by M. R. Hall
‘His wife can’t tell us. He travelled all the time and she didn’t keep track. His company is refusing to answer our inquiries. What we do know is that Winchester Systems are involved in the development of high-tech weaponry. Needless to say, their website is a little cagy, but all their staff seem to have backgrounds in either computing, aerospace or satellite technology. We appreciate that’s not particularly remarkable, but there is an interesting coincidence. In business class was a twenty-eight-year-old physicist named Dr Ian Duffy. His seat had not been reallocated, but he did have an onward ticket to Washington on the same flight as Towers. Duffy was a leader in his field. His lab at Cambridge University is sponsored by a consortium of British defence contractors including Winchester Systems. We’re trying to get a fix on his research, but so far we’ve established that he was involved with computers that work using pulses of light instead of electrical connections – this is really futuristic stuff, the sort of technology that if you were to have it first could make the interception of your data close to impossible.’
‘Were they travelling together?’
‘Not that Mrs Towers knew. Duffy was single and his parents are an ordinary middle-aged couple who are quite frankly baffled to have produced a leading physicist. They haven’t a clue what he was doing. Their best guess is that he was attending a conference of some sort.’
‘I have to add something here,’ Mrs Patterson interjected. ‘The company my husband works for leads the world in encryption software. Information is power. If you can keep it secret, it’s even more potent. He and my daughter were moved onto the Sunday flight.’
Jenny felt herself begin to disengage. Another conspiracy theory was on the way.
‘And if he and Duffy and Towers had all been killed, that would have been three men whose careers revolve around cyber security.’
‘And where does Chen come into this?’ Jenny asked.
‘He was the one who told us about Dr Duffy. He had been looking for passengers with links to Jimmy Han. Apparently Han and Duffy sat on the same panel of experts at a symposium in Frankfurt last year.’
Jenny said, ‘I’m grateful for what you have told me, but I do feel that it’s evidence that will be far more relevant to Sir James Kendall’s inquest than to mine.’
‘He won’t listen to any of this,’ Mrs Patterson said. ‘You were at his news conference, you’ve heard the party line. As far as he’s concerned it was lightning. Why would he trouble himself to dig any deeper than he has to?’
Jenny felt the urge to explain what to Mrs Patterson as a mathematician should have been blindingly obvious: that the class of people who regularly travelled the globe was a vanishingly small sliver of the population, and that among any group of five hundred of them there would be all manner of coincidental links and associations that could be moulded to fit any number of sinister theories. But that would have been callous. She reminded herself that Mrs Patterson was coping with the only tools she possessed. Other relatives would be numbing themselves with drugs or making pilgrimages to places they had once visited with their loved ones; she had set up an office and given herself an almighty problem to solve. What good would it do to tell her that the pain would slowly pass, and that what at this moment seemed like unanswerable logic would eventually resemble nothing more than wishful thinking? That was a journey she would have to take alone.
Jenny turned to Galbraith. ‘I suggest you assemble what you have into a formal dossier. I’ll happily accept it in evidence, but you appreciate my hands are partially tied.’
As Jenny left the room, Mrs Patterson called after her, ‘The truth hurts, Mrs Cooper – why else would people lie?’
As the elevator doors closed shut behind her, Jenny felt the cold, familiar press of anxiety on her chest. The descent to the lobby felt like an eternity. She bore down against the feeling of rising dread, but quietly and stealthily it had already taken root and was tightening its grip. Her heart began to beat faster. Bursting out of the doors into the lobby, her head swam as she turned to the exit, her legs threatening to buckle beneath her. Changing course, she made her way unsteadily across the corridor and dropped into the closest armchair in the lounge. She forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply as the spasms of panic peaked, then slowly tailed off, leaving her feeling powerless and spent.
She longed to reach for a chemical crutch, but she had taken more than her permitted dose of beta blockers, and the tranquillizers which had so magically lifted her out of pain were no longer an option. According to Dr Allen, she was strong enough to cope with these episodes now that she could trace them back to their root. She would feel acute anxiety only when her rawest nerves were touched, he had assured her; when events tapped into the guilt that had lived with her from childhood. As the breath slowly returned to her lungs, she realized that it was Mrs Patterson’s parting shot that had cut through her defences. She had managed to hold her nerve all throughout the long morning with Simon Moreton, his threats only strengthening her determination, but a few simple words from a grieving mother had felled her.
By accusing her of colluding in a lie, Mrs Patterson had unwittingly hit her where she was most vulnerable. It was the lying about her cousin Katy’s death, even more than her hand in it, which had caused the poison to accumulate over three and half decades. Intimidated by her father, her enforced silence had hollowed her out until the fragile walls had collapsed in on themselves. It was as clear to her now as it was daunting: she couldn’t look the other way. And if she did there would be only one outcome: her painstaking efforts to crawl back up to the light would end with a plunge back into the abyss.
It felt as if she had been dealt an impossible hand. So many dead, so many lives broken, and so many reasons why it wasn’t her business to find the answers. Not for the first time in her short career as coroner, she felt unequal to the task that confronted her. She hauled herself to her feet and made her way to the exit, the papers Galbraith had given her weighing as heavily in her hands as lead. What should she do?
The beginnings of an answer came far sooner than she had expected. She was making her way gingerly down one side of the hotel’s ornate double-sided front steps when she felt the vibration of her phone in her jacket pocket.
‘Mrs Cooper?’ a familiar Welsh voice said. ‘Inspector Williams. Those helicopters you were asking about—’
SEVENTEEN
THE WITNESS’S NAME WAS LAWRENCE COLE, and for as long as anyone could remember his home had been a caravan outside the village of Portskewett, three miles to the west of Chepstow, and a short walk from the tidal beaches of the Severn at the end of the Black Rock Road. Jenny noted this little irony: Brogan had claimed to come from the town of Blackrock in County Louth on the Irish border. A notorious, but good-natured poacher and thief, Cole fed himself and supplemented a meagre income as a casual farm labourer by illegally netting salmon and shooting the odd goose on the mudflats.
Williams’s background for the man they were about to meet didn’t inspire Jenny with confidence. And as they trudged the fifty yards of muddy track from the lane in the icy darkness, she wondered if she would have been better off spending the last working hour of the day at her desk.
They rounded a sharp corner and entered an untidy wire compound encircling the ramshackle caravan through a makeshift wooden gate. Two dead rabbits and a duck hung from a hook on a tall wooden post. A ragged collie strained at the end of chain barking excitedly.
‘Quiet down, boy,’ a voice yelled from inside.
The flimsy door creaked on its hinges and Cole came stiffly down the cinderblock steps to greet them. A short, squat man with sharp green eyes that smiled impishly at Williams, he was probably in his fifties, though a hard outdoor life had added extra years to his weather-worn face. He squeezed Jenny’s hand in a callused palm and ushered them both inside.
A pall of tobacco smoke and the fumes from an elderly paraffin stove competed to thicken the air inside to an unbreathable fog. They sat on the tatty
bench seats arranged around a table while Cole lit the gas under a kettle. Jenny shot Williams a glance, urging him to move things along before they were embarrassed into accepting a cup of tea in one of the filthy mugs heaped on the drainer.
‘We can’t stop, Lawrence,’ Williams said. ‘Mrs Cooper’s in a hurry. Why don’t you tell us what you saw?’
‘Like I told that boy of yours – it was a couple of helicopters.’
‘When?’ Jenny asked.
Cole lit a hand-rolled cigarette from the stove and eased his legs under the table.
‘Can’t have been more than ten minutes after the plane came down. I was packing up my tackle – I’d been out fishing, see.’ He smiled at Williams. ‘Hook and line, mind. All legal.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Williams said, humouring him.
Jenny said, ‘You saw the plane?’
‘I did. Came screaming over, light flashing on the wings – never seen nothing like it. Heard it hit the water too, I did. Just like a crack of thunder.’ He spoke with an accent that only existed in this pocket of South Wales: the lyrical Welsh rise and fall meeting the rich piratical vowels of the Forest of Dean. A genuine character, Jenny thought, but how would a jury perceive him?
‘Did you see it hit the water?’
He shook his large head. ‘Too far away. It was that misty out you couldn’t see a hundred yards, look. I felt it, though.’ He slapped a hand on his chest. ‘Went right through me, it did. I knew it was bad.’
‘Tell me about the helicopters.’
‘I was walking back up the lane there when I heard them coming over. There were two of them, low on the water, like. One of them had a searchlight – yellow, it was.’
‘Did you notice any markings?’
‘No. They just looked black from where I was standing – shadowy, like.’
‘You’re sure it was only ten minutes?’
‘Might even have been less. I was in a hurry to get back here and switch on the wireless to hear about that plane.’
‘You didn’t see them come back?’
‘Can’t say I did.’
His sighting was interesting, but hardly concrete proof. And if the powerful smell of whisky on his breath was any indication, his idea of time might have been less than accurate.
‘You told the constable you’d try to draw them for us,’ Williams said.
‘So I did.’ He cast a vague eye over his jumbled belongings.
‘Here,’ Williams said, fetching out his notebook and a pen, ‘have a go with this.’
Squinting though the smoke curling up from the cigarette clamped between his lips, Cole began to draw with surprisingly delicate strokes. His forehead creased with concentration, he sketched the outlines of two aircraft that not only had rotors, but also appeared to have short wings jutting out from their sides.
It was Williams who pointed it out. ‘What’s that, Lawrence? Looks like wings.’
‘That’s what they had. I can still see them, clear as anything.’ He tapped his temple with a thick finger.
Williams glanced at Jenny. ‘That’s not what the search and rescue look like. They’re in Sea Kings – no wings on those.’
Jenny said, ‘Let’s get this clear. You heard the sound of the airliner hitting the water, and some ten minutes or so later you saw these two helicopters flying downstream about a hundred feet up.’
‘That’s it.’
‘Did you hear anything else?’
Cole frowned. ‘I might have heard a bit of a bang a few minutes later, but it could as easily have been someone letting off a shotgun. It’s hard to say.’
‘When was the bang?’
He screwed up his face as he struggled to remember. ‘Just as I was coming up from the lane, I think. I can’t be sure.’
Jenny tried to imagine him being cross-examined by Giles Hartley and his colleagues and had to conclude that he wouldn’t stand up well. If his evidence were to be believed it would have to be corroborated. That meant more legwork and more delay. And with each hour that passed, her inquiry hung by an ever thinner thread.
‘What do you mean, postponed?’ Alison said, her angry voice distorting over the speakers inside Jenny’s car as she drove back along the narrow lanes to Chepstow. ‘I’ve just spent the last two hours making sure everyone’s ready to reassemble tomorrow morning.’
‘Something’s come up – more new evidence.’
‘You know what’s going to happen, Mrs Cooper?’
‘It’s a risk I’ll have to take. We’ll start again on Monday, I promise.’
‘And I’m meant to sit here all evening soaking up the abuse? Do you have any idea how angry these people are going to be?’
‘I’m sorry. It can’t be helped.’
There was a moody silence on the line.
‘Alison, look—’
‘Don’t worry, Mrs Cooper, I don’t mind cancelling my plans for tonight. Just don’t expect me to run any more errands for you. I’d better make a start.’ She rang off.
Alison’s outburst was intended to make Jenny feel guilty and she had succeeded. Jenny toyed with the idea of driving back to the office and taking over the task of telling angry lawyers and witnesses to reschedule once again, but decided there were more pressing matters demanding her attention. She could clear the air with Alison once the inquiry was over.
She scrolled through her contacts and found Michael’s number. Another call that would carry an unwelcome load. It rang several times before he answered.
‘Michael, it’s Jenny.’
‘I know,’ he said warily.
‘I was wondering if you could help me.’
‘With what? Everyone who matters has already made up their mind.’
‘I like to think I matter, and I’m still very much in the dark. A witness saw a pair of helicopters heading east only minutes after the plane went down. He’s drawn a sketch for me. I need to know where they came from.’
It was late in the evening by the time Michael arrived, tired and subdued after a day criss-crossing the country between racecourses. A colleague had called in sick and the boss had insisted he take up the slack, keeping his extra journeys ‘off the log’. It was criminal, but when there were twice as many pilots as jobs, he hadn’t much choice.
Jenny sat him in front of the fire and poured him some wine, treating herself to a glass of orange juice.
‘You’re making me drink alone?’
‘I’m meant to avoid it.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’
‘Too long a story to tell you now. I’ve made some pasta – do you want to eat first or can I show you the picture?’
‘Let’s see it.’
She retrieved Cole’s sketch from between the leaves of a legal pad and handed it to him.
‘Wow.’ He seemed puzzled. ‘He’s sure this is what he saw?’
‘I’ve no reason to think he’s making it up. Why – what are they?’
‘They look like Apaches. Helicopter gunships. These things sticking out of the side are called stub-wing pylons – they’re mounts for missile launchers. The RAF don’t have any, but I think the Army and Navy have a few. The Yanks have got hundreds of them, but none in the UK as far as I know. What colour were they?’
‘He couldn’t see. It was misty.’
‘I’ve overflown Beachley lots of times. I’ve seen Pumas and Chinooks, but never any Apaches. But I can’t think of anywhere else they could have come from that wouldn’t have taken at least twenty minutes.’
‘The brigadier at Beachley insists they were nothing to do with him.’
‘Maybe he’s right.’ Michael rubbed his tired eyes. ‘Oh, God.’ The words slipped out in little more than a whisper.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know what the current protocols are, but—’ He paused to take a steadying mouthful of wine. ‘There are standing orders about the shooting down of civilian airliners if radio contact is lost.’
‘The aircraft wasn’t shot out o
f the sky, Michael. I’ve seen photographs – there’s a scorch mark on the underside nose, that’s all.’
‘That’s a photograph. Have you seen the actual hull?’
‘No. It’s in the AAIB’s hangar down at Farnborough.’
‘I wouldn’t believe anything until I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’
Jenny said, ‘Have you changed your mind? When we came out of the simulator you seemed convinced the initial stall was at least partially Captain Murray’s fault.’
‘I don’t know what to think.’ He swallowed the rest of the glass. ‘I trust Glen Francis, but then I’ve seen misinformation enough times to know that even something as big as this could be stage-managed.’
‘The witness thinks he heard a bang or an explosion several minutes after the helicopters passed. Brogan’s life-jacket bore traces of explosive residue and it had been punctured by a double-sided knife – the lab said it could have been a military one.’ Despite the warmth of the fire, Jenny felt herself shudder as if from the cold. ‘I hadn’t allowed myself to put it all together like this before, but it’s almost as if whoever was in those helicopters cut Brogan out of his lifejacket and cast him adrift . . . Who would do that? Why?’
‘There’ll be a reason,’ Michael said. ‘Just don’t expect to find it.’ He reached for the bottle and refilled his glass.
Jenny thought of what Mrs Patterson had told her about the businessmen and law-enforcers on board the aircraft, and remembered Chen’s panicky reaction outside the press conference. It was almost unthinkable that anyone would sacrifice hundreds of innocent lives to make sure of killing one or two men, but the truth was that unthinkable things happened all the time. Then there was Nuala’s involvement. There was still no satisfactory explanation for her presence on the aircraft, still less for the fact that, in common with several of the passengers Mrs Patterson had isolated, she was booked onto a connecting flight to Washington. She wrestled with conflicting feelings over whether to share with Michael all that she had heard. But as badly as she wanted to, she had to remind herself of her duty to remain clear and objective. She couldn’t allow her opinions to be coloured by anyone’s grief, not even his.