by M. R. Hall
Telling Alison only that she would be out of the office for the rest of the day on a research trip, Jenny switched off her phone and drove the forty miles across Gloucestershire to Kemble. The winter countryside had a stark, stripped-down beauty that she had learned to appreciate since moving out of the city. Frost clung to the clefts of hillsides untouched by the sun. In the centres of bare fields ancient oaks that in summer were perfect domes of green revealed their bent and twisted limbs.
The Cotswold airport was in fact little more than an airstrip: a handful of buildings and a scattering of light aircraft and helicopters parked on the grass. Jenny stayed in the warmth of her car, watching the tiny planes coming and going and wondering what impulse it was that possessed people to take to the sky in such fragile machines.
A few minutes before one o’clock, a tiny Cessna made an erratic descent towards the airstrip, wings tilting left and right. The nose jerked suddenly upwards as it came in to land. It hit the ground heavily, bounced once, then twice, before skewing slightly as it drew to a halt. It turned at the end of the runway and taxied over the grass towards the car park. Michael climbed out of the cockpit together with a young man who was laughing self-consciously at his efforts and hoping his instructor would share the joke. But Michael had already spotted Jenny. He hastily scratched a note in the student’s logbook and made his way over to her.
She wound down her window. ‘I hope that wasn’t you at the controls.’
‘It’s only his third lesson – you should have seen the first.’
‘You must be insane. I couldn’t even set foot in one of those things.’
Michael smiled. ‘What are you scared of?’
‘What do you think?’
‘You don’t fancy going up for ten minutes?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Come on – you’ll love it. It’s a perfect day. I’ll cure your fear for good, I promise you.’
‘I doubt that very much.’
‘Just once round the field, that’s all.’ He opened the car door, refusing to take no for an answer.
The two-seater Cessna Skycatcher was cramped and claustrophobic. Jenny’s heart was already pounding as Michael fastened her belt and fixed on her headset and was fit to explode by the time he had taxied to the start of the runway. As hard as she tried to relax and disappear into inner space, each sound and sudden movement wrenched her back to unwelcome reality.
‘Just a light headwind this morning – nothing too bumpy. All set?’
Jenny nodded, feeling anything but. Even as they were accelerating along the runway she would have gladly thrown open the door and taken her chances.
‘Here we go—’
Michael eased back the stick and aimed the nose towards the sky. The little aircraft clawed its way upwards. Jenny gripped the sides of her seat as they juddered through pockets of warm air, the plane’s flimsy-looking wings shaking alarmingly.
‘Look over there.’
Michael pointed left towards far-off hills, monumentally beautiful in the sharp sunlight, but Jenny couldn’t enjoy the view. She took a slow, deep breath and tried to relax her clenched muscles, telling herself that it was good that she was facing her fears.
The plane banked sharply leftwards, the wing tilting to what felt like ninety degrees to the ground.
‘It’s perfectly safe,’ Michael said. ‘These things can glide. You don’t even need the engine to land safely.’
‘Can we not try that?’
He smiled, his eyes brighter and more alert than she had seen them before. It was as if since leaving the ground he had come alive.
‘A thousand feet. Doesn’t feel like it, does it?’
‘Are we going down soon?’ Jenny said. ‘I thought it was going to be just once around the field.’
‘We’ve got twenty minutes of fuel. My students have paid for it—’
‘Please?’
The plane took a sudden dip, the engine revving as it momentarily lost purchase. The whole fabric of the craft seemed to strain as they levelled off with a violent thud.
‘Just a touch of turbulence.’ He pointed to the west. ‘Look, you can see Bristol.’
Jenny nodded, losing her battle against her phobia.
‘Are you going to tell me what happened to change your mind?’ Michael said.
‘Can we please go back now?’
‘I’m confused. I’m having to put a lot of trust in you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘One minute you don’t want to get involved, the next you want to break into Nuala’s flat. I was taught to be wary of people who change their minds. They’re not usually who you want in a crisis.’
‘I’ve got some new evidence, that’s all. Please can we go back now?’
‘How about sharing it with me?’
He was staring straight ahead. The nose of the aircraft was pointing upwards; Jenny’s eyes ran over the dials and saw the altimeter climbing. Her anxiety crossed the threshold into panic.
‘Why are we still going up?’
‘I thought you might want to know how a stall works – it’s a routine training drill. Ease back on the throttle, lower the nose a touch—’
‘Are you trying to scare me, Michael?’
The whine of the engine trailed off to an idling tick-tick. The airspeed wound back towards zero. For a moment they seemed to hover on the edge of a precipice. Jenny felt her fingers bite into the fabric of the seat. She was too terrified to make a sound.
The sensation was like falling backwards off a cliff. One moment they were looking straight up at the sky, the next they were sliding towards earth. Jenny heard herself scream as they tumbled through one full somersault, then another. Now she was staring straight down at the ground, which was spinning clockwise in front of the windshield. Michael was pounding the foot pedals and pulling hard left on the stick. Just as it seemed the ground would rush up to meet them, the spinning abruptly ended and they were swooping in a tight arc that left her stomach somewhere far behind them. The engine growled back into life and slowly they levelled off at what felt like little more than treetop height.
‘Sorry about that,’ Michael said calmly. ‘I usually pull out a little more sharply.’ He turned back for the airfield.
Jenny sat in silence, struggling to catch her breath. Her throat was raw from screaming. Michael looked pale and rattled: she could tell he had managed to frighten himself as much as her.
Neither spoke until they had touched down and taxied to a halt.
Jenny yanked at her seat belt. ‘I thought you might apologize.’
‘I already did.’
‘Really? I should report you. You obviously can’t be trusted.’
Michael said, ‘That lasted twenty-five seconds. Try doing that twelve times over and sending a text while you’re at it.’
‘Did you think I hadn’t got that point?’
She searched for the door handle.
‘All right, I shouldn’t have done it. I didn’t plan to . . . It was just an impulse – to make you understand.’
‘How do you get out of this thing?’
‘Listen, Jenny—’
She spun round in her seat and slapped him hard across the face. ‘You bastard!’
Stunned, Michael pressed a hand to his stinging face. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
He threw open the cockpit door and jumped out. ‘Long story.’
She would gladly have hit him again. He had been sitting in the passenger seat staring out of the window for close to an hour. No more apologies, no explanation. Not a word.
Then it started, out of nowhere.
He’d killed his first civilians as a young pilot in Bosnia in September ’95. He was part of NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force, flying Tornados out of Aviano in Italy. His job was to take out a bridge the Serbian army was using to transport supplies up to its encampments in the hills surrounding Sarajevo. He hit the bridge first time, only it happene
d to be covered with refugees travelling in the opposite direction: thirty-five men, women and children. Their shattered remains were filmed by an Italian film crew and all the airmen got to watch the results of their handiwork on the evening news.
During the fortnight of raids he notched up several more civilian kills; how many he never found out. Their officers told them it was justifiable collateral damage; a few lives lost to save many more. It was a doctrine that was carried into the Afghan and Iraq campaigns. They attacked few purely military targets: the groups of militia they hunted were mostly holed up in civilian villages and compounds. You learned to be accurate, he said, the video replay proving that you’d slotted the missile straight into the ring of sandbags where the gunmen were sheltering, but often you’d see the figures scattering in the background: women, children, goats, all running for their lives.
It was strange how different men reacted to killing. Some appeared genuinely to thrive on it, each death seeming to build them up further, while others buckled and lost themselves in drink or drugs. While he was still in uniform, Michael believed he had managed to get away without permanent damage. He hardly drank and always slept at night. He counted himself one of the few lucky ones. Then one day, nearly three months after becoming a civilian, he was standing on a tube platform on the London Underground when he saw a young woman dressed head to foot in a light blue niqab just like the ones Afghan women wore, and an image rushed back to him. He had been called in to clear out a wadi along which a group of Taliban fighters had fled, having ambushed a British foot patrol. He swooped in low and saw about a dozen of them: men with rifles and RPGs running down the dried-up riverbed, the banks too steep for them to scramble up to the safety of the surrounding undergrowth. He mowed them down so easily he almost felt cheated. Having turned about for a second pass to mop up any he had missed, he saw another figure darting out from behind a rock. His finger had hit the trigger before his brain had registered who he was killing. It was a woman with her hands up. And they remained above her head even as the bullets ripped her in half and sent her severed torso flying high into the air. And from that moment on she had never left him, not for a single hour. He even had a name for her: Nikoo. It meant good and beautiful in the Afghan language.
One of the reasons it hadn’t worked out between him and Nuala, Michael said, was that each time they made love, all he could see was Nikoo flying into pieces. And now Nuala had died too, it felt like divine retribution.
Jenny said, ‘Have you had any help?’
‘A psychiatrist? I’d lose my pilot’s licence.’
‘Should you be flying if you’re suffering flashbacks?’
‘It doesn’t usually happen when I’m flying.’
She glanced over at him, ‘It did today, didn’t it?’
Michael shrugged.
‘Let me guess when else it’s happened,’ Jenny said. ‘The trip to Tyax – you and Nuala in the little float plane.’
He looked at her in astonishment.
‘It doesn’t take a lot of working out. You killed a woman from a plane. You feel guilty. And now you fly male jockeys for a living. I bet you find reasons not to teach female students, too.’
‘Nuala didn’t know about it. I handed her the controls . . . I told her I was feeling ill.’
‘You didn’t tell your lover, but you tell me.’
‘It’s different . . . I don’t know . . .’ He searched for a reason. ‘It must be that you’re older or something.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You know what I mean. You don’t expect a young woman to understand things like that. They’re full of energy and hope, you don’t want to bring them down.’
‘Keep going, you’re really building me up.’
‘Forget it. You wanted to know my story.’
‘I did not.’
‘In the plane – you said: “What’s wrong with you?” ’
‘Rhetorically.’
‘No.’
‘Oh – you know what I’m thinking, do you?’
‘I didn’t say that . . . But I think I might know what you’re feeling.’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘The same as me . . . Interested.’ He glanced at her, then turned his gaze out of the window.
Jenny said, ‘I think I preferred it when you weren’t talking.’
A silence fell between them.
Michael was the first to break it. ‘You haven’t told me about your new evidence. It’s something big, isn’t it?’
It was Jenny’s turn to look surprised.
Michael smiled. ‘I thought so. I read on the internet about the guy with the gun, but I don’t think he’s got anything to do with it. Just another drug runner is my guess. You’ve got to be a genius or an idiot to get a serious amount through the airports nowadays. Out in the Caribbean for six years – he would have had all the connections he needed.’
‘Maybe.’
‘So if it’s not him, what is it?’
‘It’s confidential.’
‘I told you my secrets.’
Jenny sighed. ‘Promise me it goes no further.’
‘Swear to die.’
She had a feeling that this was going to lead somewhere she could choose to avoid. But it was too late; she had already gone in too deep with Michael to back away now. ‘The sailor’s lifejacket was found washed up in the mouth of the Wye. The straps had been cut, the inflatable chamber had been punctured, and it had been roughly fifty yards away from an explosion of unmarked PBX – there was explosive residue on the fabric.’
Michael withdrew into himself as he seemed to turn the information over and over in his mind. His silence stretched on for several moments.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me what you’re thinking?’ Jenny asked.
‘Is there the same residue on his body?’
‘I’ll have test results tomorrow.’
‘What about the girl?’
‘I no longer have access to her.’
He gave a dismissive grunt.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means whatever we think we know now it’s bound to be wrong.’
At least it was something they could agree on.
Nuala’s flat was on the second floor of a converted Victorian house in a side street off the Uxbridge Road; as close to town as a pilot’s wage would allow, and a thirty-minute drive to the airport. She could have lived in a leafy village in Berkshire on the other side of Heathrow, Michael said, but she preferred the restless energy of the city, the streets full of Asian and Afro-Caribbeans, all the ethnic shops and food stores. He struggled to share her enthusiasm for London. Having spent many hard years in godforsaken places, he could think of nowhere he would rather be than the quiet of the English countryside.
The locksmith company sent an eager and talkative boy of eighteen called Mohammed, who barely glanced at Jenny’s ID before going to work as keenly as a thief. His jobs were mostly for bailiffs, he said. They’d get a warrant, wait for the debtor to leave home, then sneak in and seize the goods while he, or just as often she, was out. That way you avoided trouble. If the debtor was holed up indoors there were crafty ways of prising him out. He knew a bailiff who would phone saying he was from Western Union and had some money waiting for collection at the local franchise. To make it fun, he’d sometimes pretend it was a prize from an online lottery. One time, he told a man he’d won ten million euros. Mohammed claimed to have found the victim of the prank dead from a heart attack, the phone still clenched in his hand.
Michael and Jenny waited patiently, the job turning out to be trickier than Mohammed had anticipated. There was no one at home in the downstairs flat, meaning first they had to negotiate the front door. There was a deadbolt and a separate spring-latch mortise, both of which had to be picked. Nuala’s front door on the upstairs landing was a bigger challenge: a multi-point system that required two keys to be turned simultaneously. Jenny learned more about locksmithing in twenty minutes than she had ever w
anted to.
When at last the door swung open and Mohammed had taken his £200 in cash, Jenny asked Michael if he would like to go in first, perhaps to spend a few moments alone.
The prospect seemed to alarm him. ‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind,’ he said.
Jenny stepped inside and he followed.
It was just as he remembered it, Michael said, apart from the new set of blinds at the windows. It had a modern, pared-down feel, more like a hotel suite than a place someone called home. Apart from the small bedroom and bathroom, the flat was open-plan: a simple, white and chrome kitchen diner opening onto the main living space. There was a pair of simple Japanese-style sofas arranged around a low glass table, a flat-panel TV and a handful of novels stacked on a slender steel rack that snaked up the wall.
‘She liked to live simply,’ Michael said. ‘She used to say this place was the one thing in her life over which she had complete control.’
‘I’m still surprised,’ Jenny said. ‘I suppose you would expect a woman to have more stuff. There are no photographs, no pictures on the walls.’
‘She didn’t feel the need. She claimed not to have a sentimental bone in her body.’
Jenny drifted towards the desk and filing cabinet at the far end of the room. ‘Did you believe her?’
‘I never really questioned it . . . I remember one time she said that she had always known she would never have children.’
‘Like a premonition?’
‘No. Not like that.’ He joined her at the desk. ‘I think she meant that she would always be too caught up with her work. All her energy went into worrying about people flying in planes.’
Jenny nodded, but privately she thought it sounded like the kind of thing a young woman who was frightened of remaining alone might say. She speculated that Nuala would have bet a lot on Michael, seeing him as a man to share her future with. Having him leave her as she turned thirty would have been a heavy blow.
‘I see a scanner and printer but no computer,’ Jenny said.
Michael checked under the desk. ‘It’s not here – this is where she always sat down to work. She always had a laptop.’
He pulled open the single drawer beneath the desk and found several bunches of keys and airside passes for various airports in continental Europe and the Middle East, along with a photocopy of her pilot’s licence and her most recent medical certificate.
