B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (7 page)

‘She hasn’t got a next of kin, not within twelve thousand miles.’

Jenny turned at the sound of the raised voice and saw a man of about her age remonstrating with the constable guarding the entrance.

‘Please, sir—’

‘I thought you wanted the bodies identified. Isn’t that what you want?’

Alison left the couple she was dealing with to a colleague and hurried over.

‘What seems to be the problem?’

‘I’m being told I can’t identify my friend because I’m not a relative or partner.’

‘What is your relationship to the deceased?’

‘Her name was Casey. Nuala Casey. We used to be together. Her brother’s her only family and he lives in Auckland, New Zealand.’

Alison inadvertently caught Jenny’s eye and seemed to sense her disapproval at the intrusion of the petty rule. She consulted her list. ‘All right, sir, you can come through.’

Jenny turned to go, but she found herself compelled to look back. Alison led the man to near the start of the line. He moved purposefully, not flinching or averting his eyes from the other bodies which were in the process of being identified. His voice was that of a professional, but the deep lines in his face and his wiry frame didn’t belong to someone who spent their days cooped up in an office.

Alison stopped by one of the body bags and stooped to unzip it. Jenny caught a glimpse of blonde hair and a badly bruised and swollen face.

The man stared hard, then nodded. ‘That’s her. Do you have any of her effects?’

‘Those can only be released to next of kin with permission of the coroner, I’m afraid, sir. Perhaps her brother could contact him?’

‘Of course.’ The man signed his name on Alison’s clipboard then walked quickly to the exit, forcing Jenny to step aside.

Alison gestured to her to wait while she zipped up the bag, then came to meet her by the doorway. ‘I heard about the little girl. They took her straight out to one of the storage trailers.’ She pointed towards a flap in the marquee’s outer wall. ‘There are ten of them parked out there. They can fit fifty in each. They’ve been stored in a warehouse near Taunton, apparently, just waiting for something like this to happen.’ She seemed impressed. ‘We’ve recovered more than two hundred already. The divers are going to be working through the night. Can you imagine it?’

Jenny said, ‘What’s the latest word on the cause?’

‘You name it – bombs, surface-to-air missile, hijacked by terrorists then shot down by our own fighters, it all depends who you talk to.’

‘Such as?’

Alison quickly scanned the area, checking they weren’t being listened to. ‘The farmer who owns this field told the police he heard an explosion. He claims he drove down to the estuary, couldn’t see a thing through the mist, but heard engine noise out there, like helicopters or something.’

‘When was this?’

‘Ten or fifteen minutes after it went down.’

‘You haven’t heard anything about a yacht? Kendall said the divers have found one.’

‘I’d heard that; nothing about any more bodies though. What did Molyneux say about our sailor and his gun?’

Before Alison could answer, another group of relatives arrived at the entrance: an elderly man supported by two younger women whom Jenny assumed to be his daughters. ‘I think you might be needed,’ she said, and left Alison to her work.

The brief glimpses Jenny had caught of the recovered bodies had all revealed faces that had suffered impacts of varying ferocity. They reminded her of road accident victims whose heads had whipped forward and struck the dash or airbag. These were precisely the kinds of injuries she would have expected to see following a violent crash landing, and their frequency made Amy Patterson’s unbattered condition even more puzzling.

The heaviness in Jenny’s limbs told her it was time to go home and get the sleep she would need to cope with the days ahead, but she knew that even a sleeping pill wouldn’t stop the questions from churning in her mind throughout the night. She couldn’t leave without finding out more.

The autopsy room was at the far end of the corridor and accessed through a solid doorway with an electronic mechanism that could only be operated by the swipe card held by the constable guarding it. Jenny was let through to find a fully equipped mortuary that was barely distinguishable from those in the most modern hospitals. There were six tables, six modular units containing surgical instruments, dissection bench and sink, and along the far wall a row of a dozen refrigerators each with three shelves stacked one on top of the other. Pathologists were hard at work at each station. She recognized two of them as locums who were regulars at the Vale. Dr Kerr was working at the far table. He lifted a hand in greeting and gestured her over.

Jenny carefully crossed the linoleum floor made slippery by the splashes from the shower hoses used to sluice down the bodies when a post-mortem was complete. She found him starting work on a male in his twenties. The face was badly bruised from a frontal impact and the slim, muscled torso had been virtually severed above the pelvis at the level of the lap belt.

‘Morbid curiosity, Mrs Cooper?’ Dr Kerr said.

‘That and being ordered to give up the little girl to Kendall. I’m not to be trusted, apparently.’

He smiled across the body at her. His eyes were tired and bloodshot. ‘No comment.’

Jenny said, ‘What’s your theory?’

‘We know the hull split in three as they’re designed to on impact. All the bodies we’ve seen so far have been recovered from the front section. It’s stuck nose-down in the silt under fifty feet of water. A lot of them were severed by their lap belts; some shot right out of their seats and crushed their skulls on the overhead lockers. Seats ripped clear of their moorings – that’s what we’re hearing.’

‘Any more in lifejackets?’

He shook his head.

Jenny said, ‘Any evidence of an explosion?’

‘No. That’s one theory that’s losing traction all the time. If there’d been a sudden depressurization at altitude you’d expect to find air embolisms – froth in the heart ventricles from blood gases suddenly expanding – but we’ve not found any. No hypoxia either – the blood’s fully oxygenated.’

‘Meaning the plane hit the water intact?’

‘It’s looking increasingly likely. Tail-end first probably, with enough force to snap the hull in two places – could have been weakened already, of course. However it happened, the front end flipped forward and sank down to the bottom nose first. The rear and mid-sections are lying on their sides, but the tide is too strong for the divers to get inside until later.’

Jenny said, ‘All the bodies I’ve seen are in a real mess. Any idea why Amy Patterson’s isn’t?’

‘She was probably sitting along the line of fracture, most likely at the join between the rear and mid-section. If the hull was sufficiently weakened it would have snapped as the tail hit the water. Once that happened, there might not even have been a seat in front for her to hit.’ He lowered his voice, ‘We’ve had a couple from first class. You know the model everyone’s so excited about – Lily someone? – in pieces, literally. Identified from her jewellery.’

Jenny said, ‘Where are you getting all this information?’

‘It gets passed up the line. The rescue crews bringing the bodies ashore are talking to the guys who bring them back here, who are passing what they’ve heard on to our technicians. Kendall gave us all a big speech about how we weren’t to speculate, let alone talk to the press, but you can guess how well that’s working.’

Jenny said, ‘Do you think they’ll let me go down to the beach?’

Dr Kerr shrugged. ‘They can only shoot you.’

Kevin and Dave were off-duty ambulance men who had been diverted from their usual beat in central Bristol to spend the night ferrying the dead from the makeshift pontoon at the water’s edge up to the D-Mort. A damn sight easier than dealing with fighting-mad drunks in the city centre was Kevin’s assessment of their night’s work. Jenny rode with them three abreast in a vehicle that looked like a golf buggy with caterpillar tracks instead of wheels. Behind them, they towed a trailer large enough to hold four body bags. They bumped over a rutted mud road that had been bulldozed out of the field and which snaked between the dunes down to the shore. At the head of the beach they were waved down by two soldiers, who ordered Jenny to stay back while the others collected their load of bodies from the pontoon. Rescue workers and ambulance crew only were allowed down to the water’s edge, but on whose orders they were unable or unwilling to say.

Jenny stood on the muddy shale huddled in the outsize waterproof coat Dave had loaned her and took in a scene of intense activity. A large vessel she recognized as a Severn dredger was moored about three hundred yards out. A bank of spotlights on its deck lit up the water to its port side, facing the shore. Within the illuminated area – the size of several sports fields – were three smaller vessels from which teams of divers were operating. Their powerful searchlights moved like apparitions beneath the silty water. She counted more than half a dozen inflatable dinghies ferrying bodies and equipment to and from a floating pontoon. Some were manned by civilian crew, others by the Royal Navy. The pontoon itself was accessed by ramps and was anchored to the shore by cables attached to two large military trucks. With a tidal range of three vertical yards, the water was constantly moving up and down the muddy beach, and the pontoon had to be moved with it.

Jenny wasn’t sure what she had been expecting to see – some trace of the wreckage perhaps, some small clue as to how it happened, what it had looked like when an airliner carrying six hundred souls fell to earth and shattered. But there was no visible detritus on the water or lying on the mud.

Nothing.

It struck her then that what she was witnessing, and what she had already seen at the D-Mort, was a logistical operation that surpassed anything she could ever have imagined the civil authorities being capable of. In twelve short hours they had raised a small tented city in a Somerset field, assembled an armada of boats and brought together police, coastguard and military in seamless configuration. If Jenny needed any reminding, it confirmed to her that no event could have been dealt with any more seriously.

‘Excuse me, madam. Stand aside, please.’ The young infantryman motioned her away from the makeshift road as several sets of headlights appeared through the dunes.

Three black Range Rovers rounded the corner in single file and gunned straight down on to the beach.

‘Who’s that?’ Jenny asked, not expecting a reply.

‘Guy Ransome,’ the soldier said. ‘But you didn’t hear it from me.’

She watched the cars pull up at the shore. A driver climbed out of the middle vehicle and opened the rear door for the tall, good-looking entrepreneur, not yet fifty, who had made his first fortune in electronics before staking it all on an airline. It seemed to her that it was a lonely figure who walked out along the pontoon, pausing to watch the body bags being unloaded from a dinghy. How did the mind of a rich man work, she wondered? Was he counting the cost to his business or to his own soul?

‘You wouldn’t swap places with him now, would you?’ the soldier remarked.

Jenny didn’t answer.

E
DWARD
M
ARSHAM, A PRINCIPAL INSPECTOR
with the Air Accident Investigation Branch, spoke with the reassuring calm of a former test pilot. He was telling the interviewer that although it was too early to say what had brought down Flight 189, the theory with the most weight was that the aircraft had been struck by an unusually powerful bolt of lightning at high altitude. This would have shorted out critical circuits in the aircraft’s avionics, causing the captain to lose control.

Wasn’t the aircraft supposed to have many layers of backups and fail-safes? the interviewer asked.

No number of back-up systems could prevent a freak accident, Marsham said regretfully. The one crumb of comfort was that such lightning strikes were incredibly rare. In the entire history of commercial aviation only a handful of passenger craft had been lost in such a way.

Should aircraft be flying near thunderstorms when they could be avoided? the interviewer pressed.

According to the Met Office weather data, there was only a small storm in the area at the time, Marsham said. What they could be looking at was an even rarer occurrence: the plane itself causing a bolt of lightning to be discharged from the surrounding clouds; in effect, acting as a conductor for positively and negatively charged areas of cloud. The incidence of lightning, and just what caused the build-up of electrical charge in the atmosphere, was still a phenomenon science was unable fully to explain.

What evidence beyond the weather data was there for a lightning strike? the interviewer enquired.

Divers had photographed a pronounced scorch mark on the forward starboard section of the hull, Marsham said. It was close to the avionics bay, which was situated forward of the hold beneath the cockpit. A bolt of lighting could be many thousands of volts and up to 30,000 degrees centigrade – the temperature at which sand and silica fuse to form glass.

The reception on the car radio broke up and vanished temporarily as Jenny entered the forested gorge between St Arvans and Chepstow. She caught only fragments of the remainder of Marsham’s interview, but what she did notice was that he was allowed to go largely unchallenged.

Her phone rang as she was driving the straight mile alongside Chepstow racecourse. Alison’s sleep-laden voice came over the speakers, talking to her from all four corners of the car.

‘They’ve delivered your yacht, Mrs Cooper.’

‘
Delivered
it?’

‘It’s on the quayside at Avonmouth. DCI Molyneux just called to let me know. They had a dredger bring it up on the early tide.’

‘Why’s he being so helpful all of a sudden?’

‘They wanted it away from the main site,’ he said. ‘They’re clearing the rear section of the hull this morning and raising both sections to the surface this afternoon. It’s going to be a hell of a job getting it all ashore and transporting the pieces by road to the AAIB hangar at Farnborough.’