B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (9 page)

‘No, I’m not with the police,’ Jenny said.

The man studied her face and seemed to accept her answer. ‘Sorry to have troubled you.’ He turned away and started towards the building to their left, which looked like a freight depot.

The voice. She remembered now – he was at the D-Mort, the man who had insisted on identifying a woman who had been his girlfriend.

‘Excuse me,’ Jenny called after him. ‘I’m a coroner. Is there anything I can do?’

He stopped and looked back.

‘Not the coroner dealing with the crash. Mine is the next jurisdiction along – Severn Vale.’ His searching expression made her feel obliged to explain further. ‘I’m dealing with a fatality that may be connected – a boat was hit.’

He swept her with mistrustful eyes. Then Jenny detected a flicker of recognition.

‘I was at the disaster mortuary last night,’ she said, ‘in the identification suite.’

‘I know. That’s why I thought . . .’ He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

As he turned to go, Jenny said, ‘Are you a pilot?’

‘Yes . . .’ He sounded wary.

She didn’t like to bother a man who was grieving, but something in his demeanour told her it would be all right. There was a toughness about him, a detached quality she had noticed the night before. ‘Maybe you can help me answer a question—’

He didn’t look too sure.

‘It’s just that some helicopters arrived at the crash scene very soon after. I don’t see any helicopters here – do you know where else they might have come from?’

‘Within what area?’

‘A witness said they headed off to the east.’

‘Do you have a description?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I should try Beachley – the army base. That’d be the closest.’ He half-turned, then hesitated, as if he were reluctant to carry the conversation any further than he had to. ‘I hear they think the plane was brought down by lightning. Is that the official line?’

‘As far as I know.’

‘As good a story as any, I suppose.’

‘Do you know a better one?’

He met her gaze. She felt something in his attitude towards her slowly shifting.

‘I really don’t know very much about planes,’ Jenny said. ‘Would you have a moment to talk?’

He took her to the unglamorous canteen used by pilots and other airside staff and told her his name was Michael Sherman. There was a gossipy, cliquey feel to the place, pilots sitting with pilots and ground crew keeping to their own. Sherman seemed to pass unacknowledged by any of them as he led her between the crowded tables to one by the window that was free. Not a man to waste time on small talk, Jenny observed.

He sipped his coffee in silence, waiting for her to make the running.

‘What kind of plane do you fly?’ Jenny asked finally.

‘A Cessna 208, sometimes a 182. Private charter. Most of my business is flying jockeys between racecourses – the firm’s got a contract with some of the big owners. Helicopters are more convenient, but never as safe.’

He made himself sound like a glorified taxi driver. It didn’t fit with Jenny’s feeling about him: the history in his features, the way he spoke – as if he was used to operating under pressure.

‘You had a friend on 189?’

He nodded. ‘Nuala. It’s an Irish name. We were together for a while. She was a pilot, too – worked for Ransome as a matter of fact. Flew the Airbus short-haul. They still don’t like female captains crossing the big oceans. Some sort of superstition, I guess.’

‘She was what – a co-pilot?’

‘No. A passenger, as far as I can tell. They get cheap tickets . . .’ He turned to gaze out of the window as a big airliner came in to land, its tyres sending out puffs of smoke as they touched the runway. ‘I expect she was just taking advantage of the perks, getting a few days away.’

Jenny sensed there was more. Now she was sitting close to him she could almost feel the shifting layers beneath the surface. There was some anger he was hiding, and a big unanswered question.

‘You thought I was a detective. What did you think I wanted?’

He turned his gaze back from the window, a little startled. Jenny noticed his deep blue eyes. They seemed to tell her they had seen a lot.

She watched him silently ask himself a question: should I trust her?

‘Anything you tell me is entirely confidential, Mr Sherman.’

He gave a trace of a nod and stared down into his coffee. ‘Nuala and I parted about a year ago, not on the best of terms. We didn’t speak for months; not at all, in fact . . . But she tried to call me three times in the last few days. She left messages on my phone – it’s a personal one, I don’t tend to switch it on very often. My name was still written in the back of her passport – the person to contact. That’s how they got hold of me.’

‘What did she say in these messages?’

‘She wanted me to call her, that’s all—’

Jenny said, ‘There’s something more, isn’t there?’

Sherman didn’t answer.

‘Or you wouldn’t have the thought the police would be interested in her messages.’

‘It’s probably nothing, it’s . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Accidents are like that, they start making you ask stupid questions—’

‘I might be a better judge of that than you right now. Look, this conversation is strictly between the two of us, Mr Sherman – there’s no reason not to say what’s on your mind.’

‘You’re very persuasive, aren’t you? ’

‘Sorry. I’m curious, that’s all.’

‘You’d have liked Nuala – she didn’t take no for an answer either. Most pilots just deal with what’s in front of them at the present moment – anything else is a distraction – but she was never content with that. She had studied engineering, did a degree and two years’ research before she ran out of money and got a job, but she never lost that instinct.’ His eyes quickly scanned the room, then returned to Jenny. ‘Nuala’s big concern was safety. Times are tight, airlines are shrinking and cutting corners and everyone’s too frightened for their jobs to speak out . . . She ran a forum on the internet – anonymously, of course – which pilots would visit to swap stories or offer each other advice. Keeping her involvement secret was very important to her. She made me swear I’d never mention it to anyone, not in the business or outside it.’

‘And you thought the messages she left you might have been connected with this forum?’

‘The first thing I did when I heard, even before I knew she was on board, was try to log in, but it had been taken down. I can see the airlines’ lawyers might have wanted to stop the rumour mill turning, but that quickly?’

‘Had you visited it recently?’

‘About a week ago.’

‘Maybe her messages were about that? Perhaps she was having some sort of trouble with the forum and thought she’d better check you’d not said anything.’

‘I guess it’s possible,’ Sherman said, ‘but she knew she could trust me.’

‘Is there anyone else she might have spoken to?’

‘I called her brother in New Zealand. He didn’t know anything. Didn’t even know she was going to New York. She’s got a friend or two in London. I haven’t tried them yet, I’m not sure they’ll want to hear from me.’

‘That sort of break-up, was it?’

Sherman said, ‘She went in with her eyes open . . .’ He let out a sigh that expressed an emotion somewhere between anger and regret. ‘You don’t fly Tornados for eighteen years and come out as Mr Home Improvements. Nuala knew that.’

‘You were in the RAF?’

He nodded. ‘I got out, but like I told her, it would never get out of me.’

Jenny was intrigued, but he was already getting up from the table. ‘I’ve got some jockeys to fetch. Nice meeting you.’

‘I’d like to talk to you again, Mr Sherman—’

He pointed to the logo on his jacket. ‘You know where to find me.’

T
HE CALL FROM THE NURSING HOME
came as she was turning out of the airport. It was the disapproving matron, Mrs Stewart, informing her that her father had suffered another minor stroke, his third in as many weeks. He was comfortable, she said, and the doctor hadn’t seen any need to take him to hospital. The unspoken subtext was that Jenny should hurry up and visit if she wanted to see him alive again.

It was becoming awkward. Despite his rapidly failing health, Jenny hadn’t visited in over a month. She was his only daughter, his only close family. Mrs Stewart knew Jenny’s history, of course. All the staff did; it would have been impossible not to. It had been plastered across the local newspapers the previous summer. Worse still, the reports told only a fraction of the truth. None had mentioned that her father had been having sex with his own brother’s wife when it happened; there was no mention of the fact that he had sworn his five-year-old daughter to silence on pain of death. He was always referred to as ‘a respected local businessman’ and that was how his nurses thought of him. It was Jenny they shrank from in the corridors and whispered about the moment she had passed by.

‘How ill is he?’ Jenny asked, frightened to hear the answer.

‘He’s weak, Mrs Cooper. He can take a little fluid, but that’s all.’

‘Does the doctor think he’ll improve?’

‘You know how it is. If you want my honest opinion, I’m not sure he will.’

Jenny said, ‘Thank you. I’ll be over shortly.’

‘I think that would be best,’ Mrs Stewart said, adding, ‘you never know how much in his condition he might understand.’

If a dirty secret had a smell, Jenny thought, it would be the smell of the first-floor corridor at the end of which her father lay. It was a hopeless smell, one of living decay and of futile attempts to disguise it.

The door to his room was ajar, but she knocked anyway and was met with the inevitable silence. Her nerves dampened by the beta blocker she had taken during the drive over, she stepped inside to find the room neater than she had ever seen it. The nurses did that, she had noticed: treated decline with increasing orderliness until eventually the unwanted item in the bed was tidied away too.

‘Hello, Dad. It’s Jenny.’

He lay still, staring at the ceiling, as if all that remained of his life force was concentrated into the effort of breathing.

‘I heard you’d not been well.’

She drew up a chair and positioned it close, but just beyond his reach. It was as though entering his presence propelled her back into the mind of her childhood self – full of fears and dark imaginings.

You will only be free when you have forgiven him, Jenny.
She could hear Dr Allen’s word repeating in her mind like a mantra. Logically, she understood it all; she was suffering under a burden her father alone had placed on her; her buried associations with death had even affected her choice of career, but sitting close enough to touch, hearing the breath rattle in his dying lungs, she felt no understanding, only anger. And she hated herself for it. She could summon pity for every undeserving drunk scooped dead off the streets, but not an ounce for her own father. She wished he were dead, gone, finished, extinct, and even as she had the thought, she felt the black space open beneath her.

‘I’ll take you with me, Smiler,’ he seemed to say from behind his old man’s mask. ‘There’ll be no getting away from me.’

As she left his room, hurrying along the corridor to avoid the prying eyes of the nurses, she knew that he had her still, as surely as if he were gripping her with those powerful hands that had so often stung the back of her legs. And he wanted to bring her tumbling down with him.

‘No,’ Jenny snapped. ‘You’ll put me through to him now.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the adjutant protested, ‘but—’

‘I said I’ll speak to him now.’

Cowed by her ferocious insistence, the junior officer placed her on hold. She waited moodily, fully aware that it was her father she was angry with, not a man merely trying to do his job, and tried her best to calm down.

‘Mrs Cooper? Brigadier Russell. What can I do for you?’ He spoke in the sharp, impatient way of a military man annoyed at being diverted from more important business.

‘I’m investigating a death connected with the plane crash yesterday – a yachtsman. I’ve had a report that there were helicopters on the scene only minutes later and that they headed off in your direction. I wondered if they were yours.’

The Brigadier took a moment to reply. When he answered her, he had radically adjusted his tone to one of polite enquiry. ‘And where did this report originate?’

‘From a member of the public who happened to be nearby,’ Jenny said, being deliberately vague.

‘I’m quite sure we had no helicopters operating at that time. I provided some air support later in the afternoon as back-up to search and rescue, but that’s all.’

Jenny pressed on. ‘If the witness is correct they would have passed your base at approximately ten-fifteen yesterday morning. Might anyone have seen them?’

‘There are always lots of civil aircraft in the area, Mrs Cooper. I’m sure you appreciate we don’t keep a log of everything that passes by.’

Jenny was in no mood to be lied to. ‘An army base across the estuary from a nuclear reactor? You must maintain some regular surveillance.’

‘If only we had the resources you imagine, Mrs Cooper. I can assure you, we don’t.’

As Brigadier Russell put down the phone, it occurred to her that somewhere deep in the bowels of government, the same people who had so rapidly erected the D-Mort must also have formulated plans for dealing with the flow of information in the wake of a major accident. They would need to be seen to be in control, and that meant damping down speculation. All her phone call would have achieved was the ringing of another alarm bell somewhere in Whitehall and the addition of her name to a list of trouble-makers.

Avoiding the mounting pile of routine death reports collecting on the side of her desk, Jenny flicked to the latest online news reports and found a page accumulating photographs of the lost passengers. Top billing was given to Lily Tate, the model, but next to her in the A-list was a name Jenny had never heard before: Jimmy Han. His biography said he was forty-three years old and the CEO of Han Industries, a computer-chip manufacturer worth several billions of dollars. He had fled China for Taiwan aged twenty, where, despite a lack of university education, he had single-handedly built up his global computer manufacturing business from scratch. Much to the annoyance of the Chinese government, he had been an outspoken critic of their attempts to stifle access to information, especially through the internet. Wherever Han went he seemed to court suspicion and controversy. During a recent address at Cambridge University, a fight had broken out between pro- and anti-government Chinese students; while in India he had been photographed meeting the Dalai Lama. His death was described as a major loss to the cause of Chinese democracy. There were several other wealthy businessmen on board, though none as colourful, rich or young as Han.