B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm

by M. R. Hall

  Without thinking, Jenny turned the key in the ignition, but as Michael leaped in, Dalton jumped out.

  ‘Leave him,’ Michael barked.

  Jenny pulled out into the road and slammed her foot to the floor, but the car’s headlights were already far in the distance and her hands were shaking so hard she could barely grip the wheel.

  Jenny was too shattered to make the two-hour journey home and there were no rooms vacant at the motel. Michael insisted she have the bed in his while he took a blanket and pillow and lay on the floor.

  During the drive back from their encounter with Dalton he had phoned Sandy Belling and caught her during an overnight turnaround in Cairo. She confirmed that Alan Farraday had died commuting home from work. According to the police account he had lost control of his bike and launched over the central reservation of the M4 motorway en route to Heathrow. He had been divorced six months previously and lived alone. The rumour among his colleagues was that he had been drinking.

  ‘Are you still awake?’ Jenny said.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Michael said groggily.

  ‘Do you believe that about Farraday?’

  ‘They happen.’

  ‘What do?’

  ‘Accidents. No one who’s interested in living rides a motorbike in November anyway.’

  ‘I still think it’s too much of a coincidence.’

  ‘It was an accident, that’s all.’ Michael said. ‘Airlines want to protect their business, but they don’t kill people. The moment you start believing that stuff, you’re officially insane.’

  ‘What’s making you so angry?’

  ‘I don’t believe in conspiracies.’

  ‘But we’ve just been followed—’

  ‘By a private detective. The airline’s jumpy and they’ve got wind that Dalton’s a loose cannon.’

  ‘Is that what you think Nuala was?’

  ‘She was a nice girl, but she would have believed in fairies at the end of the garden if enough people told her they’d seen them.’

  ‘I don’t understand . . . Dalton clearly thought something was being covered up, too. And do you remember when we spoke to Sandy Belling last week – she mentioned the military-sounding man who called her asking whether Nuala had her computer with her? She said he frightened her.’

  Michael fell silent. A while later, he said, ‘I want to let Nuala go.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she have wanted you to find out the truth?’

  ‘She went looking for trouble and she found it.’

  Jenny heard him roll over and let out a deep despairing sigh. She listened to his jerky breathing interrupted by moans and troubled, half-formed words. Worried for him, she reached down from the bed and stroked his head until slowly he became calm, and she too felt the heaviness of sleep descend.

  When she woke, he was gone.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE FROST LAY THICK AND HARD for the entire weekend. It was the kind of cold that prised its icy fingers under every door and clawed at Jenny’s skin when she left the warmth of her cottage to fetch firewood from the little tumbledown mill at the end of the garden. Not a bird or a rabbit stirred. The deer that came early each morning to drink from the stream stayed hidden in the shelter of the woods. At any moment she expected a call informing her that her inquest would not be allowed to continue, but her overseers remained as ominously silent as the crows perched on the birch tree opposite her study window.

  Michael’s phone remained switched off and he refused to answer her messages. When she allowed herself to think of him, it was with anxious concern. Their encounter with Dalton had caused his mood to darken even further. It was as if being confronted with the proof that Nuala had indeed got hold of dangerous information made him see it as confirmation that the world was after all as bleak a place as he had feared. She wanted to tell him it was all right, that there was nothing he could have done, that Nuala would have wanted him to keep safe, but at the same time she could hear him say that none of that was true, that Nuala had deliberately steered a perilous course, hoping against hope that he would do what she longed for and step in to rescue her.

  Aside from a brief conversation with her hung-over and monosyllabic son, the only other voice she heard all weekend belonged to the matron at her father’s nursing home, who interrupted her work with a call to say that he was stable but beginning to weaken. She didn’t state explicitly that he was past the point of no return and that his only daughter’s place was at his side, but that was the subtext she delivered in her quietly disapproving tone. Jenny assured her that she would be over in the next day or two, just as soon as work calmed down.

  It was nearly midnight when she turned out her desk lamp and packed her briefcase with all that she needed for court. She had no idea what tomorrow would bring, but as she climbed the narrow wooden stairs to bed, the vixen screeching across a frozen field sounded out a portent.

  The door to the hall in Sharpness was unlocked when Jenny arrived shortly before eight-thirty. Alison was already setting out the furniture and cranking up the radiators.

  ‘You’re early, Mrs Cooper,’ she said in the brisk, judgemental tone Jenny had heard so many times in recent weeks.

  ‘Would you like a hand?’

  ‘I can manage, thank you.’ She hoisted another chair from the top of a stack and thumped it on the floor.

  ‘Thank you for organizing the witness statements,’ Jenny said in an attempt to mollify her.

  ‘There’s no need to thank me for doing my job.’

  ‘I didn’t give you much time.’

  ‘I’ve had to get used to that.’ Another chair crashed onto the boards. ‘Though I must say I’ve had rather more than usual to cope with, what with you devoting so much attention to this case. There have been eight more deaths reported over the weekend.’

  ‘You’ve been to the office this morning?’

  ‘It doesn’t run itself.’ She scraped the chairs into a line, her every movement a minor act of revenge for some perceived crime Jenny had committed. ‘Lucky for you I did – there was an email from Dr Kerr. I left his report on your desk. I told him to be here promptly.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She gathered her strength. ‘Alison, is this about the photographer’s wife?

  ‘Someone had to talk to her.’

  ‘How was she?’ Jenny asked, refusing to be cowed.

  ‘Beside herself,’ Alison said. ‘She had spent the last two weeks thinking he’d been speeding because she’d had a row with him on the phone. They’d planned to go out that Saturday evening, but at the last minute he took off on a job. She had no idea he’d gone to meet another woman.’

  ‘Do we know for sure that’s what he was doing?’

  ‘He’d rented a hotel room in Stroud. She obviously went over to meet him there.’ Alison sighed impatiently. ‘You don’t get it, do you? While we’ve been sitting on our hands the poor widow has been blaming herself for her husband’s death.’

  ‘It couldn’t be helped.’

  ‘Of course it could have been helped. We could have been doing our jobs properly instead of the bidding of some crackpot American.’

  ‘Is that what you think this is?’

  Alison stopped what she was doing and turned to face her. ‘I’m not going to lie to you, Mrs Cooper, I’ve had Simon Moreton on the phone to me this weekend wanting to know every last detail of how you’ve been running this case and every other one you care to mention. He didn’t come out and say it, but he didn’t have to – he thinks you’re unbalanced.’

  So that’s what Moreton had been doing all weekend – gathering ammunition. ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘The truth, what did you expect?’

  ‘Do you think I’m unbalanced?’

  ‘I certainly didn’t tell him that,’ Alison said, dodging the question. ‘And for what it’s worth I think you could be a very good coroner, but you seem to have a self-destructive streak—’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me and tell me this was happening?
’

  Alison shook her head. ‘I can’t cope with this any more, Mrs Cooper. It happens time and again. You go overboard, the Ministry gets furious and I get stuck in the middle.’ Her voice filled with emotion as the bottled-up resentment of weeks and months came spilling out. ‘All I want is to do my job and sort my life out, and I’m not prepared to sacrifice what’s left of it for the sake of your crusades. I’m fifty-seven years old, I’ve got no husband, I live alone in a poky flat and you act as if we’re both prepared to risk it all – and for what?’

  ‘I’m sorry if you feel—’

  ‘I don’t feel, Mrs Cooper. It’s what you do. You don’t know when to stop. You say you care about all these people, but you don’t care enough about those closest to you, let alone yourself.’ Her eyes flooded with tears. ‘I’m sorry. Excuse me.’ She hurried out of the hall.

  Jenny had never felt more grateful for the magic contained in a small white pill than when she stepped out to face a packed and hostile courtroom. Not even Alison’s was a friendly face. The lawyers – Hartley for Ransome Airways, Bannerman for Sir James Kendall, Crowthorne for the North Somerset Police and Rachel Hemmings representing the Pattersons – were bristling with resentment at the repeated delays and obfuscation over evidence. Mrs Patterson couldn’t have looked more mistrustful and disappointed if Jenny had announced that she was in the pay of a hostile foreign power. And evidently the handsome fees she was generating for Galbraith’s firm were no longer enough to keep a smile on her solicitor’s face. His expression said that he had been through several days of torment and couldn’t wait for his ordeal to be over.

  The rows behind the lawyers were full to bursting. Among the closely packed journalists, news reporters and assorted observers who could have been from airlines, intelligence agencies or one of the many government departments touched by a major transport disaster, Jenny picked out the unsmiling face of Simon Moreton. And squeezed in at the end of the back row, almost forgotten, was the slight, timid figure of Brogan’s girlfriend, Maria Canavan.

  As she took her seat she reminded herself why she was putting herself through this ordeal. She pictured Amy Patterson’s slender body lying on the beach. She recalled every detail of her delicate, trusting features and thought of her freezing to death in the icy water. That was enough. She couldn’t understand why it wasn’t enough for everybody.

  Jenny turned to the jury, thanked them for their patience and assured them that she intended their duty to be over shortly. They would hear from five witnesses: a member of the public who had discovered a lifejacket believed to be Brogan’s; a forensic scientist who led the team which had examined it; a local man who had spotted strange aircraft over the estuary minutes after the crash; another who claimed to have heard them; and the brigadier in command of the nearby Beachley army base.

  Giles Hartley QC rose unprompted from his seat. ‘This is all extremely interesting, ma’am, and certainly news to me, as I’m sure it is to my learned friends. It is customary, indeed expected, however, that the coroner provide copies of witness statements in advance of a hearing.’

  ‘I appreciate that, Mr Hartley, but how can I put this delicately?’ Jenny glanced at Moreton. ‘The evidence raises certain security implications that were judged too sensitive to risk being leaked to the world at large.’

  ‘I see,’ Hartley said, and unable to resist probing at an open wound, continued: ‘I hope you’re not suggesting, ma’am, that you have bent to any improper pressure? You do appreciate that a higher court would look very dimly on such an admission. Indeed, if such were the case, these proceedings could be brought to an immediate halt.’

  ‘Nice try, Mr Hartley,’ Jenny said. ‘I can assure you, I haven’t bent to any pressure, nor do I intend to.’ She aimed her next remark at the journalists in the hall. ‘Any and all information I have received in relation to Mr Brogan’s death will be heard. It has never been my practice, nor will it ever be, to suppress evidence.’ She glanced again at Simon Moreton. ‘I can think of no greater crime against justice.’

  His face remained a tablet of stone.

  ‘And while we’re on the subject of incomplete evidence, Mr Hartley, I still expect to hear from Mr Ransome. Tomorrow morning?’

  ‘I shall take instructions, ma’am.’

  ‘No, Mr Hartley. You will convey my instructions to him. He will give evidence first thing tomorrow morning.’

  Hartley nodded with an expression of faux sincerity. ‘Very good, ma’am.’

  ‘May we have the first witness, please?’

  Alison walked the length of the hall and knocked on the door of the small side room she had allocated for witnesses. Moments later she returned with a witness Jenny had not seen before: Thomas Evans.

  A solid, no-nonsense man in his mid-fifties, Evans was known to nearly everyone in the town of Chepstow as the owner of a local firm of building contractors. Though by no means a wealthy man, he owned a modest thirty-foot ocean-going yacht which, when it wasn’t moored in Bristol marina, he kept in the mouth of the River Wye beneath the walls of Chepstow Castle.

  On the morning of the crash he had intended to go down to the boat to try to fix the seals on a faulty pump, but had become caught up with the unfolding news of the disaster on television. It was mid-afternoon by the time he rowed his dingy out to the middle of the river, and it had been dark for nearly an hour by the time he finished his job. He was up on deck making sure the boat was securely tied to the buoys before he left for the night, when he saw something glowing in the water off the port side. He fetched a boathook and fished it out. He saw immediately that it was a lifejacket, and a good one, too.

  ‘Please show the witness exhibit TE1.’

  Alison brought the evidence bag out from a holdall stowed under her desk and handed it to Evans. It contained the lifejacket enclosed in the sealed polythene bag in which it had been securely couriered back from Forenox.

  ‘Is that the item you retrieved from the water?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘It is,’ Evans said.

  ‘Was it floating on the surface when you first saw it?’

  ‘No. That was the odd thing. It was sort of suspended a few inches below. When I fetched it out I saw that it had a hole in it – a puncture.’

  ‘What did you do with it?’

  ‘To be honest I thought someone must have dumped it, thinking it was damaged beyond repair. But I thought I might be able to patch it up. I stowed it below, intending to have a look at it next time I was on the boat.’

  ‘Who did you think might have dumped a lifejacket?’

  ‘There were tens of rescue boats out on the water that day. Could have been anyone.’

  ‘I see. And did you check to see if it had any identifying marks?’

  ‘I saw that it came from Dublin, that’s all. Like I said, I thought it had been abandoned.’

  ‘Was there anything else about it that you noticed?’

  ‘Not that night, but later on – I saw that one of the straps had been cut. I guessed whoever discarded it must have done it to try to make it safe. You couldn’t wear it like that – there’s nothing to secure it.’

  Evans went on to explain how he had received an email circulated to local yacht club members from the police asking whether anyone had seen helicopters flying over the estuary shortly after the plane went down. It also mentioned that information was being sought about an Irish yacht that was hit by the plane. It was then that he made the connection with the lifejacket he had found the previous weekend and contacted Chepstow police station.

  ‘How far from the site of the plane crash was your yacht moored, Mr Evans?’

  ‘Over the water? About six miles or so.’

  ‘And what was the tide doing at the time you picked up the lifejacket?’

  ‘It was going out – just about low water, in fact.’

  ‘So the jacket was coming downstream along the River Wye towards the Severn estuary?’

  ‘It was.’

  Jenny refer
red back to the notes she has made during the evidence given by Dick Corton from the Marine Accident Investigation Branch during the previous week’s session. ‘High tide on the 9th was at approximately ten-thirty a.m., or one hour after the plane went down. That being so, if the lifejacket went into the water at approximately nine-thirty and was carried by the tide, it shouldn’t have been inland, it should have been miles to the west.’

  ‘You’d think so,’ Evans said, ‘but if it had made it as far as the Wye it could have got snagged up on a buoy line or a rope or something. There was plenty for it to catch on.’

  No expert on tides or geography, Jenny sketched a diagram of the estuary in her legal pad. The mouth of the Wye was right beneath the Welsh end of the Severn Bridge. The distance from there to where Evans’s yacht was anchored was approximately a mile. From the mouth of the Wye to the crash site was closer to five.

  ‘You’re familiar with the tides in the estuary, Mr Evans?’

  ‘I’ve been sailing it since I was a boy. There was no bridge to Bristol then – it was boat or swim.’

  He raised a chuckle from the jury and an arch smile from Giles Hartley.

  ‘Can you tell me, in your opinion, how this lifejacket could have travelled five miles up the estuary, turned left and been carried at least another mile up the Wye in one hour?’

  Evans shook his head. ‘Couldn’t happen.’

  Hartley shot to his feet. ‘With respect, ma’am, Mr Evans is an amateur sailor, not a maritime expert. His opinion on tidal flow is hardly reliable scientific evidence.’

  ‘Point taken, Mr Hartley. If you consider it necessary I’ll allow you to call such an expert – would that satisfy you?’

  Wrong-footed, Hartley replied that he reserved the right to do precisely that, and let Jenny continue.

  ‘Assuming the lifejacket could have gone in the water at a point closer to where you found it, how close would it have to have been to get as far as Chepstow in under an hour?’

  ‘The thing is,’ Evans said, ‘for anything to come up the Wye from the estuary it’s got to go in the water tight up close to that side. There’s no way it came all the way over from the other side where the plane went down.’