“I’m worried about my patient in Bay C,” she said. “I think he may try and discharge himself, and there is also the possibility that the men who beat him up could come back.”
She left the nurse rapidly making arrangements for a member of security to come up to the ward. Not to stop Morris from leaving, that was his right – although Callie didn’t think he was in any kind of a state to leave hospital just yet – but to stop anyone else from having a go at him whilst he was still there. At least she felt that she had done all she could to protect him – whilst he remained in hospital, anyway.
* * *
Having had a thoroughly unsatisfactory afternoon, Callie decided to round it off with a visit to the incident room to see if DI Miller was back from France. He was. And so was Detective Sergeant Jeffries.
“Hiya, Doc. Or should I say bonjour?”
His accent was execrable, but Callie was impressed that he had at least attempted to learn one French word.
“How was your trip?”
“Fantastique!”
She was wrong, he’d learnt two words.
Callie was lucky that Miller came out of his office before she had to listen to Jeffries telling her more than a few choice phrases about French ladies and their sexiness, and how they had all apparently loved his accent. Callie found it hard to believe and the faces of his colleagues in the incident room told her that he had been telling them all about it, at length, ever since he had got back.
“Sounds like you had an interesting trip.”
Miller’s mouth twitched as he tried not to smile at her choice of words.
“That’s one way of putting it.” He led the way over to the refreshment station which was situated beside two boards at the front of the incident room. Callie paused to look at the photographs that completely covered one of the boards. One picture for every victim found. Normally there would be details of the victims written beside their photos, but only one had even a tentative name next to it – the young lad that Parton had mentioned, Callie presumed.
The pictures were all clearly of bodies, hard enough for relatives and friends to see and not suitable for the general public. Whilst she had been visiting Morris in the hospital, Callie had been sent the touched-up photograph that she had requested from Lisa Furnow. There was no doubt it was a much better option. Whilst there was still something about it that suggested that the man in the picture was not alive, he wasn’t so obviously dead and there remained enough detail for him to be recognisable to people who knew him; his friends, and his family.
“I’ve emailed a better picture of the body found at Fairlight over to you,” she told Miller. “So that you can try and identify him, maybe put it in the papers.”
Miller grunted and looked distracted.
“Where the hell?” he asked and looked around.
The refreshment station was never more than a table with a kettle and a coffee machine as well as an array of mugs, packs of teabags, jars of coffee. Only, at the moment, the coffee machine was empty apart from a ring of sediment at the bottom of the pot, there were no mugs to be seen and only a few crumbs and an empty packet remained of the supermarket own-brand custard creams. Miller sighed, but at that moment DC Nugent hurried over with a tray of clean mugs and the kettle.
“Sorry, Guv. Just cleaning up a little.”
“You are a star, Nigel,” Callie said and tried not to smile as the young man blushed.
“Not at all, Dr Hughes. My pleasure.” He hurried away and whilst the kettle boiled, Callie set about making tea for herself, and Miller put two spoons of coffee into a mug.
“The photo?” she prompted.
“I’ll check it out.”
She was going to have to be satisfied with that. For now.
“Was it useful, going to Calais?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he answered. “And no. There’s no great will over there to stop the migrants from crossing the Channel.”
“That’s understandable, from their point of view.”
“I know. Much easier if they become our problem rather than theirs, but they did at least promise to follow up on our leads.”
“That a trawler brought them most of the way over?”
He nodded and stirred his coffee. Callie sniffed the milk carton. Miller didn’t take milk, she knew, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to trust it, but it smelled all right so she poured a small amount in her tea.
“Using the coastguard radar, we managed to track all the fishing boats on the night in question. They all have to have these identifying transponders and they have to leave them on at all times, but in one case, the marker seemed to disappear for a short while.”
“They could have been coming closer to shore, dropping the migrants off in a RIB and then switched it back on once they were back where they should be.”
“Exactly.”
“Have they been questioned?”
“That’s where we have to leave it to the French, and they have promised to follow up.”
“But they may not follow it up too vigorously.”
“To be fair to them, they don’t like the people traffickers any more than we do. I think they will take it further, it’s just that they’ll do it in their own way.”
“And in their own time. Meanwhile, the traffickers could be getting ready to bring another boatload across.”
Miller shook his head.
“I made it quite clear that we had the boat’s registration number and if they come anywhere near our waters, we’ll intercept them with a naval vessel. Make an international incident out of it.”
Callie
