by M. R. Hall
Wilfully ignoring her, he continued with his call, telling the person at the other end that there was a coroner in reception asking for access to a pilot’s locker.’
‘A deceased pilot,’ Jenny emphasized.
‘I see. Of course.’ He put down the phone. ‘I’m sorry, madam. There’s no one available to meet you right now. Perhaps you would like to make an appointment.’ He turned the page in the desk diary and reached for a pencil.
‘Who was that you just spoke to?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’d like to speak to whoever that was.’
He looked dumbly at the phone as if it might answer for him. ‘I can’t do that, I’m afraid.’
‘Because?’
‘It’s nine o’clock in the evening, madam. You have to make an appointment for tomorrow.’
Jenny leaned over the desk and read the name on his security tag. ‘Listen, Mr Preston, I’m conducting an inquest into a death caused by one of your employer’s planes. You can either come to give an account of yourself in my courtroom later this week – and I will gladly have you arrested if that’s what it takes – or you can let me through that security barrier and tell me where I can find what I’m looking for.’
She suddenly became aware that several cabin crew who had been on their way out had stopped to watch the show. Preston glanced between her and his audience, then turned his gaze back to the diary.
‘Someone show this lady where the staff lockers are,’ he muttered.
Jenny turned to the young woman nearest to her. With an anxious glance to her colleagues, she swiped her pass over the electronic reader on the turnstile. ‘Through the glass doors, turn right. End of the corridor – pilots’ rec room.’
‘Thank you.’
The stewardess hurried away.
Jenny walked along the corridor, passing empty offices, and nudged open the door to the pilots’ recreation room. It too was empty. It reminded her of some of the shabbier areas set aside for lawyers in outlying court buildings: a few desks, some waiting-room furniture and three walls lined with wooden lockers. To her right was a door marked WOMEN. She stepped through it to find a similar room to the first, only in miniature. There were eight lockers, and a large wall mirror with a make-up shelf beneath. She tried the key in each of the locks. It turned in the last of the row. She opened the door to find it as she had suspected – empty.
‘The car’s not there. I asked one of the lads in cabin crew and he thinks it might have been towed,’ Michael said.
‘Where to?’
‘There’s a pound where all the abandoned cars from the long-term car park end up.’
‘Why would anyone work for this company?’ Jenny said.
‘Lousy conditions but more money in the hand. It’s the choice you make.’
Jenny climbed back into the Land Rover and dialled Cambourne’s number. It rang three times.
‘Mrs Cooper?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you wish to discuss?’
‘I’d like to find out what, if anything, Nuala knew about the plane that came down.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. And nor would I be able to discuss it with you even if I did. I’ve taken some advice. You’re not the official coroner. Ransome employees aren’t permitted to speak to you.’
‘Your company’s legal department may not be the most reliable source of advice, Mr Cambourne.’
‘I have a wife and child, Mrs Cooper. Captain Casey never jeopardized a colleague’s position, nor would she wish that to happen now. That’s all I have to say. What car do you drive?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Don’t make me repeat myself.’
Jenny was confused. ‘A green Land Rover Freelander.’ She glanced through the window wondering if he was nearby. ‘Why?’
‘Wait two minutes.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Cambourne rang off. Jenny tried his number again and got an automated voice telling her that his number was unavailable. He had switched his phone off.
‘Did he say wait two minutes?’
‘That’s what I heard,’ Michael said. ‘He didn’t sound like the kind of man Nuala would have slept with. She couldn’t stand public school types. She wouldn’t have been with someone married, either, for God’s sake.’
‘It’s a little late to be jealous, don’t you think?’
‘Why would I be jealous?’
‘You were thinking of going back to her, weren’t you?’
‘You’re full of it.’
‘Tell me you hadn’t been thinking about getting help to deal with the flashbacks. Every time you woke up with a hangover and a plane to fly you knew you were shaving the odds finer.’ Jenny looked at him. ‘You don’t strike me as a man ready to give up on life. You want to be happy.’
‘You really should have been a fairground mystic. Are you sure you haven’t got a crystal ball in the glove box?’
‘I know what it’s like.’ Jenny said. ‘I have flashbacks too.’
She had taken him by surprise. He looked at her dubiously. ‘Flashbacks to what?’
Jenny’s phone rattled in the cupholder between their seats. She picked it up to find a text message: Short Stay 1, level 3, end of row.
She showed it to Michael. ‘It’s not Cambourne’s number.’
‘Try calling it back.’
She pressed the green button and got a message from a synthesized voice: you have dialled an incorrect number.
‘Anonymous text,’ Michael said. ‘Easy enough to do. It’ll be him.’
Jenny silently scolded herself as she drove across the airport towards Terminal One, at a loss to explain why she had felt compelled to give so much of herself away. Why, of all men, was she about to share her secret with this one? He was troubled, damaged, irresponsible, lost – all the things she had promised herself she would avoid – yet she’d felt something from the moment she first saw him. It wasn’t a physical attraction, nor was it a compulsion. It was just as he had described it himself – an interest. A sense that somewhere beneath all the layers that separated them, there was an affinity.
She glanced sideways and inadvertently caught his eye. Not for the first time that day she could tell they were sharing the same thought: where was this going to lead?
They passed through the barrier into Short Stay 1 and slowly spiralled upwards towards level 3, Jenny still nervous handling the Land Rover in a tight space.
‘Why would he want to meet us here?’ she said. ‘There are more cameras in this car park than inside the terminal.’
‘He’ll have a reason,’ Michael said.
She crested the top of the ramp onto level 3 and turned right.
‘What does he mean, end of the row? Which row? There are lots of them.’
They were nearing the end of the building and about to make a right turn, when a silver estate car shot out from a space directly in front of them and took off at speed. Jenny stamped on the brakes.
‘What are you doing? Get after him,’ Michael said.
Jenny found first gear and stepped on the accelerator.
‘Stop!’ He slammed his hand his hand on the dash.
‘Jesus—’
She hit the brakes again, slewing to a halt halfway around the turn.
Michael threw open the door and jumped out.
‘What are you doing?’ Jenny called after him.
The driver of the car behind angrily sounded his horn.
‘OK, OK!’
She tried to ease forward and stalled. He honked again.
Michael shouted at him to calm down before he had a heart attack, and jumped back into the passenger seat as he leaned on the horn again: one long, continuous blast. Jenny hardly noticed it. Michael had a briefcase on his lap.
‘Nuala’s flight case. It was left in the space,’ he said, unfastening it. He looked inside. ‘Company laptop.’
‘Cambourne had it.’
&
nbsp; Michael shook his head. ‘The guy behind the wheel was older, bald with glasses.’
‘I didn’t get a look at him.’
‘You’re not a pilot.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Will that guy ever shut up? You’d better drive on.’
Flustered, Jenny crunched the gears.
Michael placed his hand on top of hers. ‘Why don’t I drive?’
He took a route through the back roads towards Windsor and stopped at a thatched pub tucked away down a lane away from the main road. They ordered sandwiches and retreated to a table in the corner of the quiet saloon bar to unpack Nuala’s case. Besides the company laptop, there was a hand-held GPS device, some flight charts of Europe and the Middle East, a spare white shirt, basic wash kit and underwear.
‘She travelled light,’ Jenny said. ‘No moisturizer, not even a lipstick or mascara.’
‘It was a point of pride. Anything a man could do she could do better.’
Jenny picked up the GPS. ‘What’s this for?’
‘No idea. But she did like gadgets. Maybe she got a pilot’s discount somewhere.’
‘What does it do?’
Michael took it from her and switched it on. ‘It looks like a global position system. It tells you exactly where you are, and if you program in some coordinates, it’ll point you in the right direction – see?’ He showed her the screen displaying their current location. ‘Just like a car sat-nav only a bit fancier.’
He put it aside and lifted the lid of the laptop. After a few moments booting up, it asked for a password. He typed in Tyax and up came the desktop.
‘She certainly enjoyed that trip,’ Jenny said, then felt ashamed.
Michael didn’t respond.
There were the usual icons for email and word processor, but there was no general internet access, only a button to click linking the user to the Ransome intranet.
The few documents Nuala had stored on the hard drive were from her recent Sky Route flight plans.
‘Looks like she kept this one clean. Strictly a work tool,’ Michael said.
‘Try the email,’ Jenny urged.
He opened the email program, which also housed her company calendar. Jenny took over, scrolling through the last six months. The diary entries were in a standard form that looked as if they had been entered by the company and lodged automatically on the machine. Nuala had kept up a steady routine of three or four short-haul turnarounds through late summer and early autumn, and then in late October had shifted to a pattern of twice-weekly runs to either Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
She had flown to Dubai on Christmas Eve and flown back on Christmas Day itself. December 26th and 27th were marked LEAVE.
‘Not much of a holiday,’ Jenny commented.
A further flight to Dubai scheduled for the 28th had been marked CANCELLED. There was no entry for the 29th, and from the 30th it was business as usual for the following week.
‘Look – five days’ leave,’ Jenny said.
The dates Saturday 8 January to Wednesday 12th had been marked UNAVAILABLE, but above them, two round trips to Abu Dhabi scheduled for Sunday 9th and Wednesday 12th had been struck out and marked CANCELLED.
‘It’ll be in the emails,’ Michael said impatiently.
Jenny opened the inbox and followed the trail between Nuala and flight-crew scheduling. There was no hint that she was taking leave until Wednesday 5 January. In a short note, Nuala had written, ‘Re: temporary leave of absence. I shall be available to resume normal duties as from Thursday 13 January.’ A reply sent at 14.08 later the same afternoon, read: ‘You are scheduled to fly to Dubai RA340 at 13.30 on Thursday 13 January. Please confirm availability.’ To which Nuala replied, ‘Availability confirmed.’
On Thursday 6th she had received an email from the Ransome Airways bookings desk confirming her staff-discounted flight to New York on RA189 departing at 9 a.m. on Saturday 8 January, with an onward connection on American Airlines to Washington DC. Her return flights were scheduled for the afternoon and evening of Wednesday 12th.
‘What was she doing there?’ Jenny said.
Michael shrugged.
There was only one more email in the inbox. It was dated Friday 7th and was sent at 18.35. Headed, ‘Urgent change to your itinerary’, it read:
We regret to inform you that due to an error in our reservations system, you were unfortunately booked onto a flight that was already full. Ransome Airways apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause, and unless we hear from you to the contrary we will transfer your reservation to flight RA189 departing Heathrow Terminal 4 at 9 a.m. on Sunday 9 January. Your return flights remain unaffected and your staff discounts still apply.
You need not reply to this email.
Jenny said, ‘Amy Patterson was booked onto the Saturday flight, too.’
‘It happens,’ Michael said. ‘There’s no excuse, but it does.’
‘Temporary leave of absence – that doesn’t sound like the woman you’ve described.’
‘No.’
‘Sandy said she was off-colour, so why then would she have been flying to Washington? That’s no way to recover.’
Michael sat back in his chair and stared up at the huge oak beam that ran the length of the room, his pensive expression telling Jenny that he was battling with contradictory thoughts.
‘She wouldn’t have called in sick and then booked staff-discounted tickets,’ Jenny said. ‘The airline must have approved her leave. But it wasn’t holiday, it was leave of absence. It’s almost as if there was some sort of official reason.’
‘Yes,’ Michael said, keeping his warring thoughts to himself.
‘Could she have been going on a training course?’ Jenny asked.
‘Unlikely. We’ve got all the simulators you could need here.’
Jenny closed down the laptop. ‘It could all have been perfectly innocent, of course. A few days away. Crossing the Atlantic would be nothing to a professional pilot.’
Distracted by a private thought, Michael said, ‘Do you mind if we make one more stop on the way home?’
‘It’s late, Michael—’
‘Captain Dan Murray’s widow. I’ve met her a couple of times with Nuala. Nice lady.’ He took out his phone. ‘We’ll call it a social visit.’
It was eleven p.m. when they drew up on the driveway of the house outside the village of Wokefield, further west into the Berkshire countryside. Diane Murray came to the door as they were walking up the brick path. She was a handsome woman in her late forties, but her face had a hollow, washed-out appearance, the shock of her loss still printed in her dazed expression. Recognizing Michael, she greeted him by his first name.
She had heard about Nuala, and offered her sympathies. There was something ritualistic in their exchange, as if among airmen and their loved ones such encounters were conducted according to an unwritten code. The possibility of sudden death, it seemed to Jenny, was accepted as part of the deal.
Diane led them through to the homely, farmhouse-style kitchen where they sat at the family table surrounded by reminders of her late husband. His farmer’s jacket still hung on the peg at the back door; several pairs of his boots were lined up on the rack. She apologized for the mess; the kids hadn’t yet returned to school since the crash. It had been hard to stay on top of things.
Michael was about to pass Jenny off as a friend when she stepped in to pre-empt him. She tried to explain that she was a coroner, but not part of the official investigation into the causes of the crash. Mrs Murray said she had lost count of the number of people who had visited during the previous week. There had been detectives, air accident investigators, agents from the security services, air traffic control executives, airline managers and even Guy Ransome himself.
‘Everyone’s very sympathetic,’ she said, ‘but I know they’re all desperate for me to say that there was something wrong that made him take his eye off the ball. Human error would be the perfect explanation, wouldn’t it? It’s the one outcome that wouldn’t mean an
yone else taking responsibility.’
‘It’s always the same,’ Michael said. ‘If in doubt, blame the man at the controls.’
Jenny said, ‘If it helps, we’ve seen the air traffic control data. The aircraft slowed down for a reason that’s not apparent at the moment. Michael doesn’t think it looks like pilot error.’
‘They showed it to me, too,’ Diane said. ‘Then asked me if he had been depressed.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘He loved flying. It was his life. God knows, he wasn’t doing it to get rich.’
‘He was fit and well the day of the crash?’ Michael asked.
‘I think so. He’d been having a few headaches, but that’s because he had been working so hard. He wasn’t sure he’d have many years left in the business, so it was a question of earning while he could . . .’ She paused, determined not to let herself give way to emotion. ‘He only took on this flight the day before. The pilot who was scheduled to captain it got the flu.’
Michael said, ‘Nuala was bumped from the Saturday flight. Just bad luck, I guess.’
Jenny’s felt her toes curl, but Diane seemed to find his directness reassuring and managed a ghost of a smile.
‘How long had he been on the 380?’ Michael asked.
‘About eight months. Half a dozen Ransome pilots trained. Dan scored the highest of all of them.’
‘He’d flown Boeings most of his career, hadn’t he?’
‘It was his choice to retrain. The Airbus took some getting used to, but he said that once you had learned to trust the computers it was far more relaxing.’
‘No problems he’d told you about?’
‘He only ever mentioned one. It was back in the summer, on one of his early flights – I think he said it was a problem with the thrust levers coming in to land. He thought it was some sort of computer glitch, but he booked in for some extra sim time to make sure.’
‘Did he tell you any more?’
‘Why? Was there something wrong with the plane?’
‘No idea, but it would be good to have all the information.’
Diane pushed her hands anxiously through her shoulder-length blonde hair as she tried to summon up the details. ‘It was something about how automatic thrust was meant to disengage when you pushed the levers forward a click, but for some reason it didn’t. The engines were still putting out power when they were meant to be idling. He had to switch to manual and throttle back. It meant they stopped too close to the end of the runway.’