The Tsunami File (22 page)

“Maybe you are not so smart, Smith, if you don't know why Braithwaite wants to see you. Maybe I am wrong about you,” Brajkovic said.

On the way to Braithwaite's office Smith passed by the German DVI area. This, he thought as he approached it, was perhaps not so smart.

Horst Becker was not there. He would normally be working at the mortuary compound if he was on duty today at all. Hamel was there, however, and Krupp. Both policemen stopped what they were doing at their computer screens and stared coldly at Smith as he passed by.

Hamel called out: “You have balls, at least we can say that, Smith. To come back in here.”

“Why on earth should I not come back in here, Hamel?” Smith said.

“Why on earth should I not come back in here? Krupp, do you hear what this idiot is saying? Idiot,” Hamel said.

“The knocks on his head have left him damaged in his brain,” Krupp said. “Precisely,” Hamel said. “Idiot.”

Smith felt an unaccustomed wave of rage beginning to build in his system. Before his various transformations in Thailand, he was not a man prone to extremes of emotion, least of all rage.

“You have balls too, Hamel,” Smith shouted.

“To speak to me like that.”

“Oh, my God, the fingerprint man is upset,” Krupp said. “Too many blows to the head.”

“You both have a nerve to joke like this. You're police officers. You think it's funny that someone beat me up? You wouldn't have had anything to do that, would you, Krupp? Or you, Hamel?” Smith shouted. His face was reddening.

“Steady now,” Hamel said. “Watch your mouth, Smith. Don't shout at Landeskriminalamt policemen, that's never a good idea.”

“Steady, Smith,” Krupp said, standing up behind his desk.

Brajkovic had heard the raised voices and came running into the section. Some other DVI officers and some Thai clerical staff started to gather round.

“Smith, Smith, just go,” Brajkovic shouted.

“No more trouble from you. No more.”

“There's no trouble here that we cannot handle, Janko,” Hamel said from behind his desk. “We have the situation under control. There's nothing here that a German police baton cannot handle.”

Krupp laughed extravagantly and sat back down behind his desk. Hamel continued to stare at Smith, inviting another outburst. “Just go, Jonah. Go,” Brajkovic said.

Braithwaite looked like he had been beaten up as well. But his face bore the signs of strain and fatigue, not batons.

He sat very still for a time, simply looking quietly across his desk after Smith had sat down. A cigar lay extinguished in the coffee mug he used for an ashtray.

“You puzzle me, Smith,” Braithwaite said eventually.

“Why is that, sir?” Smith said.

“You seem to be a good man, good at what you do, dedicated. Smart. They think highly of you back in London. You're a good Scotland Yard man.”

“Thank you.”

“They thought highly enough to send you over to Interpol for a few years on a nice little secondment in the south of France,” Braithwaite said.

Smith said nothing.

“The Interpol people then thought highly enough of you to send you over here on this very important operation.” Smith still said nothing.

“What has got into you, exactly, Smith? Can you tell me? Why would you risk all of that, and jeopardize this operation and risk harming the reputation of Scotland Yard and Interpol and the German police, one of the finest police forces in the world, with this nonsense. Can you explain that to me, please?”

Smith was about to try, but Braithwaite spoke again. He really did look very tired, Smith thought.

“You exhaust me, do you know that?” Braithwaite said. “I'm tired.”

“It's a very hard assignment for you, sir.”

“They gave you a pretty good beating, didn't they,” Braithwaite said. “Yes, they did.”

“It wasn't actually a robbery was it, Smith?”

“No, sir, I don't think it was.” Braithwaite suddenly looked even more tired. He rubbed his eyes with both fists. He stared at his unlit cigar.

“I don't like it when a Scotland Yard man gets beaten up, Smith,” he said. “That would be rather an obvious position for someone like me to take, correct?”

Smith said nothing. Braithwaite rubbed his eyes some more.

“That reporter has left Phuket, I'm told,” Braithwaite said suddenly. “He has,” Smith said.

“Is he coming back?”

“He might,” Smith said. “You never know with reporters.”

“No,” Braithwaite said. “That's what gets my goat.”

Smith waited for whatever it was the Detective Chief Superintendent actually wanted to communicate.

“Here's a suggestion, OK, Smith?” Braithwaite said. “From a Scotland Yard colleague. You go back over to your desk and start working again on those fingerprint IDs. We need you on this operation. I want you to keep your head down from here on and get us as many damn matches as you can get and I want you to stay out of the way of trouble of any sort. I don't want you to upset people anymore about that damn missing file and I don't want people beating up my people anymore about that damn missing file. Is that clear? I want all of the people on this operation to just get back to work and identify all those bodies in those bloody containers and then we can all go home and leave this godforsaken place behind us. Do you follow me, Smith? I don't want any more trouble here. It's enough. You forget about that file, someone will do another postmortem on that body at some point when they get around to it, we'll get some more prints off it and you can have another look and in the meantime we can all just get on with our work. Do you follow?”

Smith thought that Braithwaite was far too tired to want to hear about break-ins at the mortuary site or fingerprints having been surgically removed. Braithwaite appeared to be under enough strain as it was. “Thank you, sir.”

“I don't like it when a Scotland Yard man gets beaten up,” Braithwaite said. “OK? I've told the German team leader that. No more drunken brawling on my watch.”

Smith did not inquire as to what the German team leader might have said in response.

“Thank you, sir.”

“No more trouble. Do you follow?”

“I do.”

“Out,” Braithwaite said.

Smith and Conchi slept that night in his giant hotel bed for the first time in a long while. With his wife back in England, and Delaney in Germany taking whatever next steps that had to be taken, and a reprieve, apparently, having been granted by Braithwaite, things were somehow back to whatever could now pass for normal for Smith and Conchi in Phuket.

“You can love me for now, again,” Smith said as they lay together under his sheets.

“Maybe for a little, little time extra after that too,” Conchi said. “Maybe.” The new Jonah Smith had found himself becoming prone to strong emotions, like rage and pleasure and sometimes something almost like joy. The old Jonah Smith had felt nothing much of anything for a very long time.

“I like the sound of that, Conchi,” he said.

“It doesn't mean I don't think you are very stupid, Jonah, about things like little file folders that have gone missing.” “I understand that,” he said.

Conchi paused, and then said: “Frank Delaney says we should watch ourselves now, while he is away. Shall we be scared maybe?”

“No,” Smith said.

“They tried to kill Frank Delaney with a car,” she said.

“We'll be all right,” Smith said. “When Frank finds out what's going on, we'll tell the right people and it will all be over.”

“Do you think so, Jonah Smith fingerprint man?” Conchi said, tracing a fingertip down his face from forehead to chin. “We identify the bad guys.”

“We shall identify the bad guys,” he said.

“File stealers. We throw them in jail, maybe, no?” Conchi said.” “Maybe,” Smith said.

Once in a while in Phuket, Thailand, in the spring of 2005, in the months after the tsunami disaster, there was some good news. Some of that good news came on the day after Smith returned to work.

The body of Mrs. Stokke's daughter had finally been identified. While Smith was in hospital and then recuperating on the orders of his superiors, a Thai search team had found the body of a European child deep in a storm water culvert more than 10 kilometres from the beach where she had been swept out to sea on Boxing Day. Search teams were still, more than three months after the tsunami, occasionally finding bodies in obscure places far from the tourist beaches.

Very few DVI people had any doubt that this horribly disfigured and deteriorating body brought to the mortuary compound in a child-sized body bag was that of young Charlotte Stokke. Then, while Smith was on sick leave, Werner Eberharter, Interpol's Austrian deputy team leader and, Smith was willing to admit, a reasonably good fingerprint examiner, had made a tentative match against antemortem marks taken from Christmas wrapping paper on the gifts Charlotte Stokke had opened before her family flew to Phuket for their ill-fated holiday.

Norwegian policeman Magne Vollebaek had brought a variety of AM prints to Phuket personally. He had done as much as any policeman could in the months after the tsunami to help identify Mrs. Stokke's daughter. Charlotte's fingers had, as would be expected, deteriorated badly after weeks in tepid brackish water, but Eberharter was as sure as he could be that prints from two of the girl's leastruined fingers matched some of those that a Norwegian technician had found on a torn piece of metallic red and green Christmas paper.

Vollebaek had also brought X-rays from Charlotte's Oslo dentist. The little girl had had no fillings; at eight years of age, she was too young for that. Forensic dentists like dental fillings. They stand out clearly on postmortem X-rays and they can be matched easily with antemortem images. Charlotte had no fillings, but her parents had apparently been worried about how some of their little girl's teeth were aligned. They had asked for X-rays to be done, and these X-rays, of a slightly crooked line of children's teeth, were also carried to Phuket by missing persons detective Magne Vollebaek.

With the acceptable fingerprint match and the very good dental match, the Identification Board had formally ruled that the body in the filthy drain culvert was that of one Charlotte Margaret Birgitte Stokke, born 21 July 1996, Oslo, Norway, died 24 December 2004, Phuket, Thailand. No one, it seemed, had any interest in preventing identification of this particular disaster victim. No files had gone missing, no one was under any threat whatsoever for trying to identify Mrs. Stokke's daughter.

Vollebaek had hurried to Phuket from Oslo as soon as he received word that a little girl's body had been found in a drain culvert. For his troubles, Vollebaek had been given the task of informing Mrs. Stokke when the identification was officially declared valid.

Vollebaek stood on a chair in the management centre when he told a small group of DVI officers from a variety of countries how it had been. They gathered quietly in a cramped corner of their mazelike partitioned workspace to hear about it. They looked quietly at the ground and at each other as Vollebaek described Mrs. Stokke's shriek—the shriek, Vollebaek said, almost like that of an animal—when he had told her that the body in the child-sized body bag had been identified. Conchi and Smith stood at the back of the small crowd as the Norwegian policeman spoke.

Vollebaek told them how Mrs. Stokke had shrieked and shrieked and shrieked, and then how she had collapsed in his arms, sobbing as if she would never be able to stop. When, eventually, the tears stopped coming, for a short time, he had driven her back to her hotel and arranged for a Thai nurse and a Thai policewoman to help her undress and get into her hotel bed. A day later, Vollebaek said, Mrs. Stokke was still, apparently, in that bed, with the same Thai nurse sitting by her side.

“My commissioner in Oslo has asked me to congratulate all of you on behalf of the National Police Directorate and the Police Minister,”

Vollebaek said.

Smith thought Vollebaek looked even more worn out than Braithwaite looked. The Norwegian detective was probably only a very few years away from retirement. He was a policeman of the old school; he would not give up on a case until it had been definitively solved, no matter how many hours of casework it took, no matter what the toll on his personal life and his health. Vollebaek was the only person in the sweltering IMC that day wearing a dark suit and tie, downtown detective-style. Sweat poured from his ruddy Scandinavian face.

“You are all heroes, all of you on the teams here,” Vollebaek said, allowing himself, as Smith and Conchi decided afterward, to get somewhat carried away.

“It's our job, Magne, it's what we're all here for,” an Austrian DVI man called out.

“Here, here,” Smith called out from the back. Conchi squeezed his arm. “Don't, Jonah,” she said.

Hamel and Krupp looked around to glare at him from where they stood. Horst Becker, it seemed, had decided not to attend today's little celebration of identifications made, of files closed.