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

some flotsam on the surface and a number of bodies had been recovered, but the aircraft’s fuselage had sunk beneath the water. The number of an emergency helpline was read out repeatedly. A shell-shocked air traffic controller from Bristol told a reporter that he had lost radio contact with the stricken plane without warning and had watched it plunge to earth on his screen. The descent had taken over six minutes, which already had a hastily assembled collection of experts speculating that by no means had it dropped like a stone. A physics professor explained that following a breakup an aeroplane travelling five and a half miles above the earth would take roughly two and a half minutes to fall to the ground. A descent lasting six minutes suggested that the pilot had retained some control and had struggled to remain in the air.
    Search-and-rescue helicopters were sweeping the mile-wide stretch of water to her right as Jenny crossed the vast span of the Severn Bridge, their orange lights disappearing in and out of the curtains of grey mist that hung over the estuary. She took the first exit at the far end, and minutes later was pulling up at the edge of a mud and shingle beach between Alison’s Ford and a cluster of police vehicles. A young constable approached. Jenny wound down her window.
    ‘Jenny Cooper. Severn Vale District Coroner.’
    ‘They’re expecting you, ma’am.’
    He nodded towards two white tents that had already been erected over the corpses. Jenny climbed out and pulled on her boots, freezing drizzle pricking the back of her neck. The mud was thick and deep, sucking at her feet as she waded over.
    Alison appeared from the nearer tent, swathed in a ski jacket and a plain woollen hat with flaps that hung down over her ears. ‘The girl’s in here,’ she said with a studied absence of emotion. ‘You can’t tell me you haven’t heard the news reports by now.’
    ‘I’ve heard them,’ Jenny said. ‘But I can’t say that it helped.’
    She braced herself and followed her officer into a tent no more than ten feet square in which a young female forensics officer dressed in white overalls was taking photographs of the little girl. Daily exposure to death had largely inured Jenny to the sight of all but the most horrifically damaged adult corpses, but the sight of a dead child was something she had never grown used to. The girl lay face up on the mud just as the retreating tide would have left her. The first thing Jenny noticed was the fully inflated bright yellow lifejacket with the straps secured tightly around her slender waist. She wore blue jeans, pink canvas pumps and a pale blue T-shirt with what appeared to be a purple tabard over it. Her sandy-blonde hair was plaited in a single pigtail. On her forehead was a raised, dark, circular bruise.
    ‘I think she might have been an unaccompanied minor,’ Alison said. ‘They make them wear those tops so the staff can spot them.’
    Jenny forced herself to look closer and made out the edge of what appeared to be an airline logo. ‘Has the medic been?’
    Alison dug a folded piece of paper from her coat pocket and handed it to her. The form, hastily signed by a doctor twenty minutes earlier, confirmed that there was no sign of life and no realistic prospect of resuscitation.
    ‘Her body temperature is less than ten degrees,’ Alison said. ‘She’d have been in the water well over an hour, probably more like two.’
    Jenny noticed the small bloodstain on the left side of the girl’s T-shirt that marked the spot where the doctor had taken her core temperature by liver puncture.
    ‘Any idea who she is?’
    ‘Not yet. I’ve left details with the incident room. I’ll get a call as soon as they have an idea.’
    Fighting her instinct to recoil, she studied the girl’s plaster-white face, her smooth bare arms and her fingers curled up to form partial fists. Apart from the blow to the head there was no other sign of injury.
    ‘I was expecting more