by Jo Bannister
“Oh yeah.”
Todd stood up, not without difficulty, and switched on the television. “I’m going to watch what’s coming in on this thing. If you’d rather not, make us some coffee—the kitchen’s through there.”
“I’m all right,” said Flynn; but he was not sure how long it would last when the images started flooding in. As a compromise he made the coffee and watched from the kitchen door.
The broadcast Todd found followed the usual disaster-in-progress format of shocking pictures and not many facts. And the coverage would get worse before it would get better. Tomorrow, when there were still too few facts to make a report, there would be speculation ranging from the informed and therefore guarded to the ignorant and unfettered. There would be interviews with people who had not been on the plane (but might have been) and someone whose house (four miles away) could have been flattened on his eight children if the crash had come a minute later (and a shade to the north). And then some ghoul with more neck than brain would shove a microphone into the face of someone leaving the New York air terminal without the relative she had come to meet and ask how she felt when she heard the news.
Tonight at least viewers would be spared that, if only because there had not yet been time to get it together. For tonight coverage of the tragedy would be limited to pictures of the crash scene from different angles, reassessments of the death-toll and repeated flashes of phone-numbers which people could call to get their worst fears confirmed.
There were no more biscuits, he had fed them all to the dog, so Flynn made some sandwiches. Shimoni had unusual things in her fridge: he selected from them mostly by colour. He put the tray on a trunk that served as a coffee-table and said, “The ones on the left are red. The ones on the right are yellow and green.” Then he sat down with a mug in one hand and a yellow and green sandwich in the other and watched the television.
Then he froze rigid. He did not drink the coffee or eat the sandwich. For thirty seconds he scarcely drew breath. His eyes burned with the intensity of his gaze on the screen. He knew he was not mistaken, and after thirty seconds the roving camera picked her up again. “There,” he breathed.
Todd heard the shock resurgent in his voice, looked quickly at Flynn then back at the screen. Apart from a crashed airliner he could see nothing amiss. “What? What is it?”
Disjointed words lurched from Flynn as from a man in delirium. “There. Gil! The woman. In red. There!”
“I see her.” So he could, but nothing remarkable about her. She was moving along the edge of the site, sometimes on camera, sometimes not; much as a few moments ago he had glimpsed Leah Shimoni. As Flynn had been doing when he found him. “Mickey, what’s the matter? Who is she?”
“I don’t know.” He blinked quickly, as if to lubricate his staring eyes. Perhaps it oiled his brain as well, because he began to make a little sense. At least, the words made sense. “I don’t know who she is. But Gil, she was on that plane.”
Chapter Five
Flynn had been promoted. This time he rated a Superintendent.
He told Detective Superintendent Donnelly the whole story—everything he could think of. He started with the fire at his apartment and the man Laura Wade had identified as Jamil Fahad. He explained the grudge Fahad held against him. He recounted his decision to skip London, and the incident he witnessed on the way to the airport. He underlined the fact that he only chose New York as a destination, and therefore that particular plane, on the spot and the spur of the moment.
He boarded, he said, when the flight was already preparing for departure. He only had time to sit down, glance over his fellow passengers and find the second half of his seatbelt before two policemen turned up asking for his help with their enquiries. He related the interview pretty much word for word, also what he thought about it. Then Inspector Harris’s sergeant had seen the explosion and he had gone to the window to see the pink chrysanthemum bloom.
His first reaction had been a heartfelt, wholly instinctive delight that the plane had gone down without him. His second had been guilt, twisting up his stomach and his soul, for surviving so arbitrarily where so many had died. And his third reaction was that this was Fahad trying again: that he had followed Flynn to Heathrow and somehow got a bomb on board his plane.
And the person who took it on board was the woman in red, the business-woman with the briefcase. She might well have seemed nervous! At that moment she was sitting in a plane that she knew contained a bomb, presumably looking for a chance to leave without drawing attention to herself. She had already left it late when Flynn spoke to her.
The arrival of the police officers and the small stir they created must have seemed a heaven-sent opportunity, and she slipped off the plane in their wake. Otherwise she would have been reduced to feigning appendicitis or some such, and would have come under immediate suspicion when the aircraft crashed. As it was, only the freak chance of a man who had been sitting beside her surviving to spot her on a roving camera shot came between her and the ultimate security of being believed dead.
“You’re sure it was her you saw on the TV?” Superintendent Donnelly was a man in his late forties, not a big man, with grey hair and grey eyes and rather a grey complexion as well, but with some subtle acuteness of personality that suggested rather the blue-grey of steel than the battleship grey of lead.
“I’m sure. I talked to her.”
“What did you say?”
Flynn grinned, with more savagery than humour. “That aeroplanes don’t back into mountains.”
“Can you give me a description?”
She had been about thirty-seven, around five-foot-five, well-built verging on plump. She had curly black shoulder-length hair and dark brown eyes. Her skin had a slightly olive cast. Her accent was Southern with a slight Hispanic edge. She was wearing the red suit, tailored jacket and skirt, over a navy roll-neck blouse with navy court-shoes, and she had a grey briefcase in rigid plastic.
Donnelly gave him a watchful little half-smile. “Mr. Flynn, if you didn’t take any notice of her just say so.”
Flynn grinned. Todd laughed out loud. He suspected Flynn could have issued a similarly comprehensive description of every woman he had met in the last fifteen years. He liked women—almost all of them, regardless of age or colour or type, or their beauty or physical charm. He liked women the way some people like cats, not for what they might do for him but for the pleasure of their company.
Todd said, “Is he right? Was it a bomb?”
Donnelly retreated a little into the protective shell of professional reticence. “We shalln’t know for sure until the people at Farnborough have made a jigsaw out of what’s left. But given the fire at Flynn’s place, and the woman who ought to be dead but seems to be wandering around outside Slough, I’ll be working on that assumption. If we can find the woman she can tell us why she got off the plane. If Farnborough decides it was a mechanical failure or pilot error, she still might have something interesting to say.”
“Will you be able to find her?”
Donnelly was a man not given to extravagant gestures. He shrugged economically. “We’ve a better chance starting now than if you’d thought about it and called us tomorrow. We know where she was half an hour ago and that’s worth something.” He paused, thinking. “I don’t suppose this is a fair question. But you wouldn’t have any idea why—if she planted a bomb, or even if she didn’t—she should go to the only place that everyone with an interest in the crash would be converging?”
Flynn also shrugged, nowhere near as neatly. The parts of his body always tended towards a certain independence: at times they seemed about to break up a loose alliance and go their separate ways. Except that when you saw his photographs you knew it was an illusion, that where hand, eye and mind were in such accord there was no risk of a separation, however oddly bits of him might behave on occasions.
He said, “Maybe for the same reason I did. It’s hard to explain. It’s like—as if what happened made them family.
It was sheer fluke that I wasn’t with them when they died. I felt somehow that I owed them something—mourning, apologies, I don’t know. As if I was their heir, or their witness.” He did not think he was making much sense so he stopped.
Donnelly understood what he was saying. “That works for you. We know you weren’t responsible: you’d have been on the plane if our people hadn’t taken you off—in circumstances which they will be called upon to explain before they’re very much older,” he added grimly. “But if your woman in red deliberately blew up that plane with two hundred and twenty people on board, we have to assume she’s a pretty tough lady and not the sort to be overtaken by sudden impulses of self-recrimination. What was she looking for?”
“Proof that I was dead?” There was a rough edge on Flynn’s voice. Talking about it had helped a lot, but he was still a man who had seen more than two hundred people die because of something he did.
Donnelly shook his head. “She knew you were alive. If she got off when Harris came aboard, she must have seen them take you back into the terminal. The plane left right after that: there was no chance that you were on it.”
Todd voiced what they were all three thinking. “So she let that plane take off carrying a bomb that would kill everyone on board after she knew that the man she’d been sent to kill was already safe on the ground.”
“There may once have been a golden age,” said Donnelly, “when even hardened criminals would give themselves up rather than risk innocent lives, but it had already ended by the time I joined the police force.”
It was a bomb. The accident investigators were sure of it that first night, long before all the pieces had been collected and reassembled in a hangar at Farnborough. The people at Heathrow who saw the explosion knew even before that. Aeroplanes do occasionally fail for structural or mechanical reasons, but they do not usually do it as dramatically as that.
As the investigation continued a picture began to emerge of an explosive device, of moderate rather than massive size, detonating at the after end of the forward baggage hold. The shock-wave had broken through to the inboard starboard wing-tank.
Shimoni got home about midnight. By then she had seen all there was to see. She accepted a mug of fresh coffee then disappeared into her darkroom. Todd thought it might have been natural to show another photographer what she had in the way of equipment and shots, and noticed that she did not.
Flynn did not notice. He was worrying about Laura. “She’ll have heard about the crash by now. She has to reckon New York as one of the likelier places I’d go. She knows she left me at Heathrow half an hour before—before it happened. If she calls my place she’ll only get the Phone Melted tone. She’s no more idea how to find me than I have to find her. We fixed it that way.”
“But she can find out if you were on the plane,” Todd said reasonably. “The same way anyone else can, by ringing the emergency number.”
“She might wonder if there was time to get my name on the list. Hellfire, my name might even be on the god-damned list.” He paused as that sank in. Then he added, “She might call you.”
Todd stared. “Why should she call me?”
Flynn shuffled uncomfortably. “I gave her your number. Well, we needed some way of leaving messages for each other, I didn’t think you’d mind. The last thing you said to me in Jerusalem—”
“The last thing I said to you in Jerusalem, after you’d told me to get off your back and buy a cocker spaniel if I wanted something running round after me, was that if we were no longer partners you could make your own bloody arrangements.” The indignation in his voice was not genuine, and he smiled slowly at Flynn’s expression. “The last but one thing I said was, ‘Call me if you need me.’”
Todd stood up, tapped on the darkroom door. “Leah, we’re going back to my place. There might be something for Mickey on my answering machine. If Superintendent Donnelly calls, let him know where we are, would you? I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Yes, sure,” said Shimoni through the door. Then, under her breath, “If you’ve still some use for the second eleven by then.”
There was no message from Laura, and Superintendent Donnelly did call. His men had picked up the woman in red. She had left the scene of the crash before a search could be made, but a speculative sweep of late-night cafes in the area found her hunched over a cup of cold coffee in a motorway service station on the M4. The policeman who spotted her knew at once who she was, without having to check through the description he had been given. She was crying.
Her name was Maxine Faber and she was a junior executive with an entertainments consortium in Fort Lauderdale. Her name was on the passenger list, the list of the dead.
At first she claimed Flynn was mistaken, that she had missed the flight. He must have seen her in the departure lounge, not on the plane. While waiting to board she had suddenly felt so ill that she considered it wiser to take a later flight. She was in the washroom when the plane took off, and when the explosion occurred.
She was not sure what she did next. There was a lot of shocked activity in the terminal. For a little while she stayed there but there was nothing she could do to help, she was only in the way, so after a time she went back to the desk where she had returned her hire-car and hired it out again. She really had very little idea what she wanted to do or where she wanted to go, but she was clear on one point: she would not be boarding an aeroplane for a little while.
She headed away from Heathrow and away from London, her thoughts in turmoil, driving on automatic pilot. She found herself being passed by a succession of emergency vehicles and, without really deciding to, followed them. When the scene of the crash came into view, picked out of the darkness by a hundred twinkling lights as if it were a children’s party, nausea made her stop the car. Then she walked, aimlessly, drawn to the place where they had died almost as if the two hundred and twenty had been kin, until she was stopped by the barriers. Some time after that she went back to her car and drove away. Donnelly said, “Flynn was never in the departure lounge.”
His quiet voice, precise and without inflection, summoned her back from what had become almost a soliloquy. She blinked her large brown eyes. “What?”
“Flynn couldn’t have seen you in the departure lounge. The plane was already boarding when he got his ticket: he went straight to the gate and he was the last one aboard. The only place he could have seen you was on the plane.”
She began to cry again, bent forward, her curly hair shielding her face. Donnelly waited patiently. By degrees she stopped sobbing and her shoulders stilled; then her face came up, reddened and puffy round the eyes. Her voice was thick and her mouth quivered. “Superintendent, what is it you’re accusing me of?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything yet, Miss Faber,” he replied, deadpan. “I’m asking you to explain your rather curious and deeply convenient actions. And I’m wondering why you’re lying.”
“Somebody blew that plane up and you think it was me. You think I killed two hundred and twenty people.” Outrage and grief warred in her voice.
He explained patiently. “Airlines do not normally carry baggage for passengers who aren’t travelling. As a safety measure. If you change your mind about flying, your luggage is off-loaded. As far as we know only two bags travelled unaccompanied on that flight: Flynn’s, because he was taken off the plane by police at the last minute, and yours. I have yet to hear a credible explanation of how you and your bag got parted. We shall sit here—well, you will, I might take a break from time to time—until I do.”
There was no need for Flynn to see Faber. She had already admitted most of what he could say about her, it was only a matter of time before she offered a reason, truthful or otherwise, for being on the plane and then leaving it. But Donnelly wanted her to see Flynn. He could not justify taking her to view the corpses: confronting a man who should have been one of them, burned and shattered with the rest, was the next best thing. It might not shake a confession out of her—he w
as not yet sure what she had to confess—but he thought it would shake something loose.
Todd drove Flynn to the police station exactly as if the last three years had not happened. It was too soon for either of them to have realised it, but the older man had quite automatically taken up again the reins of the younger man’s life that had been wrested forcibly from him last time they met. For now, shocked as he was, Flynn was grateful for somewhere to go, some way to get around, someone to do his thinking for him. But when he got his breath back and his feet under him again he would wonder if he would have been wiser to keep the cork in the bottle and manage without the genie’s help.
During the last three years Todd had been driven by Shimoni more often than he had been behind the wheel himself. For four years before that Flynn had done most of the driving. The consequence was that Todd drove like an old maid, not only cautiously but cautious in the wrong ways, hesitating halfway across junctions and yielding right-of-way when it caused infinitely more confusion than claiming it. His reverse parking had to be seen to be believed.
So while Flynn appreciated his kindness at driving him across the city at three in the morning, he was not finding it a relaxing experience. He wished he could think of a tactful way of taking the wheel because, even in shock, he was a safer driver than Todd was. Todd took his eyes off the road to talk.
He said, “Did you get much sleep?” and a lamp-post rushed at them threateningly.
Flynn tried not to grab his seatbelt. “Some.” He had not. He had lain on his back in the dark room with his eyes wide open, seeing over and over again the seminal scenes of the day projected like slides inside his mind. Laura in the midst of the fire. The people on the plane. The PhotoFit picture of Fahad. The pop-singer in the Porsche. The rosy flowering in the darkening sky beyond Heathrow. The devastation beside the Thames where the big pieces and the little pieces of the destroyed aeroplane had been scattered like barren seed.