“Always.”
They stayed inside the pub as the evening was cool, Callie sipping her Pinot Grigio, the one cube of ice slowly melting in it, as Kate drank her beer somewhat faster, with a packet of crisps as an accompaniment. There was no need for small talk after their many years of friendship and Callie launched right into what was on her mind: the body on the beach below Fairlight.
“I can’t help thinking that maybe he doesn’t fit in with the others.”
“You have a whole bunch of bodies being washed up, he’s one more, what makes you think he doesn’t fit?”
“Well, for a start, he was found further west, against the prevailing tide.”
“I thought one was found at Pett Level early on, and that was where they think the survivors made it to shore?”
“Yes, but that was on the first day, or night. The bodies were then washed up progressively to the west.”
“But he was caught in the rocks, he could have been there since the first day and just not been found. That’s what you told me.”
Kate’s law training made her the ideal person to bounce ideas off of, there was nothing she liked more than acting as devil’s advocate when Callie was exploring one of her more outlandish theories and Callie knew that if she could convince Kate, then there was a chance she was right.
“True, but that was me looking for reasons why he wasn’t further west. I spoke to the man who found the body. He walks the beach every day and is insistent that it wasn’t there before.”
“Perhaps, he got caught in a different current.”
“And I spoke to Old George, the fisherman. He said not. He said the body could not have washed up where it did if it had been with the others in the boat.”
“Ah. Old George.”
Kate wasn’t going to be easy to convince.
“Yes, and then there’s the tattoos.”
“I agree, that’s different, and more convincing for a landlubber like me, but it could still fit with him being on the boat. Did any others have tattoos?”
“Yes, one or two, but of Arabic writing, probably extracts from the Koran.”
“Okay. Does Billy agree that the body belonged to an IC6 male?”
Kate’s experience in criminal law meant that she was as knowledgeable as Callie about the codes the police use to identify probable ethnicity when describing a person. IC6 covered West Asian and North African ethnicity.
“Possibly. You know as well as I do that the coding is very subjective and simply relies on skin colouring. He could easily be mixed race or even South Asian.”
“With bodies washing up all over the place, from a known source, there seems very little to convince me that this one particular body is different.”
“I know. But he could be.”
“Could be what, though?”
“He could be one of the smugglers, or have nothing to do with the boat at all.”
“What do they say about not thinking of zebras when horses are more likely?”
“That doesn’t mean zebras don’t exist.”
Kate sighed; it was clear her friend was not going to give up.
“So now you need to get some proof.”
“Yes.” Callie was silent for a moment before admitting, “I’m just not quite sure where from.”
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
