by Candy Denman
Chapter 5
How to get some, or any sort of proof or even corroboration of her theory that the body at Fairlight was not from the boat, kept Callie awake a large proportion of the night. She would have liked the police to go to the press with a suitably cleaned-up photograph of the young man, and ask if anyone recognised him, but she knew that was unlikely to happen as Miller still seemed to believe he came from the boat, or, at least, was connected to it in some way. Callie was convinced he was not, which then begged the question: who was he? And why had he got mixed up with the bodies of these other young men? She thought that she could try approaching Nigel, see if he could sort out a picture of the face, something not too horrific and as clearly dead as the current one they had pinned to the board. She wanted to ask Nigel whether anything further had come from missing persons, either in this country or anywhere else, anyway.
Putting that on her to do list for the morning, Callie went on to think of other ways she might be able to show that this corpse didn’t fit, didn’t belong to the boat, or convince herself that it did and that she could leave it alone.
Thinking about the night the body had been found, she slowly went back over the walk along the beach from Pett Level towards Fairlight. How she had approached the scene, what she had seen. The body caught between two boulders, the damaged face, no shoes on the feet, the strap of the life jacket belt. That stumped her. Why would the body have a life jacket on, or part of one, if he wasn’t from the boat? The torn shirt, the tattoos. Callie knew that nothing had been found in the pockets, no handy wallet filled with credit cards or a driving licence, but perhaps there could be some clue in the clothes. They would have been removed from the body at the post-mortem, but may have been sent on for forensic analysis. She would have to check with Billy. She was quite sure there would not have been anything overtly unusual about them, or Billy would have spotted it, but there was no harm in taking a closer look. Perhaps the labels on the clothes might tell her something.
Having given herself a couple of jobs for the morning, Callie managed to finally get to sleep.
* * *
Callie’s lunchtime plans were a quick sandwich and a trip to the mortuary as she had failed to get up early enough to tackle any of her to do list before morning surgery.
She was fortunate that there were not many surgery visits scheduled and having completed her paperwork she had time to check with Judy the practice nurse about Anna Thompson.
“I’ve made her appointment for an asthma review tomorrow,” Judy told her. “I’ll make sure to stress the importance of using her preventer inhaler regularly and check technique.”
“Perfect,” Callie replied. “If she really does need more inhalers that’s fine, but let me know what you think once you’ve seen her.”
“I did end up leaving her a spare inhaler at the desk, because she insisted that she had lost the last prescription and had none,” Judy admitted reluctantly, as she could see that Callie wasn’t convinced. “I couldn’t leave her with nothing, in case she had an asthma attack, but I made it quite clear she had to come in tomorrow.”
Callie knew she was right, but was willing to bet that Anna wouldn’t turn up for her appointment. Not now she had got what she wanted. The question for Callie was how to get her in without with-holding her medication. She just had to hope that Judy’s powers of persuasion were good enough.
* * *
Callie loved that Billy always seemed pleased to see her, even when he was up to eyes in work as he was today. Unlike Detective Inspector Steve Miller who often seemed to regard her as an irritant. She also loved that he never dismissed her theories, well, not out of hand like Miller did, anyway.
“Of course, he could quite easily be British, and of mixed origins, or even from a family that came from North Africa or West Asia and settled here,” he answered when she asked about possible ethnicity.
“But if his DNA showed a percentage of Northern European heritage, surely it would suggest he wasn’t one of the group?”
He gave this some thought.
“It would make it more likely, but not certain, because of course, it might just mean an ancestor of his had been from Europe. The problem is that people move round, they no longer stay in the country of their birth. They seek out a better life elsewhere.”
As Billy’s grandparents had, Callie knew.
“But could you do it?” she asked. “DNA testing might help me persuade Miller to look harder at the possibility.”
“If I can get permission, I will. But what you really need is detailed analysis of the minerals and trace elements in his hair, teeth and bones. That might possibly give us an idea of where he has been living throughout his life, and, more importantly, where he has been living recently.”
Callie brightened up.
“And could you do that?”
“Not personally, no, and my department head would never agree to the expense of farming it out to a lab that can. Not unless we had something definite to go on. So, let’s start with the DNA analysis and see if I can persuade him to do that, or, if he won’t pay, I could maybe see if the coroner will.”
Callie was pleased, at least it wasn’t a closed door and she knew Billy’s head of department liked him and would help if he could. She just hoped he agreed, or that Mike Parton would, because she didn’t think she would get Miller to agree to fund anything.
She was about to leave when she suddenly remembered about the clothing.
“What happened to the clothes he was brought in with?” she asked. “Did anyone take a look at them?”
Billy called for Jim the technician who told Callie they had gone to forensics, although they probably wouldn’t have done anything with them as they weren’t considered high priority, they would just be stored in case they were needed to help with identification.
“Can you remember anything about them?” she asked Jim.
He shrugged.
“Not really. Let me check my notes.” He went into the changing room and came back with a notepad. “He was wearing a torn check shirt and jeans, cotton trunks, no socks or shoes,” Jim told her. “From memory, they were all cheap makes, no distinctive labels.”
“Nothing different from the others?”
“Nope.” He shook his head. He would have liked to be more help but there wasn’t anything more he could say.
“You’ll need to ask forensics if you want to take a look at them yourself, Dr Hughes,” he said and she knew he was right, just as she knew it probably wouldn’t help even if she did manage to get the lab to let her see them.
“Maybe Mike could get more details for you. You should ask him,” Billy suggested and, much as she didn’t want to add to the coroner’s officer’s workload, Callie knew she would probably do just that. Mike Parton was the only one who could reasonably ask forensics to see the clothes now. Well, him and Miller, and that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
Chapter 6
Mike Parton had called ahead to the forensic lab where all the clothes and other items found on the bodies were being temporarily stored. Callie and Parton were led to the cool and well-ventilated room with shelves from floor to ceiling. Along one wall there was a row of identical cardboard boxes. Each box contained the effects of one of the bodies and all the clothing had been dried before placing in the boxes, to prevent mould.
Mike and Callie both wore gloves as they opened the boxes and checked the contents. Callie didn’t want to just see the clothes from the Fairlight corpse, she wanted to compare those effects to the ones collected from the other bodies as well. If she was ever going to convince Miller that this body didn’t belong with the boat, she needed to find some anomaly, something that made it stand out. Both Callie and Parton took care to only open one box at a time and replace all the contents before going on to the next. They didn’t want to mix them up and the administrator who had brought them to the storeroom watched them like a hawk just in case.
Most of the men had been wearin
g track suit bottoms or jeans, with T-shirts and cheap jackets. All bar one had been shoeless when found, and he had only had one cheap trainer left on. A box of shoes, clothes and other artifacts found on the beaches close to where the bodies had been washed up, revealed an assortment of footwear, mainly trainers and sandals, both male and female, some of which might possibly have belonged to the immigrants. There were also the remnants of several life jackets of a similar make to those found on the bodies, more than the number of bodies found, suggesting that not only had some lost theirs in the water, others might not have been wearing them at all. Those bodies might take a while longer to be found, if ever.
When Callie got to the box containing the clothes found on the body that she was beginning to think of as hers, body number nine, she carefully spread them out on the table. Parton stopped to watch her.
The red checked shirt was battered and torn, and the label was hard to make out. Callie was pretty sure it said ‘Atmosphere’. She hunted out the washing instruction label on the side seam. It gave both British and European sizes and the information on the garment was in a variety of European languages.
“I think Atmosphere is one of the Primark ranges,” Parton told her as he looked over her shoulder at the label.
Callie was disappointed. She knew that the make was widely available around the world, and that he could have bought or been given the shirt anywhere.
She turned her attention to the jeans. It wasn’t clear if they had been damaged by the waves or if they had been artfully torn as a fashion statement. These too were of a ubiquitous make and offered no definitive evidence for Callie to take to Miller. There was nothing to distinguish her man from the others. Even a search of the pockets proved that the forensic team had missed nothing.
With a sigh, Callie gave up. This had been a complete waste of time, both hers and that of the coroner’s officer.
“Sorry, Mike.”
“No problem, I needed to check them anyway.”
She knew he was just being polite and it made her feel worse.
As they walked back to their cars through the main reception area of the laboratory, Callie saw Lisa Furnow coming into the building from the staff parking area, looking as pale as ever.
“Hi, Lisa,” Callie called across the reception area.
Lisa looked up quickly at hearing her name, and she dropped the files she was holding in. Callie and Parton hurried over to help her collect the papers that had fallen out of them.
“Sorry,” Callie said as she picked up a number of what looked to be lab reports. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Lisa snatched the papers from Callie and Parton, jamming them into the files in no particular order.
“It’s okay. Thanks, I’ll sort it,” she said, stuffing the last few sheets of paper held out by Parton into a random file and hurrying to the staff entrance door, almost dropping the files again as she swiped her ID card and pushed through the door to the rear of the building.
Parton and Callie looked at each other and Parton shrugged.
“I’ve seen people happier to see me,” Callie said.
“Perhaps she was just in a hurry,” he suggested.
Callie thought that it was more than that, but said nothing. They began to leave again but Callie stopped. She could see a piece of paper that had travelled further than most of the others Lisa had dropped, and was now under one of the chairs by the window. She knelt down and reached under the chair, trying not to think of how inelegant she probably looked, scrabbling around on the floor. The paper was just out of reach and she had to push the chair back to get to it. Finally, she got enough of a grip on it to pull it out.
Having managed to stand up again without too much of a loss of dignity, Callie turned to take it to the reception desk so that it could be given back to Lisa. She glanced at it as she walked and then stopped in her tracks.
The top of the paper had the distinctive logo of a group known as FNM. Callie had heard of the First National Movement. It was a hate-ridden group, devoted to ‘keeping Britain British’. And white. The group had been behind a number of stunts that targeted immigrants. Their erstwhile leader, Darren Dixon, or Dazza as his hero-worshipping followers called him, was currently in prison having been found guilty of contempt of court. Callie thought that it was probably the least of his crimes.
The paper appeared to be a badly printed information sheet, detailing a meeting that was due to take place the coming weekend. It seemed that the death of the immigrants, or at least the ‘thwarting of their plot to invade the south coast’ as the leaflet put it, was a cause for celebration.
Callie, infuriated by what she read, was about to crumple the sheet up when Parton, who had got the gist of it reading over her shoulder, took it from her.
“I think Inspector Miller might be interested in this,” he said. “Forewarned is fore-armed, so to speak.”
Callie happily let him take the paper. She hoped Miller would be able to do something about it, preferably stop the meeting or at least throw everyone who turned up into jail, but she knew that was hardly likely. After all, they had to commit a crime first, and she knew that this group were well-versed in the law and were generally very careful to make sure they stayed just the right side of it. Dixon had been a lesson to them all.
Callie had encountered casual sexism at various points in her life, but it wasn’t until she had started going out with Billy that she had ever really understood how awful and insidious racism could be. Of course, it wasn’t all intentional, Billy told her. When he was working on the wards, many an elderly patient would ask where he was from and were surprised when he replied Croydon. The fact that he came from a third-generation immigrant family didn’t occur to many people. Or that he belonged in the country as much as they did. He came from a medical family, his grandfather, both parents, an elder brother and younger sister were all doctors. Only one sister had rebelled and trained as a lawyer. They all paid their taxes and worked to care for people who still regarded them as ‘foreigners’. Callie was amazed at how Billy managed to shrug it off, and wondered if it was part of the reason why he now worked where he did. At least the dead couldn’t ask to have a white doctor.
Chapter 7
Later that night, when they stopped for a drink in The FILO, or The First In Last Out, to give the pub its full name, Callie asked Billy that very question. Did he choose pathology so that he wouldn’t have to deal with people’s racist attitudes?
He laughed.
“No! Not at all,” he said. “I went into pathology because I find it fascinating. We can learn so much from how and why people die.”
“But didn’t it sometimes get to you when patients made remarks about your colour, or being a foreigner?”
“Of course, and it still does, although, you must remember, it happens far less these days than when my parents first started practising. And it wasn’t just the patients or people in the street, in those days it was their colleagues too. I think that was why my mother chose general practice in an area with a large immigrant population. My father had thicker skin, and a determination to be a cardiologist. I admire him for that. Nowadays, people still may not be completely at ease with my ethnicity, but at least they know better than to say anything to my face.”
Callie thought that he was putting too good a face on what must still be a problem, even if it was minor. She knew the National Health Service was a better place to work than many others, but she was sure that Billy must still encounter racism from time to time.
“I suppose it’s like sexism, it’s less of a problem in the NHS than elsewhere, but still very much around. Like the sexual harassment case you were involved with,” he added.
Callie couldn’t fault him there.
“Doesn’t anything ever make you cross?”
“Of course. But things are better than they used to be, on both the racism and sexism fronts and I honestly believe it will continue to improve. Slower than I’d like, of course, but it�
��s still moving in the right direction.”
His optimism was one of the reasons Callie loved him, so it felt bad to pursue her argument.
“What about the FNM?” she asked him and his normally happy face clouded.
“Now, that lot really do get me angry. Ignorant bunch of thugs that they are.”
“I’d happily chuck the lot of them in prison and throw away the key,” she agreed.
“They’d just proliferate in there,” he said. “Like that American gang, Aryan Brotherhood. No, you have to just ignore them. Anything you do to retaliate gives them publicity and makes the group as a whole grow stronger.” He sighed in frustration. “Come on, let’s go on home and think of other things, nicer things.” He took her hand and she happily left the pub and the subject behind, even if she wasn’t so sure she agreed with him. The FNM and movements like it, did seem to be getting stronger. Brexit, unemployment, austerity – these were the things that fed them, that made groups like FNM potent. They had reached a critical strength now, she felt sure, and ignoring them was probably no longer an option. Not if they were going to go away.
Back at her flat, Callie made coffee and Billy switched on the television.
The late news was on and a reporter was talking about another body washed up on the south coast, this one well beyond Dungeness and on the way to Folkestone as Callie had predicted, making her think again of the body that had bucked the trend of moving further to the east with the tide.
Before Callie had the chance to give that more thought, the news item cut to another reporter interviewing local MP Ted Savage.
“What’s your response to the report that the boat used by these immigrants who died in your constituency may have been sabotaged, Mr Savage?” the reporter asked, shoving his microphone in the poor man’s face.
“Well, now, I think it’s a bit early to be talking about deliberate damage,” was his measured response.
“The report suggests−”
“I’m well aware of what the report says, and what it doesn’t say,” Savage continued firmly. “We now know from the coastguard radar that the migrants were brought part way across the Channel in a fishing boat, and then were sent off in the RIB a couple of miles off our coast.”