B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (5 page)

Jenny started at the sound of a knock on the driver’s window. She turned to see Alison’s impatient features. She opened the door, letting in a blast of icy air.

‘Dr Kerr wants you to come and see the man’s body.’

‘I’ll be right there.’

‘He’s in a hurry. So am I, actually – they’ve just called and asked me to go over to the D-Mort to help with identifications.’

‘They can get police in to do that. I need you to find out a little more about Mr and Mrs Patterson. She seems to think her husband shouldn’t have let their daughter travel alone. I’d like to know what happened.’

‘Don’t you think the poor man deserves some time to let it sink in, Mrs Cooper?’

‘The poor man didn’t have the guts to tell his own wife.’

‘All right. Whatever you say, Mrs Cooper.’

Jenny braced herself for another visit to the mortuary.

‘Hypothermia,’ Dr Kerr announced from the counter at which he was weighing the dead man’s lungs on a pair of electronic scales. All the internal organs were lined up in a row, including the large intestine, which was spilling over the edge of a large steel bowl. The smell of faeces had now been added to the unpleasant mix. ‘Colder than air temperature and not a drop of water in his lungs.’ He gave her a look as if to say he was expecting her to draw an obvious conclusion.

‘Are you saying he didn’t die in the water?’

‘Unlikely. He was a sailor. He was wearing the full kit: double-lined bib-trousers and Dubarry boots.’

‘Should that mean something to me?’

‘Made in Ireland. Top notch.’

‘Sounds like inside knowledge?’

‘A childhood spent sailing on Belfast Lough. My dad wanted to make a racer out of me, but I’m afraid I proved a disappointment.’ He set the lungs aside and walked back towards the body. ‘This guy was serious – calluses and rope burns across both hands.’ He twisted the right hand towards her and pointed to the thick, rough patches of skin. ‘You say he was found near the girl?’

‘They were a few yards apart.’

‘He’s got scratches on his forearms that look like they could have come from fingernails. And a couple of marks either side of his neck.’

Jenny stepped round, fighting a growing sensation of nausea, and noticed a nick in the flesh at about collar height.

‘I’ve taken scrapings from under the girl’s nails. You never know—’

‘You think he might have come to her rescue?’

‘It’s possible. You’re sure he wasn’t wearing a lifejacket?’

‘He was found dressed in those clothes.’ She nodded to the heap of clothing folded on the trolley at the foot of the table.

‘I’m surprised. It’s usually the old salts who take a chance – make it to sixty and they think they’re immortal.’

Jenny said, ‘Could he have floated without one dressed like that?’

‘Oh yes,’ Dr Kerr said. ‘The air in his lungs would have kept him near the surface or thereabouts. It is slightly puzzling, though. If he didn’t have a lifejacket I can only think he was holding onto something else.’

‘The girl?’

Dr Kerr looked at her blankly for a moment as if distracted by a private thought, then said, ‘Who found him?’

‘As far as I know, both bodies were spotted from the air by a search-and-rescue helicopter.’

‘Who arrived on the ground first?’

‘The police, my officer, a medic, then me. Why do you ask?’

‘I’ve a feeling you’ll want to be sure of the chronology. Did any of these people check his clothing?’

‘Alison said they’d checked his pockets. What is it?’

Dr Kerr said, ‘Have a look at what he was wearing – under the shirt.’

Jenny stepped over the trolley and picked up the still-wet plaid shirt that was lying on top of the pile. Beneath it was a harness of some sort comprising two loops of padded nylon webbing connected by a single strap. Attached to one of the loops was a pocket about the size of a hand.

She was none the wiser.

‘It’s a Sidewinder shoulder holster,’ Dr Kerr said. ‘I just looked it up on the internet. It’s designed to hold a serious handgun. He was wearing it over his T-shirt. It was empty. I didn’t tell Alison – I thought you’d want to decide what to do with the information.’

Jenny paused to reorientate her thoughts. She had a dead sailor, possibly armed, recovered with no lifejacket and no water in his lungs, when all things considered he should have drowned.

‘Was there anything else on him?’ Jenny asked.

‘No. That’s it.’

She wondered what kind of man would be sailing a yacht in the Severn estuary while carrying a sidearm. ‘I’ll talk to the police. We won’t know anything without an ID.’

‘Check with them about the lifejacket. Maybe whoever found him took it off, then found the gun,’ Dr Kerr suggested.

They exchanged a look, neither wanting to speculate more than was necessary, but both intrigued by the dark possibilities.

Jenny said, ‘There’s been a lot of talk on the radio about a possible terrorist attack – an explosion.’

‘I’ve seen no evidence of that, not on the little girl, certainly not on this fellow.’ He shrugged. ‘Early days. Who knows what’ll turn up?’

Jenny watched him stroll back to the counter and draw up a high stool on which he would sit to work at his dissection, his back to the autopsy table. In a moment she would leave him alone in a windowless mortuary surrounded by corpses, yet he couldn’t have seemed more at ease. She envied his even calm. And as Jenny turned out of the room and walked swiftly towards the exit, she took care to stay on the opposite side of the corridor from the waiting bodies.

‘They’re desperate for help at the D-Mort now. There’s really nothing more I can do here,’ Alison announced, as Jenny arrived in the reception area of their humble ground-floor offices in Jamaica Street. The faded Georgian terrace close to the centre of Bristol was only saved from being shabby by the elegance of its proportions, but behind the facade, the small set of rooms they occupied was looking distinctly tired.

Jenny chose to ignore her challenging tone. ‘How did you get on?’

Alison grabbed several pages from the computer printer and handed them over. ‘The mother teaches maths. The father’s something in computers as far as I can tell. Works for a company with offices round the world. Oh, and there’s a passenger list for the plane if you’re interested – took all day, but the airline just released it.’

Jenny glanced at the biographies Alison had gleaned from various websites. From her photograph, Michelle Patterson appeared as earnest as her husband, perhaps even more so.

Jenny said, ‘Would you mind emailing Mrs Patterson a photograph of the body? She asked for one.’ She reached into her pocket and handed Alison the card Greg Patterson had given her.

Alison leaned over her computer, producing a sound like machine-gun fire as she attacked the keys. It was obvious that something was troubling her, but now was not the moment for Jenny to address it.

‘So Dr Kerr thinks our second body was a sailor,’ Alison said.

‘Yes. You don’t happen to remember who was there on the beach when you first arrived?’

‘Just a constable and two forensics. Why?’

‘Did anyone search him?’

‘I checked his pockets, that’s all,’ Alison answered, stepping away from the desk to pull on her coat.

‘Who was the first on the scene?’

‘The constable.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I spoke to him. He went to both the bodies, saw they were dead and called in assistance. Is there a problem?’

Jenny hesitated, but could think of no good reason not to tell her. ‘He was wearing a shoulder holster, but there was no gun in it. And it seems strange he wasn’t wearing a lifejacket.’

‘A gun? What would he have a gun for?’

Jenny shrugged.

‘I’ll talk to DCI Molyneux if you like. He’s heading up the incident room they’re setting up over at the D-Mort.’

Jenny said, ‘Why don’t I do that? You let me know the word on the ground.’

Alison gave her a look. She didn’t need to say that she disapproved of Jenny’s continued suspicion of the police, among whom she counted many friends and former colleagues. And Jenny didn’t have to say that her caution was based purely on experience. She’d yet to meet a serving detective who’d give an honest answer when a dishonest one would leave more room for manoeuvre.

‘I’ll see you in the morning then, Mrs Cooper,’ Alison said, and swept out of the office. Her footsteps sounded heavily along the corridor that led to the front door.

Resisting the distraction of trying to fathom the reason for Alison’s latest mood shift, Jenny went through the heavy oak door to her own office and found DCI Molyneux’s number on her computer. He answered his phone against the sound of heavy machinery. The incident room was being assembled next to the mortuary from bolted-together Portakabins, he said. It was like a full-scale bloody building site in the middle of the Somme. Jenny told him about the sailor with the holster.

‘As if we didn’t have enough crap to deal with,’ Molyneux said wearily.

‘I take it you’ve no clue who he is.’

‘I’ve got two hundred bodies on the floor of a tent, Mrs Cooper, four hundred more washing about in the river and God knows how many hysterical relatives standing around in the pouring rain. You’ll have to wait your turn.’ He rang off, yelling orders to workmen as he did so.

Grateful for the fact that the plane hadn’t come down five miles to the east, Jenny gave up any hope of identifying the man before morning and turned her attention to Amy Patterson’s parents. Alison’s description of Mrs Patterson was somewhat short of the mark. According to her online résumé, she was a graduate of Stanford and had gained a PhD in applied mathematics at Yale before taking up a teaching post. She specialized in aerodynamics and had acted as a consultant to industry. Her husband had also studied applied mathematics at Stanford, but from there had gone on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he had spent several years on the staff of the mathematics department. He left academia in his late twenties to join a company called Cobalt Inc. From the little information Alison had gathered, she deduced that its principal business was the development of specialist computer software.

Jenny found Cobalt’s website and quickly reached the limits of her understanding. The company described itself as a provider of ‘turnkey software systems incorporating bespoke algorithmic solutions’. A search for the meaning of ‘algorithm’ taught her only that it was a term that described a mathematical formula designed to carry out a specific task. Computer software, she learned through another, more detailed search, depended on algorithms: they were the logical mechanisms, or formulae, through which tasks were ordered and results achieved. If you wanted to assemble and process any significant amount of data, you needed algorithms to apply certain rules to it in order to generate the desired outcomes. Greg Patterson, she concluded, was most probably an expert in mathematical codes, but codes for what, she had no idea.

She turned to the passenger and crew list. It ran to several pages, listing names in alphabetical order. There was no clue as to which section of the aircraft each passenger had been sitting in. The names sounded mostly British or American and a few oriental. None was familiar except that of Lily Tate, a fashion model whom Jenny had already heard mentioned several times on the radio: she had been en route for New York, where she was due to shoot a commercial. Jenny had never seen the inside of the first-class section but she wondered if that had made it all the more lonely for Lily Tate and the others sitting near her on the way down. First-class passengers wouldn’t have reached out to hold each other’s hands, would they? No, she couldn’t imagine that.

It was getting late and a long week lay ahead. Jenny dropped the documents into her briefcase and stood up from the desk, her eye catching the photograph of her son, Ross, on the mantelpiece above the Victorian fireplace. He was nearly nineteen and over six feet tall, but whenever she thought of him the first picture that entered her mind was of a small boy with bright blue eyes and a gap-toothed grin, and it made her want to cry. She remembered the smell of his skin, and the way he would run to hug her. And now he was at university in London and even more distant since he had learned about Katy.

The desk telephone rang, scything through the silence and jarring her brittle nerves. Jenny instinctively glanced at the caller display, expecting to see Alison’s name, but it was an unfamiliar number.

‘Jenny Cooper.’

‘Glad to have found you, Mrs Cooper. Sir Oliver Prentice, Director General, Ministry of Justice. Among my many responsibilities, I oversee public inquiries and the legal end of major disasters. I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure.’

‘No—’

‘You’re on my list to entertain, but I’m afraid it’s not in alphabetical order.’

Jenny felt she was expected to banter a little before getting to whatever the serious business was, but he had caught her off guard. Her reply inadvertently came out sounding sarcastic: ‘Is this a special invitation?’

‘Rather the opposite, I’m afraid. You might have heard – I’ve asked Sir James Kendall in to act as coroner for this crash.’

‘I had heard it wasn’t going to be handled locally.’ She recognized Kendall’s name as that of a recently retired High Court judge. He had made the headlines the previous year for dealing robustly with a terrorist conspiracy to deliver suicide bombers into the trading rooms of several City banks disguised as maintenance men. The evidence had been flimsy – discussions between young men that might have been nothing more than bravado, but which earned them each eighteen years’ imprisonment.

‘You’ll like him. He’s a good man – fearless.’

Jenny sensed the word was added for her benefit. ‘I’m sure.’

‘I hear two bodies turned up on your patch. There’s no point duplicating effort, so I suggest you pop them over to the D-Mort right away, keep everything under one roof.’

‘Only one of those bodies came from the aircraft,’ Jenny said. ‘The other is an adult male dressed in full sailing kit. His death might even be unconnected.’

‘Do you know who he is?’