The Passenger

by Chris Petit

  When a table came free she ordered tea and a muffin, saying she had to eat. The café was full of mute search-party members. An elderly bereaved couple sat by the window. Had it not been for classical music in the background the silence would have been unbearable. Charlotte crumbled her muffin. The linoleum was covered with the marks of wet bootprints.

  ‘They are starting to say it was a bomb.’

  ‘What does it matter? Knowing that won’t bring Nick back.’

  He sensed her stirring resentment, his presence a reminder of her son’s absence.

  Sentences formed in Collard’s head and fell away, every one an insurmountable hurdle, each rehearsal sounding like an excuse.

  A local girl took the reporter’s place on the phone and said the bodies were being kept at the ice rink.

  Charlotte wore red nail varnish, which he didn’t associate with her. Her hair was shorter and more styled.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.

  Collard suggested they hire a car and look for a place to stay. He knew that was not what she meant.

  ‘I got a car at the airport. At the risk of sounding insensitive, what I most need is a bath.’ She added, sounding almost normal, ‘The car’s some make I’ve never heard of.’

  Collard drove despite not being insured because Charlotte asked him to. He felt as self-conscious as a learner. Everything that had previously been automatic required the greatest concentration.

  To fill the silence, he talked hesitantly about missing the flight. He had called the office to wish everyone happy Christmas and learned a Belgian named Tresfort who was part of a big deal wanted urgently to reach him. The man’s name sounded like something from another life as he said it.

  ‘He was adamant about meeting.’

  Charlotte stared out of the car window. He said he had suggested to Nick he stay over too. Charlotte flinched at the mention of Nick and they drove on in silence.

  Everything Collard told her was true, but without the crucial details he sounded like a man trying to construct an alibi.

  After an exhausting round of rejections, they found the last room at a hotel in the countryside, half an hour from the town. The guests were all there for the disaster, the regular Christmas bookings having cancelled or cut short. The management had hiked its rates. The hotel smelled of overcooked food.

  Their cheerless overheated room with its disastrous carpet was primped and genteel. Once they would have laughed at it.

  Charlotte had her bath. Collard stared out of the window at the damp lawn, pocked with worm casts, and a circular gravel drive.

  Charlotte came out of the bathroom with her hair wet and took a dryer from a drawer. The fluent way her hands played through her hair made everything seem normal for a moment. Collard caught the smell of singed air from the dryer. The noise of the machine made talk impossible. She didn’t usually make him nervous. He thought: Grief makes actors of us.

  Charlotte slept. Collard got as far as putting his boots on, intending to go out and look for Nick. He stared at the undone laces as Charlotte cried silently in her sleep.

  A television quiz show played to the empty residents’ lounge. Collard sat down and took none of it in.

  When he woke it was dark outside, with several people in the room watching the evening news. Collard recognized places he had walked. The reports bore little relation to the seesaw of his emotions. Their way of dealing with something so vast only as a terrible aberration sounded wrong.

  They said the crashing plane had taken less than a minute to hit the ground. Collard counted the seconds on his watch. Three seemed a lifetime, five an eternity.

  All their lives were paper houses. His had been blasted away by the repercussions of the bomb as surely as if he had been on the plane.

  Charlotte’s grief contained a level of accusation, as though it was his fault Nick was not with them. It paralysed everything. He said how cheerful Nick had been in Frankfurt, and wondered for whose sake he was lying. Nick became the censored subject between them.

  In the town near where they were staying one shop had a loudspeaker blaring ‘Jingle Bells’; otherwise the mood was of festivities cancelled. On Christmas Eve they attended a meeting in a school hall and sat on folding chairs with several hundred mourners to whom the rudiments of consideration were shown. A police officer said his job was to reconstruct the crime and arrest those responsible. The other task, equally hard, was to mourn. At that Charlotte wept. When Collard took her hand she shook him away.

  The hotel bar was taken over by reporters. Collard drank several whiskies, hoping they would help him sleep. Charlotte was upstairs. Nothing he said could comfort her.

  As the bar grew more crowded, the atmosphere became one of grim circus, led by a dissipated-looking English reporter everyone called Evelyn. He spoke with a pronounced drawl and was accompanied by an attractive young woman. Evelyn held forth, sarcasm oiled with liquor. He complained about being stuck so far out of town.

  ‘No room at the inn. So we’re stuck in the bloody stables witnessing the investigation equivalent to a virgin birth.’

  Someone asked what he meant.

  ‘Nobody’s got a bloody clue, if you ask me. No one has owned up.’

  Terrorists were mentioned.

  ‘But which terrorists?’

  The man’s cynicism was insensitive and misplaced but there was something so wheedling about his voice it was hard not to listen.

  ‘What are we to make of the warning posted before the crash in the American Embassy in Moscow?’

  The young woman with him said, ‘It was a standard bulletin. There had been rumours for weeks that something was going to happen.’

  ‘Specifically advising staff not to use American carriers during the holiday period because of warnings of bomb attacks.’

  Collard turned and looked at Evelyn.

  ‘What are you saying?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t think we’ve had the pleasure,’ Evelyn said, ignoring him and turning to his companion, who grimaced and said to Collard, ‘Don’t mind him.’

  Evelyn went on. ‘There must have been an almighty balls-up. That’s all I’m saying. If there was the security to know something was going to happen, why wasn’t there the security to stop it?’

  Collard thought how easy it had been to get seats. Nick had called him from abroad on the twelfth saying he had swapped his ticket from the eighteenth, the day they had arranged to fly, to the twenty-first. Collard had been annoyed at Nick’s thoughtlessness, protesting that he would have to rearrange meetings and might not be able to get another flight, because of the holidays.

  Evelyn said, ‘The plane was a third empty four days before Christmas when it should have been loaded to the aeronautical equivalent of the gunnels.’

  The call with Nick had ended up being less pleasant than Collard would have liked but he was wrong about the flight. His travel agent sounded surprised. ‘It’s pretty good right now with plenty of space, but it will fill up nearer Christmas with everybody wanting to get home.’

  It hadn’t.

  Charlotte walked into the bar. She appeared brittle but had made a careful effort to look smart. She had been unable to sleep, she said, and asked for dry sherry, a drink Collard couldn’t remember her having.

  A burst of laughter came across the room. Collard wondered how the reporters could switch off so easily.

  Charlotte tasted her sherry and pulled a face.

  Someone said a row of passengers had been found sitting upright in a field, with their fingers crossed.

  Charlotte looked like every word scratched her. He asked if she wanted to go back upstairs. She shook her head.

  Someone else had seen a passenger who had burst on impact.

  Charlotte said, ‘I suppose these things are better not bottled up.’

  Most of the time, she appeared too numb to speak; now she seemed irritated by him. Whatever he said came out sounding wrong. Talk faltered. Charlotte announced she was going
out for some air. She had barely touched her drink but appeared unsteady on her feet. Collard wondered if he should follow and make sure she was all right.

  Evelyn got up and talked to a man standing behind Collard who said, ‘No one was saying who they were, what they were looking for or whose authority they acted on.’

  Evelyn said, ‘The Yanks are driving the local coppers mad, disregarding all the rules of evidence.’

  Collard went to the toilet. When he came back he was surprised to see Charlotte in one of the reception telephone booths.

  He slipped back into the bar before she saw him.

  Evelyn was saying, ‘Someone knew in advance a body would need to be removed, which means they didn’t want that particular body to be part of the investigation, which is pretty rum.’

  Collard remembered seeing the coffin unloaded from the investigators’ plane. What had the bomb threatened to expose that involved a body being taken from the accident and helicopters hovering over fields at night, accompanied by armed men? And then there were the warnings and the empty seats.

  Collard’s eyes pricked with tiredness. Discarded tea bags lay on a dirty saucer the hotel cleaners had failed to remove. He stared at the vortex made from stirring his and Charlotte’s tea. He asked: How do you measure death?

  On Christmas Day, he and Charlotte built a stone cairn for Nick, to prepare for the next stage, the identification of his body.

  Decompression. The word banged around his head all Boxing Day, followed by a riptide of panic.

  Interrogation

  The police came early the next day for Collard at the hotel. Their call woke him. He was surprised because he hadn’t given them his hotel, and then dully acknowledged the persistence of his naivety. Charlotte remained asleep. She had taken a pill. Collard dressed in a hurry, fearing the worst.

  They were downstairs in the lobby, two uniformed men in fluorescent jackets and peaked caps. They took him out to a marked car. One held the door open for him. Their professional silence increased his worry. He was sure Nick’s body had been found. That kind of news would be broken face to face.

  They drove him to the ice rink that was acting as a morgue.

  The big American and his sour English companion waited at the entrance. Collard found it difficult to stand up.

  The American said, ‘We need your help with identification. This won’t be pleasant.’

  ‘Give me your name,’ Collard said, desperate for any delay. ‘So at least I know who I’m talking to.’

  The American waved his hand. ‘Call me Sheehan. A good Irish name. He’s Parker.’

  Collard stepped into the building, aware of a fall in temperature and an astringent, clinical smell.

  The ticket office had been turned into a security desk. Sheehan signed in for Collard. Not knowing had inevitably been turned into a kind of hope that was about to be shattered.

  He was led to a changing room lined with lockers where a body covered by a sheet lay on a trolley.

  ‘Is this your son?’ Sheehan asked.

  The sheet was removed. Collard had a glimpse of a swarthy young man.

  ‘Jesus, they got the wrong one,’ Sheehan said, whipping back the sheet. ‘Stay there.’

  He left Collard with the body.

  There were benches in front of the lockers and he was relieved to sit down. He had been surprised as much as shocked by the face he had just seen. It was badly damaged where the bone had been smashed but still seemed familiar. He thought it was perhaps the agitated young man he had noticed in the Frankfurt passport queue.

  He looked around at the empty lockers. The place was unimaginable as somewhere people went for amusement.

  Sheehan returned, complaining about the incompetence of the bureaucracy and how they couldn’t number anything right. He led the way to the main arena. The ice rink was frighteningly still. Collard looked at his feet to avoid the sight of so many shrouded bodies.

  The bodies were tagged by number. Sheehan took them down several rows before he found the right one then had to take Collard’s arm to steady him. The cold of the ice rink showed their breath, a painful reminder of being alive.

  Sheehan drew back the sheet.

  The face was unmarked, the eyes shut.

  He had been so ready for Nick’s face he needed a moment to focus and not burst out laughing in relief. He shook his head.

  ‘Not your son.’

  ‘No.’

  Collard looked Sheehan in the eye and realized he knew that already.

  ‘But you recognized the first boy.’

  Collard’s escape left him giddy. He had been certain it was going to be Nick. Now it wasn’t he was willing to talk about anything although he suspected he had been softened up. He said the first boy had been in front of them in the passport queue. He had been travelling alone, a sullen, beefy, young man with a thick neck who seemed nervous.

  ‘Nervous how?’

  ‘He kept glancing around like he was expecting someone. I suppose I thought he was worried about someone who was going to miss the plane.’

  ‘He stood directly in front of you in the line?’

  Collard nodded.

  ‘Did your son and Khaled exchange words or looks?’

  ‘Of course not. Khaled?’

  ‘A Lebanese student. He happened to be the only non-American, non-white-European passenger. Why of course not?’

  ‘The boy was a stranger. They didn’t know each other. What are you trying to imply?’

  Sheehan raised an eyebrow and Collard again had the feeling that showing him Khaled’s body had been deliberate.

  ‘What did you make of his nervousness?’

  ‘I told you. Maybe he was meant to fly with someone who was late. Maybe he was just afraid of flying.’

  ‘Did your son remark on that?’

  ‘No. Look, can I leave now?’

  ‘Let’s go to the broom cupboard I call my office.’

  Collard was uncomfortable walking next to Sheehan. The whole event felt like it had been stage-managed. Outside the ice rink, the streets were deserted, with house curtains permanently drawn as a mark of respect.

  Sheehan’s office was the room where they had first questioned him, in a Victorian building up several flights of concrete stairs. The corridors were empty, but Collard had the feeling that behind closed doors the building hummed with secret activity.

  The taciturn Parker was waiting. He said the passenger boarding lists had come in from Heathrow and he handed several photostat sheets to Sheehan, who waved Collard towards a chair. Parker surprised him by offering coffee. Collard declined.

  ‘Two sugars,’ Sheehan said without looking up. He took a long time reading. Collard thought of the two dead young men in the morgue. Perhaps loss of air pressure and the freezing cold shut down the brain quicker than the time it took to fall. Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds?

  Sheehan shuffled through the pages, checking.

  ‘Interesting,’ he finally said and passed Collard the sheets. ‘Your name’s on the list but your son’s doesn’t appear to be.’

  ‘My name is on the list?’ He heard the tightness in his voice.

  ‘People who booked and didn’t get on the plane are on the list, which doesn’t make our job easier. But your son isn’t, which is curious.’

  Collard read through the list twice. His eye kept being drawn back to his own name. His throat was dry and his hands shook. Nick definitely wasn’t among them. Had he changed his mind too and decided not to get on the plane? Then why wasn’t he on the list? Had he never intended to get on?

  For the first time he dared to hope. He had been convinced it would be Nick in the morgue. Now Sheehan seemed to be saying he might be alive. Collard had held himself together since the crash, but this threatened to unhinge him altogether. It took all his self-control to maintain his composure in front of Sheehan.

  Sheehan seemed oblivious to what he had just suggested. ‘I have three girls, one around your boy’s age. She could ju
st as easily have been on it. There was a whole bunch of students on the plane.’

  Collard didn’t want to know. All he could think was that, against all the odds, Nick might still be alive.

  ‘Tell me about your son. How long was he away?’

  ‘Since the end of July.’ Collard was almost incapable of speech.

  ‘Travelling where?’

  ‘He had a rail card for Europe.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  Collard gestured helplessly, shaking his head. He had no idea.

  ‘First you tell me you didn’t get on the plane, but your bag did. Now we find out your son wasn’t on the plane. Is it something that runs in the family?’

  Collard tried to interrupt. Sheehan held up a hand.

  ‘Listen, look at it from my side. I’m asking, did you know? Did he know? You flew up here pretending to be part of the investigation. Maybe you’re an embittered crazy and you put the bomb on the plane and came to gloat. Far-fetched? Or you’re a time-waster and taking up valuable resources, which makes you as bad in my eyes.’

  Collard allowed himself to shout, ‘I’m an ordinary man with an ordinary job and an ordinary son.’

  Parker returned with the coffees. Sheehan grunted when he tasted his.

  ‘Why can’t the English make coffee?’

  ‘It’s Scottish coffee, technically,’ said Parker with no trace of humour.

  Sheehan looked at Collard. ‘Was he travelling alone?’

  ‘He left on his own.’

  ‘Would you describe your son as a loner?’

  ‘No, I would not describe my son as a loner,’ he said as levelly as he could manage. ‘He turned up with a girl in Frankfurt.’

  Sheehan stared with uncontrolled hostility.

  ‘What is this now? Are you going to sit there and insult our intelligence? Do you think we’re idiots? Why the hell didn’t you tell us that before?’

  ‘I didn’t think it important.’

  ‘I decide what’s important. Who was this girl?’