by M. R. Hall
He sifted through the keys. ‘Spare house keys, car keys, and company locker.’
‘We’d better take them,’ Jenny said.
Michael slipped them into his pocket. ‘She’ll have left her car at Heathrow – there’s a staff car park at the Ransome building. That’s where her locker is. I think she might have kept her company laptop in it.’
‘She had two computers?’
‘The company machine is just for flight planning and official notices and emails. Not for personal use.’
‘We’ll call by on the way home,’ Jenny said. She scanned the few shelves above the desk: a handful of technical manuals, and an old university textbook on mechanical engineering. ‘Not many books.’
‘She read as much as she could online,’ Michael said. ‘She had a thing about not wasting paper. Guilt at wrecking the climate with passenger jets, I expect.’
Jenny drew open the upper drawer of the stylish wooden filing cabinet. It contained all of Nuala’s personal papers: domestic bills, wage slips, bank and credit card statements. Glancing through them, there was nothing out of the ordinary. Nuala was paid between four and five thousand pounds each month and spent less. There was close to forty thousand sitting in a deposit account.
Michael pulled open the bottom drawer.
Jenny knelt beside him and saw that the contents were divided up into six hefty suspension files marked MECHANICAL, ELECTRICAL, SOFTWARE, NAVIGATION/ATC, EMPLOYMENT and MISCELLANEOUS.
‘It’s all her Airbuzz stuff,’ Michael said.
‘Printed out on paper,’ Jenny remarked.
‘Didn’t want to lose it, I guess.’
He pulled out the MECHANICAL file and laid it on the floor. They sifted through pages of reports filed by air accident investigation authorities around the world that Nuala had downloaded from the internet. All the cases she had collected related to mechanical faults on commercial airliners. From malfunctioning landing gear to burst hydraulics, to toxic engine fumes penetrating the cabin, to an incident in which an entire wing severed from a small passenger prop with the loss of all lives. The doomed plane’s wing had suffered metal fatigue and been repaired in so many places that one afternoon it simply sheared off at 5,000 feet.
‘These all look like official investigations,’ Jenny said, ‘not anecdotal reports.’
‘I know,’ Michael said, reaching for the SOFTWARE file. ‘I doubt she would have printed anything out that would have linked her directly to the Airbuzz forum. She wasn’t stupid.’
They worked through each of the files in turn and found the same thing: Nuala had collected a library of official reports into accidents and major mechanical faults that had occurred during the last five years. The documents were in precise chronological order, the most recent nearest the front.
‘Why was she doing this?’ Jenny asked.
‘All pilots care about this stuff, but she was a little obsessed.’
‘Did she work entirely alone? There must have been other pilots who were frequent visitors to the forum.’
‘I don’t think you’re understanding quite how sensitive these incidents are—’ He stopped mid-sentence, his attention caught by a document he had just pulled out of the MISCELLANEOUS file. ‘Wow . . .’
‘What is it?’
‘Something that proves my point.’
He handed her the single sheet of paper. It was headed Side Letter and was dated 18 November the previous year. It read:
As a further fundamental condition of employment, the pilot hereby promises and undertakes to seek the advice and guidance of the airline’s legal department prior to notifying the Civil Aviation Authority in the UK, or the equivalent relevant authority in any foreign country, of any incident that might be deemed a ‘serious incident’ or ‘accident’ or other reportable event. Notwithstanding any legal requirement to report any such incident, the pilot hereby accepts that failure to act in accordance with the guidance of the airline’s legal department in relation to any such incident may result in termination of employment.
Further, the pilot hereby accepts that any disclosure to any third party of any or the whole of this side letter shall constitute a fundamental breach of the contract of employment and shall result in summary dismissal.
The printed names and signatures of the parties beneath the text had been blacked out prior to copying.
‘The commander of an aircraft has a legal duty to report an accident or any serious incident that could have resulted in an accident,’ Michael said. ‘What amounts to a serious incident is something of a grey area. There’s not a passenger plane in the sky that hasn’t got a handful of faults logged at any one time. It all comes down to how jumpy the pilot is as to how he responds.’
‘I’m no expert in employment law,’ Jenny said, ‘but surely you can’t threaten to sack a pilot for doing his legal duty.’
‘You can try,’ Michael said. ‘What’s an airline got to lose? It’s a buyer’s market. Qualified pilots are ten a penny.’
Jenny studied the letter closely for any further clue as to its origin. There was none. The only hints lay in the fact that the text was blotchy, suggesting it had been scanned and emailed before being printed out. The absence of a web address at the top of the page indicated that it hadn’t been printed from the internet but rather sent directly to Nuala.
‘It’s the kind of thing she was dealing with all the time,’ Michael said. ‘It’s just odd that she printed it.’
‘Maybe it was hers?’ Jenny said. Then the thought struck her: there was not a shred of unwanted paper on or around the desk, not a spent envelope or a discarded note. ‘You don’t think she might have left it here on purpose?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, look at this place. It’s immaculate. Even for a tidy person this is spotless. Every document in date sequence, all her personal papers perfectly ordered . . .’ She stopped herself.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ Michael demanded.
‘It feels unnatural . . . It’s the kind of thing I’ve seen with suicides.’
‘She was in a plane crash.’
‘But what was she doing on that plane?’
Michael shrugged. If he had a suspicion, he wasn’t committing to it.
Jenny said, ‘Let’s load this stuff into my car. I want to talk to your friend Sandy.’
TWELVE
SANDY BELLING LIVED ALONE with her seven-month-old child in a semi-detached house in one of the anonymous suburban streets in Heston, on the far western fringes of London. It was an area distinguished only by the thunder of the aircraft engines which passed over every forty-five seconds, sixteen hours a day, and was home to many of the thousands of low-paid aircrew, ground staff and myriad airport workers who flooded into Heathrow each morning.
She had just returned from three back-to-back round trips to Abu Dhabi and hadn’t seen her baby for four days. In common with many other female cabin crew, she had to rely on her mother to do the child-minding while she was away working and it was evidently causing tensions. She told Michael she was thinking of switching to a job on the check-in desk. The pay was less, but the hours regular. Jenny noticed that the baby had dark olive skin with tightly curled thick, black hair. Sandy was pale with mousy hair and freckles, and the kind of friendly, open face you expected to see when nervously stepping through the door of an aircraft.
They sat at the kitchen table while Sandy spooned something orange from a jar into her son’s mouth, trying to remind him who was mother. It felt almost indecent to talk about her dead friend when she was so clearly under strain, but Michael had promised Jenny she was tough enough to take it.
Jenny got her to talk a little about how she and Nuala had become acquainted, and learned that they had met at a staff party nearly three years ago. Nuala had recently joined Ransome Airways and Sandy, already an old hand at twenty-six, had let her in on some of the company secrets. There was a lot of gossip between pilots and cabin crew, mostly about who
had slept with whom, but also office politics. Personality traits became exaggerated in the enclosed space of an aircraft cabin; small niggles very soon became big issues and the best captains liked to be kept abreast of tensions. Sandy and Nuala had continued to work on the same routes and had become a regular team, priding themselves on running a happy plane.
‘Did she ever talk to you about technical issues to do with aircraft?’ Jenny asked.
‘No, only things that affected the cabin – electrical faults, all that—’
‘But you knew she was interested in air accidents?’
‘She mentioned it.’ Sandy wiped the baby’s mouth with a paper towel. ‘That’s not really the kind of thing I like to think about.’
‘It wasn’t always shop talk with Nuala. When we were together these two were always partying,’ Michael said, in a failed attempt to lift the mood.
Sandy shot him a look which told of a painful history. Jenny could imagine the long hours she would have spent consoling her friend after Michael left her.
‘Did she ever discuss her employment?’ Jenny asked.
Sandy looked puzzled. ‘No.’
‘She didn’t complain about working conditions?’
‘Only as much as anyone else. At least we had jobs. Lots of my friends in other airlines have been made redundant. It’s just as bad for pilots – if you’re over fifty, you can forget it.’
‘Tell me how she had been lately.’
‘Busy. She’d been flying to Dubai several times a week. A new route takes some getting used to – you have to adjust your body clock as well as everything else. She came over for a meal a couple of weeks before Christmas and she seemed tired and bit stressed. Not herself.’
‘Did she say why?’
‘No . . .’
Sandy unbuckled the baby from his high chair and lifted him into the playpen. Jenny exchanged a look with Michael, both of them having the same thought – that Sandy was hiding something.
‘But you had a suspicion?’
Sandy dangled some toys in front of her child, but he was more interested in beating the mat with his fists.
Jenny persisted. ‘What do you think was the matter?’
Sandy glanced again at Michael. ‘As far as I know, she hadn’t been seeing anyone for . . . well, since Michael and her. I asked her how she’d been getting on with the first officer she’d been flying with to Dubai. He’s a guy called David Cambourne – he’s not the most popular. She said “fine”, but in a way which said she didn’t want to talk about it.’ She aimed her remark at Michael: ‘You know how she could do that.’
‘So there was a problem between them?’ Jenny said.
Sandy was reluctant to answer.
‘Anything at all you can remember would help.’
‘How? What’s her personal life got to do with a plane crash? I knew the pilot and the co-pilot of that plane, and half the cabin crew. All of them had problems – they were human beings.’
Jenny backed off, only now fully appreciating just how much grief Sandy and her colleagues must have been dealing with in the ten days since the crash. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘There was gossip, that’s all,’ Sandy said. ‘One of the girls thought she’d seen him coming out of her hotel room in Dubai. It could only have been a rumour, but that’s enough. Pilots aren’t allowed to be in relationships together, and they’re certainly not allowed to break the law in a foreign country. If that had got back to management they’d both have been sacked.’
‘That sounds very serious. Didn’t you ask her about it?’
Sandy shook her head.
Jenny made a guess. ‘Because if you knew, technically you’d be obliged to tell someone.’
Sandy said, ‘I’m a single mother. I need my job. Nuala knew that.’
‘Did they continue to fly together?’
‘Yes. I was on one of their flights just after Christmas.’
‘And the rumours?’
‘For all I know they could have been malicious. Let’s face it, male pilots don’t want women taking their jobs. A woman can always be looked after by a man – that’s how people think, especially when things are tight like they are now.’
Michael said, ‘Sandy knew Nuala better than me, but I don’t think she would have risked her job that way. Let’s just say she had powers of self-control not possessed by most.’
Sandy looked at him in a manner that was more pitying than accusing.
‘Did she tell you she was going to New York?’ Jenny asked.
‘No. I already told Michael – all I heard was that she had phoned in sick.’
‘You didn’t call her?’
Sandy sucked in her cheeks and turned back to the baby. She looked as if she might cry.
Softening her tone, Jenny said, ‘You were worried it might have had something to do with the rumours?’
Sandy gave a hint of a shrug.
‘You shouldn’t feel guilty,’ Jenny said. ‘It’s not your fault the airline’s being run this way.’
‘I was meant to be her best friend . . .’ She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
Michael said, ‘This guy Cambourne, what’s he like? Could Ransome have been trying to get rid of two problems at once?’
‘He’s a bit distant, that’s all. Fond of himself.’
‘One to stick strictly to the rules?’
‘You’d think so.’
‘Any incidents on any of his flights that you know of? Anything that could have led to an accident? October, November time, perhaps?’
Sandy cast her mind back. ‘I heard about a flight to Zagreb that overshot by fifteen minutes. By the time they’d turned round they had only just enough fuel to land. That was about November. He might have been first officer.’
‘What was this, a canteen rumour?’
‘I overheard some of the young girls talking on the staff shuttle. No one with any sense gossips in the canteen.’
Michael glanced at Jenny, both of them having the same thought: the side letter could have been imposed on Cambourne’s contract.
‘Did you ever hear any more about it?’ he asked.
Sandy said no, it was just the once.
The baby started to grizzle. Sandy lifted him out of the playpen and pressed him to her shoulder. She looked exhausted, her four days in the air catching up with her.
‘I think we should go,’ Michael whispered to Jenny. He eased his chair away from the table and turned to Sandy. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a number for Cambourne?’
‘I think so. But you didn’t get it from me.’ She handed Jenny the baby. ‘Would you mind?’
‘No—’
Jenny took the grumbling child in her arms while Sandy crossed the room to pick up her phone to search her contacts. It had been years since Jenny had held a baby. She had forgotten how delicate they felt; they were fragile like nothing else.
‘Here,’ Sandy said, and showed the number to Michael. He punched it into his phone.
Sensing Jenny’s awkwardness, the infant started to cry. Sandy hurried over and took him back, her gentle strokes and reassuring whispers instantly soothing him into a torpor. It was a gift Jenny had never possessed.
Jenny said, ‘I can see you’re a natural.’
‘Thanks.’ Sandy seemed touched.
‘If anything else occurs to you, you’ll let me know? It’ll be strictly confidential, of course.’
‘Sure.’
Jenny turned to leave. As she followed Michael to the front door, a huge jet rumbled overhead. The house shook.
‘That’ll cost someone a fine,’ Michael said. He turned to say goodbye and saw that Sandy was weeping.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No. You had to . . .’ She rocked to and fro, seeking comfort in the embrace of her child. ‘A man phoned last week. I’m not in the book, but he got hold of the number and phoned here. He said he was part of the official investigation into the air crash. He knew I was a friend of Nuala’s. He
wanted to know whether she had her computer with her on the flight. I told him I didn’t know . . . He didn’t want to believe me.’
‘Did he give his name?’ Jenny asked.
‘Sanders. He sounded very severe, like an army officer or something.’
‘Did he say anything else?’
She nodded. ‘He said he would be back in touch, and next time I had better have an answer . . . Do you know who he is? He frightened me.’
‘No,’ Jenny said. ‘But if I find out, I’ll be sure to let you know.’
Cambourne didn’t answer his phone, but several minutes after Jenny had left a message saying she would like to speak to him about a flight to Zagreb that had overshot, he called her back.
‘Who is this?’ he demanded.
‘My name’s Jenny Cooper. Coroner for the Severn Vale District. I’m very interested in why Nuala Casey was on a flight to New York.’
‘I’ve no idea.’
Michael urged her on from the passenger seat.
Jenny pushed her luck. ‘I know enough about your relationship with Miss Casey to think that’s not very likely, Mr Cambourne.’
He fell silent.
‘You’re not in any kind of trouble. All I want is to talk to you off the record for a few minutes. I’m fifteen minutes from Heathrow, where are you?’
‘I’m flying out of Terminal Five later this evening. I’ll be there in just over an hour.’
‘Perfect. I’ll give you a call.’
She left Michael in the car park outside the Ransome building, searching for Nuala’s Fiat, while she went inside. The airline’s cut-price ethic extended to the tired decor in their reception area. She approached a grimy desk and spoke to the sour-faced employee seated behind it. A man determined to make full use of his sliver of power, he studied Jenny’s identification with officious attention to detail before lifting the receiver to call through to the office.
Interrupting him, Jenny said, ‘I have a key to Captain Casey’s locker. All I need is for you to show me where it is.’
