B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (3 page)

He wasn’t.

The brief message from the Airbus had been too fractured to make out. He switched channels and tried again. ‘Skyhawk this is Bristol eight-zero-nine –’

There was no reply.

T
HE WORN TYRES HAD LOST
their grip on the bend. The driver, who had been travelling at an estimated speed of seventy miles an hour, had stamped on the brakes, causing the already sliding wheels to lock. Skating across the wet surface, the car had ploughed into an oak at the side of the road, killing the single male occupant instantly. It was bad luck: the tree was the only one for fifty yards in either direction. That, at least, was the conclusion of the road traffic accident investigation officer who had spent the small hours of the morning measuring the skid marks on the remote stretch of country lane. Another car travelling behind appeared also to have skidded, probably to avoid the car that had spun out of control, but there was no evidence to suggest who the driver had been, and he or she had certainly not reported the accident to the police. Ordinary people could at times be shockingly callous. For the officer reconstructing the scene it had been a routine technical exercise, a matter of entering data in a computer that produced a neat 3D reproduction of the accident. But as a coroner who was often far too diligent for her own good, Jenny Cooper had been there to see the body and the wreckage, and to smell the blood. The airbags had failed. The driver, a man in his late thirties named Jon Whitestone, had bounced off the windscreen, leaving no face for his wife to identify. Beyond the fact that he was late coming home from work, no explanation could be found for the victim’s excessive speed. It was a needless death.

Closing the lid of her laptop, Jenny wished she hadn’t read the officer’s report with her late-morning breakfast. The week had been fraught enough without work spoiling her Sunday, too. By the time she had finished dealing with the accident’s aftermath it had been past midnight. It was nearly two when she’d made it back to her cottage deep in the Wye valley, and she had needed a pill to sleep. Now there were only a few precious hours of the weekend left in which to recoup. She would get some fresh air, make a start on the paperwork that had been mounting on her desk, and finally decide whether she would follow the advice of several well-meaning girlfriends and start searching for a date on one of the more upmarket singles sites. She had been putting it off for weeks: the very idea of meeting with a complete stranger filled her with dread. It also felt oddly like a betrayal. Whenever she allowed herself to think of Steve, her former lover, she ached for him. But it had been her choice. She had encouraged him to take the position at the architects’ practice in Provence and to surrender to love if it came along. And it had, with almost indecent speed. Within months of arriving he had moved in with a beautiful dark-haired girl called Gabrielle, and was blissfully happy. He still sent the odd email, even a Christmas card which he had signed with a kiss, but his communications had become steadily less frequent as, without either of them saying so, they both acknowledged that it was time to move on.

Could she ever be as close to another man as she had once been to Steve? Could she imagine sharing her most intimate secrets? She carried these questions with her up the footworn boards of the narrow wooden staircase and came no closer to answers as she ran a deep bath.

She had plunged as much of her chilled flesh beneath the surface as the antique roll-top tub would allow when the telephone rang. Jenny closed her eyes and tried to ignore it. Whoever it was, she would call them back when she was ready. But they refused to give up. Ten, twelve, fifteen rings, still they persisted. It was no use. She forced herself out of the water, wrapped herself in a towel and hurried barefoot to answer it.

She picked up the phone in the living room, water pooling on the cold flagstones around her feet.

‘Hello?’

‘Mrs Cooper? You’ve heard the news—’ It was Alison Trent, her officer.

‘No.’

‘Surely—’

‘No. What is it?’

Alison paused. ‘A plane crash . . . On the Severn.’

‘Bad?’

‘Nearly six hundred.’

It was Jenny’s turn to fall silent. Six
hundred
. ‘Not all dead?’

‘We don’t know. The good news is it’s North Somerset’s jurisdiction.’

Jenny felt a selfish sensation of relief. ‘So we’re not involved—?’

‘I’m afraid we are, Mrs Cooper. South Gloucestershire police just called saying two bodies have been washed up at Aust. An adult male and a female child. I’m on my way. I thought you might want to come. Oh, and you’ll probably want to bring your wellingtons.’

Jenny drove through the Wye valley as fast as she dared in the new Land Rover SUV with which she had reluctantly replaced her decrepit VW. Speeding through sleepy villages, she absorbed the constantly updating news of the disaster which had unfolded only a few miles to the south. A Ransome Airways Airbus A380, the world’s largest and most technically advanced passenger airliner, had ditched in the middle of the Severn estuary two miles west of the new Severn crossing. The crash had happened some three and a half hours earlier around nine-thirty. Rescue boats were at the scene, but no survivors had yet been found. There was some flotsam on the surface and a number of bodies had been recovered, but the aircraft’s fuselage had sunk beneath the water. The number of an emergency helpline was read out repeatedly. A shell-shocked air traffic controller from Bristol told a reporter that he had lost radio contact with the stricken plane without warning and had watched it plunge to earth on his screen. The descent had taken over six minutes, which already had a hastily assembled collection of experts speculating that by no means had it dropped like a stone. A physics professor explained that following a breakup an aeroplane travelling five and a half miles above the earth would take roughly two and a half minutes to fall to the ground. A descent lasting six minutes suggested that the pilot had retained some control and had struggled to remain in the air.

Search-and-rescue helicopters were sweeping the mile-wide stretch of water to her right as Jenny crossed the vast span of the Severn Bridge, their orange lights disappearing in and out of the curtains of grey mist that hung over the estuary. She took the first exit at the far end, and minutes later was pulling up at the edge of a mud and shingle beach between Alison’s Ford and a cluster of police vehicles. A young constable approached. Jenny wound down her window.

‘Jenny Cooper. Severn Vale District Coroner.’

‘They’re expecting you, ma’am.’

He nodded towards two white tents that had already been erected over the corpses. Jenny climbed out and pulled on her boots, freezing drizzle pricking the back of her neck. The mud was thick and deep, sucking at her feet as she waded over.

Alison appeared from the nearer tent, swathed in a ski jacket and a plain woollen hat with flaps that hung down over her ears. ‘The girl’s in here,’ she said with a studied absence of emotion. ‘You can’t tell me you haven’t heard the news reports by now.’

‘I’ve heard them,’ Jenny said. ‘But I can’t say that it helped.’

She braced herself and followed her officer into a tent no more than ten feet square in which a young female forensics officer dressed in white overalls was taking photographs of the little girl. Daily exposure to death had largely inured Jenny to the sight of all but the most horrifically damaged adult corpses, but the sight of a dead child was something she had never grown used to. The girl lay face up on the mud just as the retreating tide would have left her. The first thing Jenny noticed was the fully inflated bright yellow lifejacket with the straps secured tightly around her slender waist. She wore blue jeans, pink canvas pumps and a pale blue T-shirt with what appeared to be a purple tabard over it. Her sandy-blonde hair was plaited in a single pigtail. On her forehead was a raised, dark, circular bruise.

‘I think she might have been an unaccompanied minor,’ Alison said. ‘They make them wear those tops so the staff can spot them.’

Jenny forced herself to look closer and made out the edge of what appeared to be an airline logo. ‘Has the medic been?’

Alison dug a folded piece of paper from her coat pocket and handed it to her. The form, hastily signed by a doctor twenty minutes earlier, confirmed that there was no sign of life and no realistic prospect of resuscitation.

‘Her body temperature is less than ten degrees,’ Alison said. ‘She’d have been in the water well over an hour, probably more like two.’

Jenny noticed the small bloodstain on the left side of the girl’s T-shirt that marked the spot where the doctor had taken her core temperature by liver puncture.

‘Any idea who she is?’

‘Not yet. I’ve left details with the incident room. I’ll get a call as soon as they have an idea.’

Fighting her instinct to recoil, she studied the girl’s plaster-white face, her smooth bare arms and her fingers curled up to form partial fists. Apart from the blow to the head there was no other sign of injury.

‘I was expecting more damage,’ Jenny said. ‘And she obviously had time to put on a lifejacket.’

‘Almost makes it worse, doesn’t it?’ Alison said. ‘Knowing what’s coming, I mean.’

Jenny recalled the experts’ speculation on the radio. The stricken plane appeared not so much to have crashed, but to have crash-landed on the estuary. From what she had read of such disasters, bodies could emerge from the wreckage in all manner of conditions: some mangled beyond recognition, others more or less intact. It all depended what debris the body collided with. The brutal randomness of passengers’ injuries added yet another layer of horror onto an event already too large for her fully to comprehend.

The forensics officer zipped her camera into a case. ‘How soon till you take her to the D-Mort?’ she asked. ‘Only we could do with the tent.’

‘D-Mort?’

‘Disaster mortuary. They’re setting one up on a field at Walton Bay – where the plane went down.’

‘Who’s “they”?’ Jenny asked. ‘North Somerset?’

‘The Ministry of Justice is appointing someone more senior to take charge,’ Alison interjected. ‘They don’t think us provincial hicks can be trusted.’

Jenny had been so shocked by the scale of the accident that she had barely turned her mind to the complicated logistics of managing it. There were standing protocols for handling a high-casualty event which involved setting up a disaster mortuary as close as practicable to the scene. There bodies would be identified, autopsied and stored until it was appropriate to release them to families. A handful of coroners had been specially trained to manage such situations, but despite the presence of an elderly nuclear power plant and several chemicals factories within her jurisdiction, Jenny had never been selected to be one of them, a minor snub that still rankled.

‘Any bodies lying in my area will be taken to the Vale as usual,’ Jenny said. ‘They’ll have enough to deal with at Walton.’

The officer gave an uncertain nod. ‘How long are you going to be?’

‘There’s an ambulance on the way,’ Alison said. ‘You can spare your tent for ten minutes.’

‘I’ll be in the van,’ the young woman said, letting it be known that she was being caused serious inconvenience. She picked up her two bags and marched out.

An odd, liquid sound issued from the girl’s body. Jenny looked down to see a small gush of water bubble up through her lips and trickle across her cheeks.

‘Muscles contracting,’ Alison said. ‘Must have had water in her lungs.’

Some instinct prompted Jenny to lean down and touch the girl’s face – just in case – but it was as cold as porcelain. ‘If she inhaled water, she must have been breathing after the crash.’

Alison made no further comment and turned back to the entrance. ‘You’d better have a look at the other one.’

The second tent lay some ten yards closer to the water’s edge on a band of sticky black silt. Alison unzipped the flap and pulled it back to reveal the body of a bearded man lying with his right cheek on the ground, his arms spread out at his sides.

Jenny placed him in his upper thirties. He was sturdily built and looked nothing like an airline passenger. He was wearing dungaree-style over-trousers, calf-length orange rubber boots, and a red plaid shirt rolled up to the elbows with a white T-shirt underneath. His forearms were veined and muscular, those of a man accustomed to heavy manual work.

‘He looks like a fisherman.’

‘Not at this time of year,’ Alison said. ‘There’s nothing in his pockets – we checked.’

She handed Jenny a second piece of paper similar to the first. The medic had recorded his core temperature as 13.5 degrees.

‘He wasn’t flying to New York dressed like that,’ Jenny said. ‘I think we might have our first casualty on the ground.’

She walked around the body on the duckboards the forensic officers had put down inside the tent and studied the man’s face. Beneath the inch of reddish-brown growth on his left cheek she made out the outline of a disfiguring scar that his beard was probably intended to disguise: even in death there was a toughness in his features which said he would not have died without a hard struggle.

‘I don’t see any obvious injuries,’ Jenny said.

‘Nor did the medic,’ Alison replied. ‘He thinks it was hypothermia. It might not even be connected to the crash. He could have fallen in drunk anywhere between Weston and Gloucester. Until we identify him we won’t know.’

Jenny knew that the water temperature would be less than ten degrees at this time of year. The man’s body had yet to cool to that level. A drunk who had fallen into the river at some time during the night would have been at least as cold as the water by now.

She spotted a small silver medal on a chain around his neck. She stooped down for a closer look and saw that it was a St Christopher.

‘The patron saint of travellers,’ Alison said, with no hint of irony.

Jenny felt an involuntary and quite unexpected pang of emotion. She straightened, brisk and businesslike, trying to compensate for her irrational reaction. ‘All right. Let’s get them moved.’