B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (21 page)

‘Sure.’

Jenny turned to leave. As she followed Michael to the front door, a huge jet rumbled overhead. The house shook.

‘That’ll cost someone a fine,’ Michael said. He turned to say goodbye and saw that Sandy was weeping.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No. You had to . . .’ She rocked to and fro, seeking comfort in the embrace of her child. ‘A man phoned last week. I’m not in the book, but he got hold of the number and phoned here. He said he was part of the official investigation into the air crash. He knew I was a friend of Nuala’s. He wanted to know whether she had her computer with her on the flight. I told him I didn’t know . . . He didn’t want to believe me.’

‘Did he give his name?’ Jenny asked.

‘Sanders. He sounded very severe, like an army officer or something.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

She nodded. ‘He said he would be back in touch, and next time I had better have an answer . . . Do you know who he is? He frightened me.’

‘No,’ Jenny said. ‘But if I find out, I’ll be sure to let you know.’

Cambourne didn’t answer his phone, but several minutes after Jenny had left a message saying she would like to speak to him about a flight to Zagreb that had overshot, he called her back.

‘Who is this?’ he demanded.

‘My name’s Jenny Cooper. Coroner for the Severn Vale District. I’m very interested in why Nuala Casey was on a flight to New York.’

‘I’ve no idea.’

Michael urged her on from the passenger seat.

Jenny pushed her luck. ‘I know enough about your relationship with Miss Casey to think that’s not very likely, Mr Cambourne.’

He fell silent.

‘You’re not in any kind of trouble. All I want is to talk to you off the record for a few minutes. I’m fifteen minutes from Heathrow, where are you?’

‘I’m flying out of Terminal Five later this evening. I’ll be there in just over an hour.’

‘Perfect. I’ll give you a call.’

She left Michael in the car park outside the Ransome building, searching for Nuala’s Fiat, while she went inside. The airline’s cut-price ethic extended to the tired decor in their reception area. She approached a grimy desk and spoke to the sour-faced employee seated behind it. A man determined to make full use of his sliver of power, he studied Jenny’s identification with officious attention to detail before lifting the receiver to call through to the office.

Interrupting him, Jenny said, ‘I have a key to Captain Casey’s locker. All I need is for you to show me where it is.’

Wilfully ignoring her, he continued with his call, telling the person at the other end that there was a coroner in reception asking for access to a pilot’s locker.’

‘A
deceased
pilot,’ Jenny emphasized.

‘I see. Of course.’ He put down the phone. ‘I’m sorry, madam. There’s no one available to meet you right now. Perhaps you would like to make an appointment.’ He turned the page in the desk diary and reached for a pencil.

‘Who was that you just spoke to?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’d like to speak to whoever that was.’

He looked dumbly at the phone as if it might answer for him. ‘I can’t do that, I’m afraid.’

‘Because?’

‘It’s nine o’clock in the evening, madam. You have to make an appointment for tomorrow.’

Jenny leaned over the desk and read the name on his security tag. ‘Listen, Mr Preston, I’m conducting an inquest into a death caused by one of your employer’s planes. You can either come to give an account of yourself in my courtroom later this week – and I will gladly have you arrested if that’s what it takes – or you can let me through that security barrier and tell me where I can find what I’m looking for.’

She suddenly became aware that several cabin crew who had been on their way out had stopped to watch the show. Preston glanced between her and his audience, then turned his gaze back to the diary.

‘Someone show this lady where the staff lockers are,’ he muttered.

Jenny turned to the young woman nearest to her. With an anxious glance to her colleagues, she swiped her pass over the electronic reader on the turnstile. ‘Through the glass doors, turn right. End of the corridor – pilots’ rec room.’

‘Thank you.’

The stewardess hurried away.

Jenny walked along the corridor, passing empty offices, and nudged open the door to the pilots’ recreation room. It too was empty. It reminded her of some of the shabbier areas set aside for lawyers in outlying court buildings: a few desks, some waiting-room furniture and three walls lined with wooden lockers. To her right was a door marked WOMEN. She stepped through it to find a similar room to the first, only in miniature. There were eight lockers, and a large wall mirror with a make-up shelf beneath. She tried the key in each of the locks. It turned in the last of the row. She opened the door to find it as she had suspected – empty.

‘The car’s not there. I asked one of the lads in cabin crew and he thinks it might have been towed,’ Michael said.

‘Where to?’

‘There’s a pound where all the abandoned cars from the long-term car park end up.’

‘Why would anyone work for this company?’ Jenny said.

‘Lousy conditions but more money in the hand. It’s the choice you make.’

Jenny climbed back into the Land Rover and dialled Cambourne’s number. It rang three times.

‘Mrs Cooper?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you wish to discuss?’

‘I’d like to find out what, if anything, Nuala knew about the plane that came down.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. And nor would I be able to discuss it with you even if I did. I’ve taken some advice. You’re not the official coroner. Ransome employees aren’t permitted to speak to you.’

‘Your company’s legal department may not be the most reliable source of advice, Mr Cambourne.’

‘I have a wife and child, Mrs Cooper. Captain Casey never jeopardized a colleague’s position, nor would she wish that to happen now. That’s all I have to say. What car do you drive?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Don’t make me repeat myself.’

Jenny was confused. ‘A green Land Rover Freelander.’ She glanced through the window wondering if he was nearby. ‘Why?’

‘Wait two minutes.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Cambourne rang off. Jenny tried his number again and got an automated voice telling her that his number was unavailable. He had switched his phone off.

‘Did he say
wait two minutes
?’

‘That’s what I heard,’ Michael said. ‘He didn’t sound like the kind of man Nuala would have slept with. She couldn’t stand public school types. She wouldn’t have been with someone married, either, for God’s sake.’

‘It’s a little late to be jealous, don’t you think?’

‘Why would I be jealous?’

‘You were thinking of going back to her, weren’t you?’

‘You’re full of it.’

‘Tell me you hadn’t been thinking about getting help to deal with the flashbacks. Every time you woke up with a hangover and a plane to fly you knew you were shaving the odds finer.’ Jenny looked at him. ‘You don’t strike me as a man ready to give up on life. You want to be happy.’

‘You really should have been a fairground mystic. Are you sure you haven’t got a crystal ball in the glove box?’

‘I know what it’s like.’ Jenny said. ‘I have flashbacks too.’

She had taken him by surprise. He looked at her dubiously. ‘Flashbacks to what?’

Jenny’s phone rattled in the cupholder between their seats. She picked it up to find a text message:
Short Stay 1, level 3, end of row.

She showed it to Michael. ‘It’s not Cambourne’s number.’

‘Try calling it back.’

She pressed the green button and got a message from a synthesized voice:
you have dialled an incorrect number
.

‘Anonymous text,’ Michael said. ‘Easy enough to do. It’ll be him.’

Jenny silently scolded herself as she drove across the airport towards Terminal One, at a loss to explain why she had felt compelled to give so much of herself away. Why, of all men, was she about to share her secret with this one? He was troubled, damaged, irresponsible, lost – all the things she had promised herself she would avoid – yet she’d felt something from the moment she first saw him. It wasn’t a physical attraction, nor was it a compulsion. It was just as he had described it himself – an interest. A sense that somewhere beneath all the layers that separated them, there was an affinity.

She glanced sideways and inadvertently caught his eye. Not for the first time that day she could tell they were sharing the same thought: where was this going to lead?

They passed through the barrier into Short Stay 1 and slowly spiralled upwards towards level 3, Jenny still nervous handling the Land Rover in a tight space.

‘Why would he want to meet us here?’ she said. ‘There are more cameras in this car park than inside the terminal.’

‘He’ll have a reason,’ Michael said.

She crested the top of the ramp onto level 3 and turned right.

‘What does he mean, end of the row? Which row? There are lots of them.’

They were nearing the end of the building and about to make a right turn, when a silver estate car shot out from a space directly in front of them and took off at speed. Jenny stamped on the brakes.

‘What are you doing? Get after him,’ Michael said.

Jenny found first gear and stepped on the accelerator.

‘Stop!’ He slammed his hand his hand on the dash.

‘Jesus—’

She hit the brakes again, slewing to a halt halfway around the turn.

Michael threw open the door and jumped out.

‘What are you doing?’ Jenny called after him.

The driver of the car behind angrily sounded his horn.

‘OK, OK!’

She tried to ease forward and stalled. He honked again.

Michael shouted at him to calm down before he had a heart attack, and jumped back into the passenger seat as he leaned on the horn again: one long, continuous blast. Jenny hardly noticed it. Michael had a briefcase on his lap.

‘Nuala’s flight case. It was left in the space,’ he said, unfastening it. He looked inside. ‘Company laptop.’

‘Cambourne had it.’

Michael shook his head. ‘The guy behind the wheel was older, bald with glasses.’

‘I didn’t get a look at him.’

‘You’re not a pilot.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Will that guy ever shut up? You’d better drive on.’

Flustered, Jenny crunched the gears.

Michael placed his hand on top of hers. ‘Why don’t I drive?’

He took a route through the back roads towards Windsor and stopped at a thatched pub tucked away down a lane away from the main road. They ordered sandwiches and retreated to a table in the corner of the quiet saloon bar to unpack Nuala’s case. Besides the company laptop, there was a hand-held GPS device, some flight charts of Europe and the Middle East, a spare white shirt, basic wash kit and underwear.

‘She travelled light,’ Jenny said. ‘No moisturizer, not even a lipstick or mascara.’

‘It was a point of pride. Anything a man could do she could do better.’

Jenny picked up the GPS. ‘What’s this for?’

‘No idea. But she did like gadgets. Maybe she got a pilot’s discount somewhere.’

‘What does it do?’

Michael took it from her and switched it on. ‘It looks like a global position system. It tells you exactly where you are, and if you program in some coordinates, it’ll point you in the right direction – see?’ He showed her the screen displaying their current location. ‘Just like a car sat-nav only a bit fancier.’

He put it aside and lifted the lid of the laptop. After a few moments booting up, it asked for a password. He typed in
Tyax
and up came the desktop.

‘She certainly enjoyed that trip,’ Jenny said, then felt ashamed.

Michael didn’t respond.

There were the usual icons for email and word processor, but there was no general internet access, only a button to click linking the user to the Ransome intranet.

The few documents Nuala had stored on the hard drive were from her recent Sky Route flight plans.

‘Looks like she kept this one clean. Strictly a work tool,’ Michael said.

‘Try the email,’ Jenny urged.

He opened the email program, which also housed her company calendar. Jenny took over, scrolling through the last six months. The diary entries were in a standard form that looked as if they had been entered by the company and lodged automatically on the machine. Nuala had kept up a steady routine of three or four short-haul turnarounds through late summer and early autumn, and then in late October had shifted to a pattern of twice-weekly runs to either Dubai or Abu Dhabi.

She had flown to Dubai on Christmas Eve and flown back on Christmas Day itself. December 26th and 27th were marked
LEAVE
.

‘Not much of a holiday,’ Jenny commented.

A further flight to Dubai scheduled for the 28th had been marked
CANCELLED.
There was no entry for the 29th, and from the 30th it was business as usual for the following week.

‘Look – five days’ leave,’ Jenny said.

The dates Saturday 8 January to Wednesday 12th had been marked
UNAVAILABLE
, but above them, two round trips to Abu Dhabi scheduled for Sunday 9th and Wednesday 12th had been struck out and marked
CANCELLED.

‘It’ll be in the emails,’ Michael said impatiently.

Jenny opened the inbox and followed the trail between Nuala and flight-crew scheduling. There was no hint that she was taking leave until Wednesday 5 January. In a short note, Nuala had written, ‘
Re: temporary leave of absence. I shall be available to resume normal duties as from Thursday 13 January.
’ A reply sent at 14.08 later the same afternoon, read: ‘
You are scheduled to fly to Dubai RA340 at 13.30 on Thursday 13 January. Please confirm availability.
’ To which Nuala replied,
‘Availability confirmed.
’

On Thursday 6th she had received an email from the Ransome Airways bookings desk confirming her staff-discounted flight to New York on RA189 departing at 9 a.m. on Saturday 8 January, with an onward connection on American Airlines to Washington DC. Her return flights were scheduled for the afternoon and evening of Wednesday 12th.