Killer

And Job turned to her, his face expressionless, his eyes distant. “No,” he said, “Charlie was his wife.”

iv

The plane levelled out over Fairbanks on its way north from Anchorage. The whine of the twin jets died as the throttles eased back from climb to cruise power. Unseen beneath the cabin floor the orders given by the levers passed along conduits and wires in the plane’s belly to the harnessed fires in her engines; information passed back to the dials and gauges of the lighted instrument display panel. The co-pilot was doing the flying, and now they had reached cruise altitude he was adjusting the trim by turning a small wheel on his right. He looked at what his instruments told him, and his instruments told him all was well, so he watched the artificial horizon roll and settle with the actual horizon as the plane turned on to its course to Barrow field.

The pilot, like most of his kind, had the ability to do many things at once. At the moment he was chewing gum, smoking a cigarette and whistling.

They could have been father and son, such was the difference in their age and experience; indeed this was the relationship upon which they had modelled their own, the pilot teaching and ageing, the co-pilot learning and maturing. The older man’s name was Ed. He had taught the younger how to fly and the younger man had learned well. Ed had passed on the knowledge culled from flying more types of plane than the younger knew of, and in more varied conditions than the other could imagine. He had flown all over the world during the Second World War, had been a captain in his own right immediately it had finished, boosted up the ladder by the demise of so many of his generation. He had been a captain ever since, for one airline or another; but the big jets taxed him more than he could ever admit now, so he had moved over to flying smaller ones. As pilots of his generation were notoriously nostalgic this move in no way undermined his great reputation, so that whenever his name was mentioned among senior captains and aircrew there would be a sober shaking of heads and someone would say, “Now there is a flyer.”

Hiram was the co-pilot’s name. Hiram Preston. He was a man approaching thirty who had somehow missed out on his twenties. He was fairly senior but still young; maturing but immature. He still thought of himself as the All American Boy because he had yet to find out that he wasn’t. He checked the instruments which told him all was well. He looked out at the clear blue sky and his eyes, with nothing to fasten upon, focussed a little more than two feet in front of him. Like the pilot, he was whistling a tune, but he was neither chewing nor smoking.

The five passengers sat in the cabin which was a little under twenty-eight feet long, and which contained three rows of six seats – two rows on the left of the plane, one row on the right. Most of their baggage was piled in the empty seats at the back.

Kate found the steady drone of the engines soporific. Her sleep the night before had after all been troubled, and travelling is a notoriously tiring occupation. However, although she closed her eyes and leaned back comfortably into the soft depths of her seat, her mind would not stop sifting the varied mass of new information it had received lately, from the pointless minutiae of the refuelling stop at Fairbanks Airport, bleak even in mid-summer, the buildings of the terminal glistening distantly in the vivid sunlight as the aged fuel tankers laboured up the runway towards them, to the scale of the chasm which divided Simon Quick from Colin Ross.

In a tight, obviously restrained, very English silence they had loaded their bags into the plane at Anchorage. Because the hold was full, they had placed them neatly on the empty seats at the back of the cabin. The pilot had spoken urgently with her father and with Simon Quick while the co-pilot, an angular, freckle-faced, pleasant young man had helped herself, Job and Ross into their seats. The words spoken distantly between the three senior men became so heated as to be audible but not understandable before the pilot had made a theatrical gesture of resignation and come aboard.

He was about fifty, she supposed, with thin red hair and big inelegant hands, the backs of which were lightly freckled. He had exchanged a few terse words with the co-pilot, and had snapped on the intercom to tell them to strap in, while the co-pilot had made the luggage secure. There was surprisingly little luggage. Her own small case, the three small bags that Job had carried, with one suitcase he and Ross obviously shared. Her father and Simon Quick had only a weekend bag each.