B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (13 page)

‘I apologize for my husband’s absence,’ Mrs Patterson said. ‘We both find it easier to cope alone, at least for the moment.’

‘I understand,’ Jenny said, although she didn’t. Not at all.

‘My clients would like their daughter’s inquest dealt with swiftly,’ Galbraith explained, pouring them each a glass from an expensive-looking bottle of mineral water, ‘and I’ve advised them that the best way to achieve this is to have the case returned to your jurisdiction. This latest evidence seems to prove beyond doubt that their daughter’s death was subsequent to the crash, in which case I don’t see any reason why she shouldn’t be dealt with separately.’

‘I doubt the Ministry of Justice would agree,’ Jenny said.

‘Their decision was taken in ignorance of the full facts,’ Galbraith said. ‘A vital part of the coroner’s function is to provide swift and conclusive findings for grieving families. I can’t see why they would stand in the way of that.’ He smiled. ‘We would need your full support and cooperation, of course.’

‘My husband and I really would be most grateful,’ Mrs Patterson added expectantly.

Jenny noticed a look pass between them. She suspected that there was an aspect of their request that they had yet to share with her.

Jenny said, ‘If you’re worried about the release of your daughter’s body, I’m sure that can happen imminently, perhaps even in the next few days.’

‘It’s a concern, of course—’ Mrs Patterson said, but left her sentence incomplete. She glanced again at Galbraith.

‘What’s your feeling about the correct procedure, Mrs Cooper?’ he asked. ‘Do you agree with us that it would be unfair to ask grieving parents to wait possibly a year or more for Sir James Kendall to make a finding when you could deal with matters much more rapidly?’

His speech felt to Jenny like a clumsy attempt to disguise his true intentions. Having spent several minutes in the room, she was beginning to form a clearer picture.

Caldwell Rose probably charged out at over £200 an hour. They were eager for business, and in her grief, Mrs Patterson was prepared to give it to them.

‘Let’s be frank, Mrs Patterson,’ Jenny said. ‘You want to know why an aeroplane fell out of the sky. Even if I were to get your daughter’s case back, it would be on condition that I left that particular question to the disaster inquest. I would be strictly confined to determining her immediate cause of death, which we already know.’

‘That’s true up to a point,’ Galbraith began, ‘but—’

Mrs Patterson cut across him. ‘I’ve read reports of your previous investigations, Mrs Cooper, and my lawyers have confirmed their accuracy. You’ve made quite a reputation out of asking the questions from which others have shied away.’

‘I’m afraid the system is conspiring to keep people like me in their place, Mrs Patterson. Recent changes in the law mean that I’m no longer quite the free agent I once was.’

‘Which makes it all the more important to keep up the fight, surely?’

Jenny could tell from Galbraith’s expression that his client had already strayed well beyond their agreed script. He gave an apologetic smile. ‘I think what Mrs Patterson is trying to say—’

‘I understand perfectly,’ Jenny countered, ‘but what neither of you has told me is the reason you think Sir James Kendall won’t deliver what all the relatives of the deceased would expect.’

Galbraith looked at her with the troubled expression of a lawyer suffering a conflict between his own feelings and his professional ethics. But if he was asking her to help trick a court into believing her inquest would be one thing when they all intended it to be another, she felt he had an obligation to get his hands dirty too.

She looked him in the eye and waited.

‘As I think my client may already have told you, she has some experience of the aerospace industry,’ Galbraith said. ‘It’s a global business upon which all major countries depend, yet there are only a handful of major aircraft manufacturers. You wouldn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to imagine that a government would work extremely hard to protect those interests.’

‘A coroner is an independent judicial officer. I don’t conduct inquiries according to any agenda.’

‘Which is precisely what we fear Sir James Kendall might be tempted to do. You might be interested to see this.’ Galbraith motioned to Mrs Patterson, who handed a two-sheet document across the table.

It was a report written on Civil Aviation Authority stationery and headed:
Ramp-Check on Ransome Airways Airbus A319.
The text below was marked
CONFIDENTIAL.

The body of the text was couched in technical language which Jenny barely managed to follow, but she caught the gist: the previous July, a CAA inspector had, for a reason unspecified in the document, carried out an unannounced inspection of a Ransome Airways plane at Heathrow airport. He had checked the aircraft’s defect log and found evidence that the plane had flown with a significant fault that should have been repaired before it took to the air. The summary paragraphs read:

‘I’ve emailed it to a number of pilots, who were all appalled,’ Mrs Patterson said. ‘The general consensus seems to be that the airline was fortunate not to have all its planes grounded immediately. A major electrical failure could be catastrophic, all the more so on a fly-by-wire plane. We can find no record of a prosecution.’

‘How did you come by this?’ Jenny asked.

‘Interesting you should ask,’ Galbraith said. ‘One of Mrs Patterson’s colleagues found it posted on the internet on Sunday afternoon. An hour later it had gone, along with the whole site.’

‘What was this site?’ Jenny asked.

‘It was called Airbuzz,’ Mrs Patterson replied. ‘Apparently it was a forum for insider talk in the airline business. According to my colleague, this was just one of a number of similar hair-raising reports from around the world.’

Jenny looked at the blacked-out spaces covering the captain’s name and wondered if it was Nuala Casey’s. Even if it was, it might just be a collision of coincidences: for all she knew such risk taking might be commonplace in the airline business, but her gut told her it was more than that. And despite its chemical straitjacket, her heart was beating hard against the inside of her ribs.

‘It’s not exactly a smoking gun,’ Galbraith said, ‘but it does say something about Ransome’s attitude to safety.’

‘Right,’ Mrs Patterson added. ‘It’s not worth losing money over.’

‘Would you agree, Mrs Cooper?’ Galbraith said.

Jenny could see trouble ahead, a lot of trouble, but she could also see the little girl lying on the beach, swept to her on the tide along with Brogan.

‘Yes,’ Jenny answered.

‘Then you would be as anxious as we are to see that every avenue is explored in determining the cause of the crash.’

‘That goes without saying, but we have to be realistic,’ Jenny said. ‘If you’re correct about the intentions behind the official inquest, then I can’t see any court returning jurisdiction over your daughter’s death to me.’

‘That may or may not be necessary,’ Galbraith said. ‘We may not need that. In fact, it might be best if we didn’t go down that avenue. I imagine the last thing you want is to attract more controversy.’

Jenny was confused. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The thing is, Mrs Cooper,’ he said, gesturing with his palms like a skilful politician, ‘most, if not all, of the questions we would like to be addressed could fall within the scope of your inquest into Mr Brogan’s death. If you were to allow us full representation as interested parties, then it might serve all our objectives.’

It was a perfect lawyer’s play. Caldwell Rose would get to collect their fees without running the risk of having to convince a sceptical High Court judge that their clients alone amongst six hundred grieving families deserved special treatment. All they needed to seal the deal was for Mrs Patterson to hear Jenny promise to give her what she wanted.

Jenny would have been justified in getting up from the table and leaving the room without another word. She was being manipulated and so was Mrs Patterson. Some disasters were simply too big, their ramifications too far-reaching to allow the whole truth to emerge and Galbraith and his employers knew it as well as she did.

But it was already too late. She had been touched by a mother’s grief and pushed beyond the point at which she could forgive herself for walking away, and secretly she was more than a little to curious to know what else Mrs Patterson and her lawyers would unearth that otherwise might remain suppressed.

‘I have no objection to you being represented at my inquest into Mr Brogan’s death,’ Jenny said. ‘You are a legitimately interested party. But I must warn you now, there may be no answers and, if there are, they may not be the ones you want to hear.’

‘I’ll take my chances, Mrs Cooper,’ Mrs Patterson said. ‘It’s not as if I have anything more left to lose.’

O
PENING HER INQUEST ONLY
a week after Flight 189 came down had seemed the best way to catch evidence before it was buried, but Jenny had seriously underestimated the obstacles that would be placed in her path. The first warning shots had come in off-the-record phone calls from Simon Moreton, a Director in the Ministry of Justice, and her superior insofar as a coroner could be said to have one.

Despite all that she had got away with in the past, he warned her, she wouldn’t be repeating the experience. A wise coroner, he suggested, would recognize that this was one of the rare occasions that required all public officials to pull in the same direction. It was civil service code for ‘back off now or expect consequences’. When she reminded him that the law required a coroner fearlessly and independently to inquire after the truth, she was met with silence.

When Moreton’s pleading failed, his superior, the politely imperious Sir Oliver Prentice, requested her to postpone ‘to allow the media to calm down’. She responded with a request of her own: where in the Coroner’s Rules did it require her to time her inquiry according to the level of press hysteria? Then there were no more phone calls, merely a two-line email informing her that counsel had been instructed to keep a watching brief at her inquest on behalf of Sir James Kendall’s inquiry. Determined to make life difficult for her, Sir James Kendall declined to release traffic camera footage from the Severn Bridge, curtly informing her that she had no right to evidence already lawfully in his possession. Nor would he hand over statements taken from rescue workers or the farmer, Roberts, who, as far as she was aware, remained the closest anyone had to an eye-witness. Meanwhile, Kendall’s carefully managed inquiry ground on slowly and in silence. The only news that had emerged from his office was that the autopsies were complete and that the process of reassembling the wreckage of the aircraft was under way at the AAIB’s hangars at Farnborough in Hampshire.

When the Courts Service claimed there was no courtroom available within a fifty-mile radius, Jenny’s patience snapped. As a calculated act of revenge, she chose the remotest and most inaccessible venue within her jurisdiction in which to conduct her proceedings. If they wanted to keep tabs on her, she was going to make sure they suffered for it.

The village of Sharpness, situated twenty-five miles northeast of the centre of Bristol, was once a flourishing deep-water port crammed with cargo ships. Later eclipsed by the container port at Avonmouth, it had declined to a sleepy dormitory midway between the cities of Bristol and Gloucester. The tired-looking docks saw one or two ships each week, but the atmosphere was of a settlement that had been left marooned by time.

The village hall was a single-storey brick building that could have been built in any of the post-war decades. Jenny followed Alison into the echoing interior, feeling a perverse delight at bringing such momentous events to a place that still bore the stubs of Christmas streamers. The rooms were cold and a faint smell of damp hung in the air. With no sign of the helper they had been promised, Jenny and Alison took off their coats and set out the chairs and tables themselves. It was a long way from the air-conditioned comfort of the modern court buildings many coroners enjoyed, yet there was something profoundly pleasing in such basic surroundings; the truth was so much harder to disguise when there was no ceremony or ornament for it to hide behind.

Jenny hunkered down in the small committee room at the back of the building where, boosted by several cups of coffee, she attempted to focus on the task ahead. There was no avoiding the fact that her inquiry was limited to determining Gerry Brogan’s immediate cause of death; she wasn’t expected nor was she legally permitted to stray into the territory that had been marked out for Sir James Kendall. If she crossed the line, she faced the prospect of a higher court summarily halting proceedings and handing them over to another, more compliant colleague. In the few years she had been in her post, the law had gradually shifted to exert unprecedented levels of political control over the office of coroner, which for eight hundred years had managed to remain almost entirely free from outside interference. It was a fact that infuriated her, and she was determined to do all in her power to roll back the tide.