Shortly after half past twelve – half past one in Munich, Grace calculated – Kriminalhauptkommissar Marcel Kullen returned his call.

It was good to speak to his old friend and they spent a couple of minutes catching up on the German detective’s family and career news, from when they had last seen each other, all too briefly, in Munich.

‘So, no more information you have of Sandy?’ Kullen said.

‘Nothing,’ Grace replied.

‘Her photographs are still in every police station here. But so far, nothing. We are keeping trying.’

‘Actually, I’m starting to think it is time to wind down,’ Grace said. ‘I’m beginning the legal process to have her declared dead.’

‘Ja, but I am thinking – your friend who has seen her in the Englischer Garten. We should look longer, I think, no?’

‘I’m getting married, Marcel. I need to move on, to have closure.’

‘Married? You have a new woman in your life?’

‘Yes!’

‘OK, good, so – I am happy for you! You want now that us stop to look for Sandy?’

‘Yes. Thank you for all you’ve done. But that’s not why I called you. I need help in a different direction.’

‘Ja, OK.’

‘I need some information on an organization in Munich called Transplantation-Zentrale GmbH. I understand it is known to your police force.’

‘How are you spelling this?’

It took Grace several minutes, working patiently with the German detective’s broken English, to get the name across correctly.

‘Sure, I will check,’ Kullen said. ‘I call us back, yes?’

‘Please, it’s urgent.’

Kullen called him back thirty minutes later. ‘This is interesting, Roy. I am talking with my colleagues. Transplantation-Zentrale GmbH is under observation by the LKA for some months now. There is a woman who is the boss, her name is Marlene Hartmann. They have links with the Colombian mafia, with factions of the Russian mafia, with organized crime too in Romania, with the Philippines, with China, with India.’

‘What does the LKA know about them?’

‘Their business is the trafficking, internationally, of humans, and in particular in human organs. So it would seem.’

‘What action are you taking against them?’

‘At this stage, we are just information gathering, observing. They are on the LKA radar, you would say. We are looking to connect them with specific offences in Germany. Do you have information about them you can give to me for my colleagues?’

‘Not at the moment – but I’d like to interview Marlene Hartmann. Perhaps I could come over and do that?’

The German sounded hesitant. ‘OK.’

‘Is there a problem with that?’

‘Only – at this moment, according to the surveillance file, she is not in München – she is travelling.’

‘Do you know where?’

‘Two days ago she flew to Bucharest. We don’t have more information.’

‘But you will know when she is back in Germany?’

‘Yes. And we do know that she goes regularly to England.’

‘How regularly?’ Grace asked, his suspicions suddenly rising.

‘She flew into München from London last week. And also the week before.’

‘Presumably she was not on a winter-break holiday.’

‘Perhaps. Is possible,’ the German said.

‘No one in their right mind comes to England at this time of year, Marcel,’ Grace said.

‘Not to see the Christmas lights?’

Grace laughed. ‘She doesn’t sound the type.’

He was thinking hard. The woman was in England last week, and the week before. At some point in the past week to ten days three teenagers had been killed and their organs harvested.

‘Is there any possibility of obtaining this woman’s phone records, Marcel?’ he asked.

‘Her fixed lines or handy?’

Handy, Grace knew, was the German word for a mobile phone.

‘Both?’

‘I will see what I can do. Do you want all calls, or just those to the UK?’

‘Those to the UK would be a very good starting point. Do you have any plans to arrest her any time soon?’

‘Not just now. They want to keep watching her. There are other German human trafficking connections that she is linked to.’

‘Shame. It would have been good to have her computers looked at.’

‘I think on this we can help you.’ Grace could almost feel the Kriminalhauptkommissar smiling down the phone.

‘You can?’

‘We have a warrant issued by an Ermittlungsrichter for phone and computer records.’

‘By who?’

‘It is an investigating judge. The warrant is – how is it you say – in camera?’

‘Yes – without the other party knowing.’

‘Exactly. And you know now in the LKA we have good technology for computer surveillance. I understand we have duplicates of all computer activity, including laptop away from the office, of Frau Hartmann and her colleagues. We have implanted a servlet.’

Grace knew all about servlets from his colleagues, Ray Packham and Phil Taylor in the High-Tech Crime Unit. You could install one simply by sending a suspect an email, provided he or she opened it. Then all activity on the suspect’s computer would be automatically copied back to you.

‘Brilliant!’ he said. ‘Would you let me see them?’

‘I would not be permitted to send them to you, despite the EU cooperation treaty – it will be a long process of bureaucracy.’

‘Any way of short-circuiting that?’

‘For my friend Roy Grace?’

‘Yes, for him!’

‘If you are coming over – perhaps I could leave copies of them by accident – on a restaurant table? But they are for information only, you understand? You must not reveal their source, and you will not be able to use the information in evidence. Is that OK?’

‘That is more than OK, Marcel!’

Grace thanked him and hung up with a real lift of excitement.

Subcomisar Radu Constantinescu had a swanky office in Police Station No. 15 in Bucharest – at least, swanky by Romanian police standards. The four-storey building had been put up in 1920, according to an engraved plaque on the wall, and did not appear to have been dusted or redecorated since. The staircases were bare stone and the floors covered in cracked linoleum. The pastel-green walls were chipped and scored, with plaster crumbling from some of the cracks. It always reminded Ian Tilling of his old school in Maidenhead.

Constantinescu’s room was large, dark and dingy, and shrouded in a permanent blue-grey fug of cigarette smoke. It was starkly furnished, with a wooden desk that was bland and old, but almost as big as his ego, and a conference table of indeterminate vintage, surrounded by mismatched chairs. Proudly displayed, high up, beneath the nicotine-stained ceiling, were the policeman’s hunting trophies – the mounted heads of bears, wolves, lynxes, deer, chamois and foxes. Framed certificates and photographs of Constantinescu rubbing shoulders with various dignitaries filled a little of the wall space, along with a couple of photographs of him in hunting kit, kneeling by a dead boar in one and holding up the horned head of a stag in the other.

The Subcomisar sat behind his desk, dressed in black trousers, a white shirt with braided epaulettes, and a slack green tie. He busied himself for a moment, lighting a fresh cigarette from the stub of the previous one, which he then crushed out, ineffectually, in a huge overflowing crystal ashtray. Several screwed-up balls of paper, which had clearly missed the waste bin, littered the floor around the desk.

Constantinescu was forty-five years old, short and wiry, with a gaunt face, jet-black hair and piercing dark eyes with dark, heavy rings beneath them. Ian Tilling had got to know him when the officer had started to visit Casa Ioana on a regular basis.