Before she fell asleep, another thought occurred to Callie: she should talk to Mike Parton and get him to check if there had been any other cases in neighbouring areas. Perhaps there was a trend for young girls to misuse their asthma medication. If so, it needed to be raised with the coroner, and advice sent out to GPs. As Billy so rightly said, no one wanted to see any more dead young girls.
Chapter 21
Mike Parton’s office was tiny, but so neat that Callie often wondered if he used a ruler to make sure all the reminders on the pinboard were equally spaced.
Parton hurried back into the room with two mugs of tea before she had a chance to move something just to see if he noticed.
“I was going to talk to you about that,” he said when she explained her concerns about the young girl who had died from an acute asthma attack. “When I spoke to the consultant, he said there had been another two girls admitted recently in a similar state, but that they had been able to save them both; bit touch and go with one though.”
“Three? That’s not normal.”
“No, and they were all from the same school, so I wondered if we should get someone in to speak to them all, teachers and pupils, try and nip whatever is going on in the bud.”
“That sounds like a very good idea. Do you have any idea why it’s happening? What does the coroner think?”
“He seems inclined to believe it’s just a coincidence and there won’t be anymore, but I’m not so sure.”
They both knew that small groups of diseases often occurred naturally and did not necessarily mean that there was a common cause. Those not well-versed in the laws of probability would always lean towards there being a reason for groups of occurrences and it was often hard to persuade them that these clusters did happen randomly.
“Except that I also have a patient I’m concerned about as well and I think it’s always best to err on the side of caution. I’ll have a chat with the lead asthma consultant, I don’t think I’ll have any problems getting him onside. If you want to let the head teacher know, I’ll give her a call, see what I can sort out.”
“Thanks, Callie.”
They sipped their tea in silence for a moment before Callie asked about the investigation into Michelle Carlisle’s death and body nine.
“I know the police have had multiple confirmations that she was looking for our man, but they seem no closer to identifying him from the missing person databases.”
“Are they still working on the assumption that he came over with the migrants though?”
“No, I think they have accepted he’s from the UK, but might still have been here to collect the migrants, picked them up in the boat and then they all got into trouble.”
“Seems unlikely.”
“I agree, but their problem is the sheer number of people being reported missing every year, and we have no reason to assume he went missing recently.”
“He could have gone missing years ago? As a young boy, or teenager maybe?”
“Exactly,” Parton said. “He may have changed a lot over the years he’s been away, new tattoos will be no use to identify him with now. The police are going back through the registers, but the number of potential matches is huge.”
“Can’t they doctor the photo, make him younger somehow? Maybe someone would recognise him as a young boy.”
“It’s possible, but even with the new age regression software it takes an expert to get a good likeness, it’s not like social media where it doesn’t matter if it’s nothing like you.”
“Are you saying it’s expensive?”
“Yes.” Parton nodded.
“But it might be better than nothing.”
“True. And it’s something to think about if they don’t find him. In my opinion, they will probably get there, but it could take months to narrow it down.”
Callie knew he was right, but that didn’t make her feel any better.
“Meanwhile, we are no closer to knowing what happened.”
* * *
When she spoke to DS Jayne Hales on the phone later, Callie heard that Miller had gone to London to liaise with the police there, and see if they could find out where Michelle had been living in the years since she had run away from home, and more importantly, who her friends were. They were hoping to find someone who might recognise her boyfriend – body number nine.
“More likely to get to his identity there than here. We’ve had no one ring in and say they recognise him on the helpline, well, no one credible that is, so it doesn’t look like he was from round this neck of the woods.”
That left Callie wondering why he had come to Hastings and what had he done to get himself killed. If he was the English contact for the people smugglers, why was he in the boat with them? Surely, he would have been on shore, with a van or lorry, ready to transport them elsewhere once they had landed. She said as much to Jayne.
“We haven’t found any evidence that they were being met this end so far,” she told Callie. “We are checking all the ANPR cameras to see if perhaps they were being met further up the coast in Kent, which would fit with the theory that they turned up in Hastings because they’d got swept along by the tide.”
“Are you still working on the premise that he was part of the smuggling operation?” Callie asked.
“The Guv thinks it would be
