B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm

by M. R. Hall

  A roadblock had been positioned several hundred yards before the entrance to the field. Jenny pulled up at the checkpoint, which was protected on either side by concrete barriers of the kind used to shield government buildings from terrorist attack. It was a female police constable who leaned down to inspect her identification, but to either side of the barrier stood young regular soldiers carrying rifles. Jenny stated her business and informed the constable that an undertaker’s van would be arriving shortly. She received instructions to turn into the field and park in the green zone reserved for staff.

  Jenny drove slowly between two rows of plastic bollards which led to the field entrance, noticing several more armed soldiers standing watch in the darkness on either side. Turning through the open gateway, she rattled across a cattle grid and followed notices to the green zone, passing along a temporary road that appeared to have been constructed from plastic matting. Parking her Land Rover amidst a large assembly of police and military vehicles, she glanced over at the blue zone and deduced that it was where the relatives of the dead were being taken. Several young female soldiers and police officers were directing them to a marquee, in which, no doubt, they would be greeted by a host of whispering counsellors and chaplains.

  Following a colour-coded walkway to the staff reception tent, Jenny’s suspicion was confirmed that this was precisely the sort of disaster for which Home Office contingency planners had been preparing for more than a decade. She remembered from a training course she had been obliged to attend the previous summer that the government had sufficient resources to erect six such D-Morts at any one time. All the necessary equipment was stored in warehouses at strategic locations around the country ready to deal with multiple terrorist attacks or fatal epidemics. Somewhere on site there would be a handful of officials who had been planning this day for years.

  Her phone rang as she approached the entrance of the tent. She glanced at the screen with the unrealistic hope that it might be Ross. It was a London number.

  ‘Mrs Cooper, its Greg Patterson. I just picked up your message.’ He sounded fraught.

  ‘I did try you several times, and your wife—’

  ‘I know. Look . . .’ He paused, as if gathering strength. ‘I don’t want you to move my daughter’s body. Neither does my wife.’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t been given any choice. The Director General of the Ministry of Justice has instructed me—’

  ‘Her body does not belong to anyone except her parents,’ Patterson said, ‘and we do not give permission.’

  ‘Mr Patterson, until a certificate is signed releasing her for burial I’m afraid that’s not the legal position.’

  He made no reply.

  ‘I can make representations on your behalf, though,’ Jenny said. ‘Is there any particular reason—?’

  After a pause, Patterson said, ‘Her mother doesn’t want her body in with all the others. She doesn’t feel it’s appropriate.’

  ‘Is this a religious objection of some sort?’

  He fell silent for an even longer moment.

  ‘I can’t speak for my wife, but there’s something I need to know . . . it won’t happen if she’s lumped in with six hundred others.’

  ‘What’s that, Mr Patterson?’

  ‘She . . . Amy, called me while the plane was going down . . . she said the plane was falling, I could hear people screaming around her, I could hardly hear her voice . . . I said, “Put your lifejacket on, put it on, now.” I thought they’d be out over the Irish Sea, it was all I could think of . . . I haven’t told her mother any of this, it would be too distressing. But I need to know if I might have saved her, if she’d only been found more quickly . . .’

  Jenny gave him a moment. ‘Mr Patterson, there’s no reason to presume your daughter’s death won’t be fully investigated along with all the others.’

  ‘Mrs Cooper, this is an Airbus 380, the world’s biggest and most advanced passenger airliner. The companies who operate these planes are committed for the next thirty years. These aircraft are the arteries of world trade. Measured against that, my daughter’s death will count for nothing.’

  Jenny said, ‘Even if I believed that were true, it’s not an argument that would hold any sway, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, Mr Patterson. If you wish to pursue this issue further, you’ll have to take it up with the Ministry of Justice. In the meantime, your daughter’s body is being transferred to the disaster mortuary at Walton Bay.’

  Patterson said, ‘There was no explosion, Mrs Cooper. Amy didn’t say anything about a loud bang.’

  They listened to each other in silence. It was Patterson who ended the call.

  He had been talking for his wife. It was always the mother – the one who had given and sacrificed most in raising the child – who insisted on clinging to the body. Men, in Jenny’s experience, put distance between themselves and the shell of their dead offspring almost immediately. Mrs Patterson wanted her daughter’s uniqueness preserved for as long as possible, and her separation from the others who had died stood as a symbol that she remained special.

  Jenny stepped into the reception tent. Nothing could demand greater sanity than the investigation that now confronted her. A young man in naval uniform greeted her from behind a trestle table serving as a desk and issued her with a temporary staff badge to be worn around her neck ‘in all places and at all times whilst on site’. He directed her along one of two covered walkways that led from the tent to a single Portakabin that stood at ninety degrees to the stack being erected behind it.

  Walking the thirty yards from the reception area to the coroner’s office, Jenny looked out over the main area of the site and saw that three marquees were already standing and that one more was going up. One would be reserved for relatives, one would serve as a canteen and rest area for staff, one would act as a holding bay and identification suite for bodies, and the fourth would house the autopsy tables and a forensic laboratory. The modular offices would be divided between the police, the Coroners’ Service, the search and rescue coordinators and air accident investigators.

  Over the rumble of the cranes and the chug of the diesel generators, she was sure she heard DCI Molyneux shouting at someone to getting his bloody phone lines sorted out.

  She knocked at the door of the coroner’s office and stepped into an oasis of calm. Sir James Kendall, a courteous silver-haired man dressed in sober pinstripes, stood up from behind a desk to greet her. As a retired judge he would have to have been over seventy, though he retained the physique and moved with the suppleness of a far younger man.

  ‘Jenny Cooper, Severn Vale District Coroner.’

  ‘Ah yes. Good of you to come.’ He shook her hand and gestured her to a chair opposite his. ‘This is Inspector Colin Harris, my officer.’

  A fleshy-faced man, whom Jenny assumed was a specially appointed detective seconded from the Met, nodded to her from behind the screen of his laptop.

  ‘You’ve brought the body over, have you?’ Sir James asked, lowering himself into his chair.

  ‘The undertakers are on their way. Her clothing is with her, and the lifejacket she was wearing. But I ought to warn you, the parents aren’t happy with her being moved.’

  ‘Oh? Why’s that?’ He seemed to take it almost as a personal slight.

  ‘I think they might see their daughter as a special case. She was wearing a lifejacket. The results of the post-mortem suggest she survived for some time after the crash.’

  ‘We may have many such cases, Mrs Cooper, it’s simply too early to say.’ He knitted lean, liver-spotted fingers in front of his chest. ‘But you’ll appreciate that the Director General would like to keep this all under one roof. We don’t want things any messier than they have to be.’

  ‘No.’ Jenny took the few formal documents relating to Amy’s body from her briefcase and handed them across the desk. ‘Finding constable’s report, my officer’s statement and notice of identification. And with any luck a written post-mortem report to fol
low first thing tomorrow.’

  Sir James pulled on a pair of reading glasses and inspected the documents thoroughly.

  Jenny said, ‘I expect you know there was a second body on the beach. A male. A sailor, we think.’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at her over the tops of his spectacles. ‘The navy divers have found the wreckage of a yacht. I received the message a few moments before you arrived.’

  ‘Struck by wreckage from the plane,’ Harris added without looking up from his work.

  ‘Do you know anything else? Were there others on board?’

  ‘That’s all the information we have, Mrs Cooper,’ Sir James said, carefully securing Amy Patterson’s documents with a paper clip.

  ‘Do you have any idea what brought the plane down?’

  ‘There are plenty of theories, but none of them worth a breath until we locate the flight data recorders.’

  ‘Doesn’t this aircraft transmit flight data back to base all the time it’s in the air? That’s what I heard on the radio.’

  ‘There appears to have been an interruption in communications, no doubt connected to the cause of the accident.’ He gave her a patient smile which told her he now had more important things to occupy his time.

  Jenny stood up from her chair. ‘You’ll let me know about the yacht, won’t you?’

  ‘Directly, Mrs Cooper. And please, do feel at liberty to have a look around while you’re here. I must admit, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I hope not to again.’

  ‘Quite,’ Jenny said, finding herself mimicking Kendall’s courtly language. There were questions she would like to have asked and issues she would like to have raised – the dead man’s holster for one, and Amy Patterson’s phone call for another – but something stopped her. The judge was trying to manage her, and that instinctively made her want to manage him back. ‘We’ll discuss the yacht tomorrow. I’ll probably want to bring what’s left of it over to Avonmouth. I’ve got a friendly salvage firm who’ll organize that if it’s a problem for you.’

  Sir James Kendall exchanged a glance with Harris. ‘All in good time, Mrs Cooper.’

  Jenny stepped out of the office into a cold blast of wind that was whipping sheets of rain noisily against the canvas overhead. She turned left along the walkway which led to the largest marquee on site. A police constable at the nearest entrance marked ‘Staff Only’ checked her ID badge and nodded her through. She entered to find a long corridor stretching the length of the tent, from which branched several sectioned-off areas. She stopped at the entrance to the first and saw rescue workers bringing in body bags on stretchers from outside. The atmosphere was one of sombre efficiency and strange associations. The marquee was not unlike those in which grand wedding parties took place. It smelt of wet grass and damp canvas and the sound of the generators summoned images of a fairground. Jenny watched as bags were laid out on the floor and dealt with by a small team of mortuary technicians dressed in green surgical scrubs and latex gloves. The bodies were searched for identifying documentation and a note of anything found was made by one of several police officers, who moved up and down the line carrying clipboards. Even from forty feet away, Jenny could tell that some were so damaged as to be unrecognizable. Each was given a numbered tag, and a photograph was taken before it was zipped up and carried through to the next section. There was no easy or sanitized way of identifying the remains of so many dead. Those bodies that had had documents in their clothing were laid out on the floor of the identification area in alphabetical order; the rest were placed at the end of the line under a sign which read simply, ‘Identity Unknown’. Jenny looked on as Alison and three other coroners’ officers from surrounding districts escorted clusters of relatives to carry out their grim task. Most were silent, or sobbed quietly, overwhelmed by the incomprehensible scale of the disaster.

  ‘She hasn’t got a next of kin, not within twelve thousand miles.’

  Jenny turned at the sound of the raised voice and saw a man of about her age remonstrating with the constable guarding the entrance.

  ‘Please, sir—’

  ‘I thought you wanted the bodies identified. Isn’t that what you want?’

  Alison left the couple she was dealing with to a colleague and hurried over.

  ‘What seems to be the problem?’

  ‘I’m being told I can’t identify my friend because I’m not a relative or partner.’

  ‘What is your relationship to the deceased?’

  ‘Her name was Casey. Nuala Casey. We used to be together. Her brother’s her only family and he lives in Auckland, New Zealand.’

  Alison inadvertently caught Jenny’s eye and seemed to sense her disapproval at the intrusion of the petty rule. She consulted her list. ‘All right, sir, you can come through.’

  Jenny turned to go, but she found herself compelled to look back. Alison led the man to near the start of the line. He moved purposefully, not flinching or averting his eyes from the other bodies which were in the process of being identified. His voice was that of a professional, but the deep lines in his face and his wiry frame didn’t belong to someone who spent their days cooped up in an office.

  Alison stopped by one of the body bags and stooped to unzip it. Jenny caught a glimpse of blonde hair and a badly bruised and swollen face.

  The man stared hard, then nodded. ‘That’s her. Do you have any of her effects?’

  ‘Those can only be released to next of kin with permission of the coroner, I’m afraid, sir. Perhaps her brother could contact him?’

  ‘Of course.’ The man signed his name on Alison’s clipboard then walked quickly to the exit, forcing Jenny to step aside.

  Alison gestured to her to wait while she zipped up the bag, then came to meet her by the doorway. ‘I heard about the little girl. They took her straight out to one of the storage trailers.’ She pointed towards a flap in the marquee’s outer wall. ‘There are ten of them parked out there. They can fit fifty in each. They’ve been stored in a warehouse near Taunton, apparently, just waiting for something like this to happen.’ She seemed impressed. ‘We’ve recovered more than two hundred already. The divers are going to be working through the night. Can you imagine it?’

  Jenny said, ‘What’s the latest word on the cause?’

  ‘You name it – bombs, surface-to-air missile, hijacked by terrorists then shot down by our own fighters, it all depends who you talk to.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Alison quickly scanned the area, checking they weren’t being listened to. ‘The farmer who owns this field told the police he heard an explosion. He claims he drove down to the estuary, couldn’t see a thing through the mist, but heard engine noise out there, like helicopters or something.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Ten or fifteen minutes after it went down.’

  ‘You haven’t heard anything about a yacht? Kendall said the divers have found one.’

  ‘I’d heard that; nothing about any more bodies though. What did Molyneux say about our sailor and his gun?’

  Before Alison could answer, another group of relatives arrived at the entrance: an elderly man supported by two younger women whom Jenny assumed to be his daughters. ‘I think you might be needed,’ she said, and left Alison to her work.

  The brief glimpses Jenny had caught of the recovered bodies had all revealed faces that had suffered impacts of varying ferocity. They reminded her of road accident victims whose heads had whipped forward and struck the dash or airbag. These were precisely the kinds of injuries she would have expected to see following a violent crash landing, and their frequency made Amy Patterson’s unbattered condition even more puzzling.

  The heaviness in Jenny’s limbs told her it was time to go home and get the sleep she would need to cope with the days ahead, but she knew that even a sleeping pill wouldn’t stop the questions from churning in her mind throughout the night. She couldn’t leave without finding out more.

  The autopsy room was at the far end of the corr
idor and accessed through a solid doorway with an electronic mechanism that could only be operated by the swipe card held by the constable guarding it. Jenny was let through to find a fully equipped mortuary that was barely distinguishable from those in the most modern hospitals. There were six tables, six modular units containing surgical instruments, dissection bench and sink, and along the far wall a row of a dozen refrigerators each with three shelves stacked one on top of the other. Pathologists were hard at work at each station. She recognized two of them as locums who were regulars at the Vale. Dr Kerr was working at the far table. He lifted a hand in greeting and gestured her over.

  Jenny carefully crossed the linoleum floor made slippery by the splashes from the shower hoses used to sluice down the bodies when a post-mortem was complete. She found him starting work on a male in his twenties. The face was badly bruised from a frontal impact and the slim, muscled torso had been virtually severed above the pelvis at the level of the lap belt.

  ‘Morbid curiosity, Mrs Cooper?’ Dr Kerr said.

  ‘That and being ordered to give up the little girl to Kendall. I’m not to be trusted, apparently.’

  He smiled across the body at her. His eyes were tired and bloodshot. ‘No comment.’

  Jenny said, ‘What’s your theory?’

  ‘We know the hull split in three as they’re designed to on impact. All the bodies we’ve seen so far have been recovered from the front section. It’s stuck nose-down in the silt under fifty feet of water. A lot of them were severed by their lap belts; some shot right out of their seats and crushed their skulls on the overhead lockers. Seats ripped clear of their moorings – that’s what we’re hearing.’

  ‘Any more in lifejackets?’

  He shook his head.

  Jenny said, ‘Any evidence of an explosion?’

  ‘No. That’s one theory that’s losing traction all the time. If there’d been a sudden depressurization at altitude you’d expect to find air embolisms – froth in the heart ventricles from blood gases suddenly expanding – but we’ve not found any. No hypoxia either – the blood’s fully oxygenated.’