Dead Tomorrow

‘Of course. I need to be away at one sharp to catch the afternoon tide.’
    She smiled wistfully, and without any malice said, ‘Gosh, how many times did I hear you say that over the years. Off to catch the tide .’
    Their eyes met, in a moment of genuine tenderness between them.
    ‘Maybe I should have that on my gravestone,’ he said.
    ‘Wouldn’t that be a bit difficult? I thought you were going to be buried at sea?’
    He laughed. ‘Yeah, that was…’
    Then he suddenly halted in mid-sentence. She would not be impressed to know that Jane had talked him out of that. Lynn had tried to do the same herself, unsuccessfully, for all the years of their married life.
    It was quiet in the café. Just past midday, the lunchtime rush had not yet started. They waited for a moment as the waitress brought them over their food, a doorstep of a hot corned beef sandwich for Mal and a small tuna salad for Lynn.
    ‘Two hundred and fifty-two thousand pounds?’ he said.
    Lynn nodded.
    ‘You know we pulled up a dead body–caught in the drag head–the one that is in all the papers right now?’
    ‘I read about it,’ she said. ‘That must have been a shock for you.’
    ‘You’ve heardthe rumours?’
    ‘I’ve been so preoccupied, I’ve barely glanced at the papers,’ she lied.
    ‘It was a teenage boy. They don’t know where he’s from, but there’s speculation that he was killed for his organs. Some kind of trafficking ring.’
    Lynn shrugged. ‘Horrible. But that doesn’t have anything to do with our situation with Caitlin, does it?’
    His worried expression unsettled her further. ‘There were two other bodies found subsequently. All missing their internal organs.’
    He spooned some more froth into his mouth, leaving a ring of white foam, dusted with cocoa powder, around his top lip. A few years ago, she would have leaned forward with a napkin and wiped it.
    ‘What are you saying, Mal?’
    ‘You want to buy a liver for Caitlin. Do you know where it’s going to come from?’
    ‘Yes, someone killed in an accident abroad somewhere. Most likely a car or motorcycle accident, Frau Hartmann said.’
    He looked down at his sandwich, lifted the top piece of bread and squeezed mustard across the meat and gherkin from a plastic bottle. ‘You can be sure that liver’s kosher?’
    ‘You know what, Mal,’ she said, with rising irritation at his attitude, ‘so long as it is a match and healthy, I don’t actually care where it comes from. I care about saving my daughter’s life. Sorry,’ she corrected herself, looking at him pointedly, ‘ our daughter’s life.’
    He put the mustard dispenser down and laid the bread back across the pink beef. Then he picked the sandwich up, opened his jaws, sizing up where to take the first bite, then put it back down on the plate, as if he had suddenly lost his appetite.
    ‘Shit,’ he said, shakinghis head.
    ‘I know you have other priorities, Mal.’
    He shook his head again. ‘Two hundred and fifty-two thousand pounds?’
    ‘Yes. Well, it’s down to two hundred and twenty-seven thousand since an hour ago. My mother has got twenty-five thousand life savings in a building society account she’s letting me have.’
    ‘That’s decent. But two hundred and twenty-seven thousand. That’s an impossible sum!’
    ‘I’m a debt collector. I hear that line twenty times a day. That’s what almost every single one of my clients tells me, Impossible. Impossible . You know what? No sum is impossible, it’s just a question of attitude. There’s always a way. I haven’t come here to listen to you telling me you are going to let Caitlin die because we can’t find a lousy two hundred and fifty-two thousand pounds. I want you to help me find it.’
    ‘Even if we did find it, what guarantees do we have–you know–that this woman will deliver? That it will work? That we aren’t faced with this same situation in six months’ time?’
    ‘None,’ she said baldly.
    He stared at her in silence.
    ‘There’s only one guarantee I can give you, Mal. That if I–we–don’t find this money, Caitlin will be dead by Christmas–or soon after.’
    His big shoulders went limp suddenly. ‘I have some savings,’ he said. ‘I’ve got just over fifty thousand–I increased my mortgage a couple of years ago, to free up some cash to pay for an extension. But we had planning problems.’ He was about to add that Jane would go nuts if he gave it to Lynn, but he kept quiet about that.