B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm

by M. R. Hall

‘It might have made no difference at all,’ Jenny protested.

  ‘You know your problem, Mrs Cooper? You’re so caught up with your own dramas you’ve forgotten what your job is. Your predecessor, Harry Marshall, never forgot, not for a moment. Honour the dead and protect the living, those were his rules. You should try learning from them.’

  ‘You know who this woman is?’ Fuller asked, incredulously.

  ‘Her name’s Angela Wesley. She lives in Victoria Avenue, Clifton, and she worked part-time as a special needs teacher. Her husband runs his own insurance brokerage.’

  ‘Have you got a phone number for him?’

  ‘I’d rather tell him in person,’ Alison said.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ Fuller looked accusingly at Jenny. ‘I’d be grateful if you’d write me a statement setting out everything you know about this case, Mrs Cooper.’

  Propelled by an impulse she felt the need to neither question nor resist, Jenny drove the few miles across country to the spot overlooking the estuary to which she had retreated the morning Brogan and Amy Patterson had washed up on the shore.

  Leaving her Land Rover at the side of the road, she wandered over the dunes to the head of the beach, seeking comfort in the stark clarity of the open water. A keen east wind bit into her face and cut through to her skin.

  Alison had spoken out of guilt, but she was right; she had failed the dead woman. They both had. No written law had been violated, but with hindsight it was obvious that she had been the photographer’s lover, and even more obvious that Jenny’s duty had been to make sure that she knew that someone who wouldn’t judge her understood her predicament.

  Braced against the cold spits of rain whipping into her face, she found herself alone again with the dead, and no matter how hard she tried to box them up and file them away, they refused to be contained. Brogan strode listlessly back and forth across the foreshore; Amy Patterson huddled and shivered in a hollow between the dunes; Nuala Casey wandered in search of a waymarker in a landscape as alien to her as the moon’s.

  Jenny lifted her eyes to glimpse a passenger jet passing between the clouds: a tiny arrow streaking across the sky. She thought of its occupants, protected by a skin only inches thick, breathing air held at pressure by a handful of valves and seals, the entire machine kept aloft by flimsy boxes of electronics and their prayers. And then she pictured the scene inside Flight 189 as the aircraft pitched upwards, hurling bodies from their seats. She heard their screams as it plunged downwards in a vertical dive. There would have been no opportunity for silent dignity throughout its six-minute journey to earth; it would have been chaos, as close to hell as it was possible to imagine.

  She turned back to her car knowing what she had to do: her job. Without fear or compromise, she would seek out the truth. If there was an answer to why Flight 189 was lost, she felt sure the key to it lay with Nuala Casey. She needed access to the belongings that she had with her on the plane. If she could have counted on the law being fairly administered, she would simply have issued a request to Sir James Kendall in the expectation that he would oblige her, but there was more chance of 189 miraculously appearing from the clouds and coming safely in to land. Not for the first time in her career, she would have to enforce the law alone.

  Driving back through the Gloucestershire countryside towards the M5 motorway, Jenny spoke Dr Kerr’s number out to the hands-free. He picked up the call against the sound the voices and the high-pitched whine of surgical saws.

  ‘Dr Kerr? It’s Mrs Cooper. Are you still at the D-Mort?’

  ‘Until tomorrow. You’re not going to tell me you’ve postponed your inquest again – my diary’s in chaos.’

  ‘I’ve no plans at the moment,’ she answered, reasoning that a half-truth was better than an outright lie. ‘You’re still doing the autopsies?’

  ‘Mostly re-examining. This one’s for a life insurance company – don’t ask.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve got a request of my own.’

  ‘I thought you had lost jurisdiction.’

  ‘Different passenger. It turns out I’m friendly with someone who had an ex-girlfriend on board. A thirty-year-old woman by the name of Nuala Casey.’

  ‘Have you got the identifying number?’

  ‘No. But your report says she had early-stage lymphoma.’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘You said her medical records showed no diagnosis. The thing is she was a pilot herself, for Ransome Airways. I’m reading between the lines here, but I suspect that if she thought she was ill, she would have gone to a private doctor first – kept it off the record so as not to jeopardize her pilot’s licence.’

  ‘The chances are she would have still been asymptomatic, the odd swollen gland maybe.’

  ‘Is there any chance you can get access to her possessions in the evidence store? Apparently she had a phone she kept all her appointments on.’

  ‘Sorry, Jenny – we don’t have any access to personal effects. Once they’re bagged it’s all handed to the police. There’s still technically a criminal investigation going on.’

  ‘And it’s all stored at the D-Mort?’

  ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘Oh well, never mind,’ Jenny said, pretending to be satisfied with his answer. ‘But if it’s all the same, I wouldn’t mind calling by to have a word about the lymphoma.’

  ‘There’s not a lot to tell.’

  ‘We’ll see. In about an hour?’

  ‘No problem.’

  Jenny recognized the soldier at the barrier from her first visit and flashed him a friendly smile as he checked her name off his list of expected visitors. Waved through without a hitch, she parked in the officials’ car park and collected her visitor’s tag at the reception desk. She checked her watch: she had fifteen minutes before Dr Kerr was expecting her.

  She headed off along the walkway, but instead of turning right to the mortuary continued straight on towards the stack of modular offices that she had first passed with Simon Moreton. There were noticeably fewer people on the site than during her previous visits, but the fact only served to make her feel more conspicuous.

  Pretending to be caught up in a phone call, she dawdled a little distance from the evidence and effects store, and noticed that the rectangular building was made up of nine cabins: three high and three wide. The entrance, clearly signed, was through a door in the centre of the bottom middle cabin. The windows on the lower tier were all firmly closed; several upstairs were open a touch. To the left of the building a set of steps led up to a door which would doubtless open only from the inside.

  Drifting a little nearer, she glanced through a ground-floor window and saw a single male figure sitting at desk working at his computer. All along the walls there were metal racks containing deep wire-mesh trays. Each tray was labelled with text which was too small to read from this distance and contained sealed plastic evidence bags, many of them holding entire suitcases. With no idea how to get what she wanted, Jenny decided she had no option but to wing it.

  She climbed the three steps to the main door, knocked twice, then stepped inside to see a young broad-shouldered detective rising from behind his desk. He had the startled look of a man who wasn’t expecting visitors.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ Jenny said, flashing him a smile. ‘Jenny Cooper, Severn Vale District Coroner. I presume you’re in charge of evidence and effects.’

  ‘That’s my boss, DI Prentice,’ the young man said warmly, seemingly grateful for a break in the tedium of his day. ‘He’s at a meeting this afternoon. Paul Knight – detective constable. I administer the database.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’ She shook his hand and noticed that the air smelt stale and musty. She had heard that all the evidence recovered from the two halves of the sunken hull had been dried out in specially designed trailers, but the process had evidently been far from perfect. At each end of the cabin a large electric heater stood alongside a dehumidifier.

  He motioned her to a chair.
‘What can I do for you?’

  Taking a seat, Jenny glanced left and right and saw that the individual cabins were connected by open doorways with no doors in the frames. In the far right-hand corner of the cabin in which they were sitting was a compact open staircase leading to the upper level. The rear wall was lined with industrial racks with trays three deep. Each section was numbered alphabetically, and each tray bore the name of an individual passenger. Those immediately behind Knight read Donoghue, Richard (M), Downing, Elaine (F), Eason, Anthony (M). From this, she concluded that Nuala Casey’s tray would be off to her left near the entrance to the next cabin, possibly the other side of the doorway.

  What did she want from him? She had to think quickly.

  ‘You may know that I’m conducting the inquest into the death of Gerry Brogan – the man whose yacht was struck by the aircraft.’

  ‘The IRA guy.’

  ‘He had a dubious history, certainly,’ Jenny responded patiently. ‘Anyway, you might also know that I initially had jurisdiction over the case of Amy Patterson, the ten-year-old child whose body was washed up in my district.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Knight said. He turned to his computer and scrolled through a list of names.

  ‘I’m aware that no effects can be released yet, but I wonder if you could answer a couple of questions for the parents – it is rather a special case. The child was travelling alone.’

  Knight gave a cautious nod. He found what he was looking for and clicked on what Jenny assumed was Amy Patterson’s name.

  ‘What do they want to know?’

  ‘Her father received a brief phone call from her during the plane’s final descent. They would like to know if her phone was recovered, if it works, and if you intend to examine any data on it. I think they would like to find out if she was trying to call her mother, or . . . you understand.’

  ‘I’d help you if I could, but all phones are being examined by a team of data retrieval experts. It’s a private firm up in Manchester that we’re using. Everything recovered will be released to relatives in due course. Actually, they were told that – it should be on the website.’

  Jenny felt herself begin to blush. She was a bad liar at the best of times. ‘They’re very upset, probably a little confused.’

  ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘Yes—’ What was she going to say? She hadn’t a clue. She would just have to move from a white lie to an outright one. ‘Mrs Patterson thinks her daughter might have been wearing a silver necklace – it was a family heirloom. It would mean a lot to her if it’s been found. I saw the body, I should have been able to tell her, but I really couldn’t remember.’ Jenny offered a silent prayer for forgiveness, then reminded herself that she was the one acting in the interests of justice.

  Knight scanned what Jenny presumed was a list of possessions logged next to Amy Patterson’s name. He shook his head. ‘Sorry, I don’t see any mention of a necklace. We haven’t recorded every single item in everyone’s luggage, though, just the individual items found on the body. Aside from her clothing, it says she had a wristwatch, a phone and purse, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, that is disappointing.’ She couldn’t let it end here. She needed to get to Nuala’s tray. ‘I don’t suppose you could just double-check for me?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll have made a mistake.’

  ‘Please?’ Jenny implored. ‘Just so I can reassure her that I did everything I could.’

  ‘I can’t break the seals on any evidence bags, Mrs Cooper.’

  ‘Of course not—’ She held his gaze until his frown dissolved.

  ‘All right, I’ll have a quick look for you.’ He got up from behind the desk. ‘I’ll have to ask you to stay here, though.’

  ‘Fine,’ Jenny said. ‘Thank you.’

  As Knight moved off across the linoleum floor towards the staircase, Jenny slipped off her shoes. Her heart beat hard against her ribs as he neared the top of the second flight and disappeared into the cabin above. Hearing his heavy footsteps passing directly overhead, she tiptoed away from her chair along the row of trays towards the letter C. She heard him stop and pull open a tray. Jenny reached the furthest rack in the cabin – it began with Clark, Samuel (M). Damn! She slipped through the doorway into the next cabin, alive to every tiny movement on the floor above, and spotted Casey, Nuala (F) on the bottom tray of the nearest rack. Glancing through the mesh she could see a bag containing a small black suitcase on top of which was another holding items of clothing. Close to the front were two other much smaller bags, one containing what appeared to be a wash bag, and in another beneath it, a wallet. The tray was too heavy to pull out without making a noise, but there was gap of about five inches between the top edge and the bottom of the one above. She reached a shaky hand through and touched the bag containing the wash bag. She heard Knight cough and shove a tray back into a rack.

  Jenny quickly pulled out the wash bag and stuffed it into her right-hand coat pocket. Knight was moving back towards the stairs as she reached in again and closed her fingers around the wallet. She thrust it into the left-hand pocket and dashed silently back through the doorway and across the central cabin, overtaking Knight’s footsteps and arriving at her chair a moment before his foot hit the first tread on the way down. She smoothed her pocket flaps, slipped on her shoes and took a deep breath, all at once.

  Knight reached the turn in the stairs. ‘No sign of a necklace, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Never mind. I’m so sorry to have troubled you,’ Jenny said. She got up from her chair, her heart still racing. ‘I expect it’s in the case. I’ll explain to them. You’ve no idea when the phone data might be available?’

  ‘It’ll take a few weeks to process them all,’ Knight said. ‘We’ll keep them posted.’

  ‘You’re doing a great job.’ Jenny heard herself say. ‘I’m sure all the families are very grateful.’

  The five paces to the door felt like five hundred. She stepped outside into a sheet of drizzle knowing that she had just done something from which there would be no way back.

  NINETEEN

  JENNY HAD INTENDED TO KEEP her meeting with Dr Kerr in the staff canteen brief, fearing that any moment DC Knight would discover what she had taken and come after her, but she was out of luck and was forced to listen to the story of his day. Together with an American pathologist flown in especially for the task, he had spent most of it conducting a second post-mortem on the body of a wealthy New York investment banker. The dead man had two separate life insurance policies, each worth many millions, one of which excluded liability in the event of death being caused by ‘physical trauma suffered in a civil aviation accident’. Lawyers had advised that if the man could be proved to have died from a heart attack before the plane struck the water, the family had a good legal case against the insurance company, who were refusing to honour their policy. When no evidence of a coronary could be found, the other pathologist had suggested that they look again.

  Dr Kerr lowered his voice and leaned across the table. ‘Do you know what he said to me?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘“If we look hard enough we might even find 100,000 dollars each.” Can you believe that?’ His astonishment was quaint.

  ‘I hope you did,’ Jenny said. ‘Offers like that don’t get made in a mortuary every day.’

  He looked genuinely shocked.

  ‘I’m joking,’ Jenny said, but he didn’t seem persuaded.

  ‘You wanted to talk about Nuala Casey,’ Dr Kerr said, changing the subject.

  ‘Yes. You detected signs of lymphoma which you said were probably asymptomatic.’

  ‘That’s right. It was in the very early stages.’

  ‘She was a pilot. She had frequent medicals. You can’t fly if you’re in anything less than excellent health. If anyone would have been alive to symptoms, it would have been her.’

  ‘It’s possible she was feeling a little below par. I think I’ve read that some patients can suffer sympt
oms similar to depression before anything manifests physically.’

  ‘And if you’re a person unfamiliar with psychological symptoms, that could be quite disturbing.’

  ‘I have no insight into her mental condition, Jenny.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  It was intriguing, nonetheless. She had learned enough through her own experience to know that suffering from unwanted thoughts could lead one to behave in unusual ways. If Nuala was ever going to take a risk she might not otherwise have done, the period at the end of her life was it. Separated from Michael and having denied herself the possibility of motherhood, she would already have been in a deeply negative state of mind.

  ‘You said you know a friend of hers—’ Dr Kerr ventured.

  ‘More of an acquaintance,’ Jenny said offhandedly, instinctively wanting to keep Michael’s identity a secret.

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘There is just one other thing. I don’t suppose you could take another look at Amy Patterson for me.’

  ‘For you? It’s not your case, Mrs Cooper.’

  ‘But she was with Brogan until the end.’ It was Jenny’s turn to speak in a whisper. ‘This is strictly confidential—’

  Dr Kerr gave a guarded nod.

  ‘You found flash burns on Brogan’s face. I’ve got forensic evidence that there was some sort of explosion after he entered the water – there’s chemical residue on his lifejacket. I can’t get hold of her lifejacket or clothing to run similar tests – don’t ask me to explain – but if you could have a look at the areas of her body that might have been out of the water, I’d be grateful.’

  ‘What sort of residue?’

  ‘I think you might be better off not knowing,’ Jenny said, ‘but if you find anything worth swabbing –’ she dipped into her jacket pocket and pushed one of Forenox’s business cards across the table – ‘you can book it in under my account. The guy handling it’s called Ravi Achari. And tell him if he leaks any more results, I’ll put a bomb under him.’

  Jenny left the D-Mort and headed back towards Bristol in the gathering dusk. She was desperate to examine the contents of the two evidence bags, but had decided to act on a plan which, although it would do nothing to protect her, would ensure the continuity of any valuable evidence the bags contained.