Unraveled Visions (A Shaman Mystery) (29 page)

“Please come in.” She sounded formal, as if she was a little scared. “Are you having a good shift?”

“Yeah, fine, thanks.” What else could I say? That I had massive, brooding suspicions about a man who worked upstairs from the Polska Café? That I was war-weary from being up since dawn and that controlling the scooter in a gale was making every muscle in my body cramped and stiff as cardboard? “What about you?”

“Yes, thank you. It was nice to see you again at the café. It is good food there, yes?”

“Lovely.”

“I have breakfast there most days. It means I get to chat with Maria, and see other people from home too.”

“Nice,” I agreed. She’d led me into the kitchen. I put her carrier of food on the table. Arms free, I stood, wondering what she was planning to tell me.

“It is good, in Bridgwater. The Poles here stick together.”

“You’ve needed that, am I right?” I was thinking that if Mirela and Kizzy had received the sort of homeland support that Kate had been offered, they’d’ve had a better experience of Britain. Maybe even, Kizzy would still be alive.

“Four years, I am here now. My husband came over first, to work in the building trade.”

“Oh, right.” Rey had told me something of Kate’s story, how she’d ended up with Abbott. “You didn’t come over together?”

“No. I was having my baby when he left Poland. My son, who is now in his first class at school. Dawid was supposed to get back in time for the birth. But he didn’t come. He’d disappeared.”

“What?” I must have looked stunned, because she touched my hand in its glove.

“Once the baby was big enough, I came here to look for him. Agency for Change helped me trace him, but all Dawid wanted from me was a divorce. He’d found someone new.”

“Kate, that’s dire!”

“Me? I could have killed him. Right there in the Polska Café. But I just got up and walked out.” She looked at me, holding my gaze. “At that moment, I had nothing. In England, money goes faster than in Poland.”

“I bet that’s true.”

“I needed food for my child. I needed the fare home. And for the divorce, that costs too much money.”

I nodded. I didn’t think there could be much that is more scary that being broke and alone in a foreign country. “But, in the end, you stayed on? Found Gary!”

“Yes, in the end. But that is not what happened first.”

Kate shook her head, and her hair swung. She lifted a pale hand and brushed it from her face. The action rang a bell; a thing Rey had told me. The way Gary had gone a little crazy over that first dead woman’s body.

“Did Gary … did he ever talk to you about the murder, the woman they found in the summer, that turned up in—”

“Yes. Please—I know this. It is this that I want to tell you about.”

I looked at the chestnut shine of her hair. “She reminded Gary of you, didn’t she?”

“He had pestered the doctor. The woman who had done the autopsy. What is she called? Path …”

“Pathologist,” I said, wondering where this was taking us.

“The woman’s stomach, it was all opened, when they found her. You know?”

“Sort of. Well, no, I don’t.”

“Gary said … that it wasn’t fishes. He told the woman, but she didn’t listen, I don’t think. Now, he is dead, and another woman is dead!”

“They’re talking about connections, aren’t they? Between Kizzy Brouviche and the other woman. Slashings. A ripper.”

“Slashings, yes.” Her face was as white as paper. Even her lips were white. Like Kizzy’s face, through the window of the morgue. “I have been reading. Everything in the papers. I have been trying to do it for Gary. In his place.”

Waves of assumptions suddenly formed into a single solution.

“Gary knew who killed that woman, didn’t he? He knew who was going to kill Kizzy, even before she died.”

“Perhaps. I don’t know. Not who this person is or even if Gary knew. Not a name, or a thing like that. But one thing is sure. The person who killed the girls—they killed my man. They shot him.”

Neither of us spoke. I shivered, the cold of the open window getting to me. “How?” I asked, at last.

“Because … I survived.”

“You? You encountered this man? The murderer?”

“Yes. I encountered.”

“Did you see him? Is it a him?”

“It is a man. I know this. But I didn’t see him. His eyes only. I didn’t see his face. I didn’t see anything much.”

Kate turned from where we were standing beside her table full of cooling Bulgarian food. She closed the kitchen window. She worked at the plastic string and the roller blind cascaded down. It was rose pink, with a scalloped edge, trimmed with lace. She pulled it right to the sill. She moved to the kitchen door and shut that tight too.

I felt a tremor on my lips. I sucked them in to stop it showing. She shook her head, as if it was too difficult to tell. She wanted me to draw her story out of her. “How did you get away, Kate?”

“I woke up, I was paid. They paid me less than they had promised, but I was too weak and in pain to complain. I was put into the blindfold again, as before. I was driven to town. Then I walked. I walked home.”

“What?” There was a ringing in my ears. It was in my heart too.

“They say you will be paid. Good money. Make you rich. But in this country, money goes like pee from the bladder.”

“Rich.” I settled on a phrase. “Great riches.”

“No,” said Kate. “Just a package of used ten-pound notes.”

Not really riches offered
…

“They leave you, they push you out the car with the blindfold still on in the middle of town, and you never see them again.”

“Kate?” I said, unsure. Because Kate had begun fiddling with the buttons of her cardigan. She peeled it off and folded it over the back of the chair that was tucked under the table. She crossed her arms to grasp the hem of the long-sleeved top she wore underneath and pulled, so that it rose over her head. I saw goosebumps in the spotlighting. Now, all she had on above her waist was a flimsy, slightly greyish sports bra.

“Kate?”

She raised her arms away from her body. Then she turned. A full three-hundred and sixty degrees, slowly round, as if she was modelling something.

From her bra strap, round the side of her ribs and down towards her navel, was a scar. It wasn’t new, but it looked as if it hadn’t finished with her yet, as if it would always be there to remind her of a terrible day in her life, when she sold herself for great riches. Riches to feed her son and return to her country free of a man who had betrayed her.

When she’d finished turning, Kate pulled on her clothes in silence. She left the blind down so that the dark Bridgwater night couldn’t get in, couldn’t disturb her fragile peace. She stood completely still, watching for my reaction, waiting for my questions.

I was unable to piece together enough words to make a sentence. I could only look into her face as she stood motionless beside me. I couldn’t read her expression. There was nothing in it, as if the dreadful incision around her body had sucked emotion out of her at the same time it had taken her kidney in return for a package of crumpled ten-pound notes.

twenty-eight

The burger van was
closed, the shutters as tightly pulled as Kate’s roller blind. Rey was leaning against it.

“Hi,” I said. “Thanks for answering my SOS text.” There were smudges below his eyes that looked like he’d been experimenting with his mama’s makeup bag. “You haven’t slept in days, have you?”

“That is about accurate. Your trusty detective never sleeps. He never pauses in his investigation, which is why I hope you’ve pulled me out here for a good reason.”

“So do I.” I was all over the place, bone-weary, and beginning to feel useless. It must have shown, because Rey leaned in and pecked a kiss. On the cheek, but I guess we were close to the station and he was on duty. He put his arm on my back and led me to the low wall. This was the place it had begun, the Saturday morning after the carnival.

“I’ve had a bitch of day,” I said.

“Join the club.”

“But, I’ve learned something. And—well—the police are always asking us to share our suspicions, aren’t they?

“No, we are not.” He ground his first cigarette underfoot and lit a second. “We ask the public to report anything they feel may have a bearing on a case, however slight. Anything suspicious. Not
their suspicions
.”

“Okay. Well I’d better go with that, hadn’t I?” I gripped myself tight, balling my fists and pushing my elbows into my ribs to prevent him from seeing that I was trembling on the wall beside him. “I know what happens to the girls.”

“What girls?” said Rey, blowing smoke into the wind.

“Kizzy … the other woman. They died under anaesthetic, didn’t they? They died having organs removed.”

“Humph,” said Rey. He shifted slightly on the wall.

“The reason Abbott got so uptight about that first body, was because her hair reminded him of Kate.”

Rey’s jaw padlocked down. I watched him process what I knew, and correlate it against what he knew. He wasn’t dismissing my words, so I battled on.

“Because the dead woman wore her dark hair long, but also because she was from somewhere else, and no one missed her. No one knew she’d gone, except the people who ply their trade selling organs. Black market, I guess. Who wouldn’t pay for a kidney, to keep their life, if they had the money? Kate needed money. She was approached by someone on the phone. She was picked up in a car. A blindfold was placed around her eyes and she was driven some miles. Can you imagine how terrifying that would be?”

Rey didn’t respond. But he was looking at me, his attention so tightly held that he hadn’t noticed the ash had burnt long on his cigarette.

“When the blindfold came off, she was in an operating theatre. The lights were on overhead. The surgeon was all in green; mask, gloves, everything. He put an injection in the back of her hand and the next thing she knew, she was being tumbled out of the same car. She’d sold her kidney for a few thousand pounds. She had to walk home with a dressing dripping blood down her thigh.”

“Fuck,” said Rey. “Why didn’t Abbott tell us?”

“It happened some years before she met him. But he knew. He’d seen the scar and heard the story. When that woman was found at Dunball, he started following his hunch. Because it couldn’t be more than a hunch, could it? The woman was clean. There were no forensics. You said that yourself.”

“He did like to hold his cards. Scout round first before presenting his hypothesis. That was just Gary. The way he worked. I respected that, didn’t push him.” He was staring away from me, his shoulders hunched. “What if I’d pushed him? Would he be alive?”

“Didn’t you know any of this?”

“I didn’t know about Kate.”

“Oh, Rey, if you have to bring her in, treat her gently!”

“Christ, Sabbie, where d’you think we are? Chile?”

“But that’s the link, isn’t it? Between Kizzy and the other girl. It’s what happened to Kizzy, isn’t it? She donated her kidney. But it didn’t work like Kate. She didn’t wake up, get off the table, go home.”

“No.”

“Kizzy told Mirela she knew where there was a lot of money to be made. But she’d scared Mirela enough to make her say no. Mirela told me that the very first time I met her, but I didn’t understand. I’m not even sure Mirela truly understood. So Kizzy went off on her own. Middle of the night to exchange a kidney for a sum of money.” I took a deep breath. “That’s my theory. I’ve been working on it as I finished my shift.”

“I see,” said Rey.

“Horrid.”

“Yes.”

“And the first girl? Is that the link?”

“Maybe.”

“Oh, come on, Rey! I’m not going to go blabbing this around!”

“I’d love to share with you Sabbie. Love to. Don’t know if I
would
, but I’d love to have the opportunity. Truth is, we don’t know. It’s all surmise—the weakest of the Criminal Investigation Department’s tools. Supposition. You’ve laid out events nice and simple, but something more is going on. Kizzy Brouviche disappeared on November sixth and reappeared weeks later. In the meantime, she writes a letter to Mirela. Not quite so simple, is it?”

“So you need to know who ‘he’ is. The bloke she stayed with. What she was doing between her disappearance and her death. Where she was hiding all that time.”

“Huh,” said Rey. “Yeah.”

“In my journey for Mirela, I was met by a wolf. He told me to look for Kizzy in four places. I’ve isolated three of them. The fourth was the place of no escape. I’m sure that is where Kizzy was held, by the man with the snake, the man she warned her sister of.”

Rey smiled and wrapped his arm around me as we sat on the wall. “That’s my Sabbie,” he said. “I talk about pathology, interviews, forensics, footwork, Internet searches. You talk about wolves and snakes.”

“I’ve seen Kate’s scar. That was solid enough. And I can guess that both Kizzy and the first girl started off with massive wounds like that. Slasher wounds, the press are saying. Are you letting them say that to keep them off the true mark? That the girls were missing a kidney?”

“The first one, we think, yes. But Kizzy …”

“Kizzy what?”

I’d noticed that Rey needed to build up a head of anger before he told me things. As if they had to burst out of him. “What? Whatever! Whatever they pleased to take from her!” He tried to quiet his voice; the back lane was empty and dark, but the police station no distance away. “With that first girl, there were traces of abdominal organs in-tact. The fact that some might originally have been missing couldn’t be detected, not back then. But that wasn’t so with Kizzy Brouviche.”

A frisson caused me to shudder, as if the cold of King’s Sedgemoor Drain had washed over me. “Rey?”

“All her organs. Her heart. Her lungs. Her liver. Her eyes. Both kidneys. Almost all her organs. Gone. Swiped away. Packed in ice, yeah, you’re right. Packed in ice and shipped out of here.” He ground his second cigarette under his boot, gripped his hands together and shoved them between his knees, as if already struggling against lighting the next.

“Oh, goddess,” I whispered.

“So, yeah, Sabbie. You’ve hit the bull’s eye with this one. No point in taking out organs that don’t have a recipient waiting; can’t sell them later. And if you’re planning to sell a human heart …”

“It’s clear your donor patient isn’t going to survive.”

“That you don’t have any intention of letting them do so.”

I heard a moan, a cry of distress. It was me, the moan coming out of me as I remembered Kizzy, calling out to me.
Not good boys-friend lead to danger. Lead to death!

Kizzy’s prediction hadn’t been about my future at all, but a certain one for herself, starting with a fist filled with money but ending with death.

“We have a hypothesis. You might as well know; no doubt some wolf will tell you if I don’t. She was involved in the murder of Abbott. Because of that, she willingly hid away. She probably didn’t realize that as a witness, she needed to die. Possibly as a legit client, they’d already taken one kidney, to weaken her. There was blood on the letter to Mirela. Wherever she was, she was kept there while they cross-matched her up to sick people across the world and sold a whole shipload of organs.”

“How many people could do this sort of thing and stay below the radar? After all, you need the right place. Taunton Hospital?” I recalled what he’d said about interviewing the surgeons. “If you knew this, why haven’t you made an arrest?” Jimmy’s knife flashed into my mind, slicing swift and clean through meat. The generous smile on his face as he handed me the leftover takeaway. “Is Jimmy involved? I mean, he can’t be doing the operations, can he?”

“No,” said Rey. “He’s not capable of that.”

“So, would it be, like, a medical student or something?”

“We’re assuming the main perpetrator of this ring is experienced. Barbaric, cold-blooded, implacable, and probably not practicing as a surgeon any more.”

I took a long swig of the water bottle I’d brought from my scooter. My mouth was dry as ash. “So if there was someone … whose background we don’t know … who works with people that are hardly more than refugees … would they be a suspect?”

He gave me a hard stare. “Best leave the investigating to us, Sabbie.”

“I think Kate showed me her scar knowing I’d come to you.” I paused, trying to put my thoughts in order. It was an impossible task. “But I do have my suspicions. They’re crazy. They’re off-beam. But …”

“Are there wolves or snakes involved?”

I checked his face. He was grinning, which was good to see. I’d decided it was my task to add lightness and laughter to his life. Well, and love, naturally.

“If Kizzy’s captor carried with him—everywhere he went—a book with a picture of a snake on the cover—then wouldn’t that be how she might describe him? I’m having these massive, gut-wrenching suspicions
about someone. But you said you didn’t want to hear about
our suspicions
. And now, here, sitting on this bloody cold wall, they don’t feel very solid.”

“Even solid’s doing us no good, Sabbie. We’ve got enough possible suspects to fill the River Parrett, except drowning’s too good for any of them.” He put his hand on my knee. “Is there a shred of evidence, Sabbie? A single indication of proof ?”

I had to breathe for several seconds before I could answer. “Not really.”

“Then I don’t want to hear it.”

“And I don’t want to articulate it. Anyway, I recognise the statistics are off the sheet—the chance of me bumping into a killer is a million to one. And I’ve already done that before, haven’t I?” I could hear my breath in my ears. I was exhaling in relief. I didn’t want Fergus to be a killer. “Everyone thinks you’ve arrested Jimmy because you’ve got to be seen arresting someone. You’re not sure if you can charge Jimmy, are you?”

“Who knows? I sure as hell don’t.” Rey’s eyes swivelled away from me, but his hand was still warm on my thigh. “At the moment, all I want is for Jimmy Browne to cooperate with us. He’s making less sense than a chimpanzee on cocaine.” There was an edge to Rey’s voice. Urgency? No. Panic. “Would you do me a favour, Sabbie?”

“What?”

“Will you speak to Jimmy? I mean, as a shaman?”

“You want me to question him? Without knowing any details about his arrest? Do you think I’ll be of help if I only work with half the evidence you’ve got?”

Rey nodded, once. “Of course I do. Because how you work is
not exactly empirical
. That’s what you said, wasn’t it?”

“So, when do you want me to talk to him?”

“We can’t hold him much longer. This investigation has got more worm holes in it than an episode of
Star Trek
. Jimmy Browne was down one of those holes, but it’s not the right one, which is a bloody annoyance. There has to be another hole waiting for us to shine a torch down …”

I put up my hand. “Okay. Enough of the hole analogies.”

“Can I text you when we let Browne go?”

“Please do. I’d like to see Jimmy anyway.” I had reasons of my own to see him. I needed to ask him if he had poisoned my food.