Reluctantly, he turned to look at Vance, a mixture of sensations invading him, making demands on him.
The image was appalling, cold. Vance's mouth was open, loose, gulping air slowly. Burton waggled his phone, shaping with his lips, They're on their way.
Barbara was sitting in the sand beside her father, holding his hand, murmuring continually. Blakey was seated on the chair as if studying a map drawn in the distressed sand. Gant stepped outside the tent without speaking to any of them.
Vance might get over the coronary, he might not. He looked awful.
The sky was less lurid, the temperature after the humid claustrophobia of the tent surprisingly low. He shivered and hunched against the wind, watching the lightning, distant and toylike now, flickering over the tiny dark specks of other islets. The gap before the thunder was seconds long. The wind made his eyes water.
The man in Oslo, the unknown expert, had probably killed Alan Vance, along with fifty other people, and Hollis and his crew. Gant looked westward, out beyond the long, low headland on which Hanko perched, towards the Baltic. The grey sea was lightening, beginning to become fish-scale silver as the clouds broke. Over there somewhere was Oslo.
The expert would be long gone, back into the shadows by now, leaving no trace. The wreckage down there held no clues, either. He stared at the fuselage as lightning seared on the edge of his retinae. It was almost dragged off the rocks by the storm, upended in suddenly deep water, like a damaged fish.
He would find him, the expert. For his own reasons, he had to find him
… for being shafted by the NTSB and having to resign… for Vance… for the sake of having been right too late to make a difference. He hated that bleak, accusing thought.
"Ray, stop looking at your watch and worrying about your lunch!" Marian snapped, swiping a hand at hovering flies.
"Sorry," Banks murmured insincerely. He was bored, truculently discomfited because she seemed no longer to be concentrating on his problems, his little patch of delayed work.
"We shouldn't be here," he added.
"Oh, dear!" she mocked.
They had followed the canal as closely as possible towards the basin that had half mutated into a vast marina. Crowded on to the banks were renewed warehouses, slip ways rows of shop-fronts, cafes, blocks of flats, iron-gated developments of new housing. It was a scene that was incomplete, like a child's puzzle where one compared two sketches and tried to decide what alterations had been made from one to the other ladybirds now with six spots not five, a tree with a branch missing.
They had played with such puzzle drawings at Uffingham, on rain swamped days during school holidays.
Here, the marina was presented to her in a series of artists' impressions and computer images in a glossy brochure Banks had retrieved from the boot of the Mercedes, together with the map-like architect's drawings which now rested across her lap. There, around them, was the actual marina, and she had to glance from sketches to actuality several times before the huge site began to reveal its unfinished state. What had been a dazzling smile had missing teeth, plaque, carious decay. There was a warehouse still dilapidated there, intended as an office block. Farther over, across the still water that remained feet lower than it would eventually be, the wrought iron of high gates, behind which was little more than a building site rather than expensive executive homes.
There was millions in unfinished work around the canal basin, beyond which towered the blocks of two new hotels, built for American chains and completed on schedule. In the distance was the new symphony hall and the conference centre, the exhibition complex, the metro system's hub station and the new railway above it… and on and on, stretching west and south towards the present centre of the city.
And yet, this all looked no more completed, even if as substantial, than Bruegel's painting of Babel except for the holiday absence of human activity. The dust around the spot where they had parked seemed unprinted, oddly settled. Babel… She always remembered that painting in Vienna whenever some particularly grandiose European scheme passed across her desk or her television screen.
Vanity, vanity, saith the Preacher… But here, it might be crockery, crookery, she reminded herself.
"Seen enough?" Banks asked hopefully, unabashedly patting his stomach.
There's an even bigger slowdown than I'd thought," he added helpfully and in order to hurry.
"Is there?" she replied archly.
The signs of it were everywhere. A village-green project, surrounded by cheaper, cottagey housing, had not begun two miles away… two tall office blocks were merely empty boxes turned on end. Around their emptiness, more endlessly recurring building sites.
She slipped from the car seat and walked the few paces to the high fence that surrounded the marina, pressing her face close to its trelliswork of wire. Less than fifty yards away, vandals had pulled a short length of the fencing away from its stanchions. The metro station's entrance was on her side of the canal basin. It seemed dusty but complete, even to its City Metro blazon atop a flagstaff-like steel pole. Banks began sighing impatiently behind her.
"I'd like to have a look at the metro station, Ray. There's a gap in the fencing just along there." She pointed exaggeratedly.
"Didn't you mention that, according to rumour, work on the tunnelling had been slowed down?"
That's mostly the council's money, and private investment," he replied, feigning boredom.
"And perhaps twenty million from Brussels," she murmured. They like underground trains in Europe."
"Look," Banks began, 'we've seen enough, haven't we? I mean—"
"Ray, what do you think is going to happen if we engage in trespass? The canal basin isn't MoD property, so far as I'm aware. Come on let's see how advanced this advanced urban passenger transport system is, shall we?"
She strode eagerly along the fence, a broad smile on her face. It was as if the calculations she had made were of profits from her own investments… Someone is counting just like that, she told herself.
David…?
She ducked down and eased herself through the gap torn in the fence.
There were paw prints in the dusty earth. Behind her, Banks puffed and wriggled his way in pursuit. Millions, she kept reminding herself, millions of pounds. To have kept everything on schedule would have cost millions more than was evidently being spent. And Phases One, Two and Three were, she remembered from the PM's un ringing words at the opening ceremony, and from the architects' glossy handouts, intended to progress at the same pace. Now, large parts of those phases had seriously lagged, others had not even seen a sod turned in earnest.
Of course there were, dotted around the development, completed projects, new roads or stretches of road, whole new estates of houses, one of the shopping centres. She herself had been to concerts in the new symphony hall, addressed a gathering at the conference centre next door to it. But, like a city at night, seen from the air, the glaring blotches of light were balanced by areas of darkness.
There were great pieces of the entire jigsaw missing.
And no one had noticed.
"You'll need this," Banks announced smugly, holding up a heavy-duty lamp.
"Us women so impractical," she murmured.
"And you should have brought a camera."
"Why, Ray? You imagine I could force people to tell me the truth by showing them a few snaps of building sites?" She immediately sensed the intemperateness of her response.
"Sorry," she apologised.
"Right, let's have a look, shall we—?"
She hurried down the steps out of the sunlight, into a warm gloom then a subtle change of temperature. The lamp's beam became stronger, more necessary for a moment or two, then the light, dusty as it was and somehow unused, increased as they reached the ticket barriers and a glimpse of the platform. There was a huge, greenhouse-like glass roof over the station's two platforms. The barriers were open, and she walked into disappointment. The station, beneath its light coating of dust, boasted tiled walls, mosaiced platforms, large steel notices. It was complete, awaiting its first train.