Vital Signs Read online

  VITAL SIGNS

  Bodies in the English Channel spell trouble for the stubborn doctor

  CANDY DENMAN

  Published by

  THE BOOK FOLKS

  London, 2020

  © Candy Denman

  Polite note to the reader

  This book is written in British English except where fidelity to other languages or accents is appropriate.

  You are invited to visit www.thebookfolks.com and sign up to our mailing list to hear about new releases, free book promotions and other special offers.

  We hope you enjoy the book.

  VITAL SIGNS is the fourth book by Candy Denman to feature police doctor Callie Hughes. Though part of a series, it can be fully enjoyed as a standalone.

  The full list of novels in the series is as follows:

  DEAD PRETTY

  BODY HEAT

  GUILTY PARTY

  VITAL SIGNS

  Further details about these books can be found at the end of this one.

  All of Candy’s books are available FREE with Kindle Unlimited and in paperback.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  More fiction in this series

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  Prologue

  He fights and struggles, scratching and pulling, trying to free himself from the cold, cold water that keeps dragging him deeper. He kicks off his shoes, to stop them dragging him down. He is hit by something? A paddle? A person? The boat? He goes under. Which way is up? He is no longer sure. He sees a glint. Moonlight on the water? He tries to reach it but something is holding him down. He breaks free, takes a gulp of air, but is then pushed down again, losing the battle, getting weaker. So tired. He just wants to sleep. Instinct tells him to keep trying, his life depends on it, but it is too late. He has no strength left. Finally, he breathes in and water fills his empty lungs. Only then does he stop struggling completely, and allows his body and mind to drift, and the light fade. Letting go. Dying.

  Chapter 1

  The sun was glinting on the water and the waves lapping gently against the shore as Callie pulled herself up onto the fishing boat. It had been hauled up onto the beach like all the others, to either side, looking awkward, like fish out of water. Hastings’ fleet of beach-launched fishing boats was the largest in the country and it wasn’t the first time Callie had been called upon to pronounce death. The last time it was a crew member hit by a loose piece of equipment in a storm, this time was rather different.

  Dressed in her crime scene protective suit, Callie knelt down by the nets to see what, or rather who, they had hauled up with the fish. It was a formality for her to check for a pulse, he had been dead a few days. Seaweed masked some of the damage to his head, but the fish had nibbled at softer, juicier bits – his eyes, lips and nose.

  Finding no carotid pulse, she tried for a radial one, and again found none. She used a stethoscope to listen to his chest and crouched down, putting her face close to his mouth and nose, but as she expected, there were absolutely no signs of life, just as there hadn’t been on any of the bodies that had washed up on the beaches around Hastings in the last few days. All young men, some no more than boys. All cheaply dressed. All with skins darker than white, the shades varying from the deep black of this young man, to those more indicative of Eastern Mediterranean, Asian and North African origins. All with life jackets on − badly made life jackets that had little or no buoyancy and had patently failed to do their job. Half the straps on this one had broken, leaving the semi-inflated jacket lying around the man’s hips.

  Having pronounced death, Callie sat back on her heels.

  “Such a waste,” was all she could say.

  “No argument there,” Detective Inspector Miller agreed as they both stood back to allow the crime scene photographer, Lisa Furnow, to get her photographs. She was easily recognizable, despite the protective clothing, by the paleness of what skin was visible and her almost translucently white eyebrows and lashes. Like Callie, Lisa seemed to have drawn the short straw and had photographed the scenes of all the bodies washed up in the last few days. It had been a bad week. A very bad week.

  Having climbed down from the fishing boat, Miller and Callie walked up the shingle beach, pulling off their masks and gloves, heading to where a hastily constructed exclusion line had been set up. They could see further police vehicles arriving, and an outside broadcast van. The press was already in the town and knew that a collection of police vehicles near the seafront meant another body.

  Callie pulled back the hood of her suit. Her blonde hair was tied back in a scrunchie and she checked that it was still in place, hair nice and tidy. She hated to look a mess anywhere, even a crime scene.

  “How many is that now?” she asked, as if she didn’t know, hadn’t been counting along with everyone else.

  “Eight dead, five found alive.”

  “Do we know how many in total were in the boat yet?” Callie asked Miller.

  He stopped and turned to her, a look of sadness on his face. As always, Callie couldn’t help but think it was a nice face, a bit battered by time and rugby, but still a nice face, and such lovely amber eyes.

  “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 small town known for daytrips, fish and chips and kiss-me-quick hats as much as for its fishing fleet. A town that is sadly used to deaths at sea but which has still been rocked by recent incidents.”

  He hadn’t got that wrong, Callie thought.

  The reporter went on to summarise that a RIB (rigid inflatable boat) filled with illegal immigrants had capsized off the Sussex coast three nights earlier. It was thought that the small, overcrowded and unseaworthy vessel had been launched from a larger one, a trawler perhaps, trying to evade the well-patrolled shorter routes to the Kent coast. The migrants had been sent off from the larger one, despite the poor conditions of that night, which showed a reckless disregard for the safety of the men. When the upturned RIB had been spotted at dawn, about a mile off the coast, the lifeboat had been dispatched and three live immigrants clinging to the sides of the ruined boat were picked up, along with a body found trapped underneath and another floating in the water nearby. Two further men had been located, exhausted from their long swim ashore, in a village further along the coast. They were thought to be a mixed group from Somalia, Iraq and Syria, but all were reluctant to talk about how they had ended up in the sea, although it was very likely that they had most recently set off from France.

  “With the discovery of the eighth body of a young male this morning, local MP and shadow environment minister Ted Savage had this to say.”

  The television cut to Ted Savage standing outside the House of Commons. An ex-fisherman himself, ruggedly good-looking and born and bred in the town, Ted was popular with locals. His unwavering support of the fishing industry, the local hospital and a range of other causes close to the town’s heart had made him a runaway winner at election time.

  “The terrible events in my home town of Hastings have struck at the heart of our island nation and I have been warning the Government that it would happen for many months. This tragedy could have been avoided if they had invested more in the Border Force and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. We need to stop these boats before they enter British waters, and turn them back. For their own sake as well as ours. The Government needs to sit up and take notice. Now. Before more bodies wash up on more beaches.”

  True to form, just as he finished his warning of more bodies, Callie’s phone began to ring. She groaned with exhaustion, already putting on her coat as she answered the call.

  Chapter 2

  Two further bodies had been found along the coast between Camber Sands and Dungeness, as well as one nearer to Hastings. Aware that Callie could hardly be in two places at the same time, the police caller said that her colleague in Folkestone had been alerted to attend the two near Dungeness and Callie had been allocated the third body. According to the information she was given, it had caught in the rocks at the bottom of Fairlight Cliffs, closer to where the first bodies had washed up earlier in the week. Callie was to go to the nearest point where she could park her car at Pett Level, where she would be met and taken to the location.

  Bracing herself for what would probably be a battered body, and for the fact the bodies were becoming more and more decomposed as they were found, she walked along the beach from the village where she left her car, following the constable who had been waiting for her.

  The pebbles changed to boulders as they grew closer to the bottom of Fairlight Cliffs. In the fast disappearing light, Callie stumbled and tripped frequently, slipping on the seaweed-covered rocks. She wasn’t alone, the constable who was leading the way was finding the going tough as well. She silently cursed the fact that the man had been washed up in such an inaccessible spot, and was glad that she had had the foresight to put on hiking boots because the last thing she needed was to sprain an ankle, or worse. The gently sloping beach at Bexhill would have been a much easier location.

  Eventually she saw lights up ahead and the familiar sight of white-suited crime scene investigators. The area hadn’t been fully cordoned off, because of the difficult terrain and an incoming tide, but a con
stable had been posted at what had been designated the perimeter, to note the names of everyone attending the scene, and to ensure they were all appropriately suited up.

  Callie struggled into her overalls, overshoes, mask and gloves and checked exactly where the water had now reached. She was no expert on tides, but she knew that they didn’t have long to document and collect this body before the waves came and washed any evidence away. Any evidence that hadn’t already been washed away, that is. A team with a stretcher was waiting to carry the body back along the beach once they were cleared to do so. Callie didn’t envy them that task.

  Suited and booted, she finally approached the body, recognising the slight form of Lisa, the crime scene photographer, already finishing up photographing it. In these circumstances, Callie’s presence was purely a formality. They all knew the man was dead, and that the circumstances could not be deemed to be natural. The decision as to whether it was suicide, accident or murder was down to the coroner, although he could probably rule out suicide if this was another of the young migrants whose boat had capsized.

  “Hi, Lisa. What have you got for me?”

  Lisa stepped back to allow Callie to see the body wedged between some large rocks.

  “Could you give me some more light please?” Callie asked as she leant forward to get a closer view.

  Lisa angled a floodlight so that it shone more directly onto the body.

  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.