by Candy Denman
“Did the coastguard manage to identify the vessel that brought them across?”
“Unfortunately, not yet. The identifying transponder was switched off, but I’m sure they are working hard to track the boat.”
“And the report also raises the possibility that the sides of the RIB had been cut, either intentionally or accidentally, right?”
The reporter looked as if he was going to say more, but Savage didn’t give him a chance.
“I think we need to stop speculating and let the police do their job and investigate it properly. I’ve nothing further to add at this point.” Savage walked quickly away from the reporter, before getting into a waiting car and being driven off.
The reporter turned back to address the world, but the anchor at the television studio quickly cut him off. “Thank you, Ben, now in other news, a grandmother from Durham has−”
Billy turned the television off and took the cup of coffee from Callie.
“Have you heard anything about the boat being damaged?” she asked.
“No.” He shook his head. “That’s news to me.”
They both thought about it for a little while.
“I wonder how sure they are that it was deliberate damage and not just from being thrown against rocks and that.”
“If there were definite knife cuts to the rubber, that would do it.”
“Yes,” Callie said. “It would. I’ll talk to Mike next week, see if I can find out more.”
“It’s a horrific thought, isn’t it? I mean, if the boat was cut so that they wouldn’t reach land safely? That’s cold-blooded murder.”
Callie had to agree.
* * *
As she lay in bed in the early hours of the morning, mind working overtime, Billy snoring lightly by her side, she made a decision. If anyone had managed to get someone to sabotage the boat, it was likely to be someone from the FNM, and the fact that they were holding a celebratory gathering made even more sense. She didn’t think they were likely to admit it openly at the meeting, but someone might say something. She decided that she was going to go to the FNM gathering. Ideally, she’d like to take someone with her, but she certainly couldn’t take Billy, he’d become an instant target, and she wasn’t sure that Kate would approve. In fact, she knew that Kate would try and talk her out of it if she told her friend about her plans. Knowing that it would be hard to have brunch with Kate and keep it from her, Callie decided to resort to a little white lie and first thing, once Billie had hurried out to his football game, with a wave and a kiss and an “I’ll call later”, Callie sent her friend a text, crying off their regular brunch and suggesting that they meet Sunday instead. Kate replied that she was happy with that as she would have loads to tell Callie about her Saturday night date. Callie smiled to herself, her friend wouldn’t be free to go out with her, even if she had asked. Much better to go alone, Callie thought. She would have a lot to tell Kate on Sunday as well, although she didn’t imagine an FNM meeting was likely to lead to any romance.
Chapter 8
Looking through her wardrobe, Callie wondered exactly what one wore to an FNM meeting. Ringing her mother for advice wasn’t exactly on the cards. She imagined the conversation:
“Hey Mum, what’s the dress code for a fascist rally?”
“Definitely a dark colour, darling, a black shirt perhaps?”
No, ringing her mother was not a good idea. She decided on jeans, a plain white shirt and a blue jacket. Nothing flash. Nothing designer. She really didn’t want to stand out in this crowd.
Even though the sun would be going down during the meeting, she decided on a pair of large sunglasses. She didn’t want to be recognised by any of her patients, if they were there, or police, undercover or uniformed. And there was also the anxiety of being photographed and appearing in the morning papers. That would be very difficult to explain to her Asian boyfriend, no matter how tolerant he was.
There was also the anxiety over whether or not Lisa Furnow would be there. The fact that she dropped the flyer and was so flustered suggested she might be, but it could just have been something she picked up accidentally and was nothing to do with her.
Callie had argued with herself over whether or not she could befriend the crime scene photographer to try and find out her leanings, but it was well known that Callie was going out with Billy, so Lisa was never going to believe she was a member of the FNM and would be unlikely to confide in her if she was.
Callie wondered again about body number nine. Was he a member of FNM? Was it him who had sabotaged the boat? If so, it had back-fired spectacularly. She would have liked to ask Lisa if she recognised him, but the fact that the photographer hadn’t come forward and identified the body, suggested not. That, or she wasn’t prepared to admit to knowing him.
Callie’s plan was to stay away from the limelight and do her best to go unnoticed, whilst taking note of the people and what they said. She hoped there would be talk that might link the group to the damaged boat. Something solid she could take to Miller. She would dearly love to see them prosecuted for murder, because if the immigrants drowned because of poor planning that would be manslaughter, but if the boat had been deliberately damaged with the intent that it would not be able to safely reach shore, that was unquestionably murder.
* * *
As she looked around her at the crowd that was rapidly gathering at the outdoor exhibition area on the seafront, known as The Stade, Callie realised she was still more smartly dressed than most of the other attendees. She smiled to herself, there was no time to change her clothes now, so she would have to do as she was.
She found herself a quiet spot between the gallery and the net sheds. She was slightly to one side of the main group, but she would still be able to hear the speakers who were standing on a makeshift stage comprising some piled-up wooden pallets.
With her sunglasses firmly in place as the sun set to the west, she was able to take a good look at the other people there. She recognised Peter Claybourne, the local councillor and amusement arcade owner, who had been so quick to say that no crime had been committed when a body washed up on the beach. How wrong he was. Callie wondered if he had known that at the time. Claybourne was talking to several people, shaking hands, but covering his mouth when he spoke, as if he was worried about others listening in, or lip-reading what he was saying. Perhaps the police were videoing the event, although, for her own reasons, Callie hoped not. Claybourne seemed to be telling the men around him something important, and Callie wanted to know what it was, but she dare not get any closer.
More people were steadily arriving and the area was becoming quite crowded. Callie edged carefully through the mass of people to get closer to Claybourne keeping a close eye out for anybody else she recognised as she did so. As the sunlight was slowly going, the evening was becoming cooler and her sunglasses more of a hindrance than a help, she took them off and stowed them in her handbag. She’d just have to hope no one recognised her.
The crowd was in high spirits and jostled her good-naturedly as she tried to move forward.
“What’s the matter, love?” someone asked. “Go round the sides if you want to see better.”
She waved acknowledgement and kept her head down. She had spotted Lisa Furnow quite near to her. She was wearing a hoodie covering her hair, and had a scarf around the lower part of her face, but that didn’t stop Callie from recognising her – that was how she was used to seeing her in her crime scene coveralls and mask. Callie was saddened to have her suspicions about Lisa confirmed. The photographer was on the far side of Claybourne, not looking at him, but something about the way she was standing, still, intent, made Callie think that she was trying to listen in on Claybourne’s conversation, just as Callie would have liked to.
Lisa looked up and saw Callie. Their eyes met for a moment, before both Callie and Lisa slid back into the crowd, each trying to pretend that they weren’t there, that they hadn’t seen each other.
As Callie regained he
r sheltered corner, out of the way and almost out of sight, there was the sound of someone tapping on the microphone at the front, and the crowd went quiet. All eyes turned to the front and Callie was surprised to see Darren Dixon climb up on the pallets and take the microphone from a burly man beside him. From the murmurs around her, others were also surprised to see Dixon. A chant of “Dazza, Dazza!” started somewhere and many of the crowd took it up.
“Evening all,” he started and there was a roar of approval in response. “I’ll bet you’re surprised to see me, aren’t ya? Just goes to show you can’t keep a good man down. Well, you can’t keep him behind bars when he ain’t done nothing wrong, anyway.”
There was another cheer and reluctantly Callie had to admire the way he was handling the crowd. The man was a pro, a natural, and he was enjoying every minute. She was surprised to find that he had charm and was even attractive in a rough diamond sort of way. No wonder so many women flocked to support him.
Dixon went on to talk about the tide of immigration and how everyone had to stand up for their rights and reclaim their jobs, and their country, from this foreign invasion. The sort of hate rhetoric that Callie despised and the crowd clearly loved.
Callie was more interested in the people listening to Dixon than the man himself, and she slowly scanned the crowd. She couldn’t see Lisa Furnow anymore, perhaps she had decided to leave given that she had been spotted there. Callie knew that it was bound to cause a certain amount of awkwardness between them when they next met at a crime scene. Perhaps she ought to seek the investigator out before then, but what could she say? That she was only there because she wanted to see if she could find out if the FNM was behind the sabotage of the immigrants’ boat? That she was spying on them? If Lisa was a committed member of the FNM she wasn’t going to be pleased about what Callie was doing, and she was unlikely to be any help, either.
As she thought through the problem that this unlikely meeting might cause in the future, a new group of people – men and women, some young and some really quite elderly and carrying banners saying ‘Anti-Racist League’, and ‘open borders now!’ – had arrived. Callie could see that some of them even seemed to have young children with them, waving flags with peace symbols from their pushchairs. As Dixon began speaking again, the protestors started shouting, trying to drown out his rhetoric, much to the fury of some of his supporters.
“Murderer! Murderer!” came the chant, and it seemed to unsettle Dixon. He spoke to one of the men standing behind him and he nodded and disappeared into the crowd.
Some of Dixon’s supporters were shouting and jeering at the anti-fascist groups, even shaking their fists at them, but they stood firm and continued their chanting.
“Murderer! Murderer!”
It was beginning to get ugly and as much as Callie understood why these people had come to disrupt the meeting, she wished they hadn’t brought children with them. Or their grandparents.
Callie looked around, she could see a police van parked by the toilet block, and she hoped they were keeping a close eye on what was going on. She raised a hand and held it in front of her face, just in case it was too close an eye, and on film. Lisa was nowhere in sight, but Claybourne was still standing there, listening to the speech and whistling his support of the FNM leader as Dixon moved on to the deaths of the immigrants and how they had brought it on themselves by raiding the country. Callie couldn’t keep the disgust from her face, but then she saw David Morris pushing his way through the crowd towards Claybourne; he was not looking happy, in fact, he looked positively murderous. Sure enough, as soon as he got within striking distance of the councillor, that’s exactly what he did. He threw a punch at the older man’s head.
There was a shout and a scream and the two men disappeared from Callie’s view, although from the movement of the men around the place where she had last seen them, they were kicking at something on the ground, and she suspected it was Morris rather than Claybourne.
As she pushed her way through the crowd, trying to reach the fighting men, Dixon quietened down, trying to see what was going on. Callie saw him signal to the last two men who were behind him, and in response, they began to make their way towards the disturbance, talking into their lapels, calling their colleagues to leave the generally non-violent anti-fascists and come and help with the real fight, no doubt.
“Looks like we’ve got some troublemakers here tonight, trying to give us a bad name. Don’t let them ruin our celebrations.” Dixon tried to stop things from escalating, but he was too late. Others among his supporters seemed to take the disturbance as a signal to turn on the protestors and scuffles seemed to break out everywhere.
Callie was getting close to Morris and Claybourne, or at least the spot where she had last seen them but she kept being shoved back by the people around her. She felt a prodigious shove in her back and she fell. Instinct made her curl up into a ball and shield her head from the flailing feet all around her. She tried to stand again, but the movement of the crowd made it impossible. There was more shouting and screaming and then: “Police! Let me through.”
Callie was pushed back down, and she feared she was going to be crushed as people ran in all directions. Finally, the area around her began to clear a little and she was able to stand up, with a little help from Lisa Furnow.
“Thank you,” she managed to say before the woman disappeared again.
Slowly, painfully, counting the bruises as she did so, she tried to walk and was satisfied that nothing had been broken. There were blue flashing lights appearing from all directions as police vans drove into the Stade area, each disgorging half a dozen uniformed policemen. They must have been waiting a short distance away to have got here so quickly and Callie couldn’t have been happier to see them.
The crowd was dissipating fast at that point, and Callie saw Dixon being bundled off the pallet stage by his minder and pulled away to a waiting car. Going in the opposite direction to the majority of people, Callie still had difficulty pushing her way through and was almost carried along by the mass movement. With the judicious use of elbows and sheer force of will she finally made it through but by the time she got to Morris, he was unconscious on the ground, blood pouring from a wound to his head and Claybourne was nowhere in sight.
She knelt beside him as two policemen, helped by Jeffries who she was surprised to see, shielded her from the flow of people rapidly leaving the area.
Callie felt for obvious injuries to Morris’s neck. Finding none, and concerned for his breathing, she rolled him gently into the recovery position, supporting his head as she did so.
“Ambulance is on its way, Doc,” Jeffries informed her. “You okay?” He was looking at her chest.
She looked down and realised there was blood on her white shirt. She felt her head and quickly found a small cut and pressed a tissue to it. The bleeding seemed to have almost stopped, she was pleased to see.
“Fine,” she reassured him. “It’s nothing.” She turned her attention back to the unconscious man, making sure he was breathing okay and slowly checking him for other injuries.
* * *
By the time Morris had been packed off to the hospital in the back of an ambulance, the cut on Callie’s head had stopped bleeding completely and she had managed to clean herself up a bit with the help of some antiseptic wipes from the paramedic. She sat on the kerb and rolled her shoulders. She longed for a hot bath to ease the bruises that she knew she was going to have in the morning, but she had been told by the police officer who had taken her statement to wait, so that’s what she did.
Most of the people had left the area once Dixon had been driven away by his minders. The police had detained one or two men but it seemed unlikely that anyone would be charged with anything. Callie’s own statement said that Morris had thrown the first punch at Claybourne, and Callie didn’t think that she would be able to identify any of the men who she was pretty sure had been kicking him once he was down on the ground. She couldn’t even say for cer
tain that they had been putting the boot in at all, she told the officer.
She took a long deep breath and closed her eyes. She would not be able to sleep, she was still slightly shaky from the adrenalin, but she thought a bit of breath control and a mindfulness exercise might help ease the tension.
“You okay?” Miller asked and her eyes shot open. That was all she needed, it had been bad enough to know that Jeffries was there, and that her activities were going to be the talk of the incident room, but this was way, way worse.
“Absolutely fine,” she replied, levering herself up off the pavement. It hurt, but not as much as she had expected, she was relieved to find.
“What the bloody hell did you think you were doing?” he asked angrily.
“Trying to help a patient.”
She stood on the kerb, pleased that she could look him almost in the eye with this advantage.
“I meant, what were you doing here?”
“I know, I know, I shouldn’t interfere,” she answered and hesitated, thinking about why she was there before replying to his question. “I wanted to see who was here, to see if anything was said that linked them to the boat sabotage.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that we would be here doing exactly that? Or that Darren Dixon” – Miller almost spat out his name – “would know that and be very careful that he said absolutely nothing that could be used against him?”
“Well, I didn’t expect him to be that stupid, but I did hope that someone in amongst his supporters might be.”
“And were they?”
“Not that I heard,” she admitted. “But David Morris went straight over and laid into Peter Claybourne, continuing their argument from the beach. There has to be something going on there.”