B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (6 page)

‘Not yet, no.’

Prentice paused to consider the situation. Jenny knew what he was about to offer as well as she knew he would have her file, with its history of irritatingly successful insubordination, open on the desk in front of him. The law entitled him to appoint whomsoever he wished as coroner for any particular case, but there was still protocol to be considered and, of course, the fear that she might create an embarrassing fuss.

‘Well, if you’re sure he’s not from the plane there seems little point making Sir James’s life any more complicated than it need be. You’ll take the girl’s body over this evening, all her clothing and possessions, hand over the file? He’s already on site, he’ll be expecting you.’

Jenny didn’t recall telling Prentice that the body was that of a girl. ‘If you insist,’ she said.

‘It would be most helpful, Mrs Cooper. I hope it doesn’t prove too late a night for you.’

He rang off, leaving her with the distinct and uneasy feeling that the ground was moving beneath her feet.

Jenny was turning off the lights in reception and about to head out when the phone rang again. She answered it at Alison’s desk.

‘Hello, Jenny Cooper speaking.’

She was met with silence, then a catch of breath as if the caller were about to speak, only to lose courage. There was a click, followed by the burr of the dial tone. Jenny attempted to retrieve the number but the synthesized voice at the exchange reported that it had been withheld. An instinct told her to wait, that whoever it was would try again, but five silent minutes passed and no call came. Perhaps it had been a wrong number after all?

She should remember to ignore her instincts, she told herself as she bolted the office door. Acting on them had sent her down many blind alleys, and Dr Allen was always most insistent that the hallmark of sanity was rationality. From now on, she promised herself, she would act strictly according to the evidence before her.

J
ENNY FIRST SPOTTED THE HALOGEN GLOW
of the D-Mort from over a mile away along the flat, coastal road that ran alongside the estuary. Arrays of arc lights suspended from cherry pickers a hundred feet up in the air illuminated a large field in which several cranes were at work. As she came closer, she saw that they were assembling a number of portable cabins into a small office block, which stood alongside several vast marquees connected by covered walkways. Still more canvas structures were being erected around them.

A roadblock had been positioned several hundred yards before the entrance to the field. Jenny pulled up at the checkpoint, which was protected on either side by concrete barriers of the kind used to shield government buildings from terrorist attack. It was a female police constable who leaned down to inspect her identification, but to either side of the barrier stood young regular soldiers carrying rifles. Jenny stated her business and informed the constable that an undertaker’s van would be arriving shortly. She received instructions to turn into the field and park in the green zone reserved for staff.

Jenny drove slowly between two rows of plastic bollards which led to the field entrance, noticing several more armed soldiers standing watch in the darkness on either side. Turning through the open gateway, she rattled across a cattle grid and followed notices to the green zone, passing along a temporary road that appeared to have been constructed from plastic matting. Parking her Land Rover amidst a large assembly of police and military vehicles, she glanced over at the blue zone and deduced that it was where the relatives of the dead were being taken. Several young female soldiers and police officers were directing them to a marquee, in which, no doubt, they would be greeted by a host of whispering counsellors and chaplains.

Following a colour-coded walkway to the staff reception tent, Jenny’s suspicion was confirmed that this was precisely the sort of disaster for which Home Office contingency planners had been preparing for more than a decade. She remembered from a training course she had been obliged to attend the previous summer that the government had sufficient resources to erect six such D-Morts at any one time. All the necessary equipment was stored in warehouses at strategic locations around the country ready to deal with multiple terrorist attacks or fatal epidemics. Somewhere on site there would be a handful of officials who had been planning this day for years.

Her phone rang as she approached the entrance of the tent. She glanced at the screen with the unrealistic hope that it might be Ross. It was a London number.

‘Mrs Cooper, its Greg Patterson. I just picked up your message.’ He sounded fraught.

‘I did try you several times, and your wife—’

‘I know. Look . . .’ He paused, as if gathering strength. ‘I don’t want you to move my daughter’s body. Neither does my wife.’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t been given any choice. The Director General of the Ministry of Justice has instructed me—’

‘Her body does not belong to anyone except her parents,’ Patterson said, ‘and we do not give permission.’

‘Mr Patterson, until a certificate is signed releasing her for burial I’m afraid that’s not the legal position.’

He made no reply.

‘I can make representations on your behalf, though,’ Jenny said. ‘Is there any particular reason—?’

After a pause, Patterson said, ‘Her mother doesn’t want her body in with all the others. She doesn’t feel it’s appropriate.’

‘Is this a religious objection of some sort?’

He fell silent for an even longer moment.

‘I can’t speak for my wife, but there’s something I need to know . . . it won’t happen if she’s lumped in with six hundred others.’

‘What’s that, Mr Patterson?’

‘She . . . Amy, called me while the plane was going down . . . she said the plane was falling, I could hear people screaming around her, I could hardly hear her voice . . . I said, “Put your lifejacket on, put it on, now.” I thought they’d be out over the Irish Sea, it was all I could think of . . . I haven’t told her mother any of this, it would be too distressing. But I need to know if I might have saved her, if she’d only been found more quickly . . .’

Jenny gave him a moment. ‘Mr Patterson, there’s no reason to presume your daughter’s death won’t be fully investigated along with all the others.’

‘Mrs Cooper, this is an Airbus 380, the world’s biggest and most advanced passenger airliner. The companies who operate these planes are committed for the next thirty years. These aircraft are the arteries of world trade. Measured against that, my daughter’s death will count for nothing.’

Jenny said, ‘Even if I believed that were true, it’s not an argument that would hold any sway, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, Mr Patterson. If you wish to pursue this issue further, you’ll have to take it up with the Ministry of Justice. In the meantime, your daughter’s body is being transferred to the disaster mortuary at Walton Bay.’

Patterson said, ‘There was no explosion, Mrs Cooper. Amy didn’t say anything about a loud bang.’

They listened to each other in silence. It was Patterson who ended the call.

He had been talking for his wife. It was always the mother – the one who had given and sacrificed most in raising the child – who insisted on clinging to the body. Men, in Jenny’s experience, put distance between themselves and the shell of their dead offspring almost immediately. Mrs Patterson wanted her daughter’s uniqueness preserved for as long as possible, and her separation from the others who had died stood as a symbol that she remained special.

Jenny stepped into the reception tent. Nothing could demand greater sanity than the investigation that now confronted her. A young man in naval uniform greeted her from behind a trestle table serving as a desk and issued her with a temporary staff badge to be worn around her neck ‘in all places and at all times whilst on site’. He directed her along one of two covered walkways that led from the tent to a single Portakabin that stood at ninety degrees to the stack being erected behind it.

Walking the thirty yards from the reception area to the coroner’s office, Jenny looked out over the main area of the site and saw that three marquees were already standing and that one more was going up. One would be reserved for relatives, one would serve as a canteen and rest area for staff, one would act as a holding bay and identification suite for bodies, and the fourth would house the autopsy tables and a forensic laboratory. The modular offices would be divided between the police, the Coroners’ Service, the search and rescue coordinators and air accident investigators.

Over the rumble of the cranes and the chug of the diesel generators, she was sure she heard DCI Molyneux shouting at someone to getting his bloody phone lines sorted out.

She knocked at the door of the coroner’s office and stepped into an oasis of calm. Sir James Kendall, a courteous silver-haired man dressed in sober pinstripes, stood up from behind a desk to greet her. As a retired judge he would have to have been over seventy, though he retained the physique and moved with the suppleness of a far younger man.

‘Jenny Cooper, Severn Vale District Coroner.’

‘Ah yes. Good of you to come.’ He shook her hand and gestured her to a chair opposite his. ‘This is Inspector Colin Harris, my officer.’

A fleshy-faced man, whom Jenny assumed was a specially appointed detective seconded from the Met, nodded to her from behind the screen of his laptop.

‘You’ve brought the body over, have you?’ Sir James asked, lowering himself into his chair.

‘The undertakers are on their way. Her clothing is with her, and the lifejacket she was wearing. But I ought to warn you, the parents aren’t happy with her being moved.’

‘Oh? Why’s that?’ He seemed to take it almost as a personal slight.

‘I think they might see their daughter as a special case. She was wearing a lifejacket. The results of the post-mortem suggest she survived for some time after the crash.’

‘We may have many such cases, Mrs Cooper, it’s simply too early to say.’ He knitted lean, liver-spotted fingers in front of his chest. ‘But you’ll appreciate that the Director General would like to keep this all under one roof. We don’t want things any messier than they have to be.’

‘No.’ Jenny took the few formal documents relating to Amy’s body from her briefcase and handed them across the desk. ‘Finding constable’s report, my officer’s statement and notice of identification. And with any luck a written post-mortem report to follow first thing tomorrow.’

Sir James pulled on a pair of reading glasses and inspected the documents thoroughly.

Jenny said, ‘I expect you know there was a second body on the beach. A male. A sailor, we think.’

‘Yes.’ He looked at her over the tops of his spectacles. ‘The navy divers have found the wreckage of a yacht. I received the message a few moments before you arrived.’

‘Struck by wreckage from the plane,’ Harris added without looking up from his work.

‘Do you know anything else? Were there others on board?’

‘That’s all the information we have, Mrs Cooper,’ Sir James said, carefully securing Amy Patterson’s documents with a paper clip.

‘Do you have any idea what brought the plane down?’

‘There are plenty of theories, but none of them worth a breath until we locate the flight data recorders.’

‘Doesn’t this aircraft transmit flight data back to base all the time it’s in the air? That’s what I heard on the radio.’

‘There appears to have been an interruption in communications, no doubt connected to the cause of the accident.’ He gave her a patient smile which told her he now had more important things to occupy his time.

Jenny stood up from her chair. ‘You’ll let me know about the yacht, won’t you?’

‘Directly, Mrs Cooper. And please, do feel at liberty to have a look around while you’re here. I must admit, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I hope not to again.’

‘Quite,’ Jenny said, finding herself mimicking Kendall’s courtly language. There were questions she would like to have asked and issues she would like to have raised – the dead man’s holster for one, and Amy Patterson’s phone call for another – but something stopped her. The judge was trying to
manage
her, and that instinctively made her want to manage him back. ‘We’ll discuss the yacht tomorrow. I’ll probably want to bring what’s left of it over to Avonmouth. I’ve got a friendly salvage firm who’ll organize that if it’s a problem for you.’

Sir James Kendall exchanged a glance with Harris. ‘All in good time, Mrs Cooper.’

Jenny stepped out of the office into a cold blast of wind that was whipping sheets of rain noisily against the canvas overhead. She turned left along the walkway which led to the largest marquee on site. A police constable at the nearest entrance marked ‘Staff Only’ checked her ID badge and nodded her through. She entered to find a long corridor stretching the length of the tent, from which branched several sectioned-off areas. She stopped at the entrance to the first and saw rescue workers bringing in body bags on stretchers from outside. The atmosphere was one of sombre efficiency and strange associations. The marquee was not unlike those in which grand wedding parties took place. It smelt of wet grass and damp canvas and the sound of the generators summoned images of a fairground. Jenny watched as bags were laid out on the floor and dealt with by a small team of mortuary technicians dressed in green surgical scrubs and latex gloves. The bodies were searched for identifying documentation and a note of anything found was made by one of several police officers, who moved up and down the line carrying clipboards. Even from forty feet away, Jenny could tell that some were so damaged as to be unrecognizable. Each was given a numbered tag, and a photograph was taken before it was zipped up and carried through to the next section. There was no easy or sanitized way of identifying the remains of so many dead. Those bodies that had had documents in their clothing were laid out on the floor of the identification area in alphabetical order; the rest were placed at the end of the line under a sign which read simply, ‘Identity Unknown’. Jenny looked on as Alison and three other coroners’ officers from surrounding districts escorted clusters of relatives to carry out their grim task. Most were silent, or sobbed quietly, overwhelmed by the incomprehensible scale of the disaster.