B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm Read Online Free

failed. The driver, a man in his late thirties named Jon Whitestone, had bounced off the windscreen, leaving no face for his wife to identify. Beyond the fact that he was late coming home from work, no explanation could be found for the victim’s excessive speed. It was a needless death.
    Closing the lid of her laptop, Jenny wished she hadn’t read the officer’s report with her late-morning breakfast. The week had been fraught enough without work spoiling her Sunday, too. By the time she had finished dealing with the accident’s aftermath it had been past midnight. It was nearly two when she’d made it back to her cottage deep in the Wye valley, and she had needed a pill to sleep. Now there were only a few precious hours of the weekend left in which to recoup. She would get some fresh air, make a start on the paperwork that had been mounting on her desk, and finally decide whether she would follow the advice of several well-meaning girlfriends and start searching for a date on one of the more upmarket singles sites. She had been putting it off for weeks: the very idea of meeting with a complete stranger filled her with dread. It also felt oddly like a betrayal. Whenever she allowed herself to think of Steve, her former lover, she ached for him. But it had been her choice. She had encouraged him to take the position at the architects’ practice in Provence and to surrender to love if it came along. And it had, with almost indecent speed. Within months of arriving he had moved in with a beautiful dark-haired girl called Gabrielle, and was blissfully happy. He still sent the odd email, even a Christmas card which he had signed with a kiss, but his communications had become steadily less frequent as, without either of them saying so, they both acknowledged that it was time to move on.
    Could she ever be as close to another man as she had once been to Steve? Could she imagine sharing her most intimate secrets? She carried these questions with her up the footworn boards of the narrow wooden staircase and came no closer to answers as she ran a deep bath.
    She had plunged as much of her chilled flesh beneath the surface as the antique roll-top tub would allow when the telephone rang. Jenny closed her eyes and tried to ignore it. Whoever it was, she would call them back when she was ready. But they refused to give up. Ten, twelve, fifteen rings, still they persisted. It was no use. She forced herself out of the water, wrapped herself in a towel and hurried barefoot to answer it.
    She picked up the phone in the living room, water pooling on the cold flagstones around her feet.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Mrs Cooper? You’ve heard the news—’ It was Alison Trent, her officer.
    ‘No.’
    ‘Surely—’
    ‘No. What is it?’
    Alison paused. ‘A plane crash . . . On the Severn.’
    ‘Bad?’
    ‘Nearly six hundred.’
    It was Jenny’s turn to fall silent. Six hundred . ‘Not all dead?’
    ‘We don’t know. The good news is it’s North Somerset’s jurisdiction.’
    Jenny felt a selfish sensation of relief. ‘So we’re not involved—?’
    ‘I’m afraid we are, Mrs Cooper. South Gloucestershire police just called saying two bodies have been washed up at Aust. An adult male and a female child. I’m on my way. I thought you might want to come. Oh, and you’ll probably want to bring your wellingtons.’
    Jenny drove through the Wye valley as fast as she dared in the new Land Rover SUV with which she had reluctantly replaced her decrepit VW. Speeding through sleepy villages, she absorbed the constantly updating news of the disaster which had unfolded only a few miles to the south. A Ransome Airways Airbus A380, the world’s largest and most technically advanced passenger airliner, had ditched in the middle of the Severn estuary two miles west of the new Severn crossing. The crash had happened some three and a half hours earlier around nine-thirty. Rescue boats were at the scene, but no survivors had yet been found. There was