If only he could find a way in which a bomb could have been planted. That was the key factor in his theory: the fact that it was so bloody difficult these days. The ground staff? No, there was always a check after maintenance and cleaning operations had been carried out. The luggage? Impossible; all baggage was screened first. The crew themselves? Now that was a possibility. But why should any of the crew take a bomb on board only to blow themselves up? The medical checks were too thorough to allow any nutcase to continue flying and, anyway, even they now and again went through baggage searches. So who the hell – ?
Suddenly he had it!
It was just a germ of an idea but it grew in his mind, formed a complete picture. Yes, it was possible! It could have been done that way! He stood up excitedly. Should he go back upstairs and tell Slater? No, sod him! Prove it first – that was the only way. He might be wrong, but somehow . . . it . . . all . . . seemed . . . to . . . add . . . up. He was thoughtfully silent as he ran over the possibilities in his mind. There was one man who might be able to tell him more.
With a grin of satisfaction on his face, he marched out of the bar and through the swing doors of the hotel, forgetting the briefcase he had left lying on the floor by the side of the bar.
13
The people of the town were nervous. They gathered together in small groups, their apprehension growing with each new hushed conversation. Only in the public houses did their voices rise above normal conversation level when a drink or two helped quell their rising trepidation. The women met in shops and in the High Street, infecting each other with their own personal fear; the men discussed the peculiar happenings at their desks or work benches, many scornful of the suggestion that some evil was afoot in the town, but admittedly perplexed by the sequence of events. Yesterday, a young boy from the College had been struck down by a train, his head and feet sliced from his body. On the same day a couple had fallen from a window into the High Street, the man’s naked body curiously emaciated, as though he had been through a long illness. The couple, husband and wife, had kept very much to themselves, but the woman had been a life-long resident of Eton and had run the antique shop for many years. They had always appeared to be a pleasant, if conservative, pair, their lives quiet and orderly. For them to die in such a bizarre manner was disturbing to say the least.
Then there was the Reverend Biddlestone, found unconscious on the floor of his church and kept under heavy sedation since. There was the girl who had been found in a car on the other side of the field, still unable to give an account of what had happened to her. Her boyfriend had been traced and questioned by the police; his story was that a face had appeared at their car window and that the car itself had been lifted completely off the ground. He had run away in terror but the girl had refused to go with him. Naturally, the police were holding him for further questioning. A man had been found dead by the river the following morning. They said the cause was a heart attack, but it was rumoured, because of the frozen look of fright on his face, that the heart attack had been induced by fear. He had literally died of fright.
Constable Wickham sensed the growing unease, and he shared the apprehesnion. He’d had the feeling for several days now: a building-up of tension that was fast reaching a peak. There was a pregnant stillness in the air that would eventually break and somehow he knew the consequences would be dreadful when it did. The guarding of the field had been an uneasy duty for him: he sensed its brooding sullen-ness, its indescribable coldness – not the physical chill of winter, but a deeper, forbidding coldness that tormented the imagination. As he looked across at the twisted, torn fragments of the wreck and at the silver shell that had been a burning tomb, he could almost hear the shrill screams of panic, the terror of imminent death. His mind’s eye saw those hundreds of frightened faces; he heard the crying, the praying, the pleading, the wailing. He heard the dying. He felt their pain. He suffered their grief.
Even the animals would not go near the field. The dogs stood at its edge, their bodies stiff with terror, their eyes wide and pathetic, their fur prickly and their necks contracted and rigid. The riders who used the lanes running around the fields had to fight to keep control of their mounts as the horses shied away and tried to bolt.
The field had become a shrine for the dead and Constable Wickham sensed – knew – that death had not yet left that shrine.
The old man rarely left the house now. Since the night of the crash and the terrible scenes he had witnessed, a part of him had become subdued, a weariness had descended upon his ageing frame. His doctor had told him it was because of the shock and the exertion he had forced upon himself in his fearful run to the field in which the Jumbo had crashed. The effort had worn him out and the carnage he had then witnessed had shocked, then sapped, his spirit. In time, the oppression would lift and his energy would return, but it would take a strong effort of will on his part to lift himself above his melancholia.
Curiously though, he remembered little about that night. He could remember sitting on the bridge and gazing up into the sky; then the drone of the aeroplane, loud and low, the brief flash as it had split open. After that there were only blurred images of fire, bodies and chunks of scattered, torn metal. He’d had a recurring nightmare since: a black shape coming towards him from out of the flames, growing larger and larger until it stood before him. A hand reached down and he saw that the flesh had been burnt away, and only blackened, skeletal fingers were stretching towards him. Then, in the dream, he looked up into the dark figure’s face and he saw the two large staring eyes set in the plastic head of a doll, its pink painted lips set in a cruel, mocking grin. He would wake suddenly, his body drenched in perspiration, and he’d still see those terrible, lifeless eyes staring out at him from the shadows of his bedroom.
And sometimes, just as he woke, he thought he heard whispers.
He only left his tiny house in Eton Square two or three times a week nowadays, and that was only during the daytime and only when it was essential to buy food. The streets made him nervous. It was as if there were something out there waiting for him; the thought of venturing out during the dark hours filled him with dread, even though he missed his nightly jaunt to the old bridge. They had told him that he had collapsed at the scene of the disaster and that it had been the co-pilot of the 747, the only survivor of the crash, who had found him and carried him away from the burning wreck. He had never met the young man to thank him, but for some inexplicable reason, he felt a great sympathy towards this unknown survivor. Had he been unfortunate to escape when over three hundred others had perished? Was it something that could easily be lived with?
The old man sighed with despair at his own unanswerable question; only the co-pilot himself could know. He leant forward and stirred the glowing fire with a poker, then settled back in the wooden-armed armchair, his eyes half closed, his hands nervously clasped in his lap. It was still early in the day, but already his heart beat a little faster at the thought of the night to come.
The boys at the College were delightedly scared and did their very best to heighten their fear with fantasized stories of the more macabre genre. They had enjoyed the air disaster, the most spectacular occurrence in Eton’s history, the younger pupils hardly moved at all by the appalling loss of life, but intensely excited by the publicity the town had received in consequence. The boys had poured from their separate houses, dressed in a combination of night attire and black long-tailed coats on the night of the crash, their various house masters unable to prevent their eager rush to the scene of the disaster. They had gawped open-mouthed at the burning wreck, their shocked young faces hued red by the flames, their eyes wide and bright with excitement. It had taken the full force of the headmaster’s fury, and the house masters’ bullying, to get them to return to their beds where, those who could watched the spectacle from their houses’ windows whilst the others, intoxicated with the drama, talked ceaselessly into the grey hours of the dawn.
The headmaster, with some of his house ma
sters and the more senior boys, returned to the scene to offer assistance, but they were asked politely and firmly by the police to return to the College so that the emergency services could cope with the unenviable task of collecting the dead bodies and searching for their missing limbs without more hindrance than was necessary.
For the pupils (except those who were unwillingly dragged back to their homes by parents who looked on the disaster with distaste and did not want their offspring to witness the publicity circus that would inevitably follow) the next few days were filled with excitement and speculation as to how and why the 747 had crashed. The novelty had eventually worn off at the College over the weeks and was replaced by a strange sulkiness, a moodiness that concerned Anthony Griggs-Meade, the headmaster, more than the morbid fascination the boys had shown previously. Many – and not just the younger ones – had begun to suffer from nightmares, natural enough after such a devastating event, but the headmaster had noticed that even his own staff members were showing signs of irritability and edginess.
And now the peculiar death of the Thatcher boy. He hadn’t been popular among the other boys and the headmaster knew they had tormented him mercilessly over his grossness. But it had been up to the boy to stand up for himself, to show he could be a man. The cruelties of life had to be faced and conquered at some time in one’s existence, and one was never too young to taste and overcome its bitterness. How had the boy come to be on the railway line? He should have been on the playing-fields with the other boys, not wandering about the countryside alone. His house master would certainly have to be disciplined – Thatcher had been his responsibility. Griggs-Meade tried unsuccessfully to push a disturbing thought from his mind, a returning thought that caused the foundations of his ‘let-them-help-themselves’ philosophy to wobble uncomfortably. Had the unfortunate boy’s life been made so wretched that he had been driven to suicide?
The notion distressed him and caused him to wonder if his principles had become too rigid. How responsible was he for the boy’s death? He would speak to the school in the chapel tomorrow about cruelty towards each other, that love for your fellow man was more important than life itself. He walked over to his study window and looked out, trying to shake off the curious sensation which flowed through his body in waves. He had a feeling of impending – what? Doom? No, that was nonsense.
But there was something in the air.
Ernest Goodwin patiently waited for the black and white image to appear, occasionally dabbing a finger into the developing liquid to push the bromide paper back beneath the surface. The first shapes began to emerge slowly, then the process quickened and the picture rushed into being, completing itself with a flourish, and unable to stop, eager to destroy itself with blackness. He whipped the photograph out of the developer, holding the shiny paper at one corner, allowing the liquid to drain off back into its tray, then he plunged the curling paper into the fix, halting the developing process. He studied the completed picture for a while as it lay on the bottom of the white metal tray beneath the rectangular pool of chemical liquid, and for the hundredth time shook his head at the tragedy revealed there.
The photograph showed the burning 747, its flames silhouetting the figures of the firemen, desperately striving to control the inferno with their impotent hoses, wretched in the knowledge that all hope of saving lives was lost. Ernest again felt the surge of guilt flush through him. He and his partner, Martin, had made a lot of money from this photograph and the many others like it they had taken on that terrible night. Even now, weeks after the event, they were receiving offers from magazines all over the world for their pictures and to date, the world’s press had snapped up nearly every exposure they had taken. The thought of making money from the catastrophe had worried him at first, but Martin had convinced him it was their duty as professional pictorial recorders of life (and death) to syndicate their pictures, and if they made a bit of money while doing so, then what else were they in business for? Martin had always been the shrewd partner of ‘Goodwin and Samuels, Photographers for All Occasions’, and it was mostly due to his skill that their business in Eton had managed to sustain itself through so many hard years. Babies, weddings, engagements, social functions of any kind, school sports teams, industrial sites – they had tackled anything and everything, maintaining a steady but healthy income for seventeen years now.
And then, the air disaster had plunged them into a different league entirely. Both men had been working late in their small darkroom, endeavouring to meet a deadline for publicity shots of a new industrial site just springing up on the outskirts of Slough, when the terrifying roar of the Jumbo jet slamming over the High Street rooftops had almost deafened them. As the subsequent explosion made the very building shudder, they had instantly realized its cause, and Martin had rushed from the darkroom, not caring that the light flooding in would ruin their film, shouting back at him to bring as many rolls of unused film as he could carry, together with a couple of cameras.
The partners had photographed the wreck from every possible angle, recording the devastation in its most dramatic moments before even the rescue squads had arrived. They had both been too numbed to feel sickened by the destruction of human life they were witnessing, and had continued to take shots automatically throughout the night, every so often one of them returning to their studio for extra supplies of film. That night had certainly changed their lives, for they had recorded scenes that few photographers had captured before: the dramatic seconds after a major calamity.
But, although Martin had been elated in the weeks that followed, holding out for the best possible deals from the news media, exhibiting their best shots in a tasteless display in their double-fronted shop window, Ernest had felt distinctly uneasy. He had come to dread working alone in the darkroom, whether it was daytime or night-time, the darkness and the quietness adding a vivid dimension to the macabre photographs he developed. And the unease had been steadily building up over the past few weeks until his nerves had reached a barely repressed breaking point. It was as though he were being watched all the time. More than once, while alone in the darkroom, bathed in its eerie red light, he had turned suddenly at the feeling of a presence behind him. Of course, there had never been anything there and he had chided himself for his overimaginativeness. Of late, though, the feeling had become too strong to ignore completely.
When he had mentioned it to Martin, his partner had laughed and said it was hardly surprising working alone in the dark like that, surrounded by images of death, but not to worry, for very soon they would have sold everything they had taken of the wreck and would be able to relax and enjoy the financial rewards. Ernest wasn’t sure he could carry on for much longer, though. It had been left to him to make all the prints while Martin carried on with the flourishing business arrangements (for which he was obviously better suited). But today, after the sudden and inexplicable deaths of certain people, there was a new tenseness in the air. It was far less subtle than the broodiness that had hung over Eton like a dark grey shroud since the crash; there was an expectant air of fresh disaster.
Ernest retrieved the photograph and dropped it into the bigger water tank to remove the chemicals from the surface. It swirled gracefully as the container automatically purified itself with fresh water then gently floated face up to the surface. Once again, fascinated by its appalling contents, Ernest examined the lazily drifting photograph, wiping the chemicals from his fingers on his white smock-coat as he did so. It showed row upon row of white draped forms, the sheets soiled and bloodied, their general shapes giving sharp evidence of the mutilated bodies they covered. The shot had been taken in the early hours of dawn and its clarity caused Ernest to shudder inwardly. To one side lay a bulkier, more durable sheet, under which large plastic sacks had been placed, tucked out of sight lest their grisly contents became too unbearable for the rescue squads. He knew they contained the missing parts of bodies; parts that would be cremated, for it would have been useless to attempt identification and re
turn them to their rightful bodies.
And as he stared down into the floating photograph, he imagined he could see the corpses beneath the sheets; their blackened bodies, their faces twisted in hideous grimaces of death. He clutched the edges of the water tank to steady himself, his chest muscles tightening. He could almost hear them calling, their souls moaning in their anguish, their voices rising in a crescendo of misery. Their souls were still here; they had not gone. And he knew them.
It was as though, through his photography, because of the days alone in the dark with their images, he had created a link with them. Somehow, he knew they were waiting for something. Someone. That the tragedy was not yet over.
The Reverend Biddlestone walked weakly along the stone path, his eyes careful to avoid looking directly ahead at the tall greystone church at the end of the war-memorial garden. His companion held his arm to steady him as he swayed slightly. They went through a small gate to their right which led to the vicarage where the vicar’s housekeeper anxiously waited at the door.
He entered the house, smiling at the woman’s words of sympathy, assuring her of his well-being, and was relieved to sink into a comfortable chair in his drawing room.
‘I do wish you had stayed, Andrew,’ his companion said.
‘No, no, I’m fine now, Ian. Thank you for collecting me, but I’m sure you have to get back to your office now.’