B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (8 page)

‘No word from the incident room on our John Doe?’ Jenny asked.

‘Do give me a chance, Mrs Cooper. My head barely touched the pillow.’

‘Let me know what they say, oh, and see if you can get me a number for that farmer who saw the lights.’

‘What for?’

‘I want to buy some sheep – what do you think?’

‘Fine. But don’t expect me before ten,’ Alison said curtly and hung up.

The security guard at the entrance to Avonmouth docks greeted Jenny like an old friend and directed her to the quay. Late the previous summer the bodies of twelve emaciated Somali stowaways had turned up in the bilge tanks of a cargo ship registered in Karachi. The find had caused her many trips to visit the ship’s captain and crew, who had refused to come ashore for fear of arrest. She had reluctantly certified the deaths as having occurred accidentally, but she had had her doubts. Talking to men in the docks canteen, she had heard lurid second-hand tales of foreign crews tossing stowaways overboard in the middle of the ocean.

Wearing the obligatory yellow hard hat she had been issued with at the gate, she walked out along the quay towards what was barely recognizable as the wreckage of a yacht. She could see a section of mast and the pointed end of the stern, but the rest was a broken heap of wood and canvas. A man dressed in the ubiquitous fluorescent yellow coat was standing nearby, taking photographs with a camera mounted on a tripod.

‘Good morning. Jenny Cooper, Severn Vale District Coroner.’

The man looked up from his work. ‘Dick Corton, Marine Accident Investigation Branch.’ He squeezed her hand in a powerful grip. ‘Not much of this left.’ His voice was gentle and his accent pronounced. He wasn’t local – Norfolk, Jenny guessed. She placed him in his early sixties, though it was hard to say. His face was a lattice of veins broken by the weather; his eyes were narrowed to slits as if permanently fixed on a far horizon.

‘I’d forgotten you’d be involved as well,’ Jenny said.

‘Not a lot to trouble us, to be honest,’ Corton replied. ‘You can see it’s been ripped in half. I’d say part of the plane’s wing caught it as it ditched on the water. Bad luck – only vessel out there as far as I can tell.’

Jenny could see that half the hull was virtually intact. The wheel was still bolted to the deck, but the stairs that would have led down to the cabin below were absent. The galley area was still recognizable: there was half a table, some cupboards, a stove, but beyond that there was little remaining that resembled a boat.

‘It looks as if there’s a lot of it missing,’ Jenny said.

‘Smashed to pieces,’ Corton said. ‘Some of it would have been washed out on the tide. I’d put money on one of the engines having struck it. Look at where the hull’s fractured and you can see burn marks.’

Jenny stepped closer and examined the jagged edge of the broken hull. Even with her untrained eye, it looked as if the wood had been scorched, and the layer of foam between the inner and outer skin of the hull appeared in places to have melted to the consistency of burnt treacle.

‘Would the aircraft’s engines have been that hot? We’re not even sure if they were still working.’

‘I wondered about that. One for the AAIB, I’d say,’ Corton said, returning to his camera. ‘I’m just boats.’

Jenny looked up and down the wreckage for any identifying marks, but there were none that she could see. ‘Do you have any idea where it came from?’

‘I can tell you exactly.’ Corton dug into his pocket for a notebook. ‘She’s called the
Irish Mist
, 43-foot ketch registered in Dublin. Built in ’85 and owned by a Mr Peter Hylands. I got hold of him first thing and he tells me he’s just sold it through Hennessy’s yacht brokers in Dublin Bay to a fellow called Chapman in Jersey. The sale went through last week and Hennessy’s took possession. They didn’t answer their phone. I left them a message.’

‘How does that work – with the broker, I mean?’ Jenny asked.

‘Often they’ll employ a man to deliver the vessel to the buyer – for a fee, of course. Sometimes two men, depending on the size of the boat.’

‘What about this one?’

‘One man could do it,’ Corton said, moving his tripod around for a side-on shot of the wreck. ‘What I couldn’t say, though, is what they’d be doing this far up the Bristol Channel en route from Dublin to Jersey. The weather was nothing ugly, even around Land’s End. He was forty miles out of his way – unless he had business in Bristol. I called the coastguard, but he hadn’t put any messages out on the radio.’

Jenny thought of the dead man’s holster and asked herself why she had no intention of telling Corton and why she hadn’t yet mentioned it to the police. She had no answer, except that experience had taught her to share information only with those in whom she had complete trust. She couldn’t yet get the measure of Corton, and she could sense he felt the same about her.

‘Where would you keep the lifejackets on a boat like this?’ Jenny asked.

‘There’d be a locker either side of the cockpit. Nothing to see now, though – that part’s all gone.’

Jenny stepped over a section of broken mast to take in another angle. She wanted to imagine the accident from the perspective of the dead man, presuming he was at the wheel as the plane came towards him. With what remained of the vessel lying on its side, the handrail that ran around the stern was at shoulder height. She peered over it at the section of deck on which he would have been standing and saw that individual planks had been ripped out. Several remained in place, though they were largely splintered and broken.

‘What’s happened here?’ Jenny said. This damage doesn’t look like it was caused by the accident. It looks fresh.’

Corton finished taking his picture and wandered over, carefully studying the shattered boards.

‘You’re right. That’s been done since it’s been out of the water. Someone’s chopped open the deck to check the void beneath.’

‘Why?’

‘Just to be sure, I expect,’ Corton said. ‘I wouldn’t read anything into it.’ He strolled back to his equipment and started to dismantle it. ‘I take it you’ve got a body, or you wouldn’t be here.’

‘Yes. A male, dressed in sailing gear. No identity as yet.’

Corton nodded and quietly continued with his task.

‘The pathologist said he looked like a regular sailor – Dubarry boots, apparently – but no lifejacket. Does that strike you as odd?’

‘A solo sailor would normally wear one, certainly.’ Folding the tripod into its case, Corton went on, ‘Will you be wanting to hold onto the wreck or shall I arrange for it to be disposed of? I’ve no more use for it.’

‘I won’t get rid of it just yet,’ Jenny said. ‘You never know what might be needed.’

She watched him for a moment, wondering if he knew any more than he was letting on. It occurred to her that he had offered less than he might have done.

The farmer’s name was John Roberts and he wasn’t answering his phone. Jenny left a message but was impatient to talk to him. As far as she or Alison had been able to ascertain, he was the closest thing to an eyewitness that existed. The farmhouse was half a mile from the D-Mort, several hundred yards outside the cordoned-off area, yet close enough to it to hear the constant throb of the generators.

She approached the farm down a rutted track and turned into a yard in which two rusting tractors stood idle. The business had clearly seen better days.

It was Mrs Roberts who answered the door to her, a younger woman than Jenny had expected, with a worn-down face and a grizzling infant on her hip.

‘He’s not here,’ she said, when Jenny explained the reason for her visit.

‘Will he be back soon?’

‘No idea.’ She shrugged one shoulder, her guarded expression saying she hoped Jenny would hurry up and go.

‘Do you mind if I ask where he is? Does he have a phone?’

‘He’s over there.’ She nodded towards the D-Mort. ‘They wanted him to give a statement or something.’

‘My inquiry relates to a boat the plane seems to have struck when it crashed.’

The woman shook her head. ‘He never said nothing about a boat.’ She took a step back and went to close the door. ‘Sorry.’

‘You must have heard it too. Is that your kitchen window looking out over the estuary?’

‘I didn’t see nothing, just heard the bang, that’s all.’

‘What kind of bang?’

‘How many kinds are there? Like a bomb going off, I suppose. There was nothing to see out there – just mist.’

‘No flames?’

Mrs Roberts shook her head and switched the child to her other hip.

‘Didn’t you hear the plane flying in low? It must have come very close.’

‘No.’

From where she was standing, Jenny could see between the gaps in the farm buildings all the way over the fields to the crash site. She could even hear the buzz of the dinghy engines and the low rumble of the dredger’s crane.

‘How loud was this explosion?’

‘Not very.’

‘But loud enough for your husband to go and investigate.’

‘He was more curious than anything, especially when he heard the helicopters.’

‘Oh? When was that?’

‘Right after.’

‘Can you be any more precise? It would be very helpful.’

Mrs Roberts said no, she couldn’t. The baby had been crying and she hadn’t been paying much attention.

‘But you’re sure there were helicopters?’ Jenny persisted.

She shrugged. ‘That’s what he said.’

There were protocols to be followed, procedures set down in the Coroner’s Rules which required her to make written requests for production of computer records, all of which in due course she would do, but in Jenny’s experience there was never any substitute for an unannounced visit. A worried-looking junior official was sent out to meet her at the staff entrance to Bristol International Airport with orders to schedule a formal appointment, but Jenny insisted there were time-critical questions she needed answered immediately. Buckling under her veiled threat that failure to cooperate might amount to an obstruction of justice, the official signed her in at the gate and instructed her to follow her car to the air traffic control tower.

They were met inside the entrance to the new building by a man who introduced himself as Martin Chambers, the assistant director of the facility. Dismissing the young woman, he led Jenny directly to a first-floor meeting room that could have belonged to any modern office block in the country.

Chambers did a poor job of covering his irritation at her arrival. ‘I’ve already made arrangements for the transfer of our data to the coroner’s office. I discussed it all with Inspector Harris last night. Disks are going over later today.’

Jenny tried to explain the difference between her inquiry and Sir James Kendall’s, but Chambers saw only an attempt to make him duplicate his efforts when he was struggling with staff absence and the trauma of the country’s largest ever aviation disaster having happened in his airspace.

‘I am sympathetic, Mr Chambers, but I will need my own copies of those disks.’

‘Fine. We’ll send them to you.’

‘Will they include voice recordings of conversations between the ground and the pilots?’

‘There were virtually none. They had only just sought clearance when they lost contact.’ His tone was clipped and brittle.

‘Do you recall the nature of their last communication?’

‘It was something perfectly routine about the weather. There was no Mayday, no indication of anything amiss, just a loss of contact. My controller tried all possible channels but there was nothing. He just had to watch the plane fall out of the sky.’

‘When you say “fall”—?’

‘You’ll find a graph. It won’t be as accurate as the one that’ll be produced from the flight data recorder, but it shows the rates and angles of descent.’

Jenny said, ‘You make it sound like a
series
of incidents.’

‘The pilots clearly didn’t give up without a fight.’ He glanced away, the picture in his mind evidently not one he was eager to put into words.

‘I’ve had information that helicopters were at the crash site within minutes of the accident. Will your data cover that period?’

‘Our radar isn’t effective at very low levels. If they were below 500 feet they’re unlikely to show up.’

‘But surely you would have known if they were there?’

‘Everything below 2,000 feet is uncontrolled airspace. Coastguard, police, air ambulance – they’ll all check in with us. As far as I recall, it was at least thirty minutes before air sea rescue arrived. They’re from the Royal Navy and have to fly up from Cornwall.’

‘Is there any chance I can talk to the controller who was on duty at the time?’

‘His name’s Guy Fearnley. I let him have the day off,’ Chambers said. ‘I think that’s reasonable, don’t you?’

The interview was over in less than ten minutes and Chambers had stuck rigidly to the company line. He refused to speculate about causes of the crash or about the movement of low-flying aircraft in its aftermath. Air traffic control was a commercial business, and there could be no admissions.

Leaving the control tower, Jenny found herself drawn towards the high fence that separated the car park from the apron on which the smaller aircraft that used the airport operated. There were small cargo planes painted in the livery of courier companies, a handful of sleek private jets and a number of single-engine light aircraft of the kind she often saw flying over the Wye valley on summer afternoons. There was something about planes that both excited and terrified her. She needed a Valium before making even the shortest holiday flight; for every moment she was alive to the slightest change in the pitch of the engines and her stomach would lurch at the mildest encounter with turbulence. The very thought of travelling through the air at 500 miles per hour in an aluminium tube only ten inches thick had always seemed absurd to her, yet at the same time strangely exhilarating. But it seemed only right and just that the audacious freedom offered by an aeroplane came with an element of risk.

‘Are you with the police?’

She turned abruptly to see a man with a vaguely familiar face standing watching her. He was wearing a waist-length flight jacket with a company logo on the breast: Sky Drivers. She tried to place him. Had he been one of those she had held up at the perimeter gate as she argued her way in?