and snow-white hair. Dressed in white overalls, white gloves and a white hat, he looks like a fancy-dress spermatozoon.
He spends a few minutes talking to Forbes. I’m too far away to hear what they say.
Forbes turns toward me, summoning me forward. His face is set hard like the wedge of an ax.
The tent flap opens. Plastic sheets cover the ground, weighed down with silver boxes of forensic equipment and cameras. A truck is parked at the center, with its twin rear doors open. Inside there are wooden pallets holding boxes of oranges. Some of these have been shifted to one side to form a narrow aisle just wide enough for a person to squeeze through to the far end of the lorry.
A camera flash illuminates a cavity within the pallets. At first I think there might be mannequins inside it, broken models or clay figurines. Then the truth reaches me. Bodies, I count five of them, are piled beneath a closed air vent. There are three men, a woman and a child. Their mouths are open. Breathless. Lifeless.
They appear to be Eastern European dressed in cheap mismatched clothes. An arm reaches up as if suspended by a wire. The lone woman has her hair pulled back. A tortoiseshell hair clip has come loose and dangles on her cheek from a strand of hair. The child in her arms is wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and clutching a doll.
The flashgun pops again. I see the faces frozen in place, trapped in that moment when their oxygen ran out and their dreams turned to dust on dry tongues. It is a scene to haunt me, a scene that changes everything. And although I can’t picture the world they came from, which seems impossibly strange and remote, their deaths are somehow unbearably close.
“They died in the past twelve hours,” says Noonan.
Automatically, I transfer this into personal time. What was I doing? Traveling to West Sussex. Talking to Julian Shawcroft at the adoption center.
Noonan is holding several bloody fingernails collected in a plastic bag. I feel my stomach lurch.
“If you’re going to puke, Detective Constable, you can get the hell away from
“Yes, sir.”
Forbes looks at Noonan. “Tell her how they died.”
“They suffocated,” he replies wearily.
“Explain it to us.”
The request is for my benefit. Forbes wants me to hear this and to smell the sweet stench of oranges and feces. Noonan obliges.
“It begins with a rising panic as one fights for each breath, sucking it in, wanting more. The next stage is quiescence. Resignation. And then unconsciousness. The convulsions and incontinence are involuntary, the death throes. Nobody knows what comes first—oxygen deprivation or carbon dioxide poisoning.”
Taking hold of my elbow, Forbes leads me out of the truck. A makeshift morgue has been set up to take the bodies. One of them is already on a gurney, lying faceup, covered in a white sheet. Forbes runs his fingers over the cloth.
“Someone inside the truck had a mobile,” he explains. “When they began to suffocate they tried to call someone and reached an emergency number. The operator thought it was a hoax because the caller couldn’t give a location.”
I look toward the massive roll-on, roll-off ferry with its open stern doors.
“Why am I here?”
He flicks his wrist and the sheet curls back. A teenage boy with fleshy limbs and dark hair lies on the slab. His head is almost perfectly round and pink except for the blueness around his lips and the overlapping folds of flesh beneath his chin.
Forbes hasn’t moved. He’s watching me from behind his rectangular glasses.
I drag my eyes away. With a birdlike quickness he grips my arm. “This is all he was wearing—a pair of trousers and a shirt. No labels. Normally, clothes like this tell us nothing. They’re cheap and mass produced.” His fingers are digging into me. “These clothes are different. There was something sewn into the lining. A name and address. Do you know whose name? Whose address?”
I shake my head.
“Yours.”
I try not to react but that in itself is a reaction.
“Can you explain that?” he asks.
“No.”
“Not even a vague notion.”
My mind is racing through the possibilities. My mother used to put labels on my clothes because she didn’t want me losing things. My name, not my address.
“You see how it looks,” he says, clicking his tongue again. “You have been implicated in a people-trafficking investigation and potentially a murder investigation. We think his name is Hassan Khan. Does that mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“The lorry is Dutch registered. The driver is listed on the passenger manifest as Arjan Molenaar.”
Again I shake my head.
Numbness rather than shock seeps through me. It feels like someone has walked up and hit me in the back of the head with a metal tray and the noise is still ringing in my ears.
“Why weren’t they found sooner?”
“Do you know how many lorries pass through Harwich every day? More than ten thousand. If Customs searched every one of them there’d be ships queued back to Rotterdam.”
Noonan joins us, leaning over the body and talking as though the teenager were a patient and not a corpse.
“All right young fellow,
He peers closer, almost putting his lips on the boy’s cheek. “There is evidence of petechial hemorrhages, pinpoint, less than one millimeter on the eyelids, lips, ears, face and neck, consistent with lack of oxygen to the tissue…”
He holds up an arm, examining the skin.
“The scarring indicates an old thermal injury to the left forearm and hand. Something very intense, perhaps a blast.”
I notice dozens of smaller scars on his chest. Noonan takes an interest, using a ruler to measure them.
“Very unusual.”
“What are they?”
“Knife wounds.”
“He was stabbed?”
“Someone sliced him up.” He flicks an imaginary knife through the air. “None of the wounds is particularly deep. The blade threatened no organs or major blood vessels. Excellent control.”
The pathologist sounds impressed—like one surgeon admiring the work of another.
He sees something else. Lifting the boy’s right arm, he turns it outward, displaying the wrist. A small tattooed butterfly hovers halfway between the palm and elbow. Noonan takes a measurement and speaks into a digital recorder.
Forbes has shown me enough.
“I wish to go home now,” I say.
“I still have questions.”
“Do I need a lawyer?”
The question disappoints him. “I can provide you with someone if you wish.”
I know I should be more concerned but the desire for knowledge overrides my natural caution. It’s not about being invincible or believing my innocence will protect me. I’ve seen too many miscarriages of justice to be so optimistic.
The terminal has a cafe for freight drivers. Forbes takes a table and orders coffee and a bottle of water.
