by M. R. Hall
First Officer Stevens received the go-ahead from the tower and Captain Murray manoeuvred the Airbus towards the start of runway two. Inside the cabin passengers temporarily denied the comfort of electronic distractions buried themselves in newspapers or uttered silent prayers. In the cockpit the pilots’ focus narrowed to the rigid procedure that lay ahead. The Boeing 777 directly in front of them sped off along the greasy tarmac, passed the point of no return and lumbered into the air, shearing a little to the left as the pilot compensated for a sudden gust of cross-wind. Thirty seconds passed; the tower confirmed cleared for take-off and Captain Murray pushed the thrust levers fully forward to the take-off-go-around setting.
The aircraft started to accelerate; the windshield streaked with rain. First Officer Stevens called out, ‘Eighty knots.’ Both pilots cross-checked their airspeed instruments; both were in agreement. Had they not been, take-off would have been aborted immediately. Upwards of eighty knots the pilot was obliged to ignore any minor faults and abort only to avoid imminent disaster. An automated voice called out, ‘V1’, indicating that the critical speed of 122 knots had been reached. Captain Murray removed his hand from the thrust lever, now committed to take-off. As they reached 141 knots, First Officer Stevens called out, ‘Rotate,’ and Captain Murray pulled gently on the joystick, easing the nose up through three degrees per second until at twelve-point-five degrees the massive craft began to lift and climb.
At a hundred feet Captain Murray called for ‘Gear-up’, then ‘AP one’. Like most pilots, he would have preferred to fly the aircraft manually to 10,000 feet before switching to autopilot, but Heathrow being a noise-restricted airport, any deviation from the Standard Instrument Departure – such as a sudden throttle up – could infringe volume regulations and trigger a hefty automatic fine, a portion of which under Ransome’s rules would have been docked from his salary.
The autopilot engaged. Only a few hundred feet from the ground the two human pilots became virtual spectators as the aircraft banked left and headed out on a westerly course, slowly ascending towards 10,000 feet. Their displays showed the constant subtle movements of the rudder, spoilers and stabilizer countering the effects of a blustery north wind. To have flown the aircraft as skilfully by hand would have been a physical impossibility.
At 1,500 feet Captain Murray pulled the thrust lever back to the ‘climb’ setting as they entered low-lying cloud and encountered minor pockets of turbulence. First Officer Stevens swapped formalities with air traffic control and obtained permission to pass through the first altitude constraint of 6,000 feet. At 4,000, the flaps retracted from take-off position and the engines responded to the reduced lift with an increase in power, accelerating to 250 knots. The cloud was thick and dense, making for a bumpier ride than many passengers would be finding comfortable, but the weather radar showed conditions clearing over the Welsh coast. The latest reports from the mid-Atlantic were of a clear, bright, turbulence-free day.
At 10,000 feet, both pilots called out, ‘Flight level one hundred’: standard procedure designed to keep them working as a tight-knit team. Now high enough above the ground to be free of noise restrictions, the engines powered up to a more efficient climb speed of 327 knots. Captain Murray switched off the passenger seat-belt signs and enabled the inflight entertainment system. First Officer Stevens checked in with air traffic control, who handed him over to Bristol. A brief exchange of messages secured permission to continue to an initial cruising altitude of 31,000 feet.
Both pilots began to relax; they were airborne. The hardest part of their day’s work was already done.
As soon as the seat-belt signs were switched off, Kathy Flood came to check on Amy Patterson, and found the little girl so engrossed in her favourite video game that she barely noticed her. Relieved, Kathy went about her work. For the next seven hours she would be at full stretch tending to the sixty passengers in her section; there was simply not enough time to cope with a miserable child.
A polite tap at the door of Jimmy Han’s suite signalled the arrival of a pretty stewardess who handed him the complimentary drinks menu. It was too early in the day for champagne, so he ordered freshly squeezed orange juice, giving her a smile which promised a handsome tip if she looked after him well. Reaching for the remote, he flicked to CNN, hoping for updates on the latest diplomatic spat between China and Taiwan. But the studio anchor was dwelling on another minor story and he impatiently scoured the ticker at the foot of the screen before a knot of tension stiffened his neck and reminded him that he was meant to be taking it easy. Business could wait. He switched across to the movie channels and picked out an old Clint Eastwood picture: Dirty Harry. It was one of his favourites. He had learned one of his most valuable lessons from American films: the good guys are ultimately more ruthless than the bad.
The altimeters ticked past 30,000 feet, prompting both pilots to call out, ‘One to go,’ affirming that their instruments were in sync and that they were nearing level-off. First Officer Stevens checked in with Bristol and learned that aircraft up ahead had reported a belt of thunder clouds, but that no deviation was necessary. At 31,000 feet the autothrust pulled back, downgrading to a softer mode which caused the engines to quieten to an almost inaudible whisper and settle to the optimum fuel-efficient cruise speed: a steady 479 knots.
‘How’s the baby?’ Captain Murray asked his first officer. ‘Getting any sleep?’
‘Doing my best – on the sofa.’ Stevens unbuckled his belt and rolled his stiff shoulders.
‘Like that, is it?’
‘I told her, I’ll change all the dirty nappies you like, but getting up in the night, forget it. I’ve got a plane to fly.’
‘Off the leash tonight, then? I hope she doesn’t expect me to keep an eye on you.’
‘In New York? You really think you’d keep up?’
‘You’d be surprised.’
The interphone buzzed.
‘Coffee time already?’ First Officer Stevens glanced up at the entry screen and saw a stewardess standing beyond the outer of the two doors which separated the cabin from the cockpit. ‘They could have sent the pretty one.’
‘Who’s that?’ Captain Murray asked.
‘You know – the little blonde one, Kathy, with the—’ He held his hands out in front of his chest.
‘Oh, yeah – her.’
Both men laughed.
‘You’re definitely on your own tonight,’ Captain Murray said. ‘Not my responsibility.’
Stevens tapped in the entry code which would let the stewardess through the outer door.
‘Speed! Speed!’ The automated warning voice called out from speakers mounted in the instrument consoles.
‘What the hell is that?’ Captain Murray said, more puzzled than alarmed. ‘We’re at 470—’
‘Speed! Speed!’
‘Jesus—’
‘Speed! Speed!’
There was a loud clatter and a scream of alarm from between the cockpit’s two doors as the aircraft’s nose pitched violently upwards and the stewardess was thrown off her feet.
‘I’m sorry, say again, Skyhawk . . . Skyhawk, uh, are you still on?’
At his seat in the tower at Bristol airport Guy Fearnley saw Skyhawk 380 on his radar screen but heard only static through his headset.
‘Skyhawk, are you there?’
The air traffic controller watched the numbers on his screen that indicated the aircraft’s altitude was starting to fall; slowly at first, then faster and faster. He blinked twice to make sure he wasn’t imagining it.
He wasn’t.
The brief message from the Airbus had been too fractured to make out. He switched channels and tried again. ‘Skyhawk this is Bristol eight-zero-nine –’
There was no reply.
TWO
THE WORN TYRES HAD LOST their grip on the bend. The driver, who had been travelling at an estimated speed of seventy miles an hour, had stamped on the brakes, causing the already sliding wheels to lock. Skating acros
s the wet surface, the car had ploughed into an oak at the side of the road, killing the single male occupant instantly. It was bad luck: the tree was the only one for fifty yards in either direction. That, at least, was the conclusion of the road traffic accident investigation officer who had spent the small hours of the morning measuring the skid marks on the remote stretch of country lane. Another car travelling behind appeared also to have skidded, probably to avoid the car that had spun out of control, but there was no evidence to suggest who the driver had been, and he or she had certainly not reported the accident to the police. Ordinary people could at times be shockingly callous. For the officer reconstructing the scene it had been a routine technical exercise, a matter of entering data in a computer that produced a neat 3D reproduction of the accident. But as a coroner who was often far too diligent for her own good, Jenny Cooper had been there to see the body and the wreckage, and to smell the blood. The airbags had failed. The driver, a man in his late thirties named Jon Whitestone, had bounced off the windscreen, leaving no face for his wife to identify. Beyond the fact that he was late coming home from work, no explanation could be found for the victim’s excessive speed. It was a needless death.
Closing the lid of her laptop, Jenny wished she hadn’t read the officer’s report with her late-morning breakfast. The week had been fraught enough without work spoiling her Sunday, too. By the time she had finished dealing with the accident’s aftermath it had been past midnight. It was nearly two when she’d made it back to her cottage deep in the Wye valley, and she had needed a pill to sleep. Now there were only a few precious hours of the weekend left in which to recoup. She would get some fresh air, make a start on the paperwork that had been mounting on her desk, and finally decide whether she would follow the advice of several well-meaning girlfriends and start searching for a date on one of the more upmarket singles sites. She had been putting it off for weeks: the very idea of meeting with a complete stranger filled her with dread. It also felt oddly like a betrayal. Whenever she allowed herself to think of Steve, her former lover, she ached for him. But it had been her choice. She had encouraged him to take the position at the architects’ practice in Provence and to surrender to love if it came along. And it had, with almost indecent speed. Within months of arriving he had moved in with a beautiful dark-haired girl called Gabrielle, and was blissfully happy. He still sent the odd email, even a Christmas card which he had signed with a kiss, but his communications had become steadily less frequent as, without either of them saying so, they both acknowledged that it was time to move on.
Could she ever be as close to another man as she had once been to Steve? Could she imagine sharing her most intimate secrets? She carried these questions with her up the footworn boards of the narrow wooden staircase and came no closer to answers as she ran a deep bath.
She had plunged as much of her chilled flesh beneath the surface as the antique roll-top tub would allow when the telephone rang. Jenny closed her eyes and tried to ignore it. Whoever it was, she would call them back when she was ready. But they refused to give up. Ten, twelve, fifteen rings, still they persisted. It was no use. She forced herself out of the water, wrapped herself in a towel and hurried barefoot to answer it.
She picked up the phone in the living room, water pooling on the cold flagstones around her feet.
‘Hello?’
‘Mrs Cooper? You’ve heard the news—’ It was Alison Trent, her officer.
‘No.’
‘Surely—’
‘No. What is it?’
Alison paused. ‘A plane crash . . . On the Severn.’
‘Bad?’
‘Nearly six hundred.’
It was Jenny’s turn to fall silent. Six hundred. ‘Not all dead?’
‘We don’t know. The good news is it’s North Somerset’s jurisdiction.’
Jenny felt a selfish sensation of relief. ‘So we’re not involved—?’
‘I’m afraid we are, Mrs Cooper. South Gloucestershire police just called saying two bodies have been washed up at Aust. An adult male and a female child. I’m on my way. I thought you might want to come. Oh, and you’ll probably want to bring your wellingtons.’
Jenny drove through the Wye valley as fast as she dared in the new Land Rover SUV with which she had reluctantly replaced her decrepit VW. Speeding through sleepy villages, she absorbed the constantly updating news of the disaster which had unfolded only a few miles to the south. A Ransome Airways Airbus A380, the world’s largest and most technically advanced passenger airliner, had ditched in the middle of the Severn estuary two miles west of the new Severn crossing. The crash had happened some three and a half hours earlier around nine-thirty. Rescue boats were at the scene, but no survivors had yet been found. There was some flotsam on the surface and a number of bodies had been recovered, but the aircraft’s fuselage had sunk beneath the water. The number of an emergency helpline was read out repeatedly. A shell-shocked air traffic controller from Bristol told a reporter that he had lost radio contact with the stricken plane without warning and had watched it plunge to earth on his screen. The descent had taken over six minutes, which already had a hastily assembled collection of experts speculating that by no means had it dropped like a stone. A physics professor explained that following a breakup an aeroplane travelling five and a half miles above the earth would take roughly two and a half minutes to fall to the ground. A descent lasting six minutes suggested that the pilot had retained some control and had struggled to remain in the air.
Search-and-rescue helicopters were sweeping the mile-wide stretch of water to her right as Jenny crossed the vast span of the Severn Bridge, their orange lights disappearing in and out of the curtains of grey mist that hung over the estuary. She took the first exit at the far end, and minutes later was pulling up at the edge of a mud and shingle beach between Alison’s Ford and a cluster of police vehicles. A young constable approached. Jenny wound down her window.
‘Jenny Cooper. Severn Vale District Coroner.’
‘They’re expecting you, ma’am.’
He nodded towards two white tents that had already been erected over the corpses. Jenny climbed out and pulled on her boots, freezing drizzle pricking the back of her neck. The mud was thick and deep, sucking at her feet as she waded over.
Alison appeared from the nearer tent, swathed in a ski jacket and a plain woollen hat with flaps that hung down over her ears. ‘The girl’s in here,’ she said with a studied absence of emotion. ‘You can’t tell me you haven’t heard the news reports by now.’
‘I’ve heard them,’ Jenny said. ‘But I can’t say that it helped.’
She braced herself and followed her officer into a tent no more than ten feet square in which a young female forensics officer dressed in white overalls was taking photographs of the little girl. Daily exposure to death had largely inured Jenny to the sight of all but the most horrifically damaged adult corpses, but the sight of a dead child was something she had never grown used to. The girl lay face up on the mud just as the retreating tide would have left her. The first thing Jenny noticed was the fully inflated bright yellow lifejacket with the straps secured tightly around her slender waist. She wore blue jeans, pink canvas pumps and a pale blue T-shirt with what appeared to be a purple tabard over it. Her sandy-blonde hair was plaited in a single pigtail. On her forehead was a raised, dark, circular bruise.
‘I think she might have been an unaccompanied minor,’ Alison said. ‘They make them wear those tops so the staff can spot them.’
Jenny forced herself to look closer and made out the edge of what appeared to be an airline logo. ‘Has the medic been?’
Alison dug a folded piece of paper from her coat pocket and handed it to her. The form, hastily signed by a doctor twenty minutes earlier, confirmed that there was no sign of life and no realistic prospect of resuscitation.
‘Her body temperature is less than ten degrees,’ Alison said. ‘She’d have been in the water well over an hour, probably more like two.’
Jenny noticed the small bloodstain on the left side of the girl’s T-shirt that marked the spot where the doctor had taken her core temperature by liver puncture.
‘Any idea who she is?’
‘Not yet. I’ve left details with the incident room. I’ll get a call as soon as they have an idea.’
Fighting her instinct to recoil, she studied the girl’s plaster-white face, her smooth bare arms and her fingers curled up to form partial fists. Apart from the blow to the head there was no other sign of injury.
‘I was expecting more damage,’ Jenny said. ‘And she obviously had time to put on a lifejacket.’
‘Almost makes it worse, doesn’t it?’ Alison said. ‘Knowing what’s coming, I mean.’
Jenny recalled the experts’ speculation on the radio. The stricken plane appeared not so much to have crashed, but to have crash-landed on the estuary. From what she had read of such disasters, bodies could emerge from the wreckage in all manner of conditions: some mangled beyond recognition, others more or less intact. It all depended what debris the body collided with. The brutal randomness of passengers’ injuries added yet another layer of horror onto an event already too large for her fully to comprehend.