by Craig Thomas
The marquee was all but empty. It was no more than a moment or two before she replenished her plate with prawns and more salad, had her glass refilled. The encounter with Sam Egan clung about her like a chill mist. There had been knowledge, and the attempt to disguise it, in his eyes; the sense of secrecy.
Marian wandered out of the marquee into cooler air and the anticipatory noises of the guests. A smile slowly spread across her face as she walked towards the house. She knew exactly where she needed to be to watch the firework display, a window from which she had watched such events as a child.
Had Clive's Silver Wedding been one such occasion? The playroom window on the top floor of the house the idea amused and attracted her. She'd watched the domestic rituals of the gardens, the loves and quarrels and hoeing and planting, from that window. In the company of David and his long-dead brother… She climbed the steps to the rear terrace, pausing to look back at the floodlit guests like a corralled horde of peacocks and blackbirds. Then she entered the house. The housekeeper smiled at her with an old, affectionate familiarity, shrugging at the litter of abandoned glasses and plates obscuring the polish and inlay of eighteenthcentury tables. Marian shook her head in sympathy.
The long hall was deserted, silent after the babble outside. Then she heard a voice she recognised, and another so recently familiar, raised in quarrel. She hovered, feeling exposed and foolish in the middle of the hall, standing on a faded Persian carpet that covered the marble floor. She had no real sense why she had paused to listen. She had heard no distinct words, only David's raised voice and that of Sam Egan. Where—?
In the shadow of the staircase, only yards from her… It cantilevered over her head towards the gallery on her right, its other branch, like some great upended railway junction, leading to the rooms of the west wing. She moved stealthily, startled by the sound of her own name.
Except for the three of them, the hall was empty. She shivered as the first of the fireworks exploded to dutiful noises of acclaim and surprise. She pressed into the alcove on the opposite side of the staircase, hearing her name again.
'… Marian knows nothing!" That was David, the contempt clear in his tone.
"Whatever she's heard, or thinks she's heard, she knows nothing!"
"She's suspicious, I tell you," Egan persisted.
"I know when someone's trying to dig up information. She thinks there's something in the rumours—"
"Who's been speaking to her?"
"Could be anyone—"
"Keep your voice down!" David hissed.
Marian felt heated She had blundered into the conversation with Egan, disarmed by the occasion, and her own self-confidence.
"All right, all right. I just thought I'd better let you know."
"Because you panicked, Sam?" David mocked.
"Panic was why you called her the other day, wasn't it?"
"I thought—" '-she could or would help. Marian? A blessing I stopped you before you went bleating to her! Listen to me find out who may have talked to her. You know all the local subcontractors. It must have been one of them. Find out and let me know."
I'll do that," Egan reassured.
"Good. Now, go and see the fireworks before that wife of yours thinks you've sneaked up to a bedroom with one of the catering staff!"
Immediate footsteps. Then David added with contemptuous venom: The fireworks cost my father a small fortune. Try to enjoy them."
Marian pressed back into the alcove and the shadow of the staircase.
Egan passed her hiding-place without glancing in her direction, attracted by another explosion and a flash of multicoloured light that seemed to blow into the house like a stream of confetti. Weak-legged from tension, Marian sank on to a hard Caroline chair in the alcove and sipped furiously at her wine. More fireworks exploded.
Kenneth Aubrey tottered in from the rear terrace, his stick making severe tapping noises on the marble. He passed Egan in the doorway.
"Kenneth!" she whispered hoarsely, jumping from the chair, spilling the last drops of her wine.
Aubrey turned, half-startled, half-preoccupied. He was opposite the door of the library which she heard close with a heavy, comfortable sound. More fireworks, more exhaled wonder.
"Marian… What is it, my dear?" He glanced towards the library."
"In close recess and secret conclave"," he murmured.
"What?" Her nerves made her voice sharp.
"Oh, Milton. Your friends are all fore gathered in there. I glimpsed them as the door closed. A tight little group portrait. Laxton, Rogier, the Transport Commissioner, Bryan Coulthard, David, of course… and that Euro MP, what's his name—?"
"Ben Campbell. He is forgettable," she smiled.
"You look shaken in attentively so."
They were talking about me David and a builder who lives in the constituency.
I'd been talking to him a few minutes' before… What's going on, Kenneth?"
"What were they saying?" Aubrey asked heavily.
"About you?"
"Egan thought I was too suspicious about the possibility of fraud in the—"
"I warned you, Marian!" Aubrey snapped.
"You revealed your hand?"
"I didn't think-!"
Then do so now." He patted her arm as they leant together.
"Egan, the builder, thought I was trying to open a can of worms, that much was obvious. I asked him about cash flow, late payments. Things I'd heard doesn't matter from where. He jumped to everyone's defence then rushed to tell David I was asking awkward questions."
There was something more alert and hound like about Aubrey as he listened.
Concern for her, expressed as irritated anxiety, faded and was replaced by a voracious curiosity. He continually glanced towards the closed door of the library.
There is knowledge they are afraid you may possess. Concerning—"
"My fraud theory? You don't believe me at last?"
"Something, anyway and it involves money. Probably a very great deal of it."
The firework explosions were more frequent now, as if heralding some climax.
Flashes of coloured light were caught by mirrors, polished surfaces.
"Michael Lloyd…?" she remembered. Then, clearing her throat as Aubrey glanced anxiously at her, she said: "I spoke to a subcontractor yesterday, working on the Urban Regeneration Project. He believes he's being threatened, along with his family, because he complained. The money's dried up for the smaller fish. He wasn't getting paid by Euro-Construction—" '-which is wholly owned by Winterborne Holdings, who are principal contractors for—"
'-as much as thirty per cent of the whole project. European funds are pouring in.
Brussels thinks of it as a model for the future of the EU, price no object…"
"And the funds appear not to be flowing out again." Aubrey took her arm.
"Come on, my girl, I think another drink is called for. Clive's best whisky, I fancy. He'll not mind."
"Where is Clive?"
"Rattling the tin under the noses of the richest guests by this time, I should think."
A cacophony of explosions; cheering and clapping after a momentary, stunned silence.
"We need to talk. Come!"
Twelve-sixteen. He looked up from the flight engineer's panel on the flight deck of the 494 as the Norwegian chief engineer's slight form appeared in the doorway.
"All finished," Strickland announced.
"Good you want more coffee? How is she?"
"Fine. No problems. Yes to coffee. I'll come out. The fuel computer's OK, so are the instrument readouts."
"What did happen the crash?"
"It's still being analysed, all the data. It looks like a rogue chip — not the one used in this baby gave the command to jettison the fuel but there were no readouts that didn't say everything was normal… It was lucky the pilot spotted it. It won't happen again."
Strickland closed the door of the flight deck behind him and followed the Norwegi
an to the main passenger door. The routine servicing of the
494 all such effort soon to be wasted — continued at its unhurried pace.
"We've had no problems over the past six months," the Norwegian offered.
"She's a good plane."
"At Vance Aircraft we like to think so. And do we need the world to think like you!"
"Come in the office, have your coffee there."
"Sure. Thanks."
He turned to look back at the 494. The huge dock had been moved back, away from the aircraft, and it sat in the hangar like some fabulous sea mammal thought extinct but utterly real, alive. He could regret what he had arranged for the fate of the airplane, even if the lives of its crew and passengers failed to impinge. It was, like all aircraft, proof of the beauty of machines.
There was a sardonic amusement in his situation. The chief engineer obviously wanted to grill him on the Phoenix crash. Professional curiosity. Who better than himself to explain in detail, after all…
?
There was bright morning light coming through the heavy drapes of the bedroom windows. Almost ten. The bed beside him was empty, cool.
Charley had got up without disturbing him.
He fumbled for the telephone which had woken him. He hadn't slept well, endlessly rehearsing his meeting with yet more bankers and institutional shareholders, as if recollecting each move in a game of chess… a game which he feared, last night, he might have lost, despite his bravado and Vance's good news from Phoenix. That pilot, Gant his ex-son-in-law amazing… But the men in suits were cautious; soaked by a sudden shower, they seemed to expect another at any moment.
TV in America, images of Gant and Vance and the plane, the initial explanations of a rogue chip in the fuel computer system, Vance's lawsuit against the manufacturer… none of it seemed to have borne them along. He decided, before he finally fell asleep beside an anxiously wakeful Charley, that his exhilaration, fed by champagne and a few necessary pills, had failed to convince them.
"Burton."
Tim-!" It was Stuart, his MD.
"Christ, Tim, it's happened again!"
"What?" He struggled upright in the suddenly heavy bedclothes, the entwining sheets and duvet.
"Fifty miles from Helsinki, no more. It went down, Tim it went down!"
"One of our—?" He could not, could not, ask.
"Oslo to Helsinki, early-morning flight. She was fucking serviced last fucking night, Tim—"
"How—?"
"Nothing on that yet. Oh, Jesus Christ, Tim we're done for!"
"How how many died?"
"Everyone. Seven crew, forty-four passengers. She was running almost empty…"
"Yes… there's that, at least," Burton replied, watching himself in a cheval mirror in one corner of the bedroom as carefully as if studying his performance on a television monitor. He would be doing that endlessly, later… "Forty-four passengers, you said?"
"Yes."
"God, it's awful. I mean it's really appalling." He felt shaken, made nauseous, by the sense of lives lost. It overpowered all other sensations, even those that already dragged at him concerning the immediate future. Forty-four. And the crew. And the plane had been almost empty… God, it was dreadful.
"What do you want me to do immediately, Tim?"
"What—? Oh, yes. A bland press release but emphasise the tragedy, our sorrow.
We know nothing more at the moment. Get us both on a flight to
Helsinki early tomorrow. I'll have to be here to field all the interviews today. God—" he breathed as the nausea and shock gripped him once more.
"It's not possible not another…"
An immediate future of hysterical accusations, tirades that damned himself, Vance and the plane. Experts dragged into studios all over the world to pronounce judgement. The fall of the share price, the panic of the lenders… Forty-four people. And the crew. It was.
She threw aside the telephone and rushed from the bed towards the bathroom, the nausea overwhelming him, already bitter in his throat.
PART TWO
A DARK PHILANTHROPY
My politics are the politics of honest folks…
I'm grateful to the government when business is prosperous, when I can eat my meals in peace and comfort, and can sleep at nights without being awakened by the firing of guns… Now that we have got the Empire, everything prospers. We sell our goods readily enough. You can't deny it. Well, what is it that you want? How will you be better off when you have shot everybody?
Emile Zola, Le Ventre de Paris
CHAPTER SIX
Summer Lightning The lights from the town of Tammisaari glowed as fitfully and hopelessly as distress maroons through the summer thunderstorm that enraged the Gulf of Finland around the tiny islet on which they hunched against the howling wind.
Burton felt his whole body numbed by the aftershock of the accident, as if he had been hurried to this place by plane, limousine, motorboat only to collide with the debris of his airliner his entire airline.
Below the small, naked promontory on which he was standing, men scurried like crabs across sharp rocks and around the wreckage of the 494. Somewhere down there was Gant, authorised by himself and Alan Vance, who stood mutely stunned beside him, his daughter clinging to him as to an uncertain rock. The behaviour of the inspectors, the floating crane, the other vessels, bobbing and jolting in the waves, all seemed not only insignificant but desperate the activity of a team of surgeons around an operating table when all the monitors showed flat, unvarying lines; no heartbeat, no brain activity, no pulse or breath. Forty-odd people had died, together with the crew, in that mockery of wreckage. Newspapers from Europe and the States he had seen in the arrivals lounge while waiting for Vance to fly in from Phoenix in his private jet showed another wreck. Headlines crying killer airplane, deadly airliner and the like… and stock market reports, graphs and indicators describing the terminal decline of Vance Aircraft and Artemis Airways.
The storm tugged at his long hair like a vindictive housemaster confronting him with wrongdoing… Look at it, Burton, look at it, this is your doing. He wanted Vance to say something, to assist by sharing the responsibility… but Vance, with Barbara clutched against his side like a spar, was contained within an iron maiden of failure. The FAA had immediately ordered all 494s grounded and a greatest urgency enquiry into the safety of the aircraft. The banks and the DOW had responded by ditching Vance Aircraft. The company died that morning, in the press and on TV… and the creditors would distance themselves, call in the loans, pick among the rags of the few small subsidiary businesses for something to salvage. Vance and his company were finished.
Which made the activity down there on the shoreline, where the whale-like bulk of the main fuselage ground and screamed against rocks and one wing half-saluted from the rough water and the tailplane wearing Diana the Huntress stuck up to taunt him… futile, all of it.
He could see men in diving gear, others in orange waistcoats, yellow waterproofs, all as small and pointlessly active as insects.
He had asked begged Vance to bring Gant, the pilot who had appeared to save them, like a phantom bugle-call now so obviously unreal. He had suffered a round of television and radio interviews and phone calls, newspaper assaults, with a weary and defiant determination, a black time in which Gant had appeared to be some kind of distant, but real, beacon. Confronted now with the wreckage, the body-count they had already recovered at least two dozen bodies, including that of the pilot and the howling, light-flashing storm, he knew that he had clung to the illusion of rescue.
It was a pathetic irony that Gant had been able to come, collected by Vance at Dulles airport in Washington, because he had resigned from the NTSB and was available for freelance work. The force of the wind made Burton's eyes water.
The floating crane, rolling awkwardly, lowered one of the big Pratt & Whitney engines on to its flat deck, and men secured it as gently as they might have fussed around a stretcher, tucking in a red bla
nket that covered a body. He glanced away from the scene, but Vance appeared still to inhabit another world, some inner nightmare.
Gant, glancing up at the low headland of the islet where the 494 had come down, saw two figures Burton and the composite individual that was Vance and Barbara clinging to his side like an infant monkey. The sea roared around the rocks along the shore, sending another wave over him.
Water ran off him, leaving his face and hands icily chilled, his waterproofs streaming. The noises of the airliner grinding against the rocks were deafening. The airplane had come down steeply, like the 494 towards the runway at Vance Aircraft, and tried to level too late to make a landing on the water. It had broken up on the shore of the tiny island off the Finnish coast, two miles out from the town of Tammisaari. The island was a nature reserve for wildfowl. He imagined their panic in the early morning as the plane had crashed and disintegrated.
Vance's private jet had gotten into Helsinki's Vantaa airport just ahead of the summer storm coming down from the Gulf of Bothnia. The sky had been luridly discoloured and threatening as they had driven west. He had been walking the pebbled, narrow beach studying the line of impact of the 494 when the storm broke, lightning all along the horizon and the waves rearing like grey cloud only fifty yards from him. The local investigation team seemed not to resent his presence.
He was accredited as the technical expert representing the airplane manufacturer, and that seemed sufficient.
The flight recorders and the cockpit voice recorder had been recovered.
He had listened to a cassette tape of the latter, chilled by more than the wind and the glare of the lightning. It had been like listening to Hollis die, like reliving the airplane's own attempt to kill him.
Instability, growing like cardiac pains at a frightening rate, the airplane convulsing then dropping, its altitude spouting away from it like blood from a severed artery.
The sea rushed at him again from an angry cleft in the rocky shore, and he flinched away from the spume. Along the pebbled shoreline, across the rocks to the edge of the tide, there were gouges, splintered rock, great scars… small scorch marks There had been virtually no fire.