Flight Path: A Wright & Tran Novel Read Online Free

squandered?”
    “Yes,” Franklyn hesitated. “Well, that’s what the official police enquiry and the initial coroner’s report concluded.”
    Kara looked up from the file, “But you don’t think so?”
    “I don’t know. I just think it’s too convenient.”
    “Alright, let’s begin at the beginning then?”
    Franklyn smiled across the table at her and Kara, as she had done the first time they had met, found herself reciprocating the expression. There was something charmingly enigmatic about this old man which she found at once relaxing and intriguing. She knew practically nothing about him and despite Tien’s and her best efforts they had failed to uncover anything. She didn’t even know his full name. But then again, she didn’t need to.
    “Ever the practical one Kara,” he said.
    “I like to think so,” she agreed.
    “All the details we could recover are in the folder, but the general gist is this; Derek Swift was born in a village just outside of Ipswich, Suffolk in 1970. From age fourteen he volunteered at the local cottage-hospital radio station and after leaving school he moved permanently to Ipswich and started working for Radio Gippelwich.”
    “Never heard of it,” Kara said.
    “Well you wouldn’t. It services the town and about twenty miles around. But it’s second after BBC Radio Suffolk in popularity, so as Derek progressed from teaboy to DJ he began to be known in and around the town. He covered the local sports events, did outside broadcasts from the Suffolk Show, judged the occasional pageant, baking competition, you get the idea.”
    Kara nodded.
    “Eventually he had his own breakfast show, ‘The Swift Start’, which quickly became the most listened to radio show in Suffolk. After a few years he received offers to move to London and join the big national networks but he turned them all down. There’s a newspaper cutting in there saying that he loved his home county and that he was happy. Ambition and money were second to family and friends.”
    “That’s quite refreshing,” Kara said. “What family did he have?”
    “Parents and an older sister. That was it, no long-term partner although he was often seen in the company of women at functions and events,” Franklyn paused as the waitress came back with his pot of tea and Kara’s latte. He thanked her and poured himself a cup. Kara added a sugar to her coffee and watched Franklyn sipping his hot tea with no sugar or milk added. As he set the cup down he continued.
    “He diversifies by going onto the local commercial television station. Chairs local-interest panel shows, a debate at election times, interviews the manager when the town football club was doing well, or badly. Eventually they offer him his own local-television talk show on a Friday night, ‘A Swift Seven Days’ taking a look at the events of the past week. Again, it does well and again he’s offered to move to bigger things but again he turns it down.”
    “Sounds like he was doing okay. So what went wrong?” Kara asked.
    “As you can probably imagine, Swift was always involved in local charities. Last year there was a cluster of kids in the Ipswich and greater Suffolk area all diagnosed with the same rare cancer. It made the national news, but the Scottish Independence vote was at its height so it was rapidly pushed from the newsfeeds. Locally it was still a significant story because four kids in a thirty-mile radius had a cancer that normally would affect only ten in the entire country per year. The progression of the disease was advanced and the normal treatments weren’t successful.”
    “How old were the kids?” Kara asked.
    “A four year old, two five year olds and a seven year old,” Franklyn lifted his cup again.
    “This isn’t going to end well, is it?” Kara asked, dreading the answer.
    Replacing his cup in its saucer the old man refilled it from the small pot, “No. Not well. Derek Swift headed up a fund-raising drive to get enough money