by Rob Campbell
“So, what are you saying?” asked Monkey.
I thought about the reasons why the vicar might be here amongst the crowd. It wasn’t his mere presence that bothered me. It was the look on his face. Why did he look so concerned? As far as I knew, he didn’t have any kids – he wasn’t even married – so I assumed that he wasn’t afraid that any loved ones had been somehow caught up in the fire.
“Look at his face – he looks terrified.”
“Can you blame him?” asked Monkey incredulously. “He’s the vicar in town – it’s his job to be concerned.”
“True. Plus, I daresay he’s worried about the effect that it might have on his congregation.”
“Might double his workload,” suggested Anja, who’d been listening in.
“Oh my God!” Monkey suddenly said, looking over at the pale vicar and back to me. “His congregation…”
“Exactly,” I said, pleased that my friend was catching up. I turned to Anja, “What did you say about more than one person having the same nightmare?”
For the second time in less than an hour, Anja’s voice took on a robotic tone. “Something about a fireball coming out of the sky.”
Looking into the flames engulfing the petrol station, I shuddered despite the heat, trying to shake the image of the dead pilot, strapped into the cockpit of his plane, in the field beyond.
Chapter 6
Walking past the scene of carnage, Charles Gooch surveyed the wreckage of the petrol station. The incident had made the national news; whilst firefighters fought to bring the blaze under control, images of the crowds of people kept at bay behind flimsy lines of tape had played out on the late evening news. Now, the morning after, there was a certain serenity to the place.
If you could call the blackened husk of the kiosk serene. The family of the pump attendant who’d died last night probably wouldn’t see it that way.
The sense of shock was palpable. Dour expressions dominated the faces of the few people that had made it out at this early hour. No words were necessary, tight smiles and knowing looks being the order of the day, a grim acceptance that something terrible had been visited upon their town.
Gooch couldn’t help but wonder what the cause of this tragedy might be. For once, it wasn’t his handiwork.
With his right hand, he idly twisted the yellow and black police tape that had been strung between a series of makeshift bollards and posts. Suddenly, he felt a slight tremor in his left hand where it gripped his briefcase. He looked down, surprised to see that it was the briefcase that was vibrating. Not surprised that the contents of the briefcase were vibrating, because that happened whenever he fed a new item into its dark interior. But he wondered what was causing it at this specific moment. He scanned the debris-strewn forecourt; two burned-out cars and a canopy roof whose gleaming white trim had been transformed into an ugly, black mass of molten gloop at the far end. Nobody moved beyond the tape. Although he was sure the scene would be swarming with investigators in a few hours, the only others currently present were a couple of police officers who watched over the place from the comfort of their patrol car.
Yet still, the briefcase rumbled – a gentle hum that reverberated up his arm.
For some reason, he kept thinking back to the young attendant who’d died last night. Did the boy have any idea when he’d set out to work that yesterday would be his last? How could he? Gooch had dealt in death and misfortune for so long that he should have been accustomed to the feeling by now, but like all the other townsfolk, in this case he was an unwitting observer. The victim was somebody’s brother, somebody’s son. People at home were no doubt mourning his loss this very second. It was never too early for grief. It never ceased to amaze Gooch how quickly life could change.
--- Charles Gooch, 1929 ---
Chicago could be cold in October, but today the sun was smiling on Jackson Park, and Charles Gooch was in a good mood. He’d told the office staff that he’d be taking an extended lunch break – one of the perks of owning and running your own company – and the sight of his daughter, Milly, and her younger brother, Max, skipping down the path, chasing ducks, made the whole endeavour worthwhile.
“Not too near the water now!” he cautioned, but they were not in any danger.
“Daddy, can we have some cotton candy?” asked Milly.
Gooch got down on his haunches so that he could look her in the eye.
“You’re still hungry?” he asked incredulously. Milly nodded sheepishly.
“After that hot dog?” he added. She nodded again.
Gooch stood up, fumbling in his pocket for some loose change. He pulled out a gleaming coin and held it in front of his daughter’s eyes. “Well, it’s a good job that I’m the King of the Columbine Insurance Corporation and can afford to pay for all this extra food, isn’t it?”
Milly giggled. “Are you really a king, Daddy?”
“Well, I certainly am today, princess!” He handed her the coin. “Now, go and fetch you and your brother the biggest bunch of cotton candy you can find!”
Milly snatched the coin and went over towards the duck pond, grabbing Max roughly by his coat before heading towards the candy man’s cart. Gooch chuckled and took a seat on a nearby bench from where he could keep an eye on them. It was days like this that made life worthwhile. Sure, he worked long, hard hours, but every so often, he liked to indulge his kids, whom he loved dearly.
Seventeen years after the Mauretania had docked in New York, he could say without question that leaving England had been the right thing to do. America had certainly been kind to him. After a few years scratching around at the foot of the company, he’d married the boss’s daughter, and five years later he was running the place. Even better, he’d taken the Columbine Insurance Corporation to heights that his late father-in-law could only dream of. He never stopped telling his beautiful wife, Adele, how much he adored her and the children, and thankfully, despite the hours that he spent in his office, they all felt the same about him.
He watched a duck glide effortlessly across the pond, he marvelled at the shape of the leaves on the trees, he even found the hand-painted writing on the cart operated by the man who was currently doling out cotton candy to his kids a wondrous sight to behold.
Charles Gooch saw the light and beauty in every little thing.
Life didn’t get any sweeter than this.
* * *
After he’d packed the children off home with their nanny, Claudette, Gooch walked briskly back to the office. There were some indemnity documents that needed the once-over, and he’d set straight to the task once he’d grabbed a coffee. He emerged from the elevator whistling cheerily, glancing over at the banks of secretaries behind their desks.
Unusually, they avoided eye contact.
“Hey, Lorraine, have you got those documents I asked for?”
Lorraine simply stared back soberly. That was not a good sign – she usually turned up for work on a Monday as bubbly as newly uncorked champagne and left the same on Friday afternoon, with little let-up in between.
“Mr Cole is waiting in your office, sir,” she said by way of explanation.
“Drew, is everything okay?” Gooch asked his second-in-command as he walked into his office, closing the door softly behind him.
“You’d better sit down, Mr Gooch,” Drew replied in a tone that sounded like he was laying the foundations for the delivery of some grim news.
“It’s not Adele, is it?” Gooch felt genuinely concerned for the first time.
“No, sir, it’s not your wife.”
Gooch sank into his comfortable leather chair. “Then what’s the problem?”
“It’s the company, sir. Our value’s fallen ten percent in the last hour!”
His chair didn’t feel quite so comfortable anymore. “What? How?”
“It’s not just us. It’s across the board. Insurance, banking, manufacturing, you name it.”
Before Gooch had time to take in the news, there was a shar
p rap on the glass door. He looked up to see the gloomy face of Davis Grant gurning back at him. Not the most pleasant sight at the best of times, but today it seemed a fraction more unsettling. He beckoned Grant in.
“Sir, we’re down another seven percent,” Grant announced, and any happy thoughts of a pleasant lunch break with his kids were washed away by an unceasing tide of disasters.
Ten minutes later, he dismissed Cole and Grant from his office, shooing them away as if they were a couple of irritating salesmen looking to sell him something he didn’t want. They hadn’t come up with any useful suggestions, and he didn’t need their mounting hysteria. What he needed was time to think.
There had to be a way out. There was always a way out.
It was at that moment that he glanced towards the locked drawer of his desk.
Not that, he told himself, he didn’t need that particular solution.
Throughout the afternoon, the grim news kept pouring through his door. Like the rising waters of a flood, he was powerless against its ingress, and as sure as he was trapped in a house taking on water as the water level steadily rose, it was all that he could do to keep his emotions in check, fighting against the need to be doing something when realistically, he knew that there was nothing he could do.
When Grant returned for the fourth time in less than an hour to report that the company was worth less than half its value at the start of the day, Gooch felt something come loose within himself.
“Mr Grant!” he bellowed at the startled clerk. “I do not need a running commentary of how much my company is, or is not, worth!”
“No, sir,” replied Grant meekly.
“What I need is a plan to minimise the losses.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you have a plan, Mr Grant?”
If Grant detected the gallows humour in his master’s question, he didn’t show it. “No, sir.”
“Very well. Then might I suggest that you leave me alone so that I can chart a course that won’t take us into every iceberg that happens across our path.” All these years later, he still struggled to shake the mental picture of the doomed Titanic, and he never once forgot how close to disaster he had come. His words were a clear statement that even a dullard like Grant could not misconstrue, and the young clerk finally retreated to his desk. Gooch slammed the door behind him, the plastic blinds shuddering on their strings. He quickly twisted the control, shutting out his employees, and slumped back into his office chair.
Again, he glanced towards the locked drawer.
How could he have known? It was as if his old friend had foreseen this, but of course, that would be impossible.
If that first afternoon was bad enough, worse was to follow in the remaining days of October. The Wall Street Crash claimed many victims, wiping millions of dollars off the value of companies across America, and the business that Charles Gooch had worked so hard to build up faced ruin.
You never knew when misery was around the corner.
In such a dire situation, only a fool would refuse help when it was offered.
* * *
Gooch found that he was still twisting the police tape in his right hand. How long he had been standing there reminiscing, he couldn’t say. But one of the policemen had ventured out of his car and made his way over.
“Can you leave the tape alone, sir,” the young man asked wearily.
“Sorry, officer,” said Gooch, stepping away from the cordon. “I need help,” he muttered to himself as if his reverie had allowed his former self to communicate what his next course of action should be in the present. He needed help before the situation got any further out of hand – his superiors wouldn’t look too kindly on him if he didn’t at least use the resources at his disposal. Sometimes you just had to accept that you needed a helping hand. Turning his back on the blackened scene, he hit a speed dial number on his mobile phone.
After two rings, the call was answered. “It’s me. I was wrong, and you were right,” he stated simply, doubting that the man on the receiving end of the call would need any further clarification.
“What do you need me to do?” asked the voice.
“It’s too risky for me. You need to get closer to the boy. Find out what he knows.”
“As I suggested.”
“Yes,” Gooch admitted, through gritted teeth.
After a short pause, the voice responded. “Consider it done.”
Gooch killed the call and thrust the phone back into his pocket. The briefcase continued to vibrate, and he decided that he was best leaving the scene. After he’d walked a short distance, the tremors eased and eventually petered out, and he managed to regulate his breathing. He needed a coffee.
As he was sipping his drink at a table by the café window, brooding over the events of the past twenty-four hours, he rubbed the fingers of his good hand together, still feeling the tackiness from the police tape back at the crash site. He wondered whether being in the business that supplied the police with the tape that was used to construct their cordons was a good business. How many miles of tape did they sell a year? It was as he came out of this flight of fancy that the idea hit him with alarming clarity. All these elaborate schemes that might come to nothing when sometimes the simplest solution was the best! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Perhaps he could pull off something unexpected after all, then maybe he wouldn’t need the extra help.
No, he corrected himself. Safest to attack the problem from two different angles. He’d done the right thing calling the help in. This way the percentage chance of success increased considerably.
He took another sip. The coffee was good. In fact, it was very good. He chuckled to himself at the thought of his latest gambit coming to fruition.
Chapter 7
The town was awash with reporters. Where Mick and his staff at the Recorder usually struggled through the week, sifting for nuggets of anything that was remotely newsworthy, it seemed that the crash two nights ago had put Culverton Beck in the headlines of many publications far beyond the town boundary. Incidents of the kind that left a pilot dead, a young petrol pump attendant who had met the same fate, and a fireball that could be seen from ten miles away had a habit of doing that.
My walk to college was made all the more difficult due to the increased traffic in the locality. There were still several outside broadcast vans parked up around the town, and the various drivers, cameramen, reporters and assorted hangers-on meant that the cafes were doing a brisk trade in all manner of coffees and snacks.
It was hard to reconcile the scene with the town that I’d grown up in. Nothing like this had ever happened here – aeroplanes didn’t just fall out of the sky. This was the sort of thing that happened elsewhere: events that you’d view from a safe distance on the television, where you’d spare a thought for those affected and then just move on to your next piece of toast before heading out the door.
As if I’d needed reminding, the proximity of the carnage had been brought home on the breakfast news. Amidst the analysis of why the crash had happened and the drip-feed of information on the victims, a steady stream of locals were pressed for their thoughts on the matter by an over-eager newshound. The whole thing would have been laughable if the situation hadn’t come with such a high price. What did the news channels hope to glean from the thoughts of a middle-aged baker who’d not even seen what had happened? Or from the old lady who’d heard a loud bang before looking out her window to see the flames? It was sheer madness.
Then a face that I recognised had appeared – the guy with the sandwich board wasted no time in making his views known. Rather predictably, he’d used this golden opportunity to tell the viewers that it was the end of the world and that the ‘fire from the sky’ was a sign from God. When quizzed on the matter, he went on to elaborate that this was just the beginning.
I watched in disbelief. What editor had sanctioned that interview segment? Giving this crazy old fool a platform from which to spout his unhinged views to a natio
nal audience, when people had died not yards from where he was standing, didn’t seem like a sound editorial choice. Did people really need to hear that the end of the world was nigh as they tucked into their cornflakes? It made me feel a little sick. Was this the business that I was preparing to enter when I finished my education?
It seemed that my home town had become the latest in the long line of media circuses due to people’s insatiable need for news, especially if it was of the bad variety. For my part, I didn’t need reminding of death. I’d had enough of that to deal with in the past few years.
* * *
“Lorna, that was an excellent piece of work. Well done!”
I beamed back at Miss Halfpenny – Victoria, as I had to constantly remind myself – as she slid my homework across the desk towards me. She’d written a big red ‘A’ in a circle in the margin, and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t feel a flush of pride at having impressed her.
“In fact, I’d go as far as to say that for a first assignment, the whole class has made a valiant attempt at describing the beginnings of industrialisation in late eighteenth-century Britain.” She paused to look out across the sea of faces. “With one or two notable exceptions,” she added, causing a ripple of laughter. Resting on the edge of her desk, she reached for a cloth and removed her glasses to polish the lens. “Still, it’s only the start of the term, and I’m sure that by Christmas, the slackers will have caught up with the frontrunners.”
Her words were interrupted by the sound of the bell. A wave of restlessness crossed the classroom like an invisible tide.
“Okay, I know you’re all eager to get home, but before you go, just remember that I want to hear your ideas for your project by the end of next week.” There were a few groans as the class filed out.
“I wasn’t exaggerating, Lorna,” Victoria said to me as I was packing up to leave.
