Callie could see that it was once again a young man. The face was in poor shape suggesting it had taken the brunt of the battering against the rocks at the base of the cliffs where he had been found. Callie checked for pulses, finding them absent as expected, and listened to his chest, pushing his torn plaid shirt out of the way to do so. She was surprised to see a small tattoo of a heart on his chest. None of the previous bodies had had any artwork, none that she had seen anyway. She took a moment to look at the man. He wasn’t as badly decomposed as the one she had seen earlier, but different currents, differing amounts of time in the water would do that. The strap of one of the useless life jackets they had all been wearing was still tied around his waist, but the jacket itself had been torn off.
She could feel her anger rising at the traffickers who had been so negligent with these young men’s lives, as she noted the time that she had pronounced death and signalled to the crime scene manager that he was free to move the body when ready. She made notes as they shifted the body. The young man’s feet were bare, just as in the case of the other body that morning. It was not unusual, as people trying to swim will often kick off shoes to stop them weighing them down. She looked round, in case some had been washed up nearby but it was impossible to see anything outside of the arc of lights. She knew that the crime scene team would check the immediate area as soon as they could, and hopefully before the tide came in, but as the body could have been there a day or maybe two, and the tide would have washed over him several times, the chances of finding anything was slight.
Although her job was done, Callie waited for them to manoeuvre the corpse onto the stretcher and she followed them as they carried it back to the carpark where a mortuary van was waiting. Callie was glad that there was only a solitary press photographer there to mark the event. Perhaps the others were still in the pub.
* * *
Saturday brunch in The Land of Green Ginger, a favourite café in the Old Town, was a standing commitment for Callie and her friend Kate Ward. A local solicitor, full-figured and dark-haired, Kate was dressed in bright summery clothes and exuded health and contentment. Callie, dressed in her usual neutral tones, felt grey and jaded in contrast.
As Kate tucked into her full English, Callie was only playing with her scrambled eggs on wholemeal toast.
“You look exhausted,” Kate said between mouthfuls.
“Probably because I am.”
“How many is it now?”
“Eleven dead, no, twelve now. Last night it was two near Dungeness, one at Fairlight and then early this morning another was picked up by the lifeboat. That was a fun way to start my day.”
“I take it he was dead.”
“Oh, yes, very dead. He was spotted floating face down by a passing yacht who radioed the position to the lifeboat HQ and they went out and collected the body. But at least it’s probably the last one I’ll be called out to.”
“Why’s that? Do you think they’ve all been found? Everyone else made it to shore alive?”
“No,” Callie said. “I suspect very few made it to shore, probably only the two who have already been picked up and, of course, the three that were found alive with the boat. We have no real idea how many there were in the first place, but it’s likely it was packed and that there will be more to find. It’s just that, with the way the tides work, they will wash up further along the coast now. Or as decomp takes hold, sink out at sea.”
“To be pulled up in some poor fisherman’s nets.”
“Like the one brought in yesterday, but if they do, I just hope they don’t expect me to take a look and they go straight to the mortuary.”
Callie thought that it might be a while before she ate fish again.
“So how come, if the tide is pulling them east along the coast towards Dungeness, the body you went to last night was back at Fairlight?”
“It had caught in the rocks in a pretty remote place,” Callie explained. “Probably been there a day or two.” Callie shuddered as she remembered. “The body was not in a good state, but a bit better than the one this morning who had been in the water all that time.”
“No more details please,” Kate said, holding her hand up. “I haven’t finished my breakfast.”
Callie decided that she had finished eating, even though her food was hardly touched. She pushed her plate away and took a sip of tea. Kate was right, even though her head told her that it was entirely within reason for the recent body to get caught on the rocks and be found further to the west, against the general eastward direction of the tide, there was just a slight niggle of doubt.
“Are you seeing Billy today?” Kate asked. “Or is he too busy fiddling with these corpses?”
Callie smiled. Her boyfriend Billy Iqbal was the local pathologist and was doing most of the post-mortem examinations of the bodies, along with his usual work. He would certainly still get the ones pulled out of the sea in coming weeks and months even if Callie didn’t have to.
“I do wish you wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Callie admonished her friend. “Someone might get the wrong idea after, you know who.” She was referring to a mortuary attendant who had been caught being overly intimate with the dead in the past.
