“Twenty or thirty, depending on who you ask,” he replied with a shrug. “The boat was only meant to hold fourteen.”
“So, between seven and seventeen bodies still to find.”
“More might have made it, swum to shore and got away.” But Miller didn’t seem convinced that they had and Callie agreed. The chances of finding any more alive were low to zero. “And I doubt we’ll find them all.”
“It’s just criminal.” Callie was unable to hide her anger.
“Agreed.”
“And not just because people smuggling is against the law,” she added. “To overload a boat like that, to give them all cheap, damaged lifebelts. To send them out to almost certain death. It’s more than criminal. It’s inhumane.”
“No argument from me.”
Once they had ducked under the crime scene tape, Callie began removing her protective suit. She scowled and turned her back as she saw a journalist taking photographs of her and Miller and was glad that they were being kept some distance away.
“With the bad weather that night, they didn’t stand a chance.”
But Miller was no longer listening. His attention taken by a confrontation further up the beach. Two men were arguing and it looked as if it was going to get physical.
Callie recognized the younger of the two as David Morris, a local man who worked on fishing boats whenever he could get a place on one, but probably spent more time propping up the bar in the Fishermen’s Social Club. An older, portly and choleric man was jabbing a finger at Morris and shouting angrily.
“And what do you know about it?” the man shouted.
“I know more than you think,” Morris responded.
“You haven’t got a bloody clue.”
“Really? Really? You want to bet on it?”
Whilst Miller was deciding whether or not to intervene, Detective Sergeant Bob Jeffries almost broke into a run from the car park and positioned himself between the two men, interrupting their argument.
“I need you to back off,” he said loudly and firmly to the red-faced man who didn’t look as though he was going to do as he was told. Callie wondered if he might try and knock the policeman over and thump Morris as well. Despite Sergeant Jeffries being smaller, and older than this angry member of the public, Callie would have put money on him winning any fight. Mainly because she was pretty sure he would play dirty. However, the situation was diffused by Miller striding over to them.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Both men looked guilty. Morris shrugged.
“Nothing.” He started moving away, not keen to get into a conversation with the policemen, but the older man stood his ground.
“I hope you’re not going to keep the beach fenced off all bloody day,” he said, indicating the police tape.
“It’s a crime scene,” Miller explained. “We’ll keep it clear as long as we need to.”
Although, Callie thought, it isn’t a crime scene, even the boat couldn’t be said to be that – the crime occurred out at sea.
“Rubbish. How can it be a crime scene when there’s not been a ruddy crime?”
“Someone has died.”
The man chose to ignore the frostiness in Miller’s voice.
“Yes, but it’s accidental, isn’t it? He shouldn’t have been trying to get into the country, should he? Bloody illegal immigrants.”
“We are still recovering the body and I’d like to ask you to move away and let us do our jobs, sir,” Miller said in a tone of voice that indicated he was finally near the end of his patience.
The man backed away, slightly.
“Some of us have a living to earn, you know. I pay taxes, unlike him.” He gestured at the beach where the body lay. “I pay your wages,” he said as a parting shot, before turning and making his way back to the road.
“Not a nice man,” Callie said as she walked up to join them.
Miller snorted.
“That’s Councillor Peter Claybourne, Doc,” Jeffries said. “Tosser.”
“He owns the amusement arcade over there.” Miller indicated a large arcade in the row of shops opposite the beach. “He’s just protecting his income,” Miller added, giving his sergeant a warning look. Public relations was not one of Jeffries’ strengths.
“That doesn’t make me like him any more,” Callie told Miller.
He smiled.
“No, I didn’t think it would.”
* * *
It was a typically busy day in the surgery and Callie was fully focused on the problems her patients brought to her. She had no time to think about anything other than her work. Dr Calliope Harriet Hughes MBChB MRCGP DipFMS, part-time local general practitioner and part-time forensic physician for the Hastings police. She was tall and slim and always smartly dressed for work, with her straight, shoulder-length, blond hair kept neatly away from her face, and her patients, with a clip.
It wasn’t until later, as she walked home up to the top of the East Hill where she lived, that she was able to think again about the tragedy of the migrant boat that had capsized in rough seas off the East Sussex coast. How desperate those men, and boys, must have been to take such a terrible risk. How awful were the lives they had left behind?
Once Callie was back at home in her top floor flat, or penthouse apartment as the previous owner had described it when selling up, she kicked off her shoes, poured herself a glass of Pinot Grigio and turned on the television in time to catch the evening news.
The reporter was standing on a part of the beach that gave a picturesque view of fishing boats hauled up onto the shingle with the black fishermen’s huts in the background.
“I’m here in Hastings, on the South Coast, a
