The Tsunami File (3 page)

Perhaps all of these elements would come together and even the files considered very difficult could be closed.

Smith was familiar with all such scenarios, accepted them as part of the work he and others had been assigned to do. He had had his share of successes in such cases. The tsunami file that worried him, however, the problem that began to preoccupy his mind, was in a different category altogether.

Smith had examined the file in question many times.

It was a particular challenge; it intrigued him. He had returned to it often to study details on the pink Interpol Missing Persons Form which the international police teams had agreed to use in the days immediately after the tsunami.

Caucasian male, body very badly decomposed. In salt water for days before being washed up in mangroves after that, in an isolated area many kilometres from the tourist beaches. Then baked by the sun for many more days before recovery teams spotted it; filthy, obscenely bloated by corpse gases, with very bad skin slippage, bad insect damage, much sand embedded in the face, eyes missing.

So facial recognition was impossible, despite there being hundreds upon hundreds of photos of missing tourists pinned to the so-called Wall of Hope outside Phuket's main hospital by frantic people looking for the lost, and despite the hundreds of other missing persons' photographs cascading down on the Phuket DVI site from police departments around the globe.

No identity documents were found with the man's naked body, obviously. No jewellery was worn, or at least none had survived the deadly battering by tidal wave. One tattoo, however, was apparent. Not large, very old, very faded, on a forearm. It said simply:
Deutschland.

The body bore no other distinguishing marks or discernable scars or surgical incisions. There were no deformities of the bones. This man had not been crippled or badly injured in his lifetime. The round head was bald, all but bald. The examining pathologist had indicated on the Interpol form that the dead man was at least 55 years of ago, probably between 60 and 70. The examining dentist had found only a very few fillings, despite the victim's age; the man had been blessed in his lifetime with relatively sound teeth. The postmortem dental Xrays were in the file but no available antemortem Xrays had so far been found to match. A bone section had been taken from the man's right thigh, and then carefully examined and catalogued, perhaps by Conchi herself, but a DNA profile had not yet been completed by European or Japanese labs.

The fingerprints that pathologists had managed to lift from this body were very poor quality indeed. The first layer of skin on the hands had slipped away. What was left of the fingertips yielded, despite boiling water treatment and other measures, all but indecipherable smudges. Smith saw through his examiner's glass some faint whorls here and there on a few fingers, but little else. The AFIS computer, when he ran these prints, yielded no possible matches. None at all. So this case would be a particular challenge.

But there were many such challenging identifications to make in Phuket. Smith did not find this unusual or troubling. What he found troubling was the following: it became clear to him, over the course of many days as he returned somewhat obsessionally to this file to peer again at the faint fingerprints and to run them again through the AFIS system in the vain hope some possible matches would be produced or that some new AM marks might have been entered in recent days, that someone had been tampering with the documents.

At first he thought it was his own mistake, his own faulty recollection of what the file contained. At first he thought he had confused its details with those in the dozens of other such documents he looked at in any given week. But, no, he decided no. There could be no doubt. He became convinced that someone was tampering with this file in particular.

A page from the pathologist's examination transcript, for example, Smith one day discovered to be missing. Forensic pathologists call out their findings and observations as they work, while a tape recorder runs. This ghoulish commentary of injuries noted and of distinguishing marks apparent yields a written transcript to be placed in a file. Smith could not remember from his first reading of the transcript exactly what was said on the missing page, but it was clear to him that a page was indeed gone. The transcript pages were numbered, in this case, from one to six. Page two was definitely gone. On reading the preceding and subsequent pages it appeared to Smith that the pathologist might have been describing the appearance of limbs and hands, but this was not clear.

More troubling still was that when Smith returned to the file another time, some of the fingerprints themselves were gone. The Phuket pathology teams, in lifting prints from the dead, used rectangular gummed paper labels pressed against the fingertips. The labels were then stuck onto the postmortem forms for inclusion in the victim's file. Three of these labels, Smith saw when he returned to the file one day, were missing, pulled away from the page in question. Seven prints remained, none of those usable at all. The three that were gone, Smith was certain he recalled, had been poor but of possible, just possible, use if good AM marks could be obtained and if someone like him applied all his skills and the best AFIS electronic enhancement methods.

The last straw, for Smith, was when the file itself disappeared altogether. He was willing to acknowledge that the filing system set up in Phuket was far from ideal. In the chaotic early days just after the disaster there was no real filing system at all. Gradually, as DVI teams and Interpol arrived on the scene and agreed on procedures and as Thai clerical staff arrived from Bangkok and as cabinets and stationery and tags were brought into use, a system of sorts was established.

Files could be borrowed by investigators such as himself and were to be returned after use to a central storage area. Officially, this was to be at the end of each working day but many on the police teams kept difficult files, or incomplete identifications, on their desks for days at time. The file of the man with the
Deutschland
tattoo was one such item that Smith himself had frequently kept on his desk overnight
.
No, perhaps the missing file folder was not in itself the last straw. The last straw was when Smith, annoyed that the paper file had disappeared, opened up the AFIS system to retrieve the scanned electronic copy of the prints that he had used previously to seek possible matches from the growing bank of antemortem fingerprint data. He could not immediately remember the dead man's body bag number, of course, but he found that after some searching in his notebook. He also remembered approximately what week he had first implemented the AFIS search and he was confident he would recognize the exceptionally poor quality prints, especially because the set had shown only one or two faint whorls on three fingers and the other seven were mere shadows, of no forensic use at all.

He flicked through series after series of AFIS images that he and others had entered into the system around the dates in question. He saw evidence of his many searches, his system interrogations, all with body bag code numbers and other details intact. He saw many, many fingerprints pass before his eyes on the computer screen. But of the record of his search for matches to the
Deutschland
prints, and of the scanned versions of the missing original prints themselves, and of any reference whatsoever to body bag PM68-TA0386, he found no trace at all. It was as if he had never created such a search request. It was as if an electronic search had never taken place. It was as if fingerprints had never been lifted from the
Deutschland
corpse at all.

Jonah Smith was a fingerprint man. And he hardly knew himself in Thailand. But one thing that would never change, despite his new habits and new style and his new colleagues and his new Spanish lover, was his dogged determination to do things right, to do his job as he had always done it—methodically, thoroughly, completely. He was not a man to lose a file or to compromise an investigation or to allow a possible identification, any possible identification, to remain unresolved.

However, the real problem before him this time, the fundamental question, Smith thought over and over again—as he rode his bike to work or as he sat on his balcony at sunset looking at islands or as he lay awake beside Conchi on the nights when she stayed with him until dawn—was not the technical difficulty of the identification itself, or even the details of exactly how the file had gone missing. The fundamental question was the following:
Why would anyone want to prevent the body of a tsunami victim from being identified?

T
he Information Management Centre in Phuket Town had been set up in a disused wing of the cavernous Thai Telecommunications building. The centre was a busy, even a cheery, operation most days, incongruously so given the grim events that preceded its creation.

Over the weeks and months, police and civilian staff who were rotated through the disaster zone from many countries had added the little human touches to be found in any busy office anywhere. Pictures of family were taped to computer terminals. Little animal figurines graced some desktops, along with flowers, boxes of tissues, bottles of mineral water, plastic containers of takeaway food. There was much animated conversation in a variety of languages, much cross-cultural banter, frequent laughter and smiles.

The IMC was like almost any busy police office anywhere, like almost any office of any sort anywhere—crammed with desks and filing cabinets and photocopiers and phones, and with personalities, personal histories, ambitions, rivalries and insecurities.

Smith's large metal desk was in one corner, among those assigned to the Interpol staff that had come out from Lyon. For the moment, the team comprised two perpetually disgruntled French civilian data compilers, Nicole and Sandrine; Ruth Connolly, the tough-talking Irish press officer; Werner Eberharter, Interpol's portly Austrian deputy team leader, nearing the end of his police career; and Janko Brajkovic, the grim-faced team leader, seconded too many years previously to Interpol from the Croatian police, nowhere near retirement but in no hurry whatsoever to leave his dream sinecure in southern France for a return to Zagreb and the nightmare of Balkan policing. He had been treating the Phuket assignment as an unexpected beachside holiday.

The young French compilers worked with pursed lips at their computer terminals all day in an apparent state of controlled rage. They, like so many of their countrymen and women, were never at ease anywhere except in France. Smith often heard them complaining between themselves in French about their Interpol travel allowances, their hotel rooms, the local food and water, the Thai clerical staff at the IMC, and any number of other things that did not at all live up to their Gallic expectations.

Eberharter and Connolly were not at their desks when Smith came in. Brajkovic was at his, however. He was in a foul humour, clearly hung over, and drinking coffee directly from a red Thermos flask when Smith approached him with his problem.

Brajkovic rarely used a cup or a mug for coffeedrinking purposes.

“What, what, what?” he growled when Smith came near. His desk sat under a giant powder blue Interpol flag pinned to the wall behind him. “Leave me alone, Smith. I am in a bad way.”

Brajkovic had a very young Thai girlfriend, like many of the expatriate police at the tsunami scene, and his nights were long and arduous. His professional specialty at Interpol was stolen motor vehicles. His personal specialty was girls of barely legal age.

“Janko, I need a word,” Smith said.

“Please, Smith, I am in a bad way. No troubles, OK? Please? Go find some bodies, make fingerprints, do something else. Send cadavers home, leave me alone.” Brajkovic slurped coffee, wiped his handlebar mustache and his chin. He suddenly raised his left hand high above his head in a hearty greeting as a smiling young Thai clerical assistant walked by the Interpol area with her arms full of wire in-trays destined for desks somewhere else.

“There goes a nice one, Smith,” Brajkovic said.

“See, behind you. I must examine her for identifying marks at once.”

He pretended to get up to go, and then sat down again.

“Janko, there's a problem, I'm afraid,” Smith said.

“No, Smith, no,” Brajkovic said.

“Yes,” Smith said. “A file has gone missing. At least one. Perhaps more. But one I know of. A German victim, I think.”

“Smith, don't joke, please. A file missing. Who gives a damn? Please. We are in Thailand. It is like this out here. We are lucky there are any files out here at all. Go back to your desk, go back.”

“I was working on this one myself. I had the file on my desk and now it's gone.”

“Talk to the fucking Germans then,” Brajkovic said. “They have taken it. The bastards only want to identify their own people anyway. Talk to them, not to me.”

“I'm sure it wasn't the Germans,” Smith said.

“They wouldn't have known it was on my desk. And, Janko, also, the AFIS file search I created has been deleted from the system.”

“Bullshit,” Janko said. “You fucked something up. You hit the wrong key, your hand shakes too much with lust for little Spanish tarts, who cares? Create another AFIS search and don't bother me with such things. I'm going for a piss.”

Brajkovic stood up. His deeply pockmarked skin glistened with sweat. He did not look well at all.

“I think I am going to be sick,” he said. “This goddamn Thai food every night, every night, every night, is going to kill me. You will have to ship me back to Zagreb in a box.”

Stefan Zalm was by his desk in the dental forensics section. He was fiddling with an aging turquoise portable dental X-ray apparatus on squeaky wheels. It looked vaguely Soviet in design and vintage.

“They send me this stuff to fix, Jonah,” Zalm said, looking up. “What do I know about this sort of thing? They send it all the way over from the mortuary site and think I can fix it.”

“Pathologists can't fix these machines, so you'll have to,” Smith said. “They think you've probably got one just like it in your surgery back in The Hague. You're the expert.”

“Not in this. I am not a technician. And this is junk. They need to just get new equipment. Why do they bother sending this over to me?”

Zalm sat down behind his desk. It was covered with X-rays and files, in no apparent order. A plaster mould of someone's lower dentures served as a paperweight.

“Sit, Jonah,” he said. “Why do you visit me during the day anyway? There's no beer here.”

“I spoke to Brajkovic about the missing file,”

Smith said.

“Oh, Jonah, please, not this file business again,” Zalm said.

“It's important,” Smith said.

“One file among hundreds. There are still about sixteen hundred unidentified bodies in those containers by the airport. You think one file has gone missing. Be sensible, Jonah.” “It was on my desk.”

“Among how many others? How can you be sure? Look at my desk. Look at this. Look. Look at everyone's desk around here. It is not like Europe here, Jonah. We are working like the Thais work much of the time.”

“No, Stefan. We have a system in place now.”

“A system, Jonah, please. Don't be foolish.”

“I've decided to go to the operation commanders.” Smith said.

“Fool, fool,” Zalm said. “They will throw you out of the office. They have too much to worry about already. Do you think they care about a fingerprint man from Interpol who has lost a file?”

“I didn't lose that file,” Smith said gravely.

“OK, OK,” Zalm said. “So it has been mislaid. Someone borrowed it from your desk and didn't give it back. They brought it to the Whale Bar by mistake and got drunk and now it's in a rubbish bin somewhere. Some Belgian policeman ate it for a bet.”

“Something isn't right about this, Stefan. I've decided to see Braithwaite and Colonel Pridiyathorn about this.”

“Jonah, I am telling you as friend, those two are too busy with other things to bother about a missing file. They still have all those unidentified bodies. They have families from Europe camped out here for months waiting for bodies to ship home to bury. Waiting, waiting. They have the international media and the local media asking questions every day about mistaken IDs, about how long all of this is taking, about how many millions of euros it is all costing. Pridiyathorn's people in Bangkok are going to fire him if he doesn't wrap this up soon. Braithwaite's own government, your own damn British government, is on his back every day, every day, to hurry up. The Brits are the worst. Do you think the commanders can care about one missing file? They've got the whole operation to run. Not just your part.”

“If files start to go missing like this, we will never finish the work, Stefan. The commanders should know when there has been a breach.”

“It's not a breach, Jonah. It is a missing file.”

“And my AFIS search? That and a missing file? And the missing pages before that?”

“Jonah, you are an experienced Scotland Yard man. You are my friend. We drink together. You tell me about your wife. I know your girlfriend. I am telling you, don't be crazy. The commanders don't care, they can't care about this. They will each kick you in your ass. Relax. Work on other files.”

“No, Stefan,” Smith said. “Braithwaite said he could possibly see me this afternoon. Pridiyathorn may be available too.” “Fool,” Zalm said.

At lunchtime, Smith liked to get out of the IMC and take a walk through the buzzing streets of Phuket Town. He usually ate at a little roadside noodle stall whose Thai owner was growing richer by the day with the lunch money of foreign police officers. Sometimes Smith would meet Conchi and walk with her to the waterfront where fishermen used to spill their catches onto the pavement for sorting. There were few fishermen now, after the tsunami. Most had given up; the local industry had all but collapsed, after rumours circulated among superstitious locals that deep-sea fish had eaten bodies of the tsunami dead.

Conchi was not in the Spanish DVI section, so Smith walked out of the management centre alone into the steamy heat of the day. The Norwegian woman, Ingrid Stokke, was there again today, on a crumbling concrete bench under a tree, waiting for an investigator, any investigator, to come out so she could ask for a progress report in the search for her missing daughter. Today Mrs. Stokke looked very bad indeed.

“Officer Smith, Officer Smith, one moment please,” she said, getting up quickly from her bench.

She looked worse each time Smith ran into her. She had been waiting in Phuket since the day after Christmas, when her daughter, eight years old, had been washed out to sea among hundreds of other victims from the beach near their hotel. Her eleven-year-old son had been badly injured but found alive. Mrs. Stokke's husband had flown back to Oslo with the boy for the urgent surgery that was needed in a properly equipped European hospital. She had stayed on, and was slowly going insane with anxiety and grief and regret.

“Mrs. Stokke, are you all right?” Smith said.

“What news, Officer Smith? Is there news for me today?” she said.

“None that I know of today, Mrs. Stokke,” he said. “I can check for you if you like.”

It is what all the DVI people had learned to say to Mrs. Stokke each day when she accosted them, asking for news. Identification of the children's bodies, especially the very young, was difficult. Their small hands were often in very bad condition due to bloating and skin slippage, and good fingerprints could not be taken easily. Their teeth contained relatively few fillings and dental X-rays did not help much, if they existed for the missing children at all.

In any case, Smith and others were now convinced that Charlotte Stokke's body had been washed far out to sea. The child could have ended up anywhere. There were reports that the bodies of some Phuket victims were now washing up on beaches in the Maldives, thousands of kilometres away.

“Have any new bodies been located, Officer Smith?” Mrs. Stokke asked.

“A few, over the past couple of days,” he said. He paused for a moment. “Adults. No children, I'm afraid.”

Mrs. Stokke began to cry softly, as she usually did. She took off her small wire-rimmed glasses and stood crying in the busy street, her head hanging between her bare sunburned shoulders. Her floral cotton tank top was soiled and creased. Smith knew she needed grief counselling in a bad way. He had gently suggested to her many times that she should speak to some of the European counsellors who had come to Thailand to help. He was never sure she had taken his advice.

“Perhaps you should go back to your hotel to rest,” Smith said. “Rest is important at times like this.”

Rest is important
. It is what he had said many times to Fiona after she came back from the hospital when their baby had died. Fiona had cried often in those days, too. Like Mrs. Stokke, her eyes had had the same blank, faraway look of the grief-stricken, of those who have faced tragedy and cannot get tragedy out of their minds.

Fiona carried their dead baby inside her for almost three months. The doctors had insisted on allowing the pregnancy to go to term even though the fetus, their tiny daughter, was dead. Smith never understood why doctors would inflict such torture on a woman. The torture had slowly broken Fiona's spirit, it had changed her fundamentally. It changed their marriage fundamentally. It changed everything.

Smith himself, for years afterward, would think endlessly about his dead daughter. He would fantasize about what she might have looked like as she grew up, what sort of person she might have become. He wondered if she would have been pretty and smart and happy. He even wondered about her hands and fingers. He fantasized, or used to, about what sort of fingerprints were developing inside the womb when she died. Even at the early stages of fetal development, unborn babies have faint prints on their tiny fingertips. Smith used to think for hours about his daughter's tiny fingers.