Dead Tomorrow

be fantastic and would propel her into contention for this week’s bonus.
    She dialled his number.
    It was answered by his deep, resonant voice on the first ring.
    ‘Mr Okuma?’ she said.
    ‘Well, this sounds like my good friend Lynn Beckett from Denarii, if I am not mistaken.’
    ‘That’s right, Mr Okuma,’ she said.
    ‘And what can I do for you on this fine day?’
    It may be fine inside your head , Lynn thought, but it’s pissing with rain inside my head and outside my window . Following her long-used training script, she said, ‘I thought it might be a good idea to discuss a new approach to your debt, so that we can avoid all that messy litigation business.’
    His voice exuded confidence and oily charm. ‘You are thinking of my welfare, Lynn, would that be right?’
    ‘I’m thinking of your future,’ she said.
    ‘I’m thinking of your naked body,’ he replied.
    ‘I wouldn’t think about that too hard, if I were you.’
    ‘Just thinking about you makes me hard.’
    Lynn was silent for a moment, cursing for falling into that one. ‘I’d like to suggest a payment plan for you. What exactly do you think you could afford to pay off on either a weekly or a monthly basis?’
    ‘Why don’t wemeet, you and I? Have a little tête-à-tête?’
    ‘If you would like to meet someone from the company I can arrange that.’
    ‘I have a great dick, you know? I’d like to show it to you.’
    ‘I will certainly tell my colleagues.’
    ‘Are they as pretty as you?’
    The words sent a shiver rippling through her.
    ‘Do your colleagues have long brown hair? Do they have a daughter who needs a liver transplant?’
    Lynn cut the call off in terror. How the hell did he know?
    Moments later her mobile rang. She answered it instantly, spitting out the word, ‘Yes?’ convinced it was Reg Okuma, who had somehow got hold of her private number.
    But it was Caitlin. She sounded terrible.

53
    There were occasionswhen Ian Tilling missed his life in the British police force. Plenty of moments too when he missed England, despite the painful memories it held for him. Particularly on those days when the numbing cold of the Bucharest winter froze every bone in his fifty-eight-year-old body. And on those days when the chaotic bleakness of his surroundings here in the suburban sector 6, and the bureaucracy and corruption and callousness of his adopted country, dragged his spirits down.
    Whenever he felt low, his mind went back to the terrible evening, seventeen years ago, when two of his colleagues came to his house in Kent and told him that his son, John, had died in a motorcycle accident.
    But he had an instant fix for coping with that pain. He would get up from his desk in the ramshackle office, filled with donated furniture, which he shared with three young female social workers, and take a walk around the hostel he had created as a sanctuary for fifty of this cruel city’s homeless. And see the smiles on his residents’ faces.
    He decided to do just that, now.
    When Ceausescu had come to power in 1965, he had a skewed plan to turn Romania into the greatest industrial nation in Europe. To achieve that he needed to increase, dramatically, the size of the population in order to create his workforce. One of his first acts of legislation was to make it compulsory for all girls, from the age of fourteen, to have a pregnancy test once a month. If they fell pregnant they were forbidden to abort.
    The result, within a fewyears, was an explosion in the size of families, and the offspring became known as the Children of the Decree. Many of these children were handed to government care institutions and brought up in vast, soulless dormitories, where they were brutally maltreated and abused. Many of them escaped and took to a life on the streets. A huge number of them were now living rough in Bucharest, either in shanties built along the network of communal steam pipes that criss-crossed the suburbs, or in holes in the roads, beneath them. Tributaries of these pipes fed every apartment block in the city with their central heating, which was switched on in autumn and off in spring.
    After the tragedy of John’s death led to the collapse of Tilling’s marriage, he had found it impossible to concentrate on his police work. He quit the force, moved into a flat and spent his days drinking himself into oblivion and endlessly watching television. One evening he saw a documentary on the plight of Romanian street kids and it had a