S.T.I.N.K.B.O.M.B. (6 page)

By the time his airbag inflated Archie was unconscious so he was oblivious when the impact of another bounce twisted the car’s chassis to such an extent that his passenger door popped
open.

On the Audi’s sixth violent, destructive revolution Archie’s limp body was thrown clear of the vehicle, sailing five metres into the air before landing in a thick clump of cliff-top
gorse.

On its seventh roll the car bounced over the edge of the precipice, taking Archie’s father with it. Its engine was still revving as it arced over the narrow beach far below and plummeted
nose first into the sea beyond, spraying a sheet of water high into the air. In a matter of seconds the Audi filled with water, its nose bobbed downward and it sank without trace.

Archie lay still with his eyes closed, wondering if he was alive or dead. His whole body was throbbing like one big bruise, his head was pounding and his left shoulder felt
like someone was drilling a hole in it. I must be alive, he thought. Being dead can’t possibly be this painful.

Slowly he opened his eyes, blinking hard a few times to encourage them to focus, and looked up at the sky – which, weirdly, was covered in polystyrene tiles. As he tried to turn his head a
sharp spike of agony shot up his neck and jabbed at the base of his skull. Relaxing his neck muscles he slowly assessed his surroundings.

He was in a square room with white walls and a blue linoleum floor. There was a portable TV in one corner, a small chest of drawers and a tired-looking easy chair, angled to face the bed. He had
a clip on the end of one finger, which was wired to an LCD monitor and a second screen was wired up to his chest.

The door opened and Archie’s grandmother bustled in carrying a mug of tea and a copy of the
Daily Mail.
She looked weak and tired. Her skin was pale, almost grey, and the flesh
beneath her eyes was puffy.

‘Hello, Nan,’ Archie tried to say, but no sound came out. He worked some saliva round his mouth, swallowed and tried again. This time his voice was a croaky whisper.

‘Well, look who’s finally decided to wake up.’ Megan Hunt smiled brightly, setting down her mug and sliding her hand into his. ‘How are you feeling, lazybones?’

‘Achy bones would be more like it,’ croaked Archie.

‘You’ve had a nasty accident, love. You’re in hospital.’

‘That’s a relief.’ Archie winced with pain. ‘I was thinking if this was my bedroom the new decorator must be rubbish.’

Archie’s grandmother smiled, the wrinkles round her eyes forming deep creases. ‘Do you remember what happened to you?’ she said softly.

Archie gave a small nod. ‘This police car wanted us to pull over,’ he said, frowning.

His grandmother nodded. ‘Christchurch Police Station had sent out a couple of officers to talk to your father but nobody seems to know what it was all about.’

‘But Dad refused to stop,’ Archie said, puzzled. ‘They chased us for ages then they ran us off the road. I remember the car was rolling but after that it’s all a blank. I
told Dad to stop but . . .’

‘He must have had good reason to keep going. He would never have acted recklessly, especially with you in the car. He loved you more than anything.’

Archie felt suddenly sick as his grandmother’s hand tightened its grip on his.

‘You mean
loves
,’ he said urgently. ‘You said he loved me but you meant
loves
, didn’t you?’

As Archie watched his grandmother’s eyes fill with tears he felt as if he was sinking.

‘I’m sorry, Archie love,’ she murmured. ‘I’m so sorry.’

An hour later Archie was still staring up at the polystyrene ceiling tiles and trying to come to terms with the hideous news. It had been barely three years since his mother had been knocked
down and killed in a hit-and-run accident, and life without her was something he was still dealing with. Some days were better than others but at some point every day he missed her so much that he
felt like he might crumble on the spot. In those moments the thing that had kept him going was his father.

Part of Archie had felt that he had to keep going to secure his father’s respect, while another part of him suspected his father needed someone to lean on just as much as he did.

Since his mother’s death, Archie’s father had become withdrawn and more serious, as if the responsibility of raising a child on his own meant that hugs and silliness were luxuries he
rarely had time for.

Archie suddenly remembered the final cross words he had exchanged with his father, and the notion that his father had died feeling disappointed in him crashed down on him. He rolled agonisingly
on to his side and eased his hands under his pillow. On the bedside table was his laptop and a pile of books and games that his grandmother had brought in for him.

His gran had told him that when he’d been thrown from his father’s car some dense bushes had broken his fall. But the Audi had rolled over a cliff and landed in the sea. Police
divers had inspected the car but his father’s body had not been found so officials were working on the theory that it had been taken out to sea by strong tides.

As Archie stared blankly ahead he found himself looking at the monitor displaying the output from his heart, which was pulsing at a steady fifty-eight beats per minute. His father couldn’t
possibly be dead, he thought defiantly. If he could survive all those combat missions and assignments behind enemy lines there was no way a simple car crash would kill him. And what’s more,
his body still hadn’t been found.

He couldn’t believe his father was dead. He wouldn’t believe it.

Then, as he stared at the trace of his own heartbeat, he had an idea and his pulse rate leaped immediately up to a hundred.

Ignoring the grinding pain in his joints, Archie pushed himself up into a sitting position and reached across to his bedside table. Sliding his computer from under the books he
set it on his lap and opened it. The screen blinked into life and Archie’s fingers danced over the keyboard.

Within a minute he was staring at the RAF University Cranfield home page. A few clicks later he was on a page entitled ‘Physiological Studies in Aviation’. He was prompted for his
email address and the keys purred as he typed in his father’s address – then his fingers froze as he stared at the message on the screen:

He should have realised that all the data gathered for the study would be protected. ‘How about this?’ he mumbled, typing the word
Dragonfly
and clicking the
submit button.

A boxed message popped up on the screen in red lettering:

Archie bit his lip. Then he typed his own name into the password field but the same message appeared – and again when he entered
Lara
, his mother’s name. A
host of famous people he knew his father admired such as sportsmen, explorers and aviation pioneers received the same blunt refusal.

Changing tack, Archie typed in a selection of significant dates such as his father’s birthday, his birthday, his parents’ wedding anniversary, the date of the first moon landing, the
numbers of all the squadrons his father had ever belonged to. When that failed he combined dates and names in countless combinations, with capitals, without capitals, with the numbers first and
last. In desperation he tried flying terminology.
Ailerons, loop, horizon.
All rejected.

Archie sat back against his crisp white pillows and let out a long breath. He could feel a coating of sweat on his skin as he stared at the blinking cursor, utterly bewildered and defeated. Just
as he was about to close the laptop he noticed some small font at the bottom of the screen.

Feeling a rush of hope he clicked on the prompt and held his breath as he read his father’s clue.

Archie immediately knew what the hint referred to.

His father had often told him how he’d fallen head over heels for his mother when they’d met at university. Walking home late one night with some of his friends, Richard Hunt had
passed a twenty-four-hour tattoo parlour, which seemed at the time to offer the perfect opportunity to prove to Lara how serious he was about her. When she saw the tattoo the next day,
Archie’s mother had joked that it was a touching gesture but that she’d prefer a bunch of flowers next time.

Archie’s father had spent the next twenty-five years feeling slightly embarrassed by the permanent reminder of his youthful impulsiveness – the word
Lara
inscribed for
evermore within an image of a heart on his upper arm.

Archie smiled to himself as he typed the word
heart
and tapped the enter key.

This time there was no rejection message and four charts flashed on to the screen. Eagerly, he scanned the information in front of him. The top three charts’ vertical axes were labelled
Blood Pressure, Oxygen Saturation and Pulse Rate, while they all had a common horizontal scale labelled Time. The fourth chart, which could be overlaid on to any of the others with the click of the
mouse, was a plot of G-force versus time, which Archie guessed was fed by the flight data recorder on his father’s Dragonfly.

As he scrolled across the graphs he could see that his father’s pulse had been elevated for a period of about an hour the previous morning, which corresponded to some spikes on the G-force
chart ranging from plus four to negative three. His heartbeat had returned to a normal rate in the mid-50s shortly after that flight and had remained in that region until 4.49 in the afternoon
– when he’d been driving Archie home from his swimming lesson.

Archie realised that the sudden jump in his father’s pulse must correspond to the time the BMW had begun harassing them. Using his forefinger on the trackpad, he dragged the chart across
the screen so that the data recorded after 5 p.m. was displayed.

His father’s pulse had remained steadily high for a period of nearly six minutes, after which it had dropped sharply to a rate of only twenty beats per minute – the time the car went
into the sea, Archie reckoned. He could hardly bear to scroll further across the screen, almost unable to bring himself to look at this cold scientific representation of the moment his
father’s life had been snuffed out.

As he slid the time scale to the left Archie felt his own heart thumping inside his bruised ribcage. His father’s pulse had continued to drop, reaching a low of thirteen beats per minute
and remaining there for sixty seconds. Glancing up the screen, Archie saw that his blood oxygen levels were also frighteningly low at this moment.

But then, incredibly, his father’s pulse had begun to recover. Within five minutes it was back at fifty beats per minute and his blood oxygen levels were up to eighty-five per cent and
still climbing. A quick scan across the chart showed Archie that his father’s vital signs had remained strong well past midnight, when the signal had been lost.

This could mean only one thing, Archie thought, realising his hands were trembling. His father was still alive!

Detective Constable Flowers wore a permanent frown of concern as he listened to Archie’s theory, nodding occasionally and leaning forward to study the graphs on the
boy’s laptop computer. Archie’s grandmother had ushered the police officer into his room shortly after he had made his discovery and insisted on talking to the authorities.

When Archie had finished his explanation DC Flowers gave him a smile that was probably meant to appear kind but simply came across as patronising.

‘Firstly can I say how sorry I am for your loss,’ he said in an emotionless monotone.

‘Have you been listening to anything I just said?’ Archie demanded. ‘I haven’t suffered any loss. My father is still alive.’

It’s perfectly normal for someone in your position to feel this way Archie,’ Flowers continued flatly. ‘The normal response to such traumatic news is shock followed by anger
followed by a rejection of the facts, which is the emotion you are currently experiencing, at this moment in time. Soon you will come to accept the situation and finally your healing process can
begin.’