B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (31 page)

‘Miss it?’ Fuller asked.

‘Now you come to mention it, no,’ Jenny answered truthfully.

‘Can’t say it gets any easier,’ Fuller said. ‘This is a bit of an odd one, though – that’s why we called you, just in case you thought it didn’t add up.’

Jenny glanced down the inside of the line of vehicles but didn’t see any sign of a body.

‘She’s in the field on the other side of the gate,’ the DS said. ‘Not long dead – only a couple of hours, the medic estimates. That puts time of death at around nine o’clock this morning. No vehicle here, no identification on her – just this in her pocket.’ Fuller dipped into her parka and brought out a small, tagged plastic evidence bag. She held it out for Jenny to see two small, passport-sized photographs of smiling girls, one of about three, the other a little older. ‘We think they must be her kids. She’s wearing a wedding ring.’

‘I heard. How did she do it?’

‘The usual – sleeping pills. No note.’

‘Any sign of violence?’

‘No. Why don’t you have a look for yourself?’

Fuller led the way into the lay-by and through a partially open five-barred gate into a large field of dormant pasture. The body lay some twenty yards to their right next to the hedgerow under a sheet of black plastic. Two white-suited scene of crime officers had finished their work and were walking towards them, hefting their bulky rucksacks of kit.

‘All ready to move her now, boss,’ one of them announced to Fuller.

‘Give us a moment,’ she answered.

As they neared the spot where the woman lay, the detective seemed to sense Jenny’s trepidation. ‘I thought you’d be used to this by now.’

Momentarily mute, Jenny shook her head.

Fuller leaned down and pulled back the plastic sheet to expose the fully clothed body of a woman lying on her side, the fingers of her right hand still curled around the small brown plastic jar that had contained the pills. A foot to her right lay an empty bottle of water of the sort you might buy in any convenience store.

Jenny stepped around to the side so she could see the dead woman’s face. She was pretty, with pale skin and black, shoulder-length hair. She wore a stylish rust-coloured scarf inside a dark wool coat. Her shoes were flat but smart. Elegant; just as she had been in the photographer’s pictures. There was no doubt in Jenny’s mind that it was her.

She stepped back and swallowed hard.

Karen Fuller looked at her puzzled.

‘Is it her, Mrs Cooper?’

Both women turned at the sound of Alison’s voice. Buried in her anorak, she was marching across the grass from the gate.

She gave Jenny no time to protest or question what she was doing here. ‘It is her, isn’t it?’

Fuller looked to Jenny for an explanation.

‘My officer—’

‘I know who she is. What’s going on?’

Jenny started to stumble through the story of the fatal car crash and the pictures on the dead man’s camera.

‘It is—’ Alison said. She turned on Jenny. ‘I was going to see her yesterday, except you had to change your plans again, didn’t you?’

‘Alison, please—’

‘I was on my way out of the door when you called.’

‘This really isn’t appropriate.’

‘I had it all planned. I was going to tell her that her secret was safe and that no one need ever know. I even had the number of a grief counsellor with me.’

‘It might have made no difference at all,’ Jenny protested.

‘You know your problem, Mrs Cooper? You’re so caught up with your own dramas you’ve forgotten what your job is. Your predecessor, Harry Marshall, never forgot, not for a moment. Honour the dead and protect the living, those were his rules. You should try learning from them.’

‘You know who this woman is?’ Fuller asked, incredulously.

‘Her name’s Angela Wesley. She lives in Victoria Avenue, Clifton, and she worked part-time as a special needs teacher. Her husband runs his own insurance brokerage.’

‘Have you got a phone number for him?’

‘I’d rather tell him in person,’ Alison said.

‘I’ll come with you.’ Fuller looked accusingly at Jenny. ‘I’d be grateful if you’d write me a statement setting out everything you know about this case, Mrs Cooper.’

Propelled by an impulse she felt the need to neither question nor resist, Jenny drove the few miles across country to the spot overlooking the estuary to which she had retreated the morning Brogan and Amy Patterson had washed up on the shore.

Leaving her Land Rover at the side of the road, she wandered over the dunes to the head of the beach, seeking comfort in the stark clarity of the open water. A keen east wind bit into her face and cut through to her skin.

Alison had spoken out of guilt, but she was right; she had failed the dead woman. They both had. No written law had been violated, but with hindsight it was obvious that she had been the photographer’s lover, and even more obvious that Jenny’s duty had been to make sure that she knew that someone who wouldn’t judge her understood her predicament.

Braced against the cold spits of rain whipping into her face, she found herself alone again with the dead, and no matter how hard she tried to box them up and file them away, they refused to be contained. Brogan strode listlessly back and forth across the foreshore; Amy Patterson huddled and shivered in a hollow between the dunes; Nuala Casey wandered in search of a waymarker in a landscape as alien to her as the moon’s.

Jenny lifted her eyes to glimpse a passenger jet passing between the clouds: a tiny arrow streaking across the sky. She thought of its occupants, protected by a skin only inches thick, breathing air held at pressure by a handful of valves and seals, the entire machine kept aloft by flimsy boxes of electronics and their prayers. And then she pictured the scene inside Flight 189 as the aircraft pitched upwards, hurling bodies from their seats. She heard their screams as it plunged downwards in a vertical dive. There would have been no opportunity for silent dignity throughout its six-minute journey to earth; it would have been chaos, as close to hell as it was possible to imagine.

She turned back to her car knowing what she had to do: her job. Without fear or compromise, she would seek out the truth. If there was an answer to why Flight 189 was lost, she felt sure the key to it lay with Nuala Casey. She needed access to the belongings that she had with her on the plane. If she could have counted on the law being fairly administered, she would simply have issued a request to Sir James Kendall in the expectation that he would oblige her, but there was more chance of 189 miraculously appearing from the clouds and coming safely in to land. Not for the first time in her career, she would have to enforce the law alone.

Driving back through the Gloucestershire countryside towards the M5 motorway, Jenny spoke Dr Kerr’s number out to the hands-free. He picked up the call against the sound the voices and the high-pitched whine of surgical saws.

‘Dr Kerr? It’s Mrs Cooper. Are you still at the D-Mort?’

‘Until tomorrow. You’re not going to tell me you’ve postponed your inquest again – my diary’s in chaos.’

‘I’ve no plans at the moment,’ she answered, reasoning that a half-truth was better than an outright lie. ‘You’re still doing the autopsies?’

‘Mostly re-examining. This one’s for a life insurance company – don’t ask.’

‘Actually, I’ve got a request of my own.’

‘I thought you had lost jurisdiction.’

‘Different passenger. It turns out I’m friendly with someone who had an ex-girlfriend on board. A thirty-year-old woman by the name of Nuala Casey.’

‘Have you got the identifying number?’

‘No. But your report says she had early-stage lymphoma.’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘You said her medical records showed no diagnosis. The thing is she was a pilot herself, for Ransome Airways. I’m reading between the lines here, but I suspect that if she thought she was ill, she would have gone to a private doctor first – kept it off the record so as not to jeopardize her pilot’s licence.’

‘The chances are she would have still been asymptomatic, the odd swollen gland maybe.’

‘Is there any chance you can get access to her possessions in the evidence store? Apparently she had a phone she kept all her appointments on.’

‘Sorry, Jenny – we don’t have any access to personal effects. Once they’re bagged it’s all handed to the police. There’s still technically a criminal investigation going on.’

‘And it’s all stored at the D-Mort?’

‘As far as I know.’

‘Oh well, never mind,’ Jenny said, pretending to be satisfied with his answer. ‘But if it’s all the same, I wouldn’t mind calling by to have a word about the lymphoma.’

‘There’s not a lot to tell.’

‘We’ll see. In about an hour?’

‘No problem.’

Jenny recognized the soldier at the barrier from her first visit and flashed him a friendly smile as he checked her name off his list of expected visitors. Waved through without a hitch, she parked in the officials’ car park and collected her visitor’s tag at the reception desk. She checked her watch: she had fifteen minutes before Dr Kerr was expecting her.

She headed off along the walkway, but instead of turning right to the mortuary continued straight on towards the stack of modular offices that she had first passed with Simon Moreton. There were noticeably fewer people on the site than during her previous visits, but the fact only served to make her feel more conspicuous.

Pretending to be caught up in a phone call, she dawdled a little distance from the evidence and effects store, and noticed that the rectangular building was made up of nine cabins: three high and three wide. The entrance, clearly signed, was through a door in the centre of the bottom middle cabin. The windows on the lower tier were all firmly closed; several upstairs were open a touch. To the left of the building a set of steps led up to a door which would doubtless open only from the inside.

Drifting a little nearer, she glanced through a ground-floor window and saw a single male figure sitting at desk working at his computer. All along the walls there were metal racks containing deep wire-mesh trays. Each tray was labelled with text which was too small to read from this distance and contained sealed plastic evidence bags, many of them holding entire suitcases. With no idea how to get what she wanted, Jenny decided she had no option but to wing it.

She climbed the three steps to the main door, knocked twice, then stepped inside to see a young broad-shouldered detective rising from behind his desk. He had the startled look of a man who wasn’t expecting visitors.

‘Sorry to disturb you,’ Jenny said, flashing him a smile. ‘Jenny Cooper, Severn Vale District Coroner. I presume you’re in charge of evidence and effects.’

‘That’s my boss, DI Prentice,’ the young man said warmly, seemingly grateful for a break in the tedium of his day. ‘He’s at a meeting this afternoon. Paul Knight – detective constable. I administer the database.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’ She shook his hand and noticed that the air smelt stale and musty. She had heard that all the evidence recovered from the two halves of the sunken hull had been dried out in specially designed trailers, but the process had evidently been far from perfect. At each end of the cabin a large electric heater stood alongside a dehumidifier.

He motioned her to a chair. ‘What can I do for you?’

Taking a seat, Jenny glanced left and right and saw that the individual cabins were connected by open doorways with no doors in the frames. In the far right-hand corner of the cabin in which they were sitting was a compact open staircase leading to the upper level. The rear wall was lined with industrial racks with trays three deep. Each section was numbered alphabetically, and each tray bore the name of an individual passenger. Those immediately behind Knight read
Donoghue, Richard (M), Downing, Elaine (F), Eason, Anthony (M).
From this, she concluded that Nuala Casey’s tray would be off to her left near the entrance to the next cabin, possibly the other side of the doorway.

What
did
she want from him? She had to think quickly.

‘You may know that I’m conducting the inquest into the death of Gerry Brogan – the man whose yacht was struck by the aircraft.’

‘The IRA guy.’

‘He had a dubious history, certainly,’ Jenny responded patiently. ‘Anyway, you might also know that I initially had jurisdiction over the case of Amy Patterson, the ten-year-old child whose body was washed up in my district.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Knight said. He turned to his computer and scrolled through a list of names.

‘I’m aware that no effects can be released yet, but I wonder if you could answer a couple of questions for the parents – it is rather a special case. The child was travelling alone.’

Knight gave a cautious nod. He found what he was looking for and clicked on what Jenny assumed was Amy Patterson’s name.

‘What do they want to know?’

‘Her father received a brief phone call from her during the plane’s final descent. They would like to know if her phone was recovered, if it works, and if you intend to examine any data on it. I think they would like to find out if she was trying to call her mother, or . . . you understand.’

‘I’d help you if I could, but all phones are being examined by a team of data retrieval experts. It’s a private firm up in Manchester that we’re using. Everything recovered will be released to relatives in due course. Actually, they were told that – it should be on the website.’

Jenny felt herself begin to blush. She was a bad liar at the best of times. ‘They’re very upset, probably a little confused.’

‘Was there anything else?’

‘Yes—’ What was she going to say? She hadn’t a clue. She would just have to move from a white lie to an outright one. ‘Mrs Patterson thinks her daughter might have been wearing a silver necklace – it was a family heirloom. It would mean a lot to her if it’s been found. I saw the body, I should have been able to tell her, but I really couldn’t remember.’ Jenny offered a silent prayer for forgiveness, then reminded herself that she was the one acting in the interests of justice.

Knight scanned what Jenny presumed was a list of possessions logged next to Amy Patterson’s name. He shook his head. ‘Sorry, I don’t see any mention of a necklace. We haven’t recorded every single item in everyone’s luggage, though, just the individual items found on the body. Aside from her clothing, it says she had a wristwatch, a phone and purse, that’s all.’