Dead Tomorrow

wheels, you know, for my work, for my new company I am setting up, which will revolutionize the Internet.’
    She said nothing.
    ‘Are you hearing me?’
    ‘I’m listening.’
    ‘I would still like to make beautiful sex with you. I would like to make love with you, Lynn.’
    ‘Do you understand that this call is being recorded for training and monitoring purposes?’
    ‘I understand that.’
    ‘Good. If you are calling to tell me you want to make a payment plan, I will listen. Otherwise I’m going to hang up, OK?’
    ‘No, please, listen. I was turned down, rejected, for the hire purchase yesterday. When I askedwhy they told me it was because Experian gave me a bad credit rating.’
    ‘Are you surprised?’ she retorted. Experian was one of the leading companies in the UK for providing credit ratings. All of the banks and finance houses used these companies to check out customers. ‘You don’t pay your debts–so what kind of credit rating do you expect?’
    ‘Well, listen, hear me out. I contacted Experian–I have rights under the Data Protection Act–and they have informed me it is your company that is responsible for this bad rating I have.’
    ‘There’s a simple solution, Mr Okuma. Enter into a payment plan with us and I can get that amended.’
    ‘Well, yes, of course, but it is not that simple.’
    ‘I think it is. What part of that do you not understand?’
    ‘Do you need to be so hostile to me?’
    ‘I’m very tired, Mr Okuma. If you would like to come back to me with a payment plan, then I will see what I can do with Experian. Until then, thank you and goodnight.’
    She hung up.
    Moments later, the light was flashing again. She ignored it and left the office to go home. But as she stepped out of the lift on the ground floor, she suddenly had the glimmer of an idea.

73
    Roy Grace sat alone in his office, with therising southwesterly wind shaking the windowpanes and rain falling. It was going to be another stormy night, he thought, with even the street lighting and the glow from the ASDA car-park lights dimmer than usual. It was cold too, as if the damp draught was blowing through the walls and into his bones. His watch told him it was five past eight.
    He had excused Glenn Branson from this evening’s briefing. The DC’s wife had agreed that he could come over and help bathe the kids and put them to bed–no doubt on the advice of her solicitor, he thought cynically.
    He read carefully through the notes he had jotted down during the meeting, then glanced through the typed Lines of Enquiry notes. A phone line was winking, but it wasn’t his direct line so he left it for someone else to pick up–if there was anyone else in the building other than the ever-cheerful Duncan, one of the security guards downstairs on the front desk. It felt like the Marie Céleste up here, although he knew several of his team would be working long into the night in MIR One–in particular two typists and Juliet Jones, the HOLMES analyst.
    Juliet was still occupied with her scoping exercise of all potentially relevant crimes, solved and unsolved, committed in the UK. It was an arduous, but essential task, comparable to fishing, Grace sometimes thought. Typing endless key words and phrases, searching for similar victims turning up elsewhere in the UK, or for any instances of organ theft. As of thisevening, her trawl, which had been going on since Saturday, had yielded nothing.
    During the past nine years, Grace had had many solitary hours to fill with just his own company, and he had been through one phase of educating himself on the history of detection and forensics. One man he particularly admired was a French medic, Dr Edmond Locard, who was born in 1877 and became known as the Sherlock Holmes of France. It was Locard who established the founding principle of forensic science, which was that every contact leaves a trace . It became known as Locard’s Exchange Principle.
    What, Roy Grace wondered, was he missing in the contact that had taken place with these three bodies? Where were the surgical instruments that had come into contact with the bodies? All sterilized now, for sure. Maybe there would be enough microscopic traces to get a match–but first they had to find them. Where? Similarly, it was likely that whoever had removed the organs of the teenagers–unless again it was a lone madman–had been surgically gowned up. Those clothes, their rubber gloves, especially, would carry traces. But they