anyone on the ship alerted. Let them think they’re sailing Saturday morning. Can we put someone in here…’
Galloway looked round at the dishevelled office. ‘Sure. The glass is tinted so they can’t see in. I usually go aboard for the paperwork, so they don’t come here. You’d be safe. There’s a secretary, telephonist, but they’re good girls. Leave it to me.’ He walked to the glass and looked at the ship. ‘There’s dockside CCTV – a camera on the gate, one on the quay. There are screens at security. Mind you, the picture quality’s crap so don’t get your hopes up.’
‘I’ll get you that letter from the chief constable – and the Port Authority. You’ll be covered,’ said Shaw. He asked to borrow a pair of night-vision binoculars.
The light was eerie, a kind of low-voltage purple. He focused on the security booth at the gate, two hundred yards away – a blaze of neon, the cap of the security guard just visible through the plastic counter glass.
‘He’s asleep all right.’
Then he looked at the Rosa, tied to the quayside, the only link between the two worlds a thin gangplank. No, not the only link, because there was the thick power cable as well, like a snake.
Something clicked into place in Shaw’s mind, like a virtual plug into an imaginary socket.
Galloway put his hands behind his head, revealing two large patches of sweat-stained shirt. ‘We’re a green port. That means once the ships tie up they have to switch to UK power, which is generated inland from biomass. Costs a fucking fortune – nobody likes it, but that’s the way it is. If the UK’s gonna meet its emissions targets this is the kind of nonsense we have to live with.’
‘So Sunday lunchtime, when the power went, they’d have to switch to the generator?’ Shaw tried to recall the dark shape of the ship beyond the dock gates, but he couldn’t see any lights in his memory.
Galloway thought, then frowned. ‘Well, the others did – the Ostgard, the Waverley, the Rufinia. They all switched to generators ’cos I had to go aboard to do the paperwork during the afternoon and they all had power. But I did the Rosa when she came in about ten that morning. Then I went home. I do that – just to frighten the wife. But Monday morning the bloke on security said there’d been a cock-up on the Rosa – soon as they’d docked and hooked up to the shore-side power they’d taken the chance to strip down the generator ’cos it was way past its maintenance date. So when the power went pop they were buggered. Took them till after midnight to get it up and running again.’
Shaw and Valentine exchanged glances. At last, the link between the seemingly chaotic events on Erebus Street and the illegal traffic in human organs. Shaw tried to imagine the scene on board as the power failed at midday on Sunday: the frantic activity, the generator useless. Rosa. Then he scrolled down his mobile call list until he found the number for Andersen, the electricity company engineer they’d talked to in Erebus Street on the Sunday night. He answered on the third ring. Shaw guessed he had the kind of career where a call in the middle of the night wasn’t unusual. Shaw had a simple question: the power on the quayside, did it run through the Erebus Street sub-station, and if it did, where was it coming from now? Simple answers: yes, to one. Now it came from a divert they’d set up from the power supply on the Bentinck Dock.
‘Can you monitor the supply to a specific ship?’
‘Sure,’ said Andersen. ‘I’d have to get into the other sub-station – it’s over by the grain stores.’
‘Can you do that? This is confidential, so low key. Then let me know as soon as there’s a peak in the supply – anything substantial. The ship we’re interested in is the Rosa.’
‘Why?’
It was a fair question and he needed the engineer onside. ‘It’s possible the Rosa has been used as a kind of floating hospital – an illegal floating hospital. If they tried an operation on board the arc lamps alone would chew up the power supply. I want you to tell me if there’s a peak like that.’
Andersen said he’d be in position in an hour.
Then Shaw swung the glasses round to the old gates at the bottom of Erebus Street. The light still shone from Orzsak’s bathroom, but it wasn’t the only light now. Above the Bentinck Launderette the lights were on, 24-HOUR WASH sign wasn’t lit green – a livid light, echoed by the stark illuminated cross on the apex of the roof of the Sacred Heart.
‘OK,’ said Shaw. ‘For now, we wait.’
Shaw took the first watch. He set up a desk by the observation window, put his mobile on it, a coffee cup alongside. From inside his jacket he produced the CCTV print he’d taken from the footage of the fatal road accident at Castle Rising which had killed Jonathan Tessier’s grandmother – and apparently set in motion a chain of events which had led to the nine-year-old’s murder.
The print showed the Mini after the impact, parked in the shadows under the trees. The offside wing crumpled, but otherwise intact. The two-tone paint job, a radio aerial, and a roof rack. Raindrops speckled the windows, except where the wipers had kept the view clear for the driver.
He sat back, letting his mind slip into neutral. Out on the quayside nothing moved. On a moonless night the shadows didn’t move. He tried to conjure up a memory of Erebus Street on that Sunday night: the fire burning, Blanket’s abduction from the church, the attack on the hostel, Ally Judd slipping home from the presbytery, and the ship, in darkness, just beyond the dock gates at the end of the street.