by James Oswald
‘Do you reckon it’s a coincidence, where we found the body?’ he asked, as they finally inched on to the slip road and approached the first of many roundabouts leading to the airport. Grumpy Bob paused a moment before answering, although whether that was because he was considering his response or trying not to drive into the car in front of him was anyone’s guess.
‘Coincidence how?’
‘Well, if he was just chucked out of a plane, he could have landed anywhere. On a road, maybe, or more likely smashing through somebody’s roof. He had to have been dropped from some height to sustain the damage he did.’
‘You think? He can’t have been going that fast or he’d’ve gone straight through the tree and been splattered all over the path.’ Grumpy Bob mistimed a gear change, crunching the lever in a manner that made McLean very glad they weren’t in the Alfa.
‘Another thing to run past Forensics, I guess. Someone’s bound to have some way of working it out. Doesn’t really change things that much, though. Except that the closer to the ground he was when he was dropped, the more deliberate the choice of point of impact, wouldn’t you say?’
Grumpy Bob mashed another gear change in his hurry to make it through the last set of lights. ‘I guess so. Still doesn’t explain how he got up there to be dropped.’
‘No. Nor why. I can think of easier ways to kill a man.’ McLean lurched forward, hands instinctively catching the dashboard in front of him as Grumpy Bob slammed on the brakes in response to the car in front stopping without warning. ‘Driving in rush-hour traffic, for one.’
Emily Bannister turned out to be a shy, nervous young woman, quite overwhelmed by the presence of two police officers in her tiny office. It didn’t help that she kept apologizing for her colleague’s bad behaviour in giving Grumpy Bob the brush-off the day before, or that it had taken her more than two minutes to meet them at reception after they had arrived and that was clearly a terrible mistake on her part. McLean wanted to sit her down and fetch her a cup of tea before she broke with the strain of it all. Instead, he tried to keep his tone neutral and work around her anxiety.
‘Must be a busy job, dealing with all the flights coming and going from this place.’ He nodded in the direction of a small window that overlooked the main terminal building. Ranks of jet liners and smaller propeller-driven planes lined up, awaiting their passengers, or disgorging them on to the tarmac like so many blinking ants.
‘Busy doesn’t begin to cover it. But it’s not like it’s just me working it all the time. I mean, we have shifts, you understand. And different teams for different parts of the job. Like, there’s a controller for the plane when it’s on the ground, and he’ll hand over to another once it’s in the air, and then when it’s ten miles away Prestwick take over. And –’
‘Prestwick?’ McLean interrupted. He wasn’t sure it was important, except that if Ms Bannister didn’t stop talking and start breathing she would probably faint.
‘That’s where the main ATC – sorry, Air Traffic Control Centre – is located. There’re two for the whole of the UK. One down in Swanwick in Hampshire. That does the south, Heathrow and all the other London airports. Prestwick covers the north of England, all of Scotland, and out into the Atlantic. Everything’s coordinated so that we can hand over flight control automatically, or receive incoming flights, and –’
‘All very interesting, thank you.’ McLean interrupted again. ‘But not strictly relevant to our current enquiry.’
‘Oh. Sorry. I get a bit carried away sometimes.’ Ms Bannister dipped her head nervously, shrinking in on herself as if she’d been told off. ‘What was it you needed to know?’
McLean paused a moment to gather his thoughts. The office was obsessively neat, a necessity perhaps because of its tiny size, but also the sign of a mind fixated on details. The spotless desktop held two flat-screen monitors, a keyboard and a trackpad, all lined up with millimetre precision. Even the cables appeared to have been coaxed into neat, straight lines rather than the unruly tangle as on his own desk. A three-tier system of trays labelled ‘in’, ‘out’ and ‘pending’ was empty except for a single brown paper folder on the top.
‘Yesterday morning, sometime between five and six, we think a light aircraft, or maybe a helicopter, flew over the Meadows. Probably not all that high up at the time. I’m guessing it’s too much to hope there’s a flight plan and pilot’s name logged somewhere?’
Ms Bannister tilted her head like a confused dog. ‘A plane? Over the Meadows. Is that why the road was closed yesterday? But I thought the papers said you’d found a …’ She fell silent, eyes widening as the thoughts tumbled into place. ‘He fell from a plane?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out. And any records you might have to help us track that plane down would be invaluable.’
‘I … I see.’ Ms Bannister pulled her chair out from under her desk, pointed at it. ‘May I?’
‘Of course,’ McLean said, then waited while the young woman seated herself, carefully pulled her keyboard into the perfect operating position and began to type. The screens had been blank before, but at her first input they lit up with a half-dozen windows, each showing reams of numbers or graphics that meant nothing to him at all. She typed, swiped at her trackpad, typed some more, bringing up screens and flicking through windows of impenetrable gobbledegook with a speed and dexterity quite at odds with her awkwardness when interacting with the two detectives. This was clearly her preferred space.
‘Yesterday. Between five and six?’ She looked up at McLean briefly, not waiting to see his nod before turning back to her beloved computer. ‘Let me see, let me see.’ A couple more windows popped up on to the screens, then disappeared again.
‘There’s no lodged flight plans for an over-city journey. But that’s hardly surprising. Flights into the airport were over the Forth; those going out heading towards Livingston before turning to whatever course. Nothing commercial would have been over the Meadows. Then again, I don’t suppose you’re looking at commercial flights, are you?’
‘Not exactly. No.’
Another furious tapping at the keys and swiping of the trackpad. ‘So, let’s look at the radar for yesterday morning. Should be here somewhere. Yes. Here we go.’
The left-hand screen opened up into one window, showing what looked like a child’s drawing of the night sky to McLean but which might have been a radar tracking image of a dozen or so aircraft. ‘What am I looking at here?’
‘See this?’ Ms Bannister pointed a slim finger at the screen, where a dot was moving slowly from one side to the other. Meaningless numbers moved with it. ‘That’s a freight 747 from Stansted, headed for Detroit, I think. Here, this is probably easier.’ She tapped the trackpad a couple of times and the screen changed to a more recognizable map of Scotland, the North Sea and some of the Atlantic Ocean. Icons shaped like tiny aeroplanes overlaid themselves on the map, flickering on and off, moving slowly across the electronic sky.
‘This is real time, what’s happening at the moment. All non-military flights are tracked. You can just click on a plane to see the details.’ Ms Bannister did just that, showing an Iceland Air flight from Glasgow to Reykjavik.
‘What about that one?’ McLean pointed at the screen, where an icon much smaller than most of them hovered over an area to the east of the city.
‘Ah, you worked it out. I’m impressed. Yes, light aircraft. Probably heading for East Fortune.’ Ms Bannister clicked on the aircraft and a window popped up with its details. McLean squinted at the tiny writing, but it didn’t mean much to him.
‘This is live, though?’ he asked. ‘What about yesterday morning?’
‘Sorry, I only have the flight numbers and tracking, not the nice mapping graphics.’ Ms Bannister clicked back to the black screen with its pinprick lights, each followed by numbers. ‘See, this is the airport here in the middle. The city’s down here, and the Meadows would be around here.’ She pointed again and again, delicate finger almost touchin
g the screen. McLean followed her directions but couldn’t see anything.
‘There’s nothing there,’ he said.
Ms Bannister turned to face him, a triumphant grin on her face. ‘Precisely.’
‘So … There were no flights?’
‘Not between five and six. Not an aircraft with a commercial transponder, anyway. Unless it was too low for our radar to see.’ The grin faded to her more normal worried frown. ‘But that would be breaking the law.’
McLean stared at the screen again. It still meant very little to him, but the hope there would be a flight plan and name had always been a slim one. It made sense that whoever had dropped Bill Chalmers to his death wouldn’t have left such an obvious clue.
‘I don’t think whoever was flying cared much about the law, Ms Bannister,’ he said. ‘They pushed a man out without a parachute, after all.’
The forensics services might have been mucked about by the bureaucrats, cut back, cut back again, and moved from pillar to post in the name of something mis-sold as efficiency, but some things always stayed the same. Dr Jemima Cairns, for instance, was still short and round and fierce, ruling over her lab with a mixture of terror and encouragement, but mostly terror. McLean couldn’t help liking her; she didn’t suffer fools at all, let alone gladly. She’d helped him on more occasions than he cared to admit, not least with a surprising knowledge of knots that had helped in the investigation of a bizarre series of apparent suicides by hanging that had plagued the city a few years earlier. His reward to her had been the discovery of an ancient, unauthorized graveyard in the grounds of an abandoned mental hospital, and while for some the work involved in identifying dozens of long-buried victims might have been seen as onerous, for Dr Cairns it had been birthday and Christmas rolled into one.
Which was perhaps why she tolerated his idiot questions, and the very fact of him cluttering up her lab when she had work to do. Either that or she just liked him. He couldn’t be sure.
‘Bill Chalmers. Have you had a chance to look at the evidence from the scene yet?’
Cairns had met him at reception, for once insisting that he sign in and wear one of the plastic visitor badges he always forgot to give back on leaving. The walk to her office had been blissfully lacking in idle chit-chat, something for which McLean was very grateful. He was on a tight schedule, but he needed to speak to the technicians who were actually doing the analysis. Too often the important details got lost in the report, or in the Chinese whispers of getting the message passed to him through half a dozen people.
‘Your man in the tree? Aye, we’ve had a crack at it. Early days, mind.’
‘I know. And I’m sorry to put you under pressure, really. But this is about as high profile as it gets, given who he is.’
‘The drug man. I saw him on the telly a while back. Made quite a good argument, really.’
‘Aye, well. Be that as it may, what I really need to know is how high up he was when he was chucked out of the aeroplane.’
‘More likely a helicopter.’ Cairns opened the door to her office and beckoned McLean in. ‘Unless you’re going with the dragon option.’
‘I think we can rule that one out, don’t you? The wee boy’s only ten years old. I probably had just as vivid an imagination when I was his age. And he was right about one thing. Chalmers was dropped into that tree from a ways up. Must have been approaching terminal velocity to do the damage we saw.’
Cairns gave him a look that reminded him of his primary-school teacher. ‘Do you know how fast terminal velocity is, Inspector? How long it takes to get there from a standing start?’
‘Why do I get the feeling you’re just about to tell me?’
Cairns gave him a half-hearted sneer. ‘Somewhere between four and five hundred metres, at a best guess. Gravity accelerates a falling body at 9.8 metres per second. That’s in a vacuum, of course. In the real world you’ve got to deal with air resistance, and that depends on the profile of the falling object. You’ve seen those idiots with the wing suits jumping off big buildings and stuff, right? They’re maximizing their surface area, and so their resistance. Your man Chalmers weighed about ninety kilos, stood a shade under five foot ten. Sorry, I’m mixing my units again.’ Cairns shook her head. ‘About one seventy-seven centimetres. That was before his head got stoved in.’
‘So how fast was he going, then?’
‘A branch approximately five centimetres in diameter pierced his gut and pushed right through him, exiting to the right of his spine. It’s broken, dead wood, so effectively pointed like a spear, but that still takes considerable force. I’d estimate he was probably falling at around twenty metres a second when he hit the canopy. Terminal velocity for a man of his size would be around fifty metres per second, a good bit more if he was head down like a skydiver, though my best guess is he was either spreadeagled or tumbling. Doesn’t make much difference either way. He fell from no more than a hundred metres. Probably less.’
‘You’re sure of that?’ McLean shook his head apologetically. ‘Sorry. Of course you’re sure of that.’
‘It’s all a bit open at the moment. But it’s going to be somewhere in that ballpark. Not terminal velocity, for sure. He’d have to have been dropped from about five hundred metres to reach that speed. He’d have gone straight through the tree and smeared himself all over the tarmac if that had been the case.’
‘Praise the lord for small mercies, then.’ McLean slapped his newspaper against his arm. ‘Fifty to a hundred metres. How high’s that in comparison to the buildings around the Meadows? The old Royal Infirmary site up the hill?’
Cairns cocked her head like a terrier. ‘You think he was … what? Catapulted out? Maybe someone’s built themselves a trebuchet?’
‘No, nothing like that. It’s just something the air traffic people said. They’ve no record of anything flying over the city when it happened, but if it was low enough, then it wouldn’t show up on their radar anyway.’
13
It should have been a perfect evening. McLean had managed to leave the station at what was for him quite an early hour. Emma had been waiting for him and, if she hadn’t quite managed to have his supper ready and on the table, she had at least ordered something from the takeaway when she’d got in from her own work, so he didn’t have to. By the time he’d showered and changed, the pizza had arrived and the wine was poured. As they sat opposite each other at the kitchen table, he tried not to notice that she had already drunk half a glass of it, but his observational skills were hard-wired by two decades of plain clothes police work.
‘Still getting used to the paperwork?’ McLean waved a hand at his mouth, the tomato on his pizza hotter than any lava. Emma wasn’t eating much, just cradling her glass of wine. Maybe she was just waiting for the pizza to cool down.
‘Does it show?’ Emma grinned at her joke, but somehow the smile didn’t reach her eyes. ‘I guess it’s just difficult adjusting after being my own boss for so long.’
‘It can’t be that bad, surely.’ McLean risked another bite, feeling the roof of his mouth burn. It was always the same with pizza. He never learned.
Emma slumped back in her seat, her head lolling as if it were too heavy to keep it straight on her shoulders. ‘Worse. We all went out to a warehouse in Broxburn for a team-building exercise this afternoon. Bloody exhausting, running around like we were schoolkids doing PE.’ She yawned, just in case McLean didn’t understand what she meant. ‘Team building’s all good and well, but there’s a backlog of samples a mile long. Don’t seem to be anything like as many technicians as we used to have, either.’ She rubbed at one eye with the heel of her hand. ‘Damned head feels like it’s going to explode as well.’
McLean put down his half-eaten slice of pizza and looked more closely at Emma’s face. Her eyes were sunken, almost bruised. The grey streaking through her black hair now looked more like black streaking through grey. Far from the vivacious young woman he’d known, now she looked frail and shrunk in on herself. H
ow long had she been like this? A week? A month? She’d complained of a niggling headache before, but he’d not thought much of it. Stupid really, given what had happened to her because of him. Was it before she’d gone back to work, or after? So much for his finely honed observational skills.
‘Have you been to see a doctor about it?’
The question went unanswered, but Emma stopped trying to push her eyeballs into her brain and fixed him with a stare that was at least a tiny spark of her old self.
‘It’s a headache. Time of the month. It’ll pass.’
He didn’t believe it, and neither did she, if her sullen pout was anything to go by. ‘Em, you had a nasty blow to your head. You were in a coma for months. Something like this? You have to take it seriously.’
Emma opened her mouth to say something, but at the same time McLean’s phone started jangling away in his pocket. He’d been upgraded on his return to work, and all the ring tones had reverted to one monotonous and unconvincing copy of a fifties Bakelite handset. He had no idea who was calling, so he had to pull it out and check the screen just in case it was important. It was.
‘Got to take this. Control.’ He half expected Emma to complain that he never paid her any attention, but instead she seemed to perk up, interest piqued at last. She leaned forward while he talked to the operative, inquisitive eyes locked on his face. He didn’t have time to speak once he’d ended the call before she cut in.
‘Something happen? You going out again?’
McLean looked at his wine glass. He couldn’t remember whether he’d drunk any of it or not. If he had, it was only a mouthful; even with the new limits he wouldn’t be over. For a moment he wished he’d already had half the bottle, but then they’d just have sent a squad car round. Too much to hope that an on-duty detective might be able to deal with things.
‘I have to. Sorry.’ He rolled up the rest of his slice of pizza, cooled enough now, and shoved it into his face. Emma reached across the table and helped herself to his wine glass. Hers was already empty.