He was accredited as the technical expert representing the airplane manufacturer, and that seemed sufficient.
The flight recorders and the cockpit voice recorder had been recovered.
He had listened to a cassette tape of the latter, chilled by more than the wind and the glare of the lightning. It had been like listening to Hollis die, like reliving the airplane's own attempt to kill him.
Instability, growing like cardiac pains at a frightening rate, the airplane convulsing then dropping, its altitude spouting away from it like blood from a severed artery.
The sea rushed at him again from an angry cleft in the rocky shore, and he flinched away from the spume. Along the pebbled shoreline, across the rocks to the edge of the tide, there were gouges, splintered rock, great scars… small scorch marks There had been virtually no fire.
The fuselage he had leapt from a small boat into the main fuselage as it had wallowed in the tide was crushed, broken, but hardly burned.
The 494 had been out of fuel, tanks virtually empty and the instability had been because the fuel flow had not been computer controlled… and there had been no panic and no realisation because the flight engineer's panel had assured the crew that everything was normal, normal. But it had happened again, with a different computerised fuel management system. It had happened to an airplane that had encountered no problems with fuel management. Instead, it had been racking up the kind of fuel economy figures that both Vance and Burton required.
Better than Boeing, cheaper than any other airliner… Gant glanced up again at the fuselage, tilted drunkenly towards the angry sea. The floating crane was limping away towards the harbour at Tammisaari with one of the big engines aboard. Smaller craft nipped and huddled between the surges of the sea, two of them marked with red crosses.
Floating morgue wagons. The divers, now that most of the bodies had been located and marked with little bobbing flags anchored to them, were waiting for better weather, exhausted. The scene was already an aftermath, just a day after the crash.
Nothing but the fuel management computer could have gone wrong, would have caused the same sudden loss of altitude, the same disaster without fire. He had hardly needed the accounts of eye-witnesses to confirm his analysis. No, there was some flame, but not a big fire… No, there was no explosion. One man, an ornithologist camped on the islet, had video camera footage of the crash and its immediate aftermath…
His eyes had been a good enough account. And his nose.
No overpowering scent of aviation fuel.
Unless the routine overnight servicing of the airplane had created a fault, then there was no other explanation. Unless he or Alan Vance's technical people could find something wrong with the computer that controlled the fuel flow, then there would be no answer at all. He looked behind him, back along the track the plane had made along the shoreline, at the fragments of metal and perspex it had shed like old, flaking skin. He needed to talk to the Norwegian engineers who'd worked on the 494. And study the flight recorder readouts and computer realisations… like watching a movie he had seen before, one that had terrified.
He experienced a strange, new pity for Vance, and avoided looking up again towards the low headland on which he knew Vance would still be standing, immobile as if suffering paralysis. This broken machine was, quite literally, a broken dream; Vance's only dream during the years he had known him, had been his son-in-law, his pilot. Not money, not fame just the plane, flying. The sea soaked him again, and the scene was once more lit with vivid, garish lightning.
Gant shivered, as if the emotion he experienced made him weak, sickly.
It was finished, for good. Vance, standing up there facing the storm like some old Indian chief calling on the Great Spirit in the face of his people's massacre, knew with a chilling, final certainty that it was over. The newspapers, the TV had pronounced. Wall Street would foreclose. Vance was bankrupt. The whole world was a repo man knocking at his door.
But, for God's sake, why? Airplanes were safe, they didn't fall out of the sky easily, regularly. Of all the accidents he had investigated, no two no almost three, he reminded himself, in the space of a week died in exactly the same way, unless it was during a war. Or unless
… He shivered violently at the magnified, shattering noise of the fuselage grating on rock. It was impossible. Only terrorists did things like Almost three in a week.
The idea could not be blown from his imagination by the wind or burned out by the lightning.
Gant felt very cold.
Ray Banks' Mercedes, a vivid petrol blue in colour, was parked beside a large hoarding which proclaimed the Millennium Urban Regeneration Project. Beneath the grandiose boast were the gold stars on blue ground of the European Union and a list of the principal contractors and architects for what had become known in the region as the Venice of the Midlands. The larva of a marina scheme based around the city's old, polluted or derelict canal system had become the gigantic butterfly of the regeneration of perhaps a quarter of the entire city.
Marian brought the Escort Cabriolet to a halt beside Banks' car and tugged on the hand brake Banks appeared gloomy as he got out of the Mercedes. He waved his arm to indicate the empty, half-renovated warehouses and the stretch of recovered canal that was the site of Banks Construction's contribution to the project.
This is it," he said.
Thanks for agreeing to show me round. On a Bank Holiday, as well."
The site, partially ring-fenced, was silent. She could hear the distant sound of traffic on the breeze. Dust moved softly across the acres of concrete and earth seemed to lightly coat the buildings, too, as if they were already part of some failed business investment.
These three warehouses they're my bit. Turn 'em into shops, offices, apartments. We're only a half-mile from the canal basin and the main part of the marina oh, you'd better put one of these on. Mtf that any thing's likely to drop on your head 'cause no one's working here any day of the week!"
He pulled two hard hats from the parcel shelf of the Mercedes and handed her one of them. She collected her blonde hair, worn loose that morning, and heaped it into the hat as she jammed it on her head.
"Dressing the part, I see," he added and she caught the glint of attraction in his look, felt the study of his eyes.
"Don't all workmen wear denims?" she enquired innocently.
"My blokes don't look like you do in jeans."
Thank you, kind sir." Her smile defused something that was a squib rather than a grenade. There were tiny black insects already settled on the bright yellow of her cotton shirt. She glanced at the hoarding.
Euro-Construction were the principal contractors. Banks' small firm did not rate a mention. There were other names, European and even American… and she recognised two of them as familiar. They, like Euro-Construction Plc, belonged under the umbrella of Winterborne Holdings, David's conglomerate. She rubbed her arms as if cold.
"All right?" he asked solicitously.
"Just these tiny flies, or whatever they are."
"Oh, right. Well, you'd better follow me, then." He glanced at his watch.
She had rung him a little after nine and had immediately made herself sound eager to be of assistance to Banks. Kenneth had agreed, during their discussion at Uffingham, that she must be allowed to pursue her instincts… that the appalling suspicion that David Winterborne was some kind of crook must either be satisfied or dismissed. Besides, Kenneth Aubrey's legendary curiosity had, she had realised almost at once, been aroused, and it was fiercer than sexual desire and unabated by age. Behold, I show you a mystery she, like everyone who knew Aubrey, knew his motto. It had not been difficult to persuade him that the danger was minimal, the possible outcome momentous.