For Death Comes Softly

by Hilary Bonner

  Above the engine noise you couldn’t hear the cheering of the people standing in the churchyard as we began to drop down out of the sky but you could see their excitement. Many of them were waving. I pushed my face to the cabin window and waved back. Abri was a glorious sight. The whole island had been decked out for the party. There were streamers and flags flying, white-clothed tables covered the lawn outside The Tavern and bow-tied waiters were already scurrying about. The whole thing was quite breath-taking, wonderfully festive, wonderfully romantic.

  The crowd surged out of the churchyard to the helicopter landing pad just beyond. It was extraordinary to think that all those people were there to greet me, that they were anxious for the first glimpse of me. Not DCI Piper, but Robin Davey’s bride.

  I felt a tremendous glow of happiness and a certain amount of wonderment as I peered at the scenes on the ground which awaited me. I checked my watch. It was just on noon and our timing was perfect. Robin had been right. The early morning mist had completely disappeared and this was already a much warmer day than we had any right or reason to expect at the beginning of April, warm enough to make the lovely old church below me shimmer in the white glare of the sun. It almost appeared as if the building was moving. The walls seemed to be shuddering in a kind of heat haze . . .

  Then I felt my breath catch in my throat as a terrible reality overwhelmed me. It was no illusion. The walls of Abri Island Parish Church were shuddering. Great chunks of stone began to fall from them and parts of the roof flew through the air. The churchyard seemed to be sinking. Several big solid gravestones disappeared abruptly into the cavernous cracks which were opening up in all directions. People began to run. One woman collapsed to the ground, felled by some catapulting missile, and then seemed to be literally swallowed up by the earth. I caught a last horrifying glimpse of her face, her mouth wide open in a scream which nobody could hear. The church walls were no longer shuddering, they were waving, like the giant wings of some obscene dying creature revealing the decay of its innermost self. The earth seemed to open up – one monster crack now gaped and stretched its way across half the island. In ghastly slow motion the church and everyone inside it, the recently constructed foundations for the new hotel, The Tavern decked out in flags, and the wonderful old house which had been Robin’s home for so long, sank into the jaws of the chasm as if they had never been.

  Fifteen

  The scenes below us on the island were horrendous, yet at first none of us really reacted. There was total silence in the chopper apart from the roar of the engines. Then Clem began to scream. She uttered no words. Just an almost inhuman cry of terrible anguish. Her husband Brian and her five-year-old son Luke were both somewhere in the mayhem below. So was our mother. So was Robin and his brother James. So were so many friends and relatives. All I felt was a kind of numbness. I did not try to comfort her. How could I? I was myself far too shocked.

  Suddenly the carnage seemed to grow more distant and I became aware that we were rising upwards, Eddie Brown was steering the helicopter up and away from the island.

  I rounded on him. My sister was not the only one close to hysteria.

  ‘No, no, go down, we’ve got to go down,’ I shouted.

  Eddie was almost unnaturally calm, his training had taken over, I suppose. He had only one consideration, which he quickly made clear, the safety of his craft and his passengers.

  ‘I can’t, Rose, it wouldn’t be safe,’ he said in a completely expressionless voice.

  The helicopter continued to rise and suddenly Clem too became aware that we were going up. She lunged at Eddie, pulling and pushing his arms, even trying to grab the controls.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing, you bastard,’ she screamed at him. ‘My child is down there, my child.’

  Eddie was a strong fit man, a professional quite intent on his task. Clem, about my size, was no match for him. He fended her off with one arm, continuing to pilot the aircraft with the other.

  Abruptly Clem changed tack. She threw herself sideways and started trying to wrench the door open, using her feet against the wall of the cockpit as she pulled fruitlessly at the handle.

  ‘My son, my son,’ she wailed.

  We were 100 feet or so above the ground, yet I had no doubt that, had she been able to open the door, she would have jumped, so desperate was she with panic and grief. Even at that moment, though, I knew that she could not do so. While we were in the air the door was sealed and electronically controlled. Only Eddie could open or close it.

  We rose further and further into the air and began to swing around, away from the island. I had been leaning forward, peering out through the windows at the awful scenes below. Eventually I slumped back into my seat, quite defeated. Young Ruth had not moved. She remained perfectly still and her face was deathly white. It was almost as if she had gone into a trance. Somewhere in the distance I could hear Eddie on the radio. He was the only one of us who was functioning.

  ‘Mayday, Mayday,’ he repeated in his solid calm voice, and proceeded to give a brief, lucid and factual account of what was happening on Abri. ‘It looks like an earthquake,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. The ground is just breaking up, people are being swallowed into the earth . . .’

  Strange really, but it was his controlled voice – and I learned later that it was in fact Eddie’s radio call which gave the first news of the accident to the mainland and sent the emergency services scurrying into action – which added the final grim reality.

  My sister was still clawing at the door, whimpering now rather than screaming. Maude leaned forward from her seat at the back of the cockpit and put one hand on Clem’s shoulder, muttering words of comfort. It was the first time I had heard Maude speak since the disaster had happened below us. I had almost forgotten she was there. Robin’s mother. A woman whose two sons were both somewhere on the devastated island. I glanced back at her. She was still wearing the big brown hat with the veil. The little I could see of her face was dead white.

  Eventually Clem, even in her distraught craziness, began to realise the hopelessness of what she was doing. She fell back from the door as abruptly as she had thrown herself at it, and collapsed in a heap on the cockpit floor.

  I was unable to comfort her. As a senior police officer, I had already seen more than my share of death in my time, but never never anything like this. Almost everyone I cared for in the world was down there on Abri. I felt sobs begin to rack my body. I thought my heart was going to break. My dream had become a nightmare.

  Clem seemed to be half out of her mind. Overcome with nausea she began to be sick, making no attempt to control her urging. Vomit poured out of her over the floor of the chopper. Roger had reached out now for Maude and was cradling her in his arms. Maude took off the big hat, put it in her lap and sat looking at it. There was no hysteria from either of these two – I would have expected none – but the pain in her eyes was terrible to see.

  Ruth was still staring trance-like into the middle distance. I continued to sob pathetically. Eddie continued to do what he did best. Fly his helicopter. He also talked ceaselessly into the radio. I became vaguely aware that he had announced his intention of taking us straight to the North Devon District Hospital at Barnstaple.

  ‘I have passengers on board in deep shock,’ I heard him say.

  The return journey from Abri to virtually the closest part of the mainland from the island took only a few minutes. It felt like a lifetime. The helicopter landing pad at the North Devon hospital is just to the rear of the main building. I remember thinking obliquely that it was going to get a lot of use that day.

  When we touched down Eddie switched off the engines, unlocked the doors, and turned his attention to his stricken passengers. Clem, still slumped on the floor, seemed superficially at least to be in the worst state. Eddie tried to help her to her feet, but she appeared to have no desire to stand up, nor indeed to move at all. Eventually he gave it up as a lost cause, and instead bent over, pi
cked her up off the floor and carried her down the steps onto the hard Tarmac. Her vomit stained his pristine white jacket. The gold epaulettes gleamed in the sunshine. It was all so unreal. I grasped Ruth’s hand tightly and together we followed Eddie and Clem, with Roger and Maude just behind us.

  There was quite a reception waiting for us. At least two photographers and a TV news team, from Westcountry TV, I later learned, did their best to overwhelm us. The press had apparently picked up the Mayday signal, and rushed to the hospital where Eddie had said over the air that he was heading. Looking back we must have been quite a sight, and manna from heaven for press photographers, not to mention TV – Eddie in his gold-braided Ruritania suit carrying the near comatose Clem in her blue satin dress, me in all my designer wedding dress glory holding the dazed Ruth by the hand, and Roger and Maude, in her six-inch heels, with her head held up high and her chin set, quite determined not to break down in public.

  A reporter started firing questions at us and a uniformed police sergeant stepped forward to guide us into the ambulance which was waiting to take us to the hospital emergency reception area. I was still weeping and I could hardly see through my tears. All of us allowed ourselves, almost gratefully, to be clasped in the grasp of officialdom.

  To my eternal shame all I could think about was Robin. My lover. My idol. The man I was to marry. Was he alive?

  Sixteen

  Shocked and bewildered as I was, I quickly became aware of the buzz of activity in Accident and Emergency. The area was being cleared to cope with a sudden influx of casualties. All of us on the helicopter were given a medical check-up – except Eddie Brown. He had taken off again straight away back to Abri to join in the rescue operation. If I had realised what he had been planning to do I would have attempted to go with him. As it was I found myself ushered into the hospital’s relatives’ room.

  There was plenty of hot sweet tea and sympathy but there could be no comfort. News seemed a long time coming through and I even wondered if it was being deliberately withheld.

  I knew from my police training that both a Survivor Reception Area and a Relatives’ Centre would already have been set up, probably in hotels somewhere, and a police-run Casualties Bureau to assimilate information. There were 338 people on Abri that day – the 67 long-time island residents, all invited to the wedding, 228 other guests, the outside caterers brought in from Ilfracombe for the big occasion, the vicar from Bideford, and the members of a well known Devon jazz band, The Dave Morgan Five, over from Plymouth.

  The bureau’s job would be to log, as it became available, the details of everyone involved in the disaster – those who had escaped unhurt, the injured and the degree of their injuries, and, of course, the dead.

  I shuddered. It was my natural instinct to be doing something, but I knew that my best chance of learning exactly what had happened and, more importantly, who had survived and who hadn’t, would be to stay-put for as long as the hospital let me. In addition I was still wearing my wedding dress which gave a kind of eerie unreality to all that was happening.

  Somebody handed me yet another cup of tea. My hand was shaking and I spilt some of it on my dress. It was strange to think that earlier in the day that would have seemed like a disaster.

  Eventually a young woman constable came to tell us that two Navy rescue helicopters from RAF Chivenor were already ferrying the most seriously injured to hospitals in the area, not just the North Devon District, which could not possibly have coped alone with the magnitude of the disaster, but also the Royal Devon and Exeter at Wonford, Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, Torbay General, and the Musgrove at Taunton. The Clovelly and Appledore lifeboats were on their way to Abri, several fishing boats had offered their help, and about forty survivors, including many of the less seriously injured, had been picked up aboard a dredger which had fortuitously been at work in the Bristol Channel not far from Abri and had immediately headed for the island. The tides were right for the dredger to come into Ilfracombe and she was due to arrive there within the hour. Paramedics had been winched from a helicopter onto the dredger and were already at work. More were waiting on the quayside at Ilfracombe.

  ‘The survivors will be triaged on the spot there,’ said the constable.

  I understood the term, which dates back to the Napoleonic Wars. I knew it meant that as well as giving what on-site emergency medical care they could the paramedics would process all the dredger’s passengers including the apparently unhurt – this involved a quick medical examination and an even quicker decision on where the survivor should be taken depending on the level of his or her injuries or shock.

  The entire island was being evacuated as quickly as possible, I was not surprised to learn. Those who were fit enough were being loaded onto the Puffin which was being used as an emergency base off Abri and would not sail for the mainland until much later.

  I had to find out about Robin. Good news or bad, the waiting was the worst of all.

  ‘Do you have any names yet?’ I asked hesitantly. Robin dominated my thinking, over-shadowed all the many deaths and injuries I knew there must have been.

  Maude was sitting quietly nursing Ruth on her lap. Ruth still seemed incapable of reacting to anything. Roger was there too, a comforting arm around Maude’s shoulders, and I sensed her stiffen as I asked the question. She stood to lose two sons that day.

  ‘There’s this list, ma’am, but only the helicopter cases are on it so far,’ said the constable. I snatched the piece of paper from her hand and quickly scanned the names – just twenty or so of them, and all very seriously injured. Neither Robin, James, nor my mother, my nephew or his father were on the list. I did not know whether to be relieved or not.

  I could feel Maude and Roger’s eyes fixed on me. I met Maude’s gaze first and shook my head. She was still holding her incongruous oversized wedding hat in her free hand. She clutched it tightly and her knuckles were white.

  I turned my attention back to the constable. I knew from her form of address that she must have been told I was a DCI. I didn’t feel much like a DCI, but I was in control again, just about. My wedding dress was suddenly a liability. I didn’t reckon I could think straight until I got rid of it.

  ‘What’s your name, constable?’ I asked.

  Mary Riley, I was told.

  ‘OK, Mary,’ I said. ‘What do you think are the chances of getting me some sensible clothes?’

  ‘I’ll do my best, ma’am,’ she said.

  Her best was pretty damn good. Less than half an hour later she returned with a pair of jeans, a sweater, and even some elderly trainers which were almost the right size.

  ‘There’s always a store of clothes somewhere in a hospital if you know where to look,’ she responded when I congratulated her. I tried not to think about who they would have belonged to and why they were available.

  I could sit and wait no longer. It wasn’t in my nature. I tried to forget that I was a bride on my wedding day, to step outside myself, to force myself to function. Immediately after having changed my clothes I promised Maude and Roger that I would return as soon as possible, and left them to their tea and sympathy. Clem’s shock was so severe that she had been admitted and heavily sedated. I went to the ward where I knew she had been taken and slipped behind the curtain surrounding her bed. She was fast asleep. Her wedding attire had been swapped for a hospital nightgown and she looked quite peaceful. I remember thinking how short-lived that peace was going to be. When she woke up the horror would envelop her again. That was how it was going to be for all of us, I feared, probably for the rest of our lives.

  I kissed her forehead lightly before I left. Then I sought out the lobby area in Accident and Emergency where the ambulance had delivered us, and sat down to wait for more arrivals, trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. Apart from our little party, only one other helicopter had come in to the North Devon District Hospital so far, and the hospital emergency procedure was already in full swing in preparation for a much greater
influx of injured people. A row of trolleys as lined up by the double doors and a group of nurses and porters – many of whom I guessed would have been off duty and had been called in to boost the hospital staff to its maximum – were hovering around making the most of the calm before the storm.

  Peter Mellor and his wife were in the first ambulance I saw arrive. Karen Mellor seemed superficially uninjured but was obviously in deep shock. Peter had one arm around her, ever protective. His face was bruised and cut and his other arm looked as if it were broken, but he was on his feet and walking.

  I went straight to him. I was delighted to see him relatively unharmed, nonetheless, and no doubt to my discredit, my first enquiry was not about his welfare.

  ‘Robin,’ I breathed. ‘Robin, have you seen him? Is he all right?’

  Mellor’s eyes were wild, his voice cracked and strange. He spoke to me, but it was as if he had not heard what I had asked.

  ‘The earth opened up, Rose,’ he said, using my Christian name probably for the first time ever. ‘It opened up and swallowed us.’

  ‘Robin,’ I said again. ‘Where is Robin?’

  Peter Mellor just looked at me. I wasn’t even sure that he was focusing properly.

  ‘There was a child, Rose,’ he said. ‘Right in front of me. A little boy. He disappeared into the ground. I tried to hold his hand, but he slipped away from me. I . . . I nearly went too . . .’

  Mellor’s voice broke. He was trembling. A nurse appeared and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders.

  My eyes filled with tears, although still I could not weep. I backed away, suddenly all too aware of the scale of this disaster. What if that child were Luke, I wondered, thinking at last of someone other than Robin. Clem would never get over it.