The Tsunami File

by Michael E. Rose

  They would have crossed over the fence at the back of the compound no matter where the container they sought was located. The narrow dirt road in that area was adjacent to a thick grove of very tall palms. Smith pulled their white Nissan well into the palms, off the road, and they got out immediately. Smith pulled on his rucksack. Delaney carried the ladder.

  They walked a little away from the car in the brilliant moonlight. Smith took his length of rope from the rucksack and quickly tied one end to the top step of his ladder. He pulled the ladder’s legs apart and placed it at the base of the wall. Delaney watched, impressed, as the fingerprint man climbed quickly up and hoisted himself up on top of the fence, clutching the other end of the rope. He jumped down to the other side and called out to Delaney: “Your turn. Hurry up.”

  Delaney climbed up and over, landing lightly in the weeds on the other side. Smith pulled the ladder up and over the fence using the rope, folded it, and stowed it in the weeds. They crouched there together, watching and listening. There was no sound at all except for the night breeze that whispered in the container corridors. No watchman’s feet crunched on the compound’s gravel pathways.

  “You seem to be an expert burglar, Jonah,”

  Delaney said.

  “I am.” Smith said. “Have to be, in police work.”

  “Really?” Delaney said. “There’s a story in there somewhere.”

  “Many stories, Frank. Not for publication.” They waited and watched and listened some more.

  “OK, let’s go,” Smith said.

  Crouching slightly, they walked quickly along the back row, looking for CRL0912863.

  “It’ll be a Carlisle container,” Smith said. “A lot of them are. They got a big load of the Carlisle ones when they were setting up.”

  Many of the containers did indeed carry the blue Carlisle Shipping logo. The one they sought was not in the back row. They turned up the next corridor and found what they were looking for, three containers into the row. It was battered, like most of the others, and had a plastic document holder taped to the door. Inside that plastic sleeve was the same body roster Smith carried. Smith peered closely at both documents, using his flashlight. “This is it. Our man’s in here,” he said.

  “Great stuff,” Delaney said.

  Smith pulled the bolt cutters from his pack and fitted them to a very flimsy padlock, better suited to garden sheds than to forensic evidence containers full of disaster victims. He pulled and strained with the cutters for a few minutes, and then the hasp of the lock fell away. He picked up the various pieces and stowed them in his pack before turning to Delaney again.

  “Perhaps you’d better stand watch while I go in and do the deed,” he said.

  “I don’t know, Jonah. Better if we both go in and shut the door, I’d say. If a watchman comes around, I don’t want to be out here any longer than I have to.”

  “Are you squeamish?” Smith asked.

  “No,” Delaney said.

  “Have you seen dead bodies before?”

  “Yes, of course,” Delaney said.

  “Decomposed, weeks after death, postautopsy, that sort of thing?”

  “Jonah, for Christ’s sake. You’ll need someone to hold the light anyway, won’t you?”

  “OK, all right. The smell’s not too bad because it’s so cold in there. But it smells. It will smell.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “It will be really cold in there.”

  “Jonah . . .”

  “All right.”

  Jonah pulled on a white V-neck tennis sweater. Delaney put on his sweatshirt.

  “Let’s go,” Delaney said.

  Smith pulled open the large corrugated steel door of the container. It squeaked loudly. Billows of frozen vapour poured out into the tropical night air. Smith trained his flashlight inside onto the rough wooden racks. Delaney had a sudden memory of the eerily similar wooden bunks he’d seen while visiting a former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, horror tourism, to see where exhausted Jews had been crammed in to sleep and await extermination.

  Bodies lay silently in Container CRL0912863 in heavy white plastic bags. Delaney followed Smith inside, taking care not to slip on the treacherous flooring of sawdust, ice and steel. Body PM68TA0386 was precisely where Smith’s roster said it would be: Rack 4, Top.

  Smith wasted no time. He put his pack on an empty rack below the Deutschland body and pulled out his smaller bag of fingerprinting gear. Delaney held a light. Smith opened the gear bag and arranged small bottles of ink and black powder on the rack, as well as an assortment of tape, gummed labels, index cards, small brushes, sticks, scalpels, tweezers, scrapers.

  “Scotland Yard issue,” Delaney said.

  “The original and genuine. Purveyors of the finest fingerprints to Her Majesty the Queen.”

  The air inside the container was very cold, Canadian cold. It smelled sharply, as Smith had warned, of putrefaction and chemicals and damp. It was a smell that lingered in nostrils and memory for many hours after being inhaled. Delaney had inhaled such morgue smells before.

  Smith put on surgical gloves. He pulled the bag’s heavy zipper open to about mid-body level. The face of the Deutschland man when it appeared in the flashlight beam was horrifically disfigured by seawater and sun damage and general decay. All that Delaney could really make out of the features in the narrow shaft of light was a balding head and what would have once been a prominent nose. The lips were stretched back over the teeth in the terribly familiar rictus of death. Some grey hairs glistened on the man’s chest.

  Smith pulled the stiff left arm out of the bag. It, too, had grey hairs still standing. The hand was in bad condition. The skin had tightened on the bones, looking for all the world like shrunken plastic now, in a dreadful blue, green and tan hue.

  “Frank, can you give me a bit more light here?” Smith said. He held the corpse’s hand up high, crouching slightly to look up at the palm and fingertips from below. The wrists of refrigerated corpses do not cooperate when fingerprint men try to twist them around.

  “Fuck,” Smith said. Delaney had very rarely heard him swear.

  “What?” Delaney said.

  “They’re gone,” Smith said.

  “What’s gone?”

  “The prints, Frank. They’re gone. Someone’s taken them completely off the hand. Have a look.”

  Delaney crouched and looked up at the dead man’s accusing fingers. He saw, with some difficulty, that each finger pad had been removed. On some fingers, he saw bone where fingerprints should be.

  “Bastards,” Smith said, as Delaney straightened up. “It’s been done by someone who knows the business, too. Excised, with a scalpel. Gone.” Smith rummaged around in the body bag. “Nothing in there. Gone,” he said.

  He pried open the corpse’s mouth and shone his own flashlight inside. “Bastards,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Molars gone too. Everything’s gone from the back. Not a tooth left in there with any fillings. This body’s all but useless now for dental ID too.”

  Smith seemed genuinely angry, not just perplexed. Delaney had not seen him so angry before. The fingerprint man reached into the pack and took out his digital camera.

  “Hold up the arm, Frank. I want to get a shot of those fingers. You want to wear gloves?”

  Delaney hesitated.

  “Here, here, hold the wrist with this,” Smith said, handing him a cloth from his bag. “It won’t take long.”

  Delaney stood holding the Deutschland arm aloft while Smith, with forensic care, took a series of pictures of the hand. The flashes were very bright in the pitch dark container. The mouth of the corpse was open. Smith took closeup pictures of where the back teeth once had been. He also took two pictures of the body bag number—a closeup and one from a step or two back, bag open and in situ.


  “Now I’m going to take prints of the damage,” Smith said. “And a palm print.”

  “What use will that be?” Delaney asked.

  “Probably no use whatsoever,” Smith said, in no mood for queries about method.

  Delaney watched as Smith worked swiftly, professionally. He dusted the mutilated fingertips with brush and slightly greasy black powder. Then he pressed a gummed label to the end of each finger, rolling the label around on the tips to produce a wide impression of as much surface as possible. He stuck the labels onto small index cards, one per card, and wrote brief notes on each with a felt tip pen.

  Then he did the entire palm of the left hand and began to work on the right. This one was harder to get at, and he had to reach across the body and struggle with a stiff limb while Delaney held the light.

  As he slid his index cards into a plastic sleeve and stowed his gear, Smith said: “I have never seen something like this before. Never, in all my years in the trade. Damaged fingers, yes, often. But finger pads excised with a blade, no. Never.” He still looked extremely angry. “Interesting,” Delaney said.

  “It’s more than bloody interesting, Frank. It’s a crime, for one thing. And it totally eliminates the possibility that I will ever be able to check this man’s prints again, against any database, anywhere.”

  “Let’s get out of here and think things through.”

  “I’m going to go to Braithwaite.”

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Jonah. Let’s get out of here, and we’ll just think things through a bit.”

  Delaney went to the front of the container and peered out. Smith zipped up the body bag and joined him.

  “Still clear out there,” Delaney said.

  “Bastards,” Smith said.

  Delaney drove the car. Smith was still very angry indeed. He sat and fumed in silence as they headed back toward the Metropole. No watchman had accosted them at the mortuary site; no one had seen them as they clambered back over the compound fence.

  Under the awning at the entrance to the hotel, Delaney climbed out and Smith slid over to the driver’s seat. By Delaney’s watch it was 4:50 a.m. The sun would be up soon. An extremely tired-looking night clerk, well past retirement age, came out to open the hotel door, securely locked against burglars such as themselves at this hour.

  “Take it easy, Jonah,” Delaney said. “We’ll think this through later. We’ll go to Plan B.”

  Smith said nothing, hands on the steering wheel but not driving off.

  “Don’t make any decisions yet on what to do next. OK?” Delaney said. “I think it’s a mistake to tell Braithwaite anything about this right now. Jonah?”

  Eventually, Smith said: “I want to identify that body, Frank. I want to know who that man is.”

  He put the car into gear.

  “We’ll do that, Jonah. I’m sure we’ll do that eventually,” Delaney said.

  “I’m going to go get some sleep,” Smith said. He pulled away, saying nothing else. Delaney watched him drive off.

  The night clerk said: “Your evening in Phuket was enjoyable, sir?”

  When Delaney got up to his room, he did what all self-respecting journalists and burglars do. He opened a beer from the mini-bar and a tiny airlinesized bottle of whisky and drank them both in quick succession. Only as he munched peanuts and paced around his silent room, did he notice that an envelope had been pushed under his door. He had missed it in his initial haste to pour himself a drink.

  It was on Bay Hotel stationery, not Metropole stock. The desk clerks must have held it at the front and then delivered it very late because he was sure he had not seen it when he left earlier to meet his break-in accomplice. He looked at the signature before anything else. Fiona Smith.

  In perfect British private school calligraphy, the note said:

  Mr. Delaney, I wonder if you would be so kind as to join me for breakfast tomorrow morning? I would be happy to come to your hotel. There is something extremely important I would like to discuss with you. I propose 8:00 a.m. so as not to interfere with your workday. I will wait for you in the restaurant. Please let me know if this is convenient.

  Delaney read the note twice, seeking, as always, subtexts. None was apparent. He looked at his watch. Already 5:30 a.m—Mrs. Smith would have gone to bed expecting her breakfast meeting was on. She was not the sort of woman who expected such invitations to be refused.

  For a moment, he considered calling Mr. Smith, to discuss the new development regarding his wife. Something made him decide against that. Smith was already angry enough and worried enough as it was.

  Fiona Smith went nowhere at all without a cardigan, it seemed. She was sitting in a booth in the busy restaurant, surrounded by hotel hubbub. Thai waitresses in standard server-issue uniform rushed to and fro. International police and Thai policemen, some of them in another sort of uniform, helped themselves to the vast breakfast buffet. There were few, if any, tourists, in post-tsunami Phuket. In the far corner, Delaney saw the BBC TV crew, plotting and scheming.

  Mrs. Smith had already nibbled on a plate of fresh fruit. A half-finished cup of tea was on the table and the British Airways in-flight magazine she had apparently brought with her to while away any idle moments.

  Delaney shook her hand before sitting down. He had got perhaps an hour’s sleep, and looked it.

  He had also decided to leave shaving for another day. The quartet of empty Jameson sample bottles in his room, with matching beer bottles, may have been a contributing factor to his overall appearance. Mrs. Smith looked like she did not approve at all of her breakfast companion but, as Delaney had already discovered, she approved of very little in this life.

  “Thank you for coming, Mr. Delaney,” she said.

  “Frank, please,” he said. “”It’s Francis, actually, but most people call me Frank.”

  “Thank you for coming,” she said again. She did not invite him to call her Fiona. “Will you eat something?”

  She looked like she hoped the answer to this would be negative.

  “I will, yes,” Delaney said. He motioned to a waitress to bring coffee, and went to the buffet to get medicinal eggs, sausage, tomato, baked beans, croissants, butter, jam. He was unable to also carry back the glass of orange juice his aching body required and he doubted Mrs. Smith would stand for his making two trips.

  She watched for a moment as he ate. Apparently, it was up to him to begin with small talk.

  “Jonah seems like he is doing better,” Delaney said.

  “Yes, he does,” she said. “Nasty business, that.”

  “Yes.”

  It seemed that uncomfortable silences accompanied Mrs. Smith wherever she went. Delaney ate. He drank coffee. He resisted commenting on the weather or the air-conditioning excesses.

  Eventually, Mrs. Smith said, “I would like to be very forthright with you this morning, if I may, Mr. Delaney.” “Please,” he said.

  “I have been briefed by Detective Chief Superintendent Braithwaite on the situation out here,” she said.

  “The situation?”

  “Yes.” Delaney waited.

  “Superintendent Braithwaite tells me that my husband has got it into his head that something, Lord knows what exactly, is amiss with procedures out here and that he has been speaking to you about this for your magazine article. Superintendent Braithwaite is not at all happy with this situation.”

  “Superintendent Braithwaite has told me so himself,” Delaney said.

  “And did he tell you about the possible consequences for my husband’s career?”

  “Not directly. Not in so many words.”

  “Well, it’s very clear to me, Mr. Delaney, that Jonah has upset the powers that be. I feel it is my responsibility to intervene. Jonah is clearly not himself. He has clearly forgotten himself out here. One can see that even in the way he dresses. Th
at mustache . . .”

  “None of that has anything to do with me, Mrs. Smith. This is something between Jonah and his superiors, and Jonah and yourself.”

  “No it is not, Mr. Delaney. Not if you are going to write nonsense in your article.”

  “I’m writing something for International Geographic magazine, Mrs. Smith. About the DVI effort here. It’s not a scandal sheet, by any means.”

  “Not so far.”

  “What is it you want from me, Mrs. Smith?”

  “I want to avoid scandal,” she said.

  “Obviously.”

  “Is there a scandal?” Delaney asked.

  “If you fabricate one,” she said.

  Delaney had been in the game long enough to ignore insults to his professionalism. Usually.

  “Did Superintendent Braithwaite ask you to come see me?” he asked.

  “Not directly. But he made it quite clear that he was concerned. I told him I would do what I could to prevent Jonah from putting his career at risk.”

  “That’s Jonah’s decision to make, wouldn’t you say?”

  “No. Not entirely his, no. His decisions affect me. And they affect his colleagues at Scotland Yard.”

  “Is it your job to defend Scotland Yard, Mrs. Smith? Is there something there that needs defending?”

  “It’s one of Britain’s great institutions,” she said.

  “Mrs. Smith, I’m not sure where this conversation is going,” Delaney said.

  Jonah Smith’s wife waited for a moment. “My husband has confided in you,” she said. Delaney said nothing.

  “I’m going to be absolutely forthright with you, Mr. Delaney,” she said. “Please,” he said.

  “I believe my husband has been out here far too long. And in Lyon too long. His behaviour has changed. His judgment is impaired, if you like. He doesn’t know who he is anymore. I feel it is my responsibility to try to prevent him from harming his reputation and his career any more than he has already done by confiding in you and encouraging you to write stories about his work or the work that is going on generally out here and the way police officers are behaving far from their home environments.”