“True. I do realise that cigarette smuggling has got to take second place to people smuggling,” she agreed, but something was niggling at Callie and she called the incident room after she had said goodbye to her friend and agreed to meet for Saturday brunch as usual.
“Er, hello, Dr Hughes,” DC Nigel Nugent answered the phone.
“Hi, Nigel, quick question if you have a moment?”
“Of course. Is it about the identification of the bodies?”
“Well, yes, but also about the investigation of the people smugglers.”
“Okay, what do you want to know?”
“Has there been any progress?” she asked.
“I’ve just finished touching up a photo of body nine, I’ve managed to make him look a bit less frightening.”
“I thought Lisa, the crime scene photographer, was doing that for all of them.”
“She touched them up to look clearer, but the subjects are still obviously dead and the Super said we couldn’t release any of them to the public domain. I’ve photoshopped the eyes open and tried to make the face seem, well, alive.”
He was clearly proud of his achievement and Callie had to admit, it must have been a pretty hard job to make the picture less likely to put people off their cornflakes.
“That’s good, are you going to release it to the press?”
“I’m just waiting for the DI to agree to that.”
“He will do, won’t he?”
“I think so.” Nugent seemed less sure. “I’ll show it to him when he gets back.”
“Back from where?”
“Calais. He’s liaising with the French.”
Callie realised that she shouldn’t be surprised at that, everyone had assumed that the migrants had come over from there, either in the RIB the whole way, or brought part-way on a bigger boat; in either case, the French were involved.
“What about Sergeant Jeffries?”
“He’s with DI Miller.”
Callie’s mind boggled a bit at the thought of Sergeant Jeffries in France.
“How long are they staying there?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, couldn’t you take it to the press liaison officer? Get her to approve it?”
There was a bit of umming and aahing from Nugent’s end of the phone – he clearly didn’t think he could.
“Or take it to the Superintendent? Get his agreement?”
“The thing is, Dr Hughes, he doesn’t think it’s a priority.” Nugent was almost whispering and Callie could imagine him looking round the incident room, checking that no one was listening.
“You’ve already asked?”
“Sort of.” Nugent was less than reassuring. “I told him I was getting the photo ready, but erm, well he told me not to waste my time on something that wasn’t going to lead anywhere, because it’s quite clearly just another boat person.” This last bit came out in a rush and Callie could hear the anxiety and hurt in his voice.
Callie sighed, she knew she couldn’t persuade the poor man to do anything about the photograph when the Superintendent had vetoed it, she would just have to wait until Miller got back and hope that she could persuade him.
“Okay. How about you send it to me?”
“Oookay.” Nugent sounded unsure. “No offence, Dr Hughes, but will you promise you won’t release it before I have permission?”
“Absolutely, Nigel. I’ll just use it to show a few people round here, see if anyone knows him.”
She heard Nugent sigh with relief that she understood that he could get into a lot of trouble if she did release it, and she would never do that to him.
“Now to the other thing,” she continued. “I take it there’s no possible link between the people trafficking and the cigarette smuggling that Trading Standards are investigating?” Callie didn’t want them barging into the middle of Miller’s investigation and she wasn’t convinced that they would have communicated with him about the planned raid.
As she had feared, Nugent knew nothing about it and promised to have a word with Sergeant Hales and make sure she was aware, but he confided that they were beginning to get leads on who was involved in bringing the refugees over by boat and that it didn’t look as though it was a local gang.
“The working premise is that they were brought part-way over by a trawler, probably French and launched in the RIB from there,” Nigel continued, confirming Callie’s understanding of how they had been moved. “Coastguard tracking has possibly identified where they were launched, closer to Kent than here and for whatever reason, wind, tide, bad navigation, they ended up capsizing on our patch.”
That was exactly what Callie wanted to hear. If it was just bad luck that the refugees had landed here, then the cigarette smuggling was unlikely to be connected. She thanked Nigel and hung up.
* * *
Callie was meeting Billy after evening surgery, they’d planned a quick drink and dinner at Porters, a local wine bar that was a favourite of Callie’s. It had seen her through a number of disastrous relationships.
She arrived first, ordered a glass of wine for herself and a bottle of continental lager for Billy, before managing to find a table near the back. A light breeze through the open door kept the room comfortably cool.
Billy arrived not long after and she was able to tell him about the progress Nigel Nugent had told her about.
“Thing is, the picture he sent me is absolutely useless. He’s stuck these open eyes on, that don’t seem to quite fit, then smoothed over the cuts and bruises so that it looks like the poor man is wearing make-up. And then he’s blurred it all to the extent that it could be pretty much anybody.”
Billy laughed.
“Maybe
