The Rhythm Section. Mark Burnell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ would be some sort of price to pay for Proctor’s apparent kindness. Experience had taught her that much.

      They were in the kitchen. It was early evening and Stephanie was sitting on a wooden stool watching Proctor cut chicken breasts into thin strips. When he’d finished, he started to slice broccoli and courgettes with a clean knife on a clean board. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed her staring.

      ‘Are you laughing at me?’

      ‘I’m smiling, not laughing.’

      ‘What about?’

      ‘Watching you chop food reminds me of my father. Not that you’re similar in any way. It’s just that he liked to cook and he was good at it. He taught me how to cook.’

      ‘Do you enjoy it?’

      Stephanie shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’

      ‘What about your mother? Didn’t she cook?’

      ‘Very well. But she didn’t enjoy it the way he did. I preferred to learn from my father. I liked to watch him work with knives. He always cut things really quickly. He had these huge hands but he was so precise with a blade. There’d be a blur of steel and suddenly everything was beautifully sliced.’

      ‘I guess that comes from being a doctor.’

      ‘He was a general practitioner, not a surgeon.’

      Proctor nodded and then wiped his hands on a tea-towel. ‘What were they like, your parents?’

      Stephanie’s smile vanished. ‘They weren’t like anything. They were my parents.’

      It was five-thirty in the morning. Stephanie was unable to sleep. She rose from the sofa and dressed quickly; it had been a bitter night and the central heating didn’t come on until six. She made herself coffee the way Proctor made it. Then she took the mug back to the living room and lit herself a cigarette. Down in the street, a man was scraping ice from the windscreen of his Vauxhall. Frozen breath shrouded his head.

      On the cherry table were the reports that Proctor had been going through the night before. Stephanie sat down and began to leaf through the photo-copies. On the front cover of one plastic folder, a date had been scrawled in fluorescent green ink. It was only three months old.

      There was some analysis on the causes of death for those bodies that had been recovered. Twenty-eight passengers remained unaccounted for. Given the crash site, Stephanie felt that number was remarkably low. The divers had made almost four and a half thousand dives to retrieve the debris and the dead. Their task had been made harder by the vast area over which material had been scattered and by the violent storms which settled over the region twenty-four hours after the crash. Approximately two dozen of the recovered bodies were more or less intact. The condition of the rest of the corpses ranged from ‘partially’ to ‘totally disintegrated’. Of all the photographs of the dead that were taken, only eight were deemed suitable for circulation for the purposes of identification, according to a psychologist assigned to handle the liaison between the authorities and the relatives of those on board. In the end, none of the eight was used.

      There was another section from one of the FAA’s reports that described the impact of explosive deceleration on the passengers. Many of them had been killed instantly. The force with which their bodies had been thrown forwards was so powerful that some of them had been decapitated, while others perished due to the violent separation of the brain stem. Those who survived this were then subjected to numerous alternative forces. The pressurized air leaked from the puncture points in the fuselage with a power ferocious enough to strip a body of its clothes, to rip contact lenses from eyes. During the free-fall, some passengers were burned to death while others were cut apart by structural debris.

      In another file, Stephanie came across a passenger manifest. Proctor had made several copies of it and scrawled notes over most of them. His comments were mostly concerned with structural damage from the first explosion. Stephanie looked down the list until she saw their names.

       Seat 49A: Patrick, Sarah

       Seat 49B: Patrick, David

       Seat 49C: Douglas, Martin

       aisle

       Seat 49D: Patrick, Monica

       Seat 49E: Patrick, Andrew

      In that part of the 747, towards the rear of the economy section, the seats had been in a three-four-three configuration, split by two aisles. Seeing their names in print, seeing where they had been positioned within the aircraft, Stephanie felt numb. She could deal with the emotions that she saw in others; the instant despair, the long-term despair, the bewilderment and the rage. What she found harder to cope with was the brutal, clinical truth. Printed statistics, cause of death on a signed certificate, names on a passenger manifest.

      She knew Proctor was looking at her before she saw him. He was in the doorway.

      ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

      ‘I couldn’t sleep. Did I wake you?’

      ‘I heard you in the kitchen.’

      ‘The man in seat 49C, Martin Douglas,’ she said, staring at the name between her brother and her mother. ‘Do you know who he was?’

      ‘He was an architect from a place called Uniondale. He lived and worked in Manhattan.’

      ‘An American?’

      ‘Yes.’

      She nodded to herself slowly. ‘So, an American architect condemned by an act of petulance from an English teenager he never knew existed.’

      ‘I’m not with you.’

      ‘I should have been in that seat. It was booked in my name.’

      ‘How come you weren’t?’

      ‘It was a family holiday but I didn’t go. I said I couldn’t be back late for the start of my university term. Not even forty-eight hours, which is all it was. But that wasn’t the reason and they knew it.’

      ‘What was?’

      Stephanie smiled sadly. ‘I don’t even remember. Something petty and hurtful, I expect.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because that’s how I was back then. Spiteful and rebellious.’ She looked up at Proctor. ‘Now, I’m just spiteful.’

      ‘Martin Douglas would have got another seat, Stephanie.’

      ‘Maybe …’

      ‘The flight was almost full but not every place was taken. If you’d been on board, he’d have sat somewhere else and the death toll would have been greater by one.’

      ‘How old was he?’

      ‘If my memory serves me correctly, he was thirty-three.’

      ‘Married?’

      ‘No.’

СКАЧАТЬ