The Passenger Read online

  For Murray, Robert and Louis

  and for the sake of the dead

  46.5 Seconds

  The plane pushed back from its Heathrow stand just after six in the evening and took off twenty minutes later, an hour behind schedule. The captain was not hopeful of making up the time against headwinds. The forecast was for intermittent rain and showers, with a night visibility of fifteen kilometres. As they reached cruising height the cabin crew served drinks from the trolley. For the first thirty-seven minutes this was just another transatlantic flight, with everyone settling down for the long haul.

  Thirty-one thousand feet below, a herd of cows stampeded across a field, the first sign on the ground something was wrong.

  The bang is not even that loud at first, surely not loud enough to rip up the lives of 259 people. The plane does not explode, which would be the kinder death. It falls apart, accompanied by an ear-splitting thunder that people on the ground think is a nuclear bomb; it disintegrates in mid-air and the stewardess who welcomed aboard is sucked into the void, and the cabin lights go out, baggage spills from overhead lockers, so quick there is barely time to scream, and the dozing man wakes to think: this can’t be real! Within three seconds the whole of the nose of the plane snaps away, a vast wave of rushing air hits the main cabin and outside the fuselage skin stretches, blisters and petals into starbursts, unzipping along rivet lines, tearing from hole to hole, shedding panels, and a tiny, sane nugget of your whimpering brain is trying to shout: These babies were never meant to fly! And the whole of your life until that moment peels away and you wish you were anyone but you while the plane yaws and lurches, and in all the terror is an absurdity of embarrassment at wondering whether you are allowed to hold on to the stranger next to you. It is a calibrated process, the stages of an air crash – as reconstructions invariably show – and the mind holds many positions as the churning chemical slurry of your body registers all the responses of shock and disbelief, each stage stretched far longer than the split second it takes, no time for an original thought, only the beyond-sad realization of the interrupted narrative of your/my/our lives, and the desperate banality of praying this is the nightmare from which you will wake. Yet in the time it takes to plummet, there is a stage after terror, not of consolation exactly, but of a kind of crazed mental energy that kicks in as fear short-circuits the brain, bringing one last surge of intense concentration and a sense that this final great roller coaster through the dark – the unseen ground waiting to receive – is a universal journey as much as the personal one of your death, my death, the death of the falling man in row twenty-five, the child across the aisle, the infant in her mother’s arms, the young woman flying to meet her fiancé and the very tall American who got himself upgraded, and in a moment nothing will matter.

  At nineteen thousand feet the body of the plane goes into a vertical dive and crashes into the ground at a speed of more than 200 mph, 46.5 seconds after the bomb has detonated. It is December 21 1988.

  The Crash

  When he heard the news, his first thought was for his son, flying at that moment. The television was on in his room at Heathrow’s Post House Hotel when the news flash interrupted the scheduled programme to say a passenger plane had gone down in the Scottish borders. Collard checked his watch and sat down, shaky but relieved. It couldn’t be Nick.

  Collard’s panic returned when the carrier was named. He tried to reason that it could have been a flight to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Miami, Washington, perhaps not a Heathrow departure at all. Besides, the timing was wrong. He pictured Nick high over the Atlantic, probably asleep.

  He thought about the people on the plane that had crashed and felt shamed by his inadequate response, tempered with relief. He regretted parting with Nick on such unsatisfactory terms.

  The news flashes became more frequent but didn’t confirm the flight number. Collard rang the emergency line, which he found repeatedly engaged. He wondered whether to call Charlotte in New York then decided against alarming her.

  Eventually the engaged tone drove him from the room. The empty lift was claustrophobic. People sat in the bar and restaurant as normal, and checked in at reception as though nothing had happened.

  He waited under the hotel awning for a shuttle bus to the terminal. The weather was blustery with gusts of thin rain. Night was little more than an electric twilight, the vast illuminations of London staining the sky. He breathed the heady, mildly nauseating airport smells of scorched tyre and aviation fuel, imagining being trapped on a plane as it went into its final dive. Did people cry and scream or sit resigned, alone with their last private thoughts?

  To the east, lights flashed on a plane landing, bellying in, made graceless by the drag of gravity.

  The terminal hall was silent, as though the news had stopped everyone in their tracks. No one seemed sure how to behave in the face of unfolding disaster. A woman with a blue-rinse perm said in a stage whisper that trembled with morbid anticipation, ‘They haven’t said yet.’

  No one was saying.

  The departures boards still rippled, as they had in Frankfurt four hours earlier, and Collard remembered Nick’s rueful wave of goodbye in the Heathrow transit corridor as he walked away, dressed uncharacteristically in army-surplus trousers and black military-style anorak with a complicated array of pockets, both picked up on his travels. One unlaced sneaker flapped and his hair stuck up where he had slept on it during the flight from Frankfurt. Collard had been surprised by the different Nick that turned up. He’d had an ear pierced and wore a ring. Sensing Collard’s disapproval, Nick said it was done to annoy him. Three months was a long time away.

  Ahead of any official announcement, people started to name the New York flight, to the anger of a middle-aged man who spoke for Collard when he snapped, ‘How can you know? People here have friends and relatives on that flight.’

  After the longest time, a senior official arrived, harassed and inconvenienced, and reluctantly announced that Flight 103 to New York had crashed thirty-five minutes after take-off. A delay on the runway prevented its scheduled departure by half an hour.

  Someone sounding very distant asked Collard if he was all right. He nodded and walked unsteadily to the other end of the hall where he stood patting his pockets for cigarettes he didn’t smoke.

  An American voice behind asked, ‘Are you with us?’

  Collard stared uncomprehendingly as the man asked again. He knew the answer was no. He was not one of them, whoever they were, gathered in small groups around him, carrying hand luggage. They looked official and purposeful, something to do with the crash. Collard had given no thought to what he would do – go home, he supposed, and wait.

  He looked at the man and said yes.

  A maze of corridors took them away from the usual channels. No one spoke to him. No check took place as they left the building; no boarding cards or head count.

  They walked across tarmac to the plane, a normal short-haul carrier stripped of civilian markings. Collard heard someone wonder why it wasn’t leaving from somewhere less conspicuous like RAF Northolt. Faced with the gangway steps he had to grip the handrail to force himself up into the fuselage.

  Getting on the plane was hardest. Collard went to the back and took an aisle seat. The cabin was full but silent, with no pre-takeoff muzak, and only a skeleton crew. He found he was incapable of praying.

  A man in front of him said the programme he had been watching when he heard the news was This Is Your Life.

  They landed at Carlisle. Collard stood shivering on the runway, waiting in the queue to board the buses. He had spent the short flight failing to stamp out the images in his head of Nick trapped in the crashing plane.

  ‘Would you look at that?’ said a man with a London accent
behind him in the queue.

  Collard turned round in spite of himself. A luggage trolley stood on the tarmac and a single coffin was being unloaded from the hold.

  ‘What are you supposed to do with that?’ the man asked. He was smart, with an Italian suit and casually long hair. He wanted to know what Collard was doing there. Collard mumbled something about technical reasons.

  ‘You’re not anti-terrorist, then?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘My guess is at least half of them here are. We’re from the Met. Are you all right?’

  Collard thought he might faint, the pitted tarmac rushing up to meet him at any moment. What would it be like being blown out of the sky at thirty-five thousand feet?

  ‘There are a lot of Yanks here, shitting themselves it’s terrorism.’

  It took all Collard’s concentration to stay upright and get on the coach. With everyone seated, an officer announced that the plane had broken up in the air and landed partly on a town. Survivors were not expected. Because of the scattered wreckage they would have to wait for daylight to do a proper assessment, a task made no easier as it was the winter solstice, the longest night of the year.

  Collard hoped for Charlotte’s sake she had heard the news as late as possible and he experienced another rush of panic, realizing she would think he had been on the plane with Nick.

  The Disaster Zone

  Collard walked through the emergency centre, ghosted by the experience, unable to believe it had anything to do with his son. Nick hated fuss. Doors were labelled as rooms were requisitioned. A coffee machine was being installed on the ground floor. People shared the same bewildered, tense look, as though they were about to be tested for an examination they were bound to fail.

  He knew he had to call Charlotte, and searched in vain for a phone. Every one was commandeered. In an otherwise empty room, he found a harassed woman on the telephone, saying they needed hundreds more lines. She listed the police, the press, the army, fire brigade, medical services, crash investigators, civil-aviation experts, government observers, the emergency call centre, and a second tier of bereavement counsellors, caterers, accommodation, computer operators, transport coordinators and office workers drafted in to handle extra paperwork.

  ‘I’ve probably left some out,’ she said, catching Collard’s eye. She sounded local and sympathetic.

  He dug deep into his dwindling reserves, and thought that life would never be the same for that small Scottish town. Already things had changed for ever.

  He waited for her to finish and told her he had to call New York. He didn’t say why. It would be the first time he admitted Nick’s death aloud.

  ‘I need a break anyway,’ she said. ‘Guard the phone till I get back otherwise someone else will take it.’

  He tried dialling Charlotte’s number but couldn’t get past the code.

  ‘It may be that the lines are overloaded,’ the woman said when she came back. She tried the number, dialling fluently, hung up and frowned.

  ‘I’ve heard people are having trouble getting through to the United States. Someone said American telephone engineers have arrived from their naval base and all calls are being routed through them.’ She shrugged at this latest in a long line of inexplicable events. ‘You might have a better chance with a public call box.’

  The first kiosk Collard found across the road from the emergency centre was occupied by a reporter filing his story, with a queue waiting.

  Sections of the town were already cordoned off. The public Christmas decorations were still switched on. Collard marched on, head down, breath visible and ragged in the cold air. The reek of aviation fuel was palpable and threatening.

  On the outskirts, a fleet of ambulances, blue lights flashing, lay idle and waiting. Collard couldn’t persuade himself it was because there were no survivors, just as he couldn’t believe that the boy who had laughed at him that afternoon was dead.

  The first free phone box turned out to be empty because it had been vandalized. Collard stared at the guts of its receiver hanging out and wondered how he could carry on.

  Beyond the town’s limits, he found another kiosk, occupied, but with no queue. He waited, watching one coin after another being shovelled in the slot, concentrating on the disappearing money, the biting cold and his waiting.

  After twenty minutes, he claimed the kiosk and used his business phone card and listened to the digits hum down the transatlantic line.

  The number was busy.

  He redialled continuously, wishing Charlotte would clear.

  In the end he had to give up the booth to an ambulance man.

  The town drew him back against his will. He saw the first television crews arrive, wearing expensive anoraks and Timberland boots. A woman in a window was taking down the lights from her tree. The crackle of a two-way radio bled into the clatter of an approaching helicopter.

  No one questioned Collard when he ducked under a crime-scene tape.

  The other side was illuminated like a film set. Lights on stands, larger versions of the ones the television crews were setting up, were fed by snaking, thick black cables from a noisy generator truck.

  A shoe lay in the road. A miniature bottle of gin was cradled, unbroken, in a hedge. A woman’s cardigan had caught in the bare branches of a tree. An intact aircraft seat snapped off from the rest of its row lay in the road, a tray nearby and a torn in-flight magazine. A suitcase had burst on impact. Collard stared at the strewn belongings as the implications of his escape sunk in for the first time. The case he had checked in at Frankfurt had flown without him and would be lying somewhere.

  A parcel in bright decorative wrapping lay intact on a verge. The plane had been full of Christmas gifts, including his for Nick and Charlotte. The reunion with Nick should have been a cause for celebration, but in their last ever meeting he had failed as a father.

  The Search

  Collard bought walking boots, thick socks and a waterproof, preparing for the worst, knowing what volunteering to bring in bodies would entail, knowing he should be with Nick among the dead.

  The shopkeeper said, ‘What has the town done to deserve this?’

  Outside, tinny megaphone announcements gathered the search parties, their faces tense, like soldiers about to go into battle. Collard hoped he had the strength to handle what he would find. He thought there was still time to try and call Charlotte again before joining the parties as they moved out.

  Each of the closest phone boxes had a line of reporters waiting; the press centre was still to be set up. A few streets away, Collard found a kiosk with no queue, in which a brash young man was dictating from a notepad, taking his time.

  The search parties started leaving quicker than Collard expected. Frustrated, he rapped on the glass of the booth and was waved away. With a vehemence that shocked him, Collard wished the man had been in the plane to feel the starburst of terror as the dark skies opened beneath him.

  The reporter hung up at last, telling Collard not to be long because he needed to make another call.

  Collard’s fingers automatically dialled Charlotte’s number. The line connected, but her answerphone was on. He told her to pick up. His voice sounded hollow in the echo of the transatlantic line.

  She answered and cried with relief. She thought he had been on the plane. It followed Nick was safe too.

  He had to lean against the phone booth as he explained that he had been delayed but Nick had flown on.

  Talking to his wife, Collard wondered whether some sixth sense had steered him away from the disaster. And he wondered too about Charlotte’s unasked question – in that case, why hadn’t he taken proper care of his son?

  He listened to Charlotte’s soft crying three thousand miles away and recalled the shuffle of the departures board in Frankfurt and thought: All this from that.

  The search parties had already left by the time he returned, so he walked out of town after them. It was a grey winter morning of the kind that would barely r
ise beyond twilight. Helicopters droned overhead like mechanical insects.

  Charlotte had insisted on coming over. Collard, barely coping, suggested she wait. At the end of the call she said, ‘I unfroze him a turkey from Thanksgiving. He always hated turkey but the one year we didn’t have it he complained.’

  Collard passed through an empty stretch of countryside. Even the noise of helicopters disappeared. There were no cars, no searchers. It was like time had rewound. Collard stopped and looked at a saturated field, aware only of being miserably alive.

  A passing van stopped with a woman at the wheel. She was from the Salvation Army, on her way to serve hot drinks to the search parties.

  ‘You can help me. The urns are heavy. I can’t lift them by myself.’

  Collard got in. Her name was Mona.

  ‘Emergency or no emergency, you can’t expect people to be out in this weather with nothing to eat or drink.’

  In town there wasn’t a bun or sandwich to be had.

  Mona’s efforts reduced the disaster to coping. She showed no curiosity towards Collard, who only hoped she wouldn’t start talking about God.

  They stopped at the municipal golf course. The pay hut was manned by a policeman. Mona announced they had tea. The policeman tried and failed to summon the searchers on a walkie-talkie.

  ‘There was nothing wrong with it a minute ago,’ he said, shaking it.

  He couldn’t leave his post so it fell to Collard to go and find the searchers.

  ‘They’ve not got far,’ the policeman said. ‘They’re only over the hill. You can probably shout from the top.’

  Collard ran to attack the shock of what he might see. He was breathless when he reached the brow of the hill. What he saw below him stopped him short. It was devastation beyond comprehension. The nauseous feeling, caused by the stink of aviation fuel that had surrounded him since his arrival, returned. It was not a crash in any recognizable sense, more a long, vast scattering that made him think he was witness to a huge cosmic visitation. The aircraft had shed its contents as it broke up, leaving an enormous trail of debris back to the horizon, marking the path of its fatal journey.