"Will you help him?"
"What went wrong?" He was curious, he admitted. There had been nothing but speculation on TV and in the newspapers, and by men whose credentials he either suspected or dismissed. Pilot error… how they loved that old dog. The oldest, most inclusive slur and easiest escape route for guys who shaved safety and quality for profit, extended maintenance schedules, ignored routine checks.
"We he doesn't know…" She sounded doubtful, angry.
"He hasn't told you what he suspects? What about the flight recorder?"
"Nothing to account for the crew died, Mitchell." He wondered, disliking himself at once for the suspicion, whether the lack of information was just another persuasive tactic.
"It was on the news."
The banks are crawling all over him, Mitchell. He could be ruined by this-!" The element of hysteria in her voice was uncalculated, genuine. He knew the tone only too well.
"Did he ask you to call me?"
After a silence: "No…"
"No. He wouldn't. What could I possibly know he didn't know already the guy who flew his personal jet and disappointed his daughter?"
"Please not now…" She sounded wounded, exhausted. Then hard-edged as a flint.
"Will you help, Mitchell? Just a simple yes or no, then we can end this—"
"How badly is he hurt?"
"You've seen the Dow? The banks are panicking. Burton, the man who's agreed to buy the first six planes he's suffering, too." Then her filial outrage overmastered all other feelings.
"He doesn't deserve to fail, Mitchell. Even you'd have to admit that!
They're all waiting for him to fall he's on his own and he's on the edge. For God's sake help him!"
He felt as if he was listening to the sound of a collapsing building.
Her noises were dry sobs, grasps at air and calm. Where her husband was he could not guess or from where she was calling. He owed Barbara precisely nothing except her continued apprehension of the truth that he was responsible for the failure of their marriage. She was entitled to that prop to her confidence, that investment in her new marriage. He owed Vance even less. Headlights slid across the curtains like a searchlight seeking him, then they were gone.
He went on listening to the silence from the other end of the line. Was she waiting for his reply, or did she think she had already heard it in his silence? Perhaps she was clinging to the phone like a life belt What in hell could he do, anyway even if he was a better accident investigator than most, probably than the guys picking the plane to pieces in Vance's hangar outside Phoenix? It had been a pre-delivery, routine flight. Nothing had seemed wrong, everything was registering normal or satisfactory, the status of every working part… Then the pilot had reported sudden engine failure, declared an emergency and felt the plane carrying him drop out of the sky, determined to kill him and everyone on board. It was the pi lot who hadn't deserved it.
"Barbara," he said eventually, his voice level.
"Yes?" Unreasonable hope mingled with self-protective contempt.
"A guy reminded me, two days ago, I was a federal employee. If I come to you if I find anything then the FAA will have to know. I won't cover up for Alan or you. That's the risk. If the plane's guilty, I'll have to say so whatever it does to the stock and however much it frightens the banks." He paused, then murmured: That's the deal."
She was silent for no more than a moment, then she asked abruptly: "Can you be here tomorrow?"
"Maybe. See you—" But the connection had already been broken, as suddenly as if they were lovers and her husband had walked unexpectedly into the room from which she was making the call. He looked at his receiver, then replaced it.
He had expected the call, he decided. It had been that anticipation that had kept him awake. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. He rested against the headboard, arms folded across his chest. Had he wanted her to call? Maybe… probably. He sensed, from the TV news and the scuttlebutt at the FAA offices, that it was the plane that was at fault, not the pilot. Alan Vance's dream, become a reality, was faulty it didn 't work. And he would prove it. And, because he was a senior accident investigator, he would be able to tell the whole of America on TV.
Good Morning America… He grinned sourly. Barbara hadn't thought it through, hadn't realised how much he still hated Vance and resented his treatment at the man's hands as the marriage accelerated down its slippery slope to its day in court. Vance had lied about him, blackened him made out he was the jerk of all time and violent, too.
He'd told the newspapers, anyone who'd listen and repeat the slurs.
He continued smoking. Now Vance needed him. Better than that, Vance didn't even know he was coming, didn't know that his beloved only daughter had invited him Yes, he had waited, really waited for her call… When she returned to the Holland Park house from the board meeting of one of the unfashionable charities she helped shepherd, Charlotte Burton found her husband in the first-floor drawing room, the younger boy, Jamie, on his lap.
Both of them had, apparently, been lulled to sleep by the book that lay fallen on the Chinese carpet. She paused in the doorway, studying him as he struggled awake. The youth that sleep, however exhausted, had given his features, vanished. Jamie stirred and, looking at her, Tim hugged the child.
"Hi," he said.
"Er we must have fallen asleep…" He grinned apologetically.
She crossed the room and stood behind the sofa, her hands resting on his shoulders. At once, his cheek rubbed against her fingers, intent as the gesture of a small, dependent animal. Jamie had probably been tired out by the grim, dedicated intensity Tim always brought to play with his children when he was deeply worried. It was almost as if he were enjoying them for a final time. His lovemaking at such times was, by contrast, apologetic, tender and guilty, as if he had betrayed her.
"Rough day?" He nodded against her fingers.
"Are you in this evening?" His head shook.
"Sorry, Charley." He stretched his head back and stared up at her.
"You're so beautiful," he announced, and she quailed inwardly. He was ragged, becoming unravelled. It was even obvious in the way he carefully handed Jamie to the carpet, as if he was dealing with something Ming and fragile, bought with a loan he could not repay.
"That bad?" she steeled herself to say, adding: "Has Greta made your tea, Jamie?"
Jamie, pushing tracks of a toy lorry into the thick pile of the carpet, nodded. He was still Daddy's boy, herself and the au pair just females for the moment.
"Yuck. I left it salad. That's all she eats. Yuck!"
Where' sTony "Cricket nets," Jamie replied. There were three years between them, but they still attended the same prep school. Next year, Tony would begin at Winchester, Tim's old school.
"Cricket — yuck."
Burton, stroking her hands with his own as they rested on his shoulders, chuckled.
"Disgraceful slur on the beautiful game."
"Footballers and golfers are richer than cricketers," Jamie observed, idly turning the pages of the book from which Burton had been reading.
Lord of the Rings- of course. It was Tim's idea of literature as well as what children should imbibe with their mother's milk or their au pair's salads.
"Richer than me, too, before very long," Burton murmured, and he flinched as her grip involuntarily tightened on his shoulders.
"Sorry," he added, patting her fingers.
"Who are you wooing this evening?" she asked, staring over his head, across the room to the marble-topped sideboard, the two Louis Seize chairs, one on either side, and at their figures reflected in the French mirror with the trumpeting angel surmounting it. She always and perhaps to her slight, shameful disappointment appeared the more mature of the two, the more purposeful, self-confident. Quite often, especially in mirrors and when unaware, Tim was still the schoolboy who had desperately sought, even bought, his friendships; who had always played amanuensis, second fiddle to boys better at sport, or more intellectually equipped.