They all joined in and I wasn’t even embarrassed. It was going to be that kind of a day.
Abri looked as dramatically wonderful as always, looming up from nowhere, with the distinctive phallic shape of the Pencil — to which I gave only a passing glance — to its left.
As we flew closer I could see the huge crowd already gathered for the ceremony. Abri was abuzz, jam-packed with wedding guests. But I was no longer daunted by this. Instead I was by that time completely carried away by excitement. My adrenaline flow was in overdrive.
Above the engine noise you couldn’t hear the cheering of the people standing in the churchyard as we began to drop down out of the sky but you could see their excitement. Many of them were waving. I pushed my face to the cabin window and waved back. Abri was a glorious sight. The whole island had been decked out for the party. There were streamers and flags flying, white-clothed tables covered the lawn outside The Tavern and bow-tied waiters were already scurrying about. The whole thing was quite breath-taking, wonderfully festive, wonderfully romantic.
The crowd surged out of the churchyard to the helicopter landing pad just beyond. It was extraordinary to think that all those people were there to greet me, that they were anxious for the first glimpse of me. Not DCI Piper, but Robin Davey’s bride.
I felt a tremendous glow of happiness and a certain amount of wonderment as I peered at the scenes on the ground which awaited me. I checked my watch. It was just on noon and our timing was perfect. Robin had been right. The early morning mist had completely disappeared and this was already a much warmer day than we had any right or reason to expect at the beginning of April, warm enough to make the lovely old church below me shimmer in the white glare of the sun. It almost appeared as if the building was moving. The walls seemed to be shuddering in a kind of heat haze...
Then I felt my breath catch in my throat as a terrible reality overwhelmed me. It was no illusion. The walls of Abri Island Parish Church were shuddering. Great chunks of stone began to fall from them and parts of the roof flew through the air. The churchyard seemed to be sinking. Several big solid gravestones disappeared abruptly into the cavernous cracks which were opening up in all directions. People began to run. One woman collapsed to the ground, felled by some catapulting missile, and then seemed to be literally swallowed up by the earth. I caught a last horrifying glimpse of her face, her mouth wide open in a scream which nobody could hear. The church walls were no longer shuddering, they were waving, like the giant wings of some obscene dying creature revealing the decay of its innermost self. The earth seemed to open up — one monster crack now gaped and stretched its way across half the island. In ghastly slow motion the church and everyone inside it, the recently constructed foundations for the new hotel, The Tavern decked out in flags, and the wonderful old house which had been Robin’s home for so long, sank into the jaws of the chasm as if they had never been.
Fifteen
The scenes below us on the island were horrendous, yet at first none of us really reacted. There was total silence in the chopper apart from the roar of the engines. Then Clem began to scream. She uttered no words. Just an almost inhuman cry of terrible anguish. Her husband Brian and her five-year-old son Luke were both somewhere in the mayhem below. So was our mother. So was Robin and his brother James. So were so many friends and relatives. All I felt was a kind of numbness. I did not try to comfort her. How could I? I was myself far too shocked.
Suddenly the carnage seemed to grow more distant and I became aware that we were rising upwards, Eddie Brown was steering the helicopter up and away from the island.
I rounded on him. My sister was not the only one close to hysteria.
‘No, no, go down, we’ve got to go down,’ I shouted.
Eddie was almost unnaturally calm, his training had taken over, I suppose. He had only one consideration, which he quickly made clear, the safety of his craft and his passengers.
‘I can’t, Rose, it wouldn’t be safe,’ he said in a completely expressionless voice.
The helicopter continued to rise and suddenly Clem too became aware that we were going up. She lunged at Eddie, pulling and pushing his arms, even trying to grab the controls.
‘What do you think you’re doing, you bastard,’ she screamed at him. ‘My child is down there, my child.’
Eddie was a strong fit man, a professional quite intent on his task. Clem, about my size, was no match for him. He fended her off with one arm, continuing to pilot the aircraft with the other.
Abruptly Clem changed tack. She threw herself sideways and started trying to wrench the door open, using her feet against the wall of the cockpit as she pulled fruitlessly at the handle.
‘My son, my son,’ she wailed.
We were 100 feet or so above the ground, yet I had no doubt that, had she been able to open the door, she would have jumped, so desperate was she with panic and grief. Even at that moment, though, I knew that she could not do so. While we were in the air the door was sealed and electronically controlled. Only Eddie could open or close it.
We rose further and further into the air and began to swing around, away from the island. I had been leaning forward, peering out through the windows at the awful scenes below. Eventually I slumped back into my seat, quite defeated. Young Ruth had not moved. She remained perfectly still and her face was deathly white. It was almost as if she had gone into a trance. Somewhere in the distance I could hear Eddie on the radio. He was the only one of us who was functioning.
‘Mayday, Mayday,’ he repeated in his solid calm voice, and proceeded to give a brief, lucid and factual account of what was happening on Abri. ‘It looks like an earthquake,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. The ground is just breaking up, people are being swallowed into the earth...’
Strange really, but it was his controlled voice — and I learned later that it was in fact Eddie’s radio call which gave the first news of the accident to the mainland and sent the emergency services scurrying into action — which added the final grim reality.
My sister was still clawing at the door, whimpering now rather than screaming. Maude leaned forward from her seat at the back of the cockpit and put one hand on Clem’s shoulder, muttering words of comfort. It was the first time I had heard Maude speak since the disaster had happened below us. I had almost forgotten she was there. Robin’s mother. A woman whose two sons were both somewhere on the devastated island. I glanced back at her. She was still wearing the big brown hat with the veil. The little I could see of her face was dead white.
Eventually Clem, even in her distraught craziness, began to realise the hopelessness of what she was doing. She fell back from the door as abruptly as she had thrown herself at it, and collapsed in a heap on the cockpit floor.
I was unable to comfort her. As a senior police officer, I had already seen more than my share of death in my time, but never never anything like this. Almost everyone I cared for in the world was down there on Abri. I felt sobs begin to rack my body. I thought my heart was going to break. My dream had become a nightmare.
Clem seemed to be half out of her mind. Overcome with nausea she began to be sick, making no attempt to control her urging. Vomit poured out of her over the floor of the chopper. Roger had reached out now for Maude and was cradling her in his arms. Maude took off the big hat, put it in her lap and sat looking at it. There was no hysteria from either of these two — I would have expected none — but the pain in her eyes was terrible to see.
Ruth was still staring trance-like into the middle distance. I continued to sob pathetically. Eddie continued to do what he did best. Fly his helicopter. He also talked ceaselessly into the radio. I became vaguely aware that he had announced his intention of taking us straight to the North Devon District Hospital at Barnstaple.