B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (17 page)

Jenny peered through the plastic. One lifejacket looked much the same to her as any other.

‘Look here—’ He took the bag from her. ‘You see this?’ He pointed to one of the two inflatable pouches at the front of the jacket. ‘It’s been punctured. It’s a clean cut, about two inches long. Looks like it was done with a knife.’

‘Is that how it was found?’

‘Hasn’t been touched. I took a statement from the fellow myself. And here.’ He fumbled through the plastic for one of the nylon webbing straps. ‘This is the bit that’s meant to go down your back and between your legs. Clips together at the front. It’s been cut up there, by the shoulder.’

‘I can see,’ Jenny said. ‘It was like that when he found it too?’

Williams nodded gravely, enjoying a rare moment of drama in his steady line of work ‘It was, Mrs Cooper. The man only brought it in because it didn’t look right to him. I’ll expect you’ll want someone to have a look at it.’

‘Yes—’ Her mind was already racing with possibilities.

As Williams handed her the bag she saw that the words ‘Hennessy’s, Dublin Bay’, and beneath them the company phone number, were written in faded black marker pen on the rear side of the jacket. There was no doubting it was Brogan’s.

‘Can I take a copy of the finder’s statement?’

‘Certainly,’ Williams said, sensing that he might have become involved in something portentous. ‘Is there anything else I can do to help, Mrs Cooper?’

Jenny pulled herself back from her distracted thoughts. ‘There is one thing. There’s a witness on the Somerset side of the estuary who heard a helicopter flying back in this direction from the scene of the air crash very soon after it happened. I tried to get hold of the CCTV footage from the bridge, but I was beaten to it by Kendall and he’s keeping it to himself.’

‘I know. Some of my boys were drafted in to the D-Mort, said he was a right uppity English bastard.’

Jenny gave a patient smile. ‘You do know I’m half-English, Inspector.’

‘We’ve all got a touch of the mongrels, Mrs Cooper, but always remember – the beautiful bits are Welsh.’

Jenny took a circuitous route back to the office, stopping off at the depot of a courier company, where she arranged for the immediate dispatch of the lifejacket to a private forensic laboratory in Oxford. Her phone didn’t stop ringing for the entire hour, and like one of the people she used to smile at pityingly in traffic jams, she conversed with her callers as animatedly as if they were sitting in the seat next to her. There were calls from the lawyers anxious for information she wouldn’t give, and another from an official in the Ministry of Justice demanding to know when her inquest would be concluded. As soon as possible, she replied, refusing to be pinned down.

Simon Moreton joined the procession and informed her that he had postponed an important meeting with the Justice Minister, no less, to find out what the devil she was playing at.

‘It’s hardly sinister, Simon. New evidence has turned up.’

‘What evidence?’

‘A lifejacket.’

‘And?’

‘I don’t know yet. It’ll take the lab a few days to run some tests.’

‘What kind of tests?’

‘Why don’t you trust me for once?’

‘I’ve tried that before, Jenny. It’s not done either of us any favours.’

‘Would you believe me if I told you I intend to do this strictly by the book?’

‘Jenny, it’s not betraying any official secrets to tell you that this disaster is being treated as an issue of national security. The PM has already chaired three meetings of a specially convened disaster management committee. There are military and intelligence people crawling all over this. You don’t honestly believe you can improve on their efforts?’

‘If they were behaving properly they’d pass their evidence on to me.’

‘Always the constitutionalist when it suits you.’

‘You don’t have to deal with grieving mothers.’

Moreton let out a weary sigh. ‘I can’t shield you any more, Jenny. I won’t say it again – the world’s safest airliner falling from British skies is out of your league.
Dangerously
out of your league.’

‘Noted. Haven’t you got a minister to suck up to?’

‘Goodbye, Jenny. You’re on your own now.’

‘Goodbye, Simon.’ She hit the overhead button that ended the call.

She was fumbling for her phone, intending to switch it off in order to gain a few moments’ peace, when it rang again. It was Michael Sherman.

‘Michael?’

‘Hi. Look, sorry to bother you—’

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Can we meet for a few minutes? I’d rather not talk on the phone.’

‘Any particular reason?’

He chose not to answer. ‘I’m not far from your office.’

‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

‘How about the Mexican place on the corner? I could do with a drink.’

There were student bars on Whiteladies Road, and those that were strictly for the after-work crowd. Montezuma’s was squarely in the former category. Jenny had never been tempted to step inside, and now knew why. The floor was tacky with spilt beer and everything, including the paper napkins, smelt of last night’s tacos. But Michael appeared neither to notice nor to mind. As he sat down in the corner booth, his mind seemed to be elsewhere. Sliding into the bench seat opposite, Jenny noticed that his eyes were heavy with tiredness.

She waved her hand in front of his face. ‘Is this a social visit, only I’m rather busy?’

‘Sorry—’ He shook his head as if to wake himself. ‘Long weekend. Race meetings from Plymouth to Carlisle. Some of the jockeys seem to spend more time in a plane than they do on a horse.’

‘There was something you didn’t want to say on the phone—’

His eyes instinctively swept the largely empty room. It was a habit she guessed he had picked up in the Air Force – always alert to who might be listening. ‘I spoke with Nuala’s brother last night. Called him up in Auckland. He’s feeling bad that he hasn’t come over, but he’s a young guy, twenty-five – he’s trying to get the money together for the fare.’

She waited while he gathered himself to continue.

‘He said she called him a couple of weeks ago – on a Wednesday. They usually skyped every couple of weeks on a Sunday, so it took him by surprise. Anyway, she said she was going to New York at the weekend – Saturday, he thinks she said – and might not be able to make their usual time. He asked was it another one of her free flights she got through the airline. She said, no, it was “sort of a work thing”. He thought she was hinting she might have been going for a job out there – she’d often talked about leaving Ransome – but she didn’t really want to discuss it.’ Michael glanced out through the window at the passers-by, his thoughts turning inwards once again. ‘She could be like that. If there was something she didn’t want to talk about, there was no way you’d prise her open.’

‘That all sounds perfectly plausible.’

Michael nodded distractedly.

‘Was there anything else?’

‘I called one of her old friends – I used to know her when Nuala and I were together. Her name’s Sandra, calls herself Sandy. Sandy Belling. She’s chief stewardess on the London– Dubai route. She said Nuala had stepped up from short-haul to the Middle East destinations two months ago and was loving it. She’d been due to fly to Dubai the Thursday before she set off for New York, but had called in sick on the Wednesday. She was going to be out of action for a week is what Sandy heard.’

‘She called in sick then booked herself onto a Ransome flight? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.’

‘Sick for a pilot can mean just a little under the weather. I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions.’

Jenny was dubious. ‘What is it, Michael? There’s something you’re not telling me.’

‘The text she sent me –
Tyax.
I keep picturing her in that plane. Have you any idea what that must have been like? You’d have people screaming, stuff flying through the air. Once she realized they were in a deep stall she’d have known exactly what was coming next. It’s the nightmare descent people like her train for on the simulator and pray never happens . . .’ He took a long pull on his beer.

‘There are huge resources being thrown into finding out what brought that plane down,’ Jenny said. ‘The military, the security services – I’ve heard it from the horse’s mouth.’

‘I’ve been in the military. Believe me, the truth doesn’t come into it.’ She saw the deep anger in his eyes. ‘When someone fouled up, bombs went astray, innocent civilians got killed, our officers weren’t interested in the truth, only in working out the lie.’

‘My inquiry doesn’t extend to the causes of the plane crash, Michael. I’m not being allowed to go there.’

‘You’re not curious?’

‘Of course I am.’

‘According to Sandy, Nuala’s entire life was on her smart-phone. Her contacts, diary, all her computer passwords and pins. She was never without it. I asked for access to her effects at the D-Mort, but was told the coroner had to give permission. Apparently he’s not releasing anything, not for anyone.’

‘Did she have a computer?’

‘Maybe it was with her, maybe it was at her flat. I’m guessing she had her house keys with her. She used to keep them in her pocket. She never carried a handbag.’

‘Someone else might have a key.’

‘Not that I know of. I’m not sure she would have trusted anyone.’

‘What are you trying to find? Why not let the inquiry run its course?’

He tapped both sets of fingers on the edge of the table, as if seeking reassurance from its solidity. Jenny could see that his thoughts were taking him to a place where he felt disconnected from whatever version of reality it was he normally inhabited. ‘I don’t believe in conspiracies, Jenny – not even the British Army can organize them properly. But I have seen cover-ups. In my experience there’s never been a military plane crash that’s been reported straight. There’s invariably a spin on it. The technology’s never allowed to fail, somehow or another it’s always pilot error.’

‘You said it was the text message that was troubling you – that word. If it had the kind of significance I think you’re implying, then it must have been related to something she already knew; something before the plane went down. Be straight with me – is that what you’re thinking?’

He gave an uncomfortable shrug. ‘She knew lots of things. She made it her business to.’

‘Such as?’

‘It was all on Airbuzz. Ill-maintained planes taking to the air, planes with faulty parts. Ground staff told not to record faults in the tech log. Pilot errors, computer errors, air traffic control errors. Pilots forced to fly dog-tired or unfit. Most of this stuff’s down to natural human error and the pressures of business, but a 380 . . .’ He shook his head. ‘This is a machine that is meant to fly itself. It’s the pinnacle of a hundred years of innovation, millions of man hours, billions of dollars of R and D. It should not have dropped out of the sky like that.

‘And I’ve been thinking about the air traffic control data you showed me. That’s not a lightning strike. The plane was levelling off at 31,000 feet – that’s above most of the weather. But think about it. Bam! Lightning strikes the hull. Even if it’s the most powerful bolt there’s ever been, the worst it can do is short out some of the electrics. There are back-up computers, back-up generators, and if the worst comes to the worst, a propeller flips out beneath the aircraft which we call a ram air turbine. The air makes it spin. It generates enough electrical power for the pilot to operate the basic controls – rudder, stabilizer, some of the ailerons, throttles – and to maintain his primary flight display. You’d expect to see a controlled descent, not a stall.’

Jenny said, ‘Let’s say the AAIB are right and there was a giant lightning strike, couldn’t it have so disrupted the electrical systems that nothing worked correctly? There are no mechanical controls between the pilot and flying surfaces, are there?’

‘I’m not a physicist, I don’t know what massive electrical fields can do, but everything I do know about planes tells me that lightning would have to have blown a hole in the fuselage and damaged the avionics to bring it down. But there are five avionics bays in a 380 – I still can’t see it. A missile literally blowing them apart maybe, or a bomb . . .’

Jenny pictured the diagram of the 380 she had retrieved from the internet. The avionics bays were right beneath the cockpit, accessed from above through a trapdoor, and from outside the aircraft via a door beneath the nose cone.

‘The avionics bays are pressurized,’ Jenny said. ‘If the hull was breached anywhere close to them, surely the passenger cabin would have depressurized, too?’

‘Of course,’ Michael said.

‘That didn’t happen. As far as I know, none of the bodies show any signs of depressurization. And the little girl who phoned her father as the plane was going down said nothing about a bang.’

‘That’s my point. If it wasn’t lightning, and if it wasn’t a bomb, then the only explanation is a catastrophic technical failure. That aircraft’s computers monitor every aspect of flight; the pilots are being constantly reminded and warned. If they were in danger of stalling, an electronic voice would have called out a warning to them, and if they didn’t respond the plane’s computers would have adjusted the speed and attitude.’

‘And if anyone would have known about a weakness in that aircraft—’

Michael met her gaze. ‘It would have been Nuala. You’ve got it.’

Alarm bells sounded in her head. It was human nature to want a neat explanation for disturbing and unexpected events, and to search for causes and connections where none existed. But there was also a time to acknowledge that the circumstantial evidence had mounted to an extent that couldn’t be ignored. And it wasn’t so much Nuala’s text that troubled her – it might have been nothing more than a message of affection – but Brogan’s lifejacket. The severed straps, the seemingly deliberate puncture. The niggling suspicion that something that Sir James Kendall already knew was being hidden from her.

Jenny said, ‘I don’t hold out any hope of getting access to Nuala’s personal effects, and I’m not even sure it would help to attempt it. I’ve no legitimate grounds to make a request and, even if I did, it’s a sure-fire way of getting it looked at by Kendall’s people first.’