Death and Other Lovers Page 5

  There had been two hundred and twenty people, passengers and crew, aboard when Flight 98 left Heathrow. They had all died in the twenty or thirty seconds between the explosion seen by Inspector Harris’s sergeant and the collision of the aluminium capsule, invested now its wings were gone with the flight characteristics of a brick, and the planet which spawned it. The bodies of many of them were still inside the wreckage, strapped into the expensively engineered seats which could offer no protection at all from the sudden intercession of the laws of physics a mile above the ground. Others were strewn in a surprisingly neat line along the axis of the crash.

  Because there was no fire, and because it was now dark, the scene was illuminated by chains of powerful electric lights. From a distance they looked like fairy-lights picking out a walk beside the river.

  From where Todd stood there was nothing whimsical about the scene. The lights, clear-eyed and impersonal as lights in an operating theatre, defined the extent of the devastation. People worked in the midst of it without haste but also without hope. The near-silence was chilling. Todd’s job had taken him to the scenes of many disasters, and he had always thought that the agonised and despairing cries of the injured and bereft were the most harrowing part. Now he would have given a month’s income to hear someone sobbing with the pain of broken bones.

  Back at the airport, in a private area patrolled by priests and Samaritans and other professional compassionates, relatives and friends and lovers of the two hundred and twenty were sobbing with the pain of broken lives. Later some of them would find their way here, to this damp fragrant meadow by the river, and stare with grief and no comprehension at the wreckage of so much. But for now the site was the property of the professionals, Todd among them, and if they grieved they did it silently and without interrupting their work.

  The proximity of Heathrow meant the top experts in their fields began arriving on the scene within minutes of the crash. Some of them had seen it, the pink chrysanthemum blooming halfway down the sky. Some of them came in working clothes, some in uniform, a couple like Todd in dinner jackets and several in baggy watching-the-telly cardigans that their wives would be horrified to learn they had gone out in public in.

  But time was of the essence, and the urgency diminished only for the medical teams when it transpired that there were no survivors. With identical airframes and engines flying every minute of the day all over the world it was vital to establish what had happened, and whether it could happen again.

  No-one said it but everyone there hoped it was a bomb. A bomb cast no doubts over the integrity of the plane, of manufacturing and operating procedures. A bomb would be a disaster that happened in spite of everyone’s best efforts, not because of somebody’s mistake. No-one would have to decide whether planes should be grounded, which meant all concerned anxiously monitoring the airwaves for the hours it would take to get everything down safely if they decided to, and with even greater anxiety for weeks if they decided not to. In the perhaps blasphemous view of those responsible for making aeroplanes safe, a bomb—planted by someone mad enough to want to and cunning enough to succeed—was an Act of God. It raised the fewest spectres.

  Heathrow had been Todd’s local airport for many globe-trotting years, and he had written enough about aircraft and flying to paper a jumbo-jet so many of those picking over the site were known to him. By the same token he was known to them and could have expected longer shrift than would have been available to most journalists in such circumstances. But Todd kept his demands on their time light. There was nothing to be gained from haunting these people, still in a state of shock as they began their microscopic examination of the wreckage. He had no deadline to meet: editors who bought his stories looked not for the first but for the most complete account of events. Most of the official information that would appear in the morning papers would come from press releases anyway.

  In the course of the next few days he would talk to most or all of them and end up with clear impressions of what could and could not have happened, and how the odds were stacking up on sabotage as against mechanical failure. For the moment, though, it was enough to be here, letting the horror of the thing sink into his soul, watching people who had already done a day’s work accept the massive challenge of establishing whether the thousands of people currently airborne in planes like this were in danger of falling out of the sky.

  A flicker of light to one side reminded him that Shimoni was getting on with her work too. They marched to the beat of different drummers: these first confused hours, full of horror and heroism and contradiction, that were of scant value to Todd as a serious reporter were priceless to Shimoni in distilling the ethos of tragedy onto film. Later, by daylight, she would photograph specific aspects of the wreckage with specific significances, and those pictures might be more telling and more important. But for ten years people looking back on the disaster would remember it in terms of these first confused, dramatic, chiaroscuro images condensed out of the darkness and the despair.

  In the first year they had worked together Todd had worried about taking a young woman into some of the situations his job demanded. The business was too full of people suffering. Hardly a month went by but that he had to look at something he would rather not have seen. Professional pride made him look, just long enough to know what he was writing about. But he was not sure he could have done Shimoni’s job, weighing up angles and lighting and carefully focusing and then taking three steady shots; and after that developing the things and printing them. Photography made even fewer concessions to the normal sensibilities than journalism.

  But he need not have worried. Shimoni was a lot tougher than she looked: not hard, there are hard photographers in the business but not many good ones, but tough. She had a range of mental, emotional and physical staminas that he had not suspected.

  He supposed it was something to do with his age. When he was her age a plucky girl was one who could drive a car, or remount a horse after a bruising fall. The idea of tough women doing difficult, dangerous, dirty jobs as well and as badly as the men they worked with had never occurred to him; and had it done so, he would not have imagined them a little over five feet high, compact going on stocky and, on a good day, quite pretty in a serious sort of way. He would not have imagined them working calmly amid terrible devastation, doing any crying they had to do in private, as he did his.

  So he watched Shimoni moving along the perimeter of the crash site, recording the horrors with precision and dedication, and he was proud and impressed and really rather fond of her. As fond, anyway, as was decent for a man of fifty-six and a girl thirty years younger.

  It was then, as his eyes skimmed along the front line between darkness and the artificial day created by the fairy-lights, that he saw someone else he knew. At first he jolted to the shock of recognition. Then he doubted, told himself it was too dark, too far away, that the world was full of tall young men and this one did not even have a camera dangling round his neck like a talisman. He could not see the man’s face, could not get that clear a view of him at all. Yet something about him was forcefully familiar so that the darkness was no obstacle to recognition.

  It was three years since they had parted. It felt both more and less than that. Half of him had expected never to see Flynn again; the other half had taken six months to get used to Flynn not being there when he turned round.

  Pitching his voice above the generators he called, “Mickey?” There was no response. The tall stooped figure, round-shouldered as if with hands in pockets, drifted into deep shadow and disappeared. Todd frowned. Could he be mistaken? There was a vagueness, a lack of purpose in the way the man moved that was not typically Flynn—at least, not typical of Flynn on a job. He worked with a restless energy that animated his angular attenuated frame like electricity. Like a child he could keep going as long as the game was worth playing, but five minutes after the final whistle he would be curled up in a chair somewhere fast asleep.

  The fact that he seem
ed not to be working was more puzzling still. It was almost inconceivable that Flynn was here without a camera. He took a camera when he visited his dentist. Still Todd was left wondering why Flynn was wandering around like that and where he had lost his camera rather than whether it was Flynn at all.

  Before he was aware of taking a decision Todd was moving obliquely down the side of the low hill he had been watching from towards the shadows where Flynn had disappeared. He was walking quite quickly for a portly fifty-six-year-old reporter. After a moment he began to trot. “Mickey! Wait for me.”

  Flynn was not going anywhere. Attracted perhaps by a darkness matching that of his spirit, he had stopped in the dense shade cast by a clump of little shock-haired trees standing on the river-bank. His eyes were shut against the mind-numbing horror of an aluminium coffin a hundred and eighty feet long split open and spilling its contents on the grass. But he had looked at it too long already and the image picked out in fairy-lights was printed on the inside of his eyelids.

  He did not know what he was doing here. He could not remember how he got here, or why he had felt compelled to come. He had no camera and anyway no inclination to make permanent what he had seen. Someone else could do his job today.

  But what should he do? The obvious avenues of prayer and alcohol were closed to him. The sense of loss was as overpowering as it was irrational. A Hungarian conductor, a boy in a suit, a business-woman with a fear of flying—and dear God, how right she had been! But what were they to him? What right had he to mourn their passing? Yet it was a sense of bereavement like vertigo that was tugging at his heart, knocking his perceptions out of focus and making his long body sway.

  Todd saw him dark among the dark trees and said his name again, but before he could reach him Flynn’s long legs folded and he sank to his knees on the damp earth, sitting back on his heels, his palms flat on his thighs, his head rocked back, his eyes shut. For a moment half the world’s suffering seemed reflected in his half-seen face.

  Todd hurried to him, anxious and uncomprehending, and uttered possibly the silliest words ever heard at the scene of a major disaster. “Mickey, whatever’s the matter?”

  In the darkness, the look on his face might have been partly in Todd’s imagination. But there was no mistaking the profound shock in his voice that made it run up thin and terribly frail. “Gil? What are you doing here?”

  Todd stared at him. “I’m a reporter: where else would I be?” He had been right about the camera too. “Where’s your camera?”

  Flynn pointed. It seemed an effort.

  Todd did not understand. “At the wreck? How come?”

  Flynn looked at him for the first time. Moving his head seemed to break whatever spell held him. He blinked and a little animation seeped into the hollow spaces in his eyes. “Not at it. In it. Gil, I was on that plane. Five minutes before it took off I was on it, heading for New York. I’d still have been on it but for a disagreement with the local cops. And Gil—” In the dark his kind eyes were luminous with unshed tears. He could hardly push the words past the grief gathering in his throat. “Oh Christ, Gil, I think this happened because of me.”

  Shimoni had seen Todd move into the trees and wondered what he was doing. As much as anything for a break from the tension of constantly looking at this, she went to see.

  She found them by the sound of Todd’s voice—”On your feet, Mickey, we have to do something about this, tell someone”—so she knew, or at any rate guessed, who he was talking to. A sudden unexpected pang of jealousy fluttered under her breastbone. She had never met Flynn, but she had heard all about him—not only from Todd who worked with him for four years but from a dozen different people she had met while working with Todd in the last three. She had seen Flynn’s pictures. She had heard about Flynn’s awards. She had heard his entire life-story broken down into anecdotes. She had the clear impression, and once or twice had been told to her face though never by Todd, that she was a lot more decorative than Flynn and a lot easier on the ear but she would not be half the photographer he was if she lived to be a hundred.

  She could have forgiven Flynn all that. She too thought he was a better photographer than she was. She did not begrudge him the recognition he deserved. What she resented was the place that quite obviously, after a bitter parting and three years of going their own ways, he still occupied in Todd’s affections.

  Shimoni would have given anything for that kind of relationship with the old man who had seen more of and contributed more to twentieth-century journalism than anyone she had ever met. She knew he was fond of her, that he cared for her as he might for a favourite niece, that he respected her as a person and a colleague. But she would have exchanged all the respect in the world for what she had seen in his eyes, heard even in his anger when he talked about Flynn. That depth of commitment which Flynn had found claustrophobic and rebuffed.

  Moving as they did in the same orbit, she had expected to meet Flynn before now. She had wondered idly how they would react to one another, if they would have enough in common to hit it off or if the best that they should aim for was an armed neutrality. She had not expected to feel this sudden animosity towards him.

  And the second surprise was that this internationally acclaimed photo-journalist, renowned almost as much for the daring of his exploits as for the brilliance of his published work, the man who conceived and carried out the Obregon campaign and constantly set new standards of boldness, originality and style, should look—stripped of the accolades and the manic grin he wore in photographs—like nothing so much as six-foot-two of lost child, his hair in his face, a suspicious glistening on his cheeks, damp and grass clinging to his trouser legs.

  Shimoni’s vocabulary could not match Flynn’s for offensiveness, in any of her three languages, but in her own quieter way she had a nasty enough mouth when provoked. She demonstrated it now. She looked Flynn up and down with a degree of disfavour apparent despite the dark, then said to Todd, “What’s the matter with him? Seen something to upset him, has he?”

  Todd was not paying her enough attention to notice the rancour in her voice. “Leah, it’s Mickey.” As if she knew him. As if that was all the introduction she could possibly need. “I think he’s in shock. He was on the plane.”

  Shimoni looked past him to the twisted jumble of metal and flesh strewn across the water-meadow under the flat glare of the lights. She did not believe it, and made it clear. “Nobody could have survived that,” she said flatly.

  Todd finally noticed her uncharacteristic hostility and frowned. “No, before it took off—just before. The police—” He broke off. He could tell her later. “Mickey, did you tell them about the fire?”

  “Sure I told them.” His voice was thin, the accent prominent. “They weren’t listening. They told me to get lost or they’d find something to arrest me for. So I came here.”

  And what he had found here had shaken him to the roots of his soul. Now he was coming out of it he had enough detachment to wonder at the scale of his reaction. He had seen disasters enough before, and if they were different in detail they were all terribly alike in overall effect. Every one of them came down in the end to lists of names, the dead and/or the injured. By tomorrow this one too would be redefining itself in lists of dead and tables of figures for easy assimilation into that custodian of modem history the computer. The fact that his name was scratched from the list in the nick of time was cause for celebration: he did not understand why it had pulled him apart like a cub-reporter at his first road accident.

  Todd said, not to him, “I’m going to get him out of here. Then I’ll call the police. They’ll damn well listen when I tell them.”

  “Use my place if you like, it’s closer.” Shimoni freed a key from her ring.

  “Are you staying here?”

  “A little while. I’ll come on when I’m finished.”

  “What do I do about your dog?”

  Shimoni gave him an old-fashioned look. “Offer him a biscuit and he’ll c
ome out from under the couch.”

  In the event it took half the packet to reassure the Saluki that the strange men in his livingroom meant him no harm. Flynn fed them to him, bit by bit, while Todd talked on the telephone, and bit by bit the slender blond dog edged out from under Shimoni’s couch. His name was Flute. From the couch he advanced by inches, slim silky paws first and his long slight body low to the carpet, until finally he trusted enough to put his nervous aristocratic nose on Flynn’s knee and let Flynn stroke his silk-flagged ears. Flynn had read somewhere that stroking dogs brings your blood pressure down. He may not have known that it does the same for the dog.

  Todd made four calls in quick succession: to the incident centre coordinating the emergency services, to Inspector Ford who was investigating Flynn’s fire, to Inspector Harris who had escorted Flynn off the plane, then the incident centre again. When he had finished he came and sat down, his heavy body sinking uncomfortably low in a chair that was essentially a bean-bag.

  “Well, I’ve got them all talking to one another. They’ll send someone round to talk to you in due course. I said we’d be here.”

  Flynn raised one mobile eyebrow. “Leah will be pleased.”

  Todd frowned. “She did seem a bit out of sorts tonight, didn’t she?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” As the horror down the road was beginning to lose its first impact, so Flynn’s natural resilience was beginning to make a tentative reappearance. “I know one thing though. She hates my guts.”

  Todd stared in amazement. “How can she? She doesn’t know you.”

  Flynn barked a laugh that sent the Saluki back under the couch. “With the best will in the world, Gil, it’s hard to take that as a compliment.”

  Todd twitched him half a grin. “You know what I mean.”