by M. R. Hall
‘As you can appreciate, Mrs Cooper,’ Singh said, drawing towards a conclusion, ‘between them, those four men and one woman represented a body of knowledge whose value could safely be considered priceless – easily worth the loss of a few hundred innocent lives.’
‘Will there be retaliation?’ Jenny asked, realizing how naive she sounded as soon as the words left her mouth.
‘It all gets weighed in the balance,’ Talbot answered. ‘I am sure that at some point there will be consequences.’
Silence fell across the table. Glances were exchanged, indicating that the committee’s business was drawing to a close.
‘We appreciate your cooperation, Mrs Cooper,’ Singh said. ‘It won’t go unacknowledged.’
Simon Moreton took his cue to see her out. ‘Thank you, Jenny. Can I offer you a lift home?’
Jenny turned back to Singh. ‘You haven’t told me what happened on the water.’
‘We’re still trying to establish the precise facts,’ Talbot cut in. ‘It seems likely that American personnel were acting directly on Kennedy’s orders. We can presume they attempted to destroy the avionics of the downed aircraft rather than let them fall into our hands, and it probably also follows that they made every effort to ensure that there were no surviving witnesses to their actions. In the latter respect, at least, they were successful.’
‘The Americans don’t trust us?’ Jenny needled. ‘I thought we cooperated fully over terrorism.’
More uncomfortable glances were exchanged. Jenny suddenly felt foolish but didn’t understand why.
‘We’re considered leaky,’ Sir James Kendall said, speaking for the first time. ‘It’s our press and, I’m afraid, people like you they fear, Mrs Cooper. Somehow we’ve lost the knack of keeping a secret.’
Ignoring his note of disapproval, Jenny persisted. ‘Someone tried to kill Brogan, or at least ensure he didn’t survive. That can’t be allowed to go unpunished.’
No one answered her.
‘And what will the public be told? No one is going to believe it was a lightning strike after what happened today. You can’t continue to issue misinformation for ever.’
Singh took up the baton again. ‘Please try to be content with what you have already achieved, Mrs Cooper. Not even you can improve the situation any further. The contaminated avionics will be analysed; a solution will be found.’
Jenny wasn’t content, far from it, but she could truthfully say there was nothing more she could have done.
Several inches of snow had fallen overnight, covering the valley in a white shroud that had frozen hard in a searing east wind. The snow ploughs had left the tiny lane from Melin Bach untouched, forcing Jenny to creep slowly down the hill cutting the first tracks of the day. The smothered landscape looked as subdued as she felt. The radio bulletins carried the latest speculation that Flight 199 had been forced to land because of a faulty electrical component supplied to the aircraft’s manufacturers. Familiar-sounding officials reassured the listening public that very occasionally faulty components slipped through the net, but that this would never be allowed to happen again. Jenny almost found herself believing them.
Likewise, she almost trusted Simon Moreton’s assurances that diplomats were now working day and night to ensure that no more airliners were plucked from the sky, but it was little salve for her conscience. When, in a few days’ time her inquest resumed, it would end in an open verdict, leaving Brogan’s girlfriend, Maria Canavan, with unanswered questions and a lingering suspicion that the man she had loved had been an unredeemed criminal. Mrs Patterson, too, would never be allowed to know that in the interests of keeping their shady mission secret, the operatives in the Apache helicopters had left her daughter to the mercies of the freezing river. Picking her way through the winding miles of snow-covered forested gorge, she felt like a traveller on a journey that might never end.
The uneasy sensation stayed with her even as she broke out of the wilderness and crossed the bridge into the tamed English countryside. Following the motorway into Bristol, she scolded her imagination and reminded herself that she had banished irrational feelings to the past, but there it was: a real and undeniable sensation, as tangible as any in the corporeal world; a presence that sat neither next to nor behind her, but seemed to occupy every aspect of her space, and which was urging her to something. Who could it be? Was it Brogan or Amy Patterson? Don’t be so stupid, she told herself. You’re over all that now. You’ve been into the darkest places; you’ve shared everything with Dr Allen there ever was to share; there are no ghosts left to haunt you.
But as she crunched across the pavement in Jamaica Street the sensation seemed to grow stronger still. Approaching the entrance to her building, she started in alarm as a burly, red-faced man threw open the front door and marched angrily out. It was Alison’s husband.
‘Terry?’
He glared at her and stormed past, wrenching open his car door.
Jenny hurried inside and along the hallway. She called out Alison’s name.
‘Mrs Cooper?’
She was sitting calmly at her desk, dressed in a neat navy suit, her hair elegantly set. The room was serene and orderly. Fresh flowers stood in a vase on the waiting-area table.
‘I just saw Terry . . . I thought for a moment—’
‘That he’d strangled me?’ She let out an ironic laugh. ‘I could have strangled him. He would have deserved it, too – the tramps he’s been consorting with in Spain.’
Jenny took a moment to reorientate herself, but something remained definitely wrong.
‘What’s going on, Alison? I thought you were—’
‘Leaving?’
‘You did say—’
‘I’d prefer not to, if you don’t mind, Mrs Cooper.’
They looked at each other, Alison’s expression pleading that she would rather they left it at that and carried on as usual.
But Jenny was not content to let more unfinished business linger.
‘What happened?’
Alison composed herself, determined not to spoil her elaborate make-up with tears. ‘I decided to take a lesson from the dead photographer and his lover. They were so desperate not to hurt the people who loved them . . .’ Her voice wavered. ‘You can’t live without hurting someone, Mrs Cooper. That’s just how life is. And if you’re the one who always lets themselves be hurt, you end up hardly living at all . . . I gave Terry thirty years and he repaid me by walking out when it suited him. Now it’s my turn. He came here begging me to take him back but I told him no, I’ve started seeing Paul and he’s making me very happy.’ She gave a bittersweet smile.
‘So happy I can even cope with staying here with you.’
‘Good,’ Jenny said, raising a smile at Alison’s joke. ‘I wasn’t sure how I’d manage.’
‘Let’s face it, you wouldn’t, would you?’ Back to her old self, Alison pushed a pile of death reports topped with a bundle of mail across the desk. ‘I’m afraid we’ve let things get behind.’
‘What’s new?’
Jenny picked up the papers and carried them through to her office with a heavy heart. Her immediate future held little to look forward to: chained to a desk, ever more estranged from her son, and any prospect of seeing Michael again seemingly having vanished like the mist. And standing at her shoulder the presence that still refused to leave. Sitting at her desk in the quiet of her office, she understood how it must feel for a blind man to know that someone is silently watching.
The rude interruption of the telephone came as a welcome relief.
‘Jenny Cooper.’
‘It’s Mrs Stewart,’ the frosty voice announced. ‘I really don’t think your father’s going to last the day.’
TWENTY-NINE
SHE STEPPED INTO THE spotless room and forced herself to confront the emaciated figure lying semi-conscious beneath blankets tucked tightly under the mattress. He looked as if he had already been laid out; his breathing was slow and shallow, his lips slowly t
urning blue. His body was a shell, but the spirit that still clung to it remained as strong and present as an ogre. She felt his fear of death as strong invisible hands around her throat. He wasn’t resigned to this, and nor was she.
‘Dad?’ Jenny whispered.
No response.
She extended a wary hand and touched his clammy forehead.
Not a flicker. He was unconscious; slowly descending the final steps. It was safe.
Unsure what to do, she drew up a chair and glanced around the family photographs the nurses had loosely tacked to the walls. She featured in many of them: a fussily dressed baby in her mother’s arms, a smiling seven-year-old, posturing teenager, proud graduate. She realized they were all her father’s pictures brought from home by his second wife before she, too, had abandoned him to his lonely fate. They were sufficiently thumbed at the corners to suggest that he must have studied them from time to time, and even as a mad thing confined to the shrinking cell of his collapsing mind he had never torn them from the walls.
Did it mean that he still loved her?
Did she still love him?
Since her memory had returned, an unkind part of her had secretly longed for his life to end. She had convinced herself that when he was gone she would be clear and free. But now the moment had come, it felt anything but a liberation. What would she do without the man who had patrolled the passageways of her unconscious mind for more than thirty years? Where would she find herself?
Adrift.
Alone.
Despite the warmth of the room she felt strangely cold. She fought the urge to weep and plead with him not to leave. ‘I don’t want to be by myself. You can’t leave me.’ The words flooded unprompted into her mind. She was a small and frightened child suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to show him all the affection that she had withheld for most of a lifetime. She moved closer and stroked his face.
‘I’m sorry, Dad . . .’ she whispered. ‘I do love you.’
She circled his cheek with her fingers but his skin grew colder.
‘Dad . . .’
The tiny movements of his chest had stopped. The gentle rasping on each breath had faded to silence.
‘No—’
Somewhere in the corridor outside a door slammed. Nurses chattered; life went on. Jenny looked up at a photograph of her father on the beach at Weston on a hot summer’s day. Slim and tanned, he was beaming as he held her five-year-old self in his powerful arms. She reached up and took it down. Tucking it into her pocket, she went to tell Mrs Stewart that he had gone.
The snow had frozen hard and more was starting to fall. Jenny inched the Land Rover up the lane to Melin Bach through the raven-black darkness, wishing for once that she lived somewhere with neighbours and street lights. Halfway up on the steepest part of the hill she passed a car that had been abandoned in the gateway to a field, the driver having surrendered to the elements. It was no night to be travelling; it was a night to be safely indoors hoping for warmer days to come.
It had come as no surprise to her that it had taken the coldest day of the year to break her father’s iron grip on life. He had held on to it with the same fierce determination with which his ancestors had clung to the decks of their storm-lashed trawlers in the Irish Sea. Some people slipped from this world without protest, glad to be free of its troubles; others fought to the last moment, resisting the inexorable tides of death until the waters closed over their heads. He had held on until she had arrived at his side. It was still too early, and her feelings too raw for her to say exactly what had passed between them in his final moments, but she already sensed that the malevolent presence that had haunted her for so long had gone. She dared to think that at journey’s end they might finally have forgiven one another.
She rounded the final bend and parked the Land Rover on the cart track at the side of the cottage. Retrieving the torch she kept in the glove box, she braced herself to face the freezing night. Picking her way back onto the lane towards the front gate, the security light fixed to the outside wall of the house lit up. She heard footsteps crunching on the snow.
‘Hello?’ she called out nervously.
‘Jenny – it’s me.’
Approaching the gate she saw a frozen figure outside the open-fronted porch. It was Michael.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
‘That’s all right—’
Her momentary panic subsiding, she went through the gate, struggling to adjust her thoughts. She hadn’t been ready for this. Making her way up the path, she could see that he was shivering uncontrollably. He was wearing only a thin sweater over his shirt.
‘You’re frozen—’
‘I couldn’t get my car up your hill.’
‘You haven’t even got a coat.’
‘I came straight from the hotel where they were debriefing me.’
She reached her keys from her bag with cold, clumsy fingers and unlocked the door. ‘They kept you all this time?’
‘Thorough isn’t the word.’
She stepped inside and switched on the light. He followed her in. She turned to look at him: his face was bruised and stitched in several places. His eyes were dark and hollow.
‘You look terrible.’
‘I’m fine. I called your office. I heard your father—’
‘He’s gone.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He looked stricken. ‘I shouldn’t have come . . .’ He stepped back towards the door.
‘No.’ She caught his arm. ‘Please.’
He slowly turned to face her. ‘This feels wrong, Jenny . . . I shouldn’t . . . Another time.’
‘What?’
He dipped his head.
‘What is it, Michael? Tell me.’
‘I owe you an apology – for the time I frightened you in the Cessna. I don’t know what possessed me.’
‘You told me. I even remember her name.’
He looked up.
‘Believe me,’ Jenny said, ‘I know what it’s like to be haunted. But what I’ve learned is that if you turn to look them in the eye ghosts vanish.’
‘You know, you scare me a little, Jenny.’
‘The feeling’s mutual.’ She shrugged off her coat and hung it on the peg. ‘Come through into the kitchen, it’s freezing out here.’
‘There’s something I want to say first – you might want to throw me out after you’ve heard it.’
She looked at him, feeling all of the things that she had felt since she first saw him at the D-Mort. He was delicate, damaged, and promised to be more work than she could handle, but he was too darkly beautiful to turn away.
‘Try me,’ Jenny said.
‘I . . . I don’t know how to say it.’
‘Then maybe you shouldn’t say anything.’
Jenny let his cold fingers slip between hers.
‘Thank you,’ Michael said. ‘I won’t.’
He kissed her gently on the lips. Jenny smiled and led him into the warmth.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I confess to having always been a nervous flyer. Three childhood experiences helped nurture this wholly rational fear. The first was a trip in a light aircraft owned by a friend of my mother’s – an aerobatics enthusiast – whom I vividly recall carrying out some distinctly amateurish-looking repairs under the hood to enable the old crate to get off the ground: they involved a length of wire, some pliers and a lot of cursing. While we survived that particular flight – despite the alarming coughing noises from the engine – a few years later the pilot crashed during a foolhardy manoeuvre and was rendered semi-paralysed. Even then, he continued to fly with modified controls. On another occasion, I was on a flight with my parents and brother from London to Malaga, southern Spain, when gentle music started playing over the cabin speakers and the adults around me began whispering agitatedly about engine failure. This was duly confirmed by the anxious-sounding Spanish pilot, who carried out an emergency landing at Madrid airport. Thankfully he brought us safely down, but the incident
confirmed my mounting suspicion that planes weren’t as invincible as I had been led to believe. Finally, aged fourteen, I was on a return flight from Milan with a school party when the plane ran into a violent storm over the Alps. It was one of those in which the cabin crew turn ghostly pale and those who aren’t tightly strapped in are hurled out of their seats. A boy sitting across the aisle struck his head on the overhead locker, causing a wound that required many stitches. For nearly thirty minutes we all thought we were doomed. Thankfully, I have never had to endure a repeat performance.
However, despite what my fevered imagination tells me, planes do not very often fall out of the sky, and when they do it is most often due to human error or shoddy maintenance. It is a testament to the immense skill and expertise of aircraft manufacturers that problems in construction or design are very rarely the reason for aircraft failure. For the avoidance of doubt, I must stress that the fly-by-wire technology pioneered by Airbus has undoubtedly made aviation safer, not least by significantly reducing the possibility for human error. I must also emphasize that there has never to my knowledge been a case of a commercial airliner’s avionics having been maliciously corrupted. Academics and military strategists are increasingly discussing such possibilities (see for example Frank D. Kramer et al, Cyberpower and National Security, NDU Press, 2009), but the threat remains a strictly theoretical one. And, heaven forbid, should terrorists of the future develop such capability, there is nothing to my knowledge about the Airbus A380 which would make it any more vulnerable to attack than a Boeing or any other make of aircraft. I chose the A380 as an inanimate ‘character’ in this book simply because at the time of writing it is the ultimate in commercial aviation, and as such the most potent and visible symbol of our ongoing conquest of the skies.