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‘You sound like you know them?’
‘Men like that, yes.’
‘What about the missing women?’
‘If they’re alive, they were most likely taken on board the trawler because they had value.’
Carlson knows the reason. Hundreds, if not thousands, of undocumented migrants are kept as sex slaves in British brothels; exploited, imprisoned, beaten, drugged, and threatened. They’re told their families back home will be killed if they refuse to obey orders.
One of them, a patient of mine, was only seventeen when she escaped. She had worked twenty-hour shifts in a Soho brothel in London, forced to have sex with up to forty men a day for as little as £10 a time. She was told she had to pay off a £20,000 debt, which was the price the brothel had paid for her.
‘We have to find them quickly,’ I say.
‘I’m doing my best.’
Birchin Way Custody Facility is built on the edge of an industrial estate and looks like a cross between a high-tech production facility and a business headquarters. The only clues to its use are the police cars parked out front and an automatic security gate signposted ‘Custody Entrance’.
‘State-of-the-art,’ says Carlson. ‘Thirty-six custody cells, charge rooms, interview suites and round-the-clock processing. This is supposed to be the future.’
‘Does it work?’
‘As much as anything will.’
I’m photographed and given an electronic pass before being taken upstairs to the incident room – an open-plan office where detectives, civilian analysts and data processors are collecting and collating information. Whiteboards display photographs of the dead, whose personal details are slowly being filled in – ages, nationalities and next of kin.
The coastguard official is waiting in Carlson’s office. He’s in his mid-fifties with a weather-beaten face and pale circles around his eyes caused by his sunglasses.
‘Commander Greg Stanford,’ he says, standing to attention. ‘I was the senior operations officer who handled the search and rescue.’
I don’t know if I should salute or shake his hand.
Stanford has set up a laptop and a viewing screen. ‘This is what we’ve pieced together so far,’ he says, calling up an interactive map of the French coastline. ‘Two small boats left Calais shortly after 2100 hours. The seas were calm, visibility good. They separated almost immediately and one went north-east, following the coastline as far as Rotterdam, before turning north-west.’
His finger traces the route on the screen.
‘How can you be sure?’ I ask.
‘Large ships carry professional radar, which can reach up to four miles. This can be limited by fog and rain but is reasonably accurate. A rigid-hulled inflatable boat is not a strong target because it doesn’t have radar reflectors, but it can become more visible in larger swells due to refraction.’
Stanford calls up a satellite map and points to an icon.
‘We think this is the migrant boat. It was picked up by the radar on a container ship that was travelling from Harwich to Zeebrugge in Belgium. A different ship picked up a similar signature two hours later, about thirty-five miles further north.’
The screen changes again, this time showing a neon green flight path. ‘These are radar images captured by a UR5 drone used for border surveillance. It was airborne at 240 metres at 05.19.’
The footage speeds up but slows down when it reaches a chosen time stamp.
‘What am I looking at?’ I ask.
‘These two blips indicate two vessels, one larger than the other. They appear to almost merge before one of them disappears.’ ‘A collision,’ says Carlson.
‘Unless the larger boat began towing the smaller one. We estimate the collision occurred sixteen miles north-east of Skegness, east of Mablethorpe, at approximately 05.32 hours. The bodies drifted north-east, pushed by the currents and wind, before coming ashore at Cleethorpes.’
‘What vessels were in the area?’ asks Carlson.
Stanford calls up another screen. ‘This is a maritime traffic map for that quadrant. It doesn’t show either boat because neither was using an automatic identification system, which transmits location signals to satellites. A trawler should have been equipped with an AIS, but it was likely turned off.’
‘Can you track it using the radar of other ships in the vicinity?’ I ask.
