by Candy Denman
“Absolutely.”
“We’ll need to speak to him. Confirm it all.”
Callie hesitated; this is where it got difficult.
“This is a murder enquiry,” he reminded her.
“I’m perfectly well aware of that,” she snapped back. “It was David Morris.”
“I thought he was in hospital?” Jeffries said.
“He discharged himself.”
Jeffries headed for the door.
“Right, Jayne, Dick, move your arses, we’re going to pick up David Morris.” Jeffries grabbed a jacket and headed to the incident room door, followed by Jayne and another DC.
Callie decided to keep quiet about Morris’s plans to leave the area. They’d find that out soon enough and there was no need for her to admit she knew what he was going to do. It would only make matters worse.
Chapter 20
“Have you come in to say ‘I told you so’?” Mike Parton said when Callie walked into the mortuary hoping to see if Billy was free for a late lunch.
“I told you so,” Callie responded with a smile.
“Told you so what?” Billy asked them both.
“That body number nine wasn’t anything to do with the migrant boat,” Callie said.
“Well…”
Mike wasn’t prepared to go as far as that, clearly.
“We know he wasn’t likely to be one of the migrants, that’s all. He still might have been one of the smugglers,” he said.
“Then he would have been French, or whatever nationality they were, surely?” Callie wasn’t prepared to let her theory go so easily. “The girl looking for him was from London.”
“What girl?” Billy was lost in this conversation.
“The girl who was showing his photo around town.”
“A photo of a missing boyfriend, possibly body nine, and then she wound up dead,” Mike explained to the bemused pathologist before turning to Callie. “One of the ladies at the club has confirmed what you told Miller, and she is pretty sure it was a photo of him.”
Callie was relieved for David Morris. She knew that he wouldn’t have been in when Jeffries went round to his home, and was unlikely to return there in the near future, but now that the police had confirmation of what he had told her, it would be less urgent for them to find him. Although, she knew, they would probably still like to talk to him about Councillor Claybourne and the cigarettes, not to mention to ask him who had beaten him up.
“Right, so they were connected, the girl whose body was found and the man, body nine?” Billy was trying to sort out what this meant.
“Which is why I came down to see you,” Mike explained.
“Of course.” It was all becoming clear to him, but Billy did not look pleased. “He will need another PM, done by the Home Office pathologist.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just in case they are connected.”
“It’s not your fault, Mike, it’s the rules. It’s just irritating.”
“I’m sure they won’t find anything you’ve missed.”
“So am I.” Billy was very sure of himself, he knew he was a very thorough and very good pathologist. “It’s the waste of time and money involved in redoing it that gets me.”
Both Parton and Callie knew that wasn’t strictly true. Autopsies were often done more than once, for the prosecution and the defence, in complex legal cases. It was a way of making sure that nothing was missed, although in practice, it often introduced an element of doubt, because two doctors would rarely agree completely.
Billy went to his office door and called out for his technician, who quickly appeared.
“You’ll need to get body nine ready to transport up to London or Brighton or wherever the Home Office pathologist says he wants it, Jim. Now, if you don’t mind, I have work to do.”
Billy went into the changing room and closed the door, conversation over.
Jim looked at Parton and Callie and shrugged before disappearing back into the storeroom.
“I don’t think he was best pleased,” Parton said.
“No,” Callie agreed.
“Maybe he should think about getting registered with the Home Office himself,” Parton said.
“He is,” Callie said.
“Ah.”
Nothing else needed to be said.
* * *
“I’m sorry,” Billy said later in bed.
“About what?”
“About snapping at you and Mike in the mortuary.”
“Oh that, I thought you were apologising about your performance.”
He sat up.
“Are you saying I need to apologise for my bedroom skills?”
“No.” She laughed. “You certainly do not.”
They kissed, and then he lay back, serious once again.
“I was cross about them re-doing the PM on body nine and I really wasn’t looking forward to the job I had to do that afternoon, but that’s no excuse for taking it out on the two of you. Or Jim. He had to help with it as well, and he didn’t shout at anyone.”
“I don’t remember you shouting, just prancing off and slamming doors.”
“Prancing off? You make me sound like a schoolgirl.” He shook his head and lay back, remembering his afternoon.
“What was it?” Callie asked. “The job that you weren’t looking forward to?”
“A schoolgirl. Sixteen. Only she won’t be prancing off anywhere and slamming doors. You think I’d be used to it by now.”
“What was the cause of death?”
“Asthma attack, according to the ED consultant, and I couldn’t disagree, she had hyper-inflated lungs and mucous plugs grossly restricting the airways. Apparently, she was completely unresponsive to treatment, he said. There was nothing they could do, so sad.”
Callie sat up, suddenly panicking.
“Her name wasn’t Anna Thompson, was it?”
Billy hesitated as he thought for a moment.
“No. I’m sure it wasn’t. It was Colleen or something like that. Why?”
Callie relaxed.
“Patient,” she explained. “Over-using salbutamol. I warned her of exactly this when I saw her last.”
“Well, go round and warn her again. I tell you, I don’t want to see another young girl in my mortuary for something so preventable ever again.”
Callie would do exactly that, she decided. She had to make sure Anna understood the possible consequences of her actions, if she wouldn’t reduce the over-use of her inhaled medication, Callie would have no choice but to change her to a non-aerosol treatment. Callie felt it was important that she understood that, so she would put a clear plan in writing for the girl, with exactly what course of action Callie would take if she didn’t comply.
Before she fell asleep, another thought occurred to Callie: she should talk to Mike Parton and get him to check if there had been any other cases in neighbouring areas. Perhaps there was a trend for young girls to misuse their asthma medication. If so, it needed to be raised with the coroner, and advice sent out to GPs. As Billy so rightly said, no one wanted to see any more dead young girls.
Chapter 21
Mike Parton’s office was tiny, but so neat that Callie often wondered if he used a ruler to make sure all the reminders on the pinboard were equally spaced.
Parton hurried back into the room with two mugs of tea before she had a chance to move something just to see if he noticed.
“I was going to talk to you about that,” he said when she explained her concerns about the young girl who had died from an acute asthma attack. “When I spoke to the consultant, he said there had been another two girls admitted recently in a similar state, but that they had been able to save them both; bit touch and go with one though.”
“Three? That’s not normal.”
“No, and they were all from the same school, so I wondered if we should get someone in to speak to them all, teachers and pupils, try and nip whatever is going on in the bud.”
“That sounds like a ve
ry good idea. Do you have any idea why it’s happening? What does the coroner think?”
“He seems inclined to believe it’s just a coincidence and there won’t be anymore, but I’m not so sure.”
They both knew that small groups of diseases often occurred naturally and did not necessarily mean that there was a common cause. Those not well-versed in the laws of probability would always lean towards there being a reason for groups of occurrences and it was often hard to persuade them that these clusters did happen randomly.
“Except that I also have a patient I’m concerned about as well and I think it’s always best to err on the side of caution. I’ll have a chat with the lead asthma consultant, I don’t think I’ll have any problems getting him onside. If you want to let the head teacher know, I’ll give her a call, see what I can sort out.”
“Thanks, Callie.”
They sipped their tea in silence for a moment before Callie asked about the investigation into Michelle Carlisle’s death and body nine.
“I know the police have had multiple confirmations that she was looking for our man, but they seem no closer to identifying him from the missing person databases.”
“Are they still working on the assumption that he came over with the migrants though?”
“No, I think they have accepted he’s from the UK, but might still have been here to collect the migrants, picked them up in the boat and then they all got into trouble.”
“Seems unlikely.”
“I agree, but their problem is the sheer number of people being reported missing every year, and we have no reason to assume he went missing recently.”
“He could have gone missing years ago? As a young boy, or teenager maybe?”
“Exactly,” Parton said. “He may have changed a lot over the years he’s been away, new tattoos will be no use to identify him with now. The police are going back through the registers, but the number of potential matches is huge.”
“Can’t they doctor the photo, make him younger somehow? Maybe someone would recognise him as a young boy.”
“It’s possible, but even with the new age regression software it takes an expert to get a good likeness, it’s not like social media where it doesn’t matter if it’s nothing like you.”
“Are you saying it’s expensive?”
“Yes.” Parton nodded.
“But it might be better than nothing.”
“True. And it’s something to think about if they don’t find him. In my opinion, they will probably get there, but it could take months to narrow it down.”
Callie knew he was right, but that didn’t make her feel any better.
“Meanwhile, we are no closer to knowing what happened.”
* * *
When she spoke to DS Jayne Hales on the phone later, Callie heard that Miller had gone to London to liaise with the police there, and see if they could find out where Michelle had been living in the years since she had run away from home, and more importantly, who her friends were. They were hoping to find someone who might recognise her boyfriend – body number nine.
“More likely to get to his identity there than here. We’ve had no one ring in and say they recognise him on the helpline, well, no one credible that is, so it doesn’t look like he was from round this neck of the woods.”
That left Callie wondering why he had come to Hastings and what had he done to get himself killed. If he was the English contact for the people smugglers, why was he in the boat with them? Surely, he would have been on shore, with a van or lorry, ready to transport them elsewhere once they had landed. She said as much to Jayne.
“We haven’t found any evidence that they were being met this end so far,” she told Callie. “We are checking all the ANPR cameras to see if perhaps they were being met further up the coast in Kent, which would fit with the theory that they turned up in Hastings because they’d got swept along by the tide.”
“Are you still working on the premise that he was part of the smuggling operation?” Callie asked.
“The Guv thinks it would be too much of a coincidence if he wasn’t.”
Callie disagreed about that, but DS Hales was not the person to complain to, she’d save it for when she next saw Miller.
“What about the girl?”
“Well, clearly she wasn’t on the boat, because she was found so much later,” Jayne conceded. “And she didn’t drown. Dead before she went in the water.”
“You’ve had the PM report back already?”
“No, just a brief phone call with that news.”
“So, what’s the theory?” Callie couldn’t hide her interest. “Had she fallen or been pushed off the cliff then?”
“Well–” The policewoman hesitated. “No, they don’t think so. She had no injuries apart from the ones to the head which killed her and the pathologist said there would be more if she had reached the beach that way. Plus, she had definitely been in the sea, so the working theory is that she was dumped overboard from a boat.”
“Like her boyfriend.”
“Yes.”
“It can’t be from the same boat if he came in with the migrants because you have that boat, well, what’s left of it, anyway.”
“Exactly. We’re checking the movement of every fishing and leisure boat along the coast in the forty-eight hours before she was found, as that would cover the probable time of death.”
Callie finally let the sergeant go, she had a lot of work to do, after all, tracking down all the trawlers and yachts that had been out and about that night. But what if the boat didn’t have its transponder switched on, like the boat that dropped off the migrants? Callie knew it was a risk that the coastguard might be sent out to check on them under those circumstances, but if they were not out for long, they might have been able to get there and back, and that was always supposing she had been dumped from a boat big enough to have a transponder. If it was just a small RIB or tender, meant for inshore use, it wouldn’t have one at all.
Callie just had to hope that they were able to track even small boats on the coastguard radar and might be able to see where the boat had come from, if that was the case, but she wasn’t sure that they would.
* * *
Friday, with the promise of a weekend off to look forward to, plus seeing Billy that night and plans to meet Kate at some point, meant that Callie was in a particularly good mood. As she walked towards her consulting room, the last person she had expected to see in the waiting room was Lisa Furnow. Callie was pretty sure she wasn’t even a patient at the practice.
Lisa stood as she saw Callie, so she had been clearly waiting to see her and not anyone else.
“Hi.” Callie glanced at her watch, her first patient was Mr Herring, inevitably, and she could see he was already waiting and watching closely lest someone be given preferential treatment and get in before him. “Follow me,” she said to the crime scene photographer and couldn’t suppress a little smile of satisfaction as she saw the look of outrage on Mr Herring’s face.
“Thank you for seeing me, Dr Hughes,” Lisa said as soon as they were in Callie’s consulting room and the door was closed.
“Not at all, thank you for doing that photograph for me. It really helped.”
“I thought no one recognised it.”
“Well, no, but it helped in that it eliminated him as a local.”
“Okay, good.” Lisa didn’t seem sure how to proceed.
“Although putting the picture on the news hasn’t helped either.”
“So, I heard.”
There were a few moments of silence.
“Tell me what you want to say, Lisa, I have a waiting room full of patients out there.” Not strictly true, but Callie felt she had to hurry things up.
“I’m not a racist,” Lisa blurted out, and Callie resisted the urge to reply that all racists say that. “I was at the rally, just to find out what was going on,” she continued.
“It’s none of my business why you were there, Lisa. I don’t have
to remind you that I was there too.”
“Yes, but everyone knows you’ve got an Asian boyfriend, so no one’s going to think you were there that night because you’re a member of the FNM.”
Callie wasn’t surprised it was common knowledge that she was going out with Billy Iqbal.
“Whereas anyone who knows you were there, would?”
Lisa nodded and then shook her head, as well.
“Close friends would know I’m not racist, but others, at work, might think I was. I don’t advertise my views and some of them are… you know, they might think I agreed with them.”
The suggestion seemed to be that there were some FNM sympathisers in the lab, which concerned Callie. If there was a culture of racism, it could affect their work, not to mention any colleagues that were people of colour.
Callie would have liked to ask for more details but Lisa looked miserable and Callie took pity on her. For now.
“So why were you there? What were you hoping to find out?”
“If they had any connections to Claybourne.” Lisa almost spat out the name.
“The FNM? What makes you think he has anything to do with them? Apart from the fact he was at the rally.”
“Because Claybourne’s an evil bastard.”
“Much as I might agree that he’s no saint, why do you think he’s evil? I mean, that’s a very strong word.”
“It’s the only word for him.” Lisa closed her eyes and shook her head, before deciding to tell Callie. “He and my dad were in business together, back when I was a kid. Claybourne tricked my dad out of his half of the arcade. He told everyone he bought my dad out, but he didn’t. My dad got nothing. It ruined him, cost him his marriage and he never recovered. He died last year, cirrhosis of the liver.”
“So now you are looking to get your own back and find something to ruin Claybourne with?”
Lisa nodded and Callie saw a tear run down her cheek.
“Look, Lisa,” Callie said. “Going to an FNM rally isn’t going to ruin him, he could claim, like you, that he was only there on a fact-finding mission.”
“But his thugs beat up that other man.”
“Who has chosen not to press charges.”