by M. R. Hall
The forensics officer zipped her camera into a case. ‘How soon till you take her to the D-Mort?’ she asked. ‘Only we could do with the tent.’
‘D-Mort?’
‘Disaster mortuary. They’re setting one up on a field at Walton Bay – where the plane went down.’
‘Who’s “they”?’ Jenny asked. ‘North Somerset?’
‘The Ministry of Justice is appointing someone more senior to take charge,’ Alison interjected. ‘They don’t think us provincial hicks can be trusted.’
Jenny had been so shocked by the scale of the accident that she had barely turned her mind to the complicated logistics of managing it. There were standing protocols for handling a high-casualty event which involved setting up a disaster mortuary as close as practicable to the scene. There bodies would be identified, autopsied and stored until it was appropriate to release them to families. A handful of coroners had been specially trained to manage such situations, but despite the presence of an elderly nuclear power plant and several chemicals factories within her jurisdiction, Jenny had never been selected to be one of them, a minor snub that still rankled.
‘Any bodies lying in my area will be taken to the Vale as usual,’ Jenny said. ‘They’ll have enough to deal with at Walton.’
The officer gave an uncertain nod. ‘How long are you going to be?’
‘There’s an ambulance on the way,’ Alison said. ‘You can spare your tent for ten minutes.’
‘I’ll be in the van,’ the young woman said, letting it be known that she was being caused serious inconvenience. She picked up her two bags and marched out.
An odd, liquid sound issued from the girl’s body. Jenny looked down to see a small gush of water bubble up through her lips and trickle across her cheeks.
‘Muscles contracting,’ Alison said. ‘Must have had water in her lungs.’
Some instinct prompted Jenny to lean down and touch the girl’s face – just in case – but it was as cold as porcelain. ‘If she inhaled water, she must have been breathing after the crash.’
Alison made no further comment and turned back to the entrance. ‘You’d better have a look at the other one.’
The second tent lay some ten yards closer to the water’s edge on a band of sticky black silt. Alison unzipped the flap and pulled it back to reveal the body of a bearded man lying with his right cheek on the ground, his arms spread out at his sides.
Jenny placed him in his upper thirties. He was sturdily built and looked nothing like an airline passenger. He was wearing dungaree-style over-trousers, calf-length orange rubber boots, and a red plaid shirt rolled up to the elbows with a white T-shirt underneath. His forearms were veined and muscular, those of a man accustomed to heavy manual work.
‘He looks like a fisherman.’
‘Not at this time of year,’ Alison said. ‘There’s nothing in his pockets – we checked.’
She handed Jenny a second piece of paper similar to the first. The medic had recorded his core temperature as 13.5 degrees.
‘He wasn’t flying to New York dressed like that,’ Jenny said. ‘I think we might have our first casualty on the ground.’
She walked around the body on the duckboards the forensic officers had put down inside the tent and studied the man’s face. Beneath the inch of reddish-brown growth on his left cheek she made out the outline of a disfiguring scar that his beard was probably intended to disguise: even in death there was a toughness in his features which said he would not have died without a hard struggle.
‘I don’t see any obvious injuries,’ Jenny said.
‘Nor did the medic,’ Alison replied. ‘He thinks it was hypothermia. It might not even be connected to the crash. He could have fallen in drunk anywhere between Weston and Gloucester. Until we identify him we won’t know.’
Jenny knew that the water temperature would be less than ten degrees at this time of year. The man’s body had yet to cool to that level. A drunk who had fallen into the river at some time during the night would have been at least as cold as the water by now.
She spotted a small silver medal on a chain around his neck. She stooped down for a closer look and saw that it was a St Christopher.
‘The patron saint of travellers,’ Alison said, with no hint of irony.
Jenny felt an involuntary and quite unexpected pang of emotion. She straightened, brisk and businesslike, trying to compensate for her irrational reaction. ‘All right. Let’s get them moved.’
Leaving Alison to organize the bodies’ transfer to the mortuary, Jenny drove along the shore road until she reached a lay-by overlooking the water which was screened from passing traffic by a dense hedgerow. Shivering, she tried to reason through the feelings that had unexpectedly reared up on the beach. It had been many months since, in Dr Allen’s consulting room, she had recovered the memories of the childhood accident – a word upon which he insisted – in which she had pushed her five-year-old cousin Katy down the stairs of her aunt’s house to her death. For weeks afterwards the image of the little girl tumbling backwards through the air and landing neck first on the treads had been the constant backdrop to her every waking thought, and flashbacks would jerk her from her sleep. But, just as Dr Allen had promised, the haunting had slowly started to fade.
Gradually, she had been able to reason through the events of that afternoon nearly forty years ago and begin the slow process of forgiving herself. It wasn’t her fault, the psychiatrist had insisted: they were merely two innocent children reacting to a painful situation not of their making. Her father and her aunt, Katy’s mother, were the ones who had to bear responsibility. What had they expected in leaving their daughters to play on the other side of the door from their noisy, illicit love-making?
Responsibility. That was the word which triggered the tightness in her chest and the sensations of panic deep in her core. It carried an absoluteness from which there was no escape, as definite as death itself. And it was the hapless dead, the innocents, who caused her to feel it most acutely, those who bore no responsibility of their own. Those, she supposed, who reminded her of Katy. It would have been easy to have sent the bodies on the beach to the D-Mort and to have washed her hands of them, but the moment the suggestion had been made she had known it would be impossible. The little girl wouldn’t let her. The past and the present were still too entangled; she had still to atone.
‘Her name’s Amy Patterson,’ Alison said. ‘American. Ten years old. I was right – she was travelling alone. Her father works in London, should be arriving any minute. Family liaison told him to meet us here.’
The buzzer sounded and Alison pushed open the door to the single-storey building that housed the Severn Vale District Hospital’s mortuary. Despite the mortuary’s pervading odour of disinfected decay, Jenny was glad to step out of the cold wind and into the airless warmth.
She followed Alison through the swing doors that opened onto a corridor lined with gurneys bearing corpses shrouded in envelopes of white PVC. A young mortuary technician Jenny hadn’t met before exited the autopsy room wheeling the body of a man too large for the plastic to meet fully across his middle.
‘Alison Trent, coroner’s officer,’ Alison said. ‘And this is the coroner, Mrs Cooper. I had the body of a young girl sent over from Aust. Her father’s about to arrive for an identification.’
‘Dr Kerr’s working on her now,’ the young man said.
‘He told me it wouldn’t be until later,’ Alison said with a note of alarm.
‘He’s meant to be over at the D-Mort, see. Everything here’s got to wait.’
He gestured to the half-dozen or more corpses lined up against the opposite wall.
‘I’ll talk to him,’ Jenny said, stepping forward. ‘You wait outside. Hold Mr Patterson off until I phone you.’
Dr Kerr was leaning over the tiny female body on the table with his broad, muscular back to her. Although young for a pathologist heading a hospital department – still only in his mid-thirties – he worked wi
th the calm assurance of a seasoned professional. The row of organs already laid out on the steel counter to his right told Jenny he was deep into the autopsy.
He glanced back over his shoulder at the sound of her approach. ‘Mrs Cooper. I thought you might look in.’
‘I thought you’d wait until later. Her father’s arriving from London any moment.’
‘Emergency procedures, I’m afraid. Wouldn’t have been able to touch her for a week if I hadn’t dealt with her this afternoon. I’ll try and get your man done too.’ He carefully lifted the dead girl’s stomach into a large kidney dish, which he carried to the counter.
Jenny’s eyes flicked of their own accord into the opened, empty torso. White as ivory, the delicate, gracefully curving ribs were strangely beautiful.
‘Can you hurry?’ Jenny asked.
‘That depends on whether you’re expecting the bargain or the de luxe service.’
‘I’d settle for a cause of death.’
‘We’ve got that already. Hypothermia.’
He carefully squeezed the liquid contents of the stomach into the dish. Jenny smelt the acid, then felt it at the back of her throat.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m expecting to find some bleeds from that knock on the head, but I don’t think it was fatal. There was some water in her lungs and there’s some in her stomach, but not the amount you’d associate with a conventional drowning. If she was floating in a lifejacket in rough water she’d have slowly lost consciousness but continued to breathe with waves breaking over her.’
‘That sounds like drowning to me.’
‘It’s the cold that would have stopped her reflexes. She’d have had twenty, twenty-five minutes at the most.’
‘There’s speculation the plane was breaking up in midair,’ Jenny said. ‘If that was the case, the cabin would have depressurized and dropped to the outside temperature.’
‘About minus fifty degrees. You’d expect to see frostbite, maybe even signs of the eyeballs freezing. Really nasty stuff. It didn’t happen.’
Jenny spotted Amy’s wet clothes and lifejacket in a clear plastic bag stowed on the shelf of the gurney that would carry her body back to the refrigerator. ‘From what I hear most of the bodies sank with the plane. It seems odd she emerged from the wreckage intact.’
‘Stranger things have happened,’ Dr Kerr said. ‘I met a French pathologist who dealt with the Air France crash off Brazil a few years ago. The plane broke up in mid-air and fell five miles into the sea. Most of the bodies were in pieces, but some were virtually intact. Luck of the draw, I guess.’
‘She was wearing a lifejacket. Why haven’t I heard of any others recovered in lifejackets?’
‘Nothing’s going to make sense for a while yet, Mrs Cooper. We don’t even know what happened to the plane.’
Jenny turned at the sound of Alison bursting through the door. ‘He just called. He’s five minutes away.’
‘Buy him a coffee,’ Jenny said. ‘It won’t be long.’
Jenny looked away as Dr Kerr went on to complete his removal of the major organs and tried to marshal what little knowledge she had of air accidents to imagine what might have happened. Wasn’t it always said in the pre-flight safety announcement that in the event of ditching on water passengers should put on lifejackets? Surely six minutes was long enough for that to have happened? But how easy would it be to reach under your seat and pull a jacket over your head during the equivalent of a roller-coaster ride?
‘As I thought,’ Dr Kerr said a short while later.
Jenny watched him as he examined the partially exposed brain.
‘Tiny bleeds near the point of impact, no major haemorrhage. There’s no fracture to the skull. I doubt she’d have been rendered unconscious, at least not for long.’
‘Any idea what she hit?’
‘The screen on the back of the seat in front of her, probably. She got off very lightly, all things considered.’
‘Not that lightly.’
He reached for a scalpel. ‘You don’t like this bit, remember?’
‘No . . .’ Jenny said. ‘You will make sure she looks presentable?’
‘Of course. Why don’t you leave me to it?’
Greg Patterson’s grim expression as Alison brought him along the corridor towards the refrigerator told Jenny that he understood the cause of the delay perfectly well. A tall, square-shouldered man recently turned forty, he looked as if he had been a sportsman in his youth. She noticed his shoes and expensive preppy clothes worn not for self-expression, but as a uniform of some kind. Corporate – that was the word; Patterson had sacrificed something of himself to be whatever he had become.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Patterson. Jenny Cooper. Severn Vale District Coroner.’ She offered a hand.
He shook it firmly, meeting her gaze with tired but grimly determined eyes. ‘Greg Patterson.’
‘All I need at this stage is a visual identification. If it’s any reassurance, your daughter’s body is virtually unscathed. Are you ready to proceed?’
He nodded, containing his emotion behind a tightly clenched jaw.
Jenny turned to the refrigerator cabinet. She opened the drawer numbered fourteen just far enough to expose the top half of Amy’s body. She pulled back the flap of plastic to reveal the girl’s face. Dr Kerr’s technician had excelled himself: she looked peaceful; there was even colour in her cheeks.
Patterson glanced down briefly. ‘That’s her,’ he said, determined not to falter.
Jenny covered the face and slid the drawer shut.
‘Your officer said she was wearing a lifejacket,’ Patterson said.
‘Yes—’ Jenny answered, unsure how much Alison had told him.
‘How long was she alive in the water?’
‘It’s unlikely to have been more than half an hour, probably less.’
‘Was she conscious?’
‘It’s impossible to say.’
‘How soon was it till help arrived? Why wasn’t she found?’ His voice was clipped, his tone painfully dispassionate.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have that information, Mr Patterson.’
‘What about the man who was found nearby? Who is he?’
‘We don’t know yet. Your daughter is the first to have been identified.’
Patterson stared at the closed refrigerator door, then down at the floor.
‘There’s talk of a bomb, an explosion.’
‘There are a lot of questions to be answered, Mr Patterson,’ Jenny said. ‘I’m afraid it’s going to take some time.’
He nodded, his thoughts held firmly within. Jenny wanted to ask him more, to fill in the details of why Amy had been flying alone, but the moment wasn’t right. He had behaved with dignity and she didn’t want to rob him of it. Instead she retrieved her card from her pocket and handed it to him.
‘Feel free to contact me any time. I’ll be in touch shortly.’
Patterson took out a soft calfskin wallet and carefully slotted the card inside. He paused and briefly closed his eyes as if letting a wave of emotion crash over him then wash away. ‘Do you know if her mother has been told? . . . I didn’t want to . . .’ He swallowed. ‘What I’m trying to say is that I would appreciate it very much if you were to make the call.’
Jenny and Alison traded a glance.
‘Of course,’ Jenny said.
He hastily pulled another card from his wallet and handed it to her. It read: Professor Michelle R. Patterson, Department of Applied Mathematics, Hartford University, Hartford, Connecticut.
‘She’ll want to come over,’ Patterson said. ‘The body will still be—?’
‘It will have to remain here for several days at least,’ Jenny said. ‘As you can imagine, the investigation may take some time.’
He nodded. ‘I understand.’
They looked at each other for a moment, both concluding that there was no more to be said, then Patterson turned abruptly and set off back along the corridor.
‘He looked ever so guilty, don’t you think?’ Alison said, as soon as he had passed through the door at the far end. ‘He’s probably thinking he should have been there with her. I could never have let my daughter fly alone at that age.’
Jenny didn’t answer. She was steeling herself to make a phone call.
THREE
IT WAS ALREADY FIVE O’CLOCK in the afternoon: almost the precise time at which Flight 189 had been due to land in New York. Jenny sat in her parked car outside the mortuary and dialled the cellphone number printed on Michelle Patterson’s card. There was a long moment of silence, then the distinctive extended single ring of an American phone.
‘Hello. Who is this?’ The woman who answered sounded desperate and tearful.
‘Mrs Patterson?’
‘Who is this?’
Jenny could barely hear her over a noisy babble in the background. ‘My name’s Jenny Cooper. I’m the coroner for the Severn Vale District – near Bristol, in England.’ Jenny paused as she was overwhelmed at Mrs Patterson’s end by a flight announcement. She was taking the call in an airport. ‘I’ve just been with your husband—’ She sensed that she was no longer being listened to. ‘Mrs Patterson?’
‘Go on.’ The mother’s voice had become dull and flat: the tone indicative of shock.
‘Your daughter was in the plane that crashed. Your husband asked me to telephone you . . . He has just identified her body. I’m so sorry.’
After a pause, Mrs Patterson said, ‘Where is my husband?’
‘On his way home, I assume.’
Another, longer pause followed. Amongst the clamour surrounding Mrs Patterson, Jenny heard the sound of women weeping and wondered what had driven them to gather at the airport nearly eight hours after they knew the plane had gone down.
‘Did he . . .’ Her voice cracked with emotion. ‘Did he tell you what the hell he was thinking letting her travel alone?’
‘No. He didn’t discuss that.’ Keen to bring the conversation to an end, Jenny said, ‘I have your email address. I’ll forward my details within the hour. Would you like me to attach a photograph?’