He bit his lip. ‘She’s going to have to have a transplant.’

‘A transplant? Shit, she’s only fifteen years old! FIFTEEN!’

He nodded, but said nothing.

‘I’m not shouting at you – I’m sorry – I…’ She fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief, then dabbed her eyes. ‘She’s just been through a lot in her life, poor angel. A transplant?’ she said again. ‘That is really the only option?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid it is.’

‘Or?’

‘To put it bluntly, she won’t survive.’

‘How long do we have?’

He raised his hands helplessly. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘Weeks? Months?’

‘A few months, at most. But it could be a lot less if her liver continues to fail at this rate.’

There was a long silence. Lynn stared down at her lap. Finally, and very quietly, she asked, ‘Ross, are there risks with a transplant?’

‘I’d be lying if I said there weren’t. The biggest problem is going to be finding a liver. There is a shortage because there is a lack of donors.’

‘She’s a rare blood group too, isn’t she?’ Lynn said.

Checking his notes, he said, ‘AB negative. Yes, that is rare – about 2 per cent of the population.’

‘Is the blood group important?’

‘It’s important, but I’m not sure of the exact criteria. I think there can be some cross-matching.’

‘What about me – could I give my liver to her?’

‘It’s possible to give a partial liver transplant – using one of the lobes, yes. But you’d have to have a compatible blood type – and I don’t think you are big enough.’

He searched through a few index cards, then read for a moment. ‘You’re A positive,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’ The doctor gave a bleak, wintry smile of sympathy but near helplessness. ‘That is something Dr Granger will be better able to tell you. Also whether your diabetes would be a factor.’

It scared her that his man she trusted so much suddenly seemed lost and out of his depth.

‘Great,’ she said bitterly. Diabetes was another of the unwelcome souvenirs of her marriage break-up. Late-onset Type-2, which Dr Hunter told her might have been triggered by stress. So she hadn’t even been able to go on comfort-food binges to console herself. ‘Caitlin’s going to have to wait for someone who is the right blood group match to die? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Probably, yes. Unless you have a family member or a close friend who is a match, who would be willing to donate part of their liver.’

Lynn ’s hopes rose a little. ‘That’s a possibility?’

‘Size is a factor – it would need to be a large person.’

The only large person she could immediately think of who would be approachable was Mal. But he was the same blood type as herself – they had found that out some years ago, during a period of trying to be responsible citizens, when they had become regular blood donors.

Lynn did a quick mental calculation. There were 65 million people in the UK. Maybe 45 million of them teenagers or older. So two per cent would be about 900,000 people. That was a lot of people. There must be people with AB negative blood dying every day.

‘We’re going to be in a queue, right? Like vultures? Waiting for someone to die? What if Caitlin freaks out at the thought?’ she said. ‘You know what she’s like. She doesn’t believe in killing anything. She gets upset when I kill flies!’

‘I think you should bring her in to see me – if you want to I could have a chat with her later on today. A lot of families find that donating the organs of someone who’s died can give some purpose and value to their death. Do you want me to try to explain this to her?’

Lynn gripped the sides of her chair, trying to put aside her own inner terror. ‘I can’t believe I’m thinking this, Ross. I’m not a violent person – even before Caitlin’s influence, I never liked killing flies in my kitchen. Now I’m sitting here actually willing some stranger to die.’

The morning rush-hour traffic on Coldean Lane that had been halted by the accident was already backed up almost to the bottom of the hill. To the left was part of the sprawling post-war council housing estate of Moulescoomb, to the right, beyond a flint wall, were the trees marking the eastern boundary of Stanmer Park, one of the city’s biggest open spaces.

PC Ian Upperton cautiously edged the nose of the Road Policing Unit’s BMW out past the rear of the stationary, chuntering bus that was at the end of the queue until he could see the road ahead, then, with the siren flailing the still air, he launched the car up the wrong side of the road.

PC Tony Omotoso sat next to him in silence, scanning the vehicles ahead in case any of them in their impatience tried to do something stupid like pulling out or turning round. Half the drivers on the road were either blind or drove with their music too loud to hear sirens, only looking in their mirrors to do their hair. He felt tight, clenched up with anxiety, the way he always felt on the way to a road traffic collision, as accidents were now officially called in the ever-changing police lexicon. You never knew what you were going to find.

In a bad accident, for many people their car turned from friend to deadly foe, spiking them, slicing them, crushing them and, in some horrific cases, cooking them. One moment they would be cruising along, listening to their music or chatting happily, the next – just a fraction of a second later – they were lying in agony in a tangle of metal with edges as sharp as razors, bewildered and helpless. He loathed idiots on the roads, people who drove badly or recklessly, and the twats who didn’t put their belts on.

They were reaching the crest of the hill now, where there was a nasty dogleg junction, with Ditchling Road joining Coldean Lane from the west and east, and he saw a blue Range Rover at the front of the queue with its hazard flashers blinking. A short distance on was an old-model white 3-Series BMW cabriolet slewed across the road with its driver’s door open and no one inside. There was a massive V-shaped dent behind the door and the rear wheel was stoved in. The rear window was shattered. Just beyond it, a knot of people were standing in the road. Several turned their heads as the police car pulled up and some moved aside.

Through the gap they opened up, Omotoso saw, facing them on the far side of the crest of the hill, a stationary small white Ford van. Spread-eagled, motionless on the ground close to it, was a motorcyclist, a trail of dark crimson blood running from inside his black helmet and pooling on the road. Two men and a woman were kneeling beside him. One of the men appeared to be talking to him. A short distance away lay a red motorcycle.

‘Another Fireblade,’ Upperton said grimly, almost under his breath as he brought the car to a halt.

The Honda Fireblade was a classic born-again-biker machine, one of the motorcycles de choix for blokes in their forties who had ridden in their teens, had now made some money and wanted a bike again. And naturally they wanted the fastest machine on the road, though they had no real understanding of just how much faster – and harder to handle – modern bikes had become during the intervening years. It was a grim statistic, evidenced by what Omotoso and Upperton – and dozens of other Road Policing Officers like them – saw daily, that the highest risk age group were not tearaway teenagers but middle-aged businessmen.

Omotoso radioed in that they were at the scene, and was told that an ambulance and fire crew were on their way. ‘We’d better have the RPU inspector up here, Hotel Tango Three-Nine-Nine,’ he told the controller, giving him the call sign for the duty Road Policing Unit inspector. This looked bad. Even from here he could see that the blood wasn’t the light, bright red of a superficial head wound, but the ominous colour of internal bleeding.