Authors: Scott Mariani
So much for R&R, he thought to himself. Something had got torn in there, but the stitches seemed to have held. He patted himself dry, dabbed antiseptic cream on the wound and put on a fresh dressing that he covered with a clean black shirt.
By eight-thirty, the sun was already hot and he was back in the car, cutting northwards up the Seven Mile Beach road towards CIC. He walked into Nick’s old office without knocking and found Tamara sitting alone at the desk.
‘You’re up early,’ she said.
‘I’m up late. And you can forget about Julius T. Brigman.’ He sat on the edge of the desk and told her what he’d found out.
Tamara leaned back in her chair and pursed her lips. ‘It seemed to make such sense. Who sent those guys to beat you up?’
‘Someone else,’ Ben said.
‘Where do we go from here?’
‘Somewhere else,’ Ben said.
‘Will a cup of coffee make you more communicative?’
Ben shook his head. Gently so as not to yank his stitches any more, he reached into his back pocket for his whisky flask.
Tamara wrinkled her nose. ‘Isn’t it a little early in the morning for that?’
‘Hair of the dog that bit me,’ Ben said.
‘You’ll wind up like Brigman.’
He ignored her, unscrewed the little chrome cap and knocked back a slug.
‘I was awake all night thinking,’ she said. ‘Maybe the Brigman connection
was
too obvious. I had another idea. What if there was some fault with the aircraft and the manufacturers tried to cover it up to save themselves a bunch of lawsuits? Someone with a history of depression would be an easy target to pin it on.’
Ben screwed the cap back on his flask and shook his head. ‘They’d pin it on CIC maintenance personnel, neglectful servicing. And I don’t think they’d be running around murdering their scapegoat’s relatives. A lot easier just to call their insurers.’
‘Then what?’
‘Something else,’ he said. He slid off the edge of the desk and started pacing up and down the office.
‘Does it really help you to pace like a caged tiger?’ Tamara asked him irritably.
A caged tiger was exactly what Ben felt like, but Tamara was right – pacing wasn’t going to help. He stopped, looking around him for inspiration. His gaze locked on to the Escher print on the wall over the desk.
The angels, then the demons. It was impossible to see them both at the same time. When you focused away from one, the other came into view, creating a whole paradigm shift, an altered reality.
Sometimes it wasn’t what was there – it was how you looked at it. You just needed to look with different eyes.
‘We’re approaching this thing from the wrong angle,’ Ben murmured after a long pause.
‘Tell me what you mean,’ Tamara said. ‘And don’t say “another angle”.’
‘You have the passenger list on file?’ he asked.
She tapped the screen in front of her.
‘Let me take a look,’ he said. ‘And maybe I will have that coffee after all.’
Ben spent the next half hour studying the computer with such intensity that, watching over his shoulder, Tamara thought he might melt the screen. With the CIC files in one window and running web searches in another, he systematically checked each of the twelve passengers’ names against local and international news reports, as well as whatever else he could dredge up from the internet.
He started with the four British nationals on the crash flight. Their profiles quickly came together. Colin and Sandra Hartnoll and their son Jamie had been on holiday from their home in Leeds: Colin Hartnoll had taught geography at a sixth-form college, Sandra had been a legal secretary, and Jamie had been taking a year off before University. The fourth Brit was Gordon Love, a retired private dentist who’d emigrated to Little Cayman some years earlier and had been travelling to London to visit his daughter, Helen, and her husband, Clive.
Then there were the De Groots, a family of four from Amsterdam. According to online news sources Ruud De Groot was an ophthalmologist; his wife Ursula was a stay-at-home mother taking care of little Jan, 8, and Carice, 11.
Ben could see nothing here at all. He moved on to the next on his list. Monica Steinhart, 28, originally from Long Island, had been a freelance diving instructor based on Little Cayman. On July 23 she’d been travelling across to Grand Cayman to take a class of novices out to Stingray City off the north point.
The last three passengers to meet their deaths that day had been tourists from Tampa, Florida: Jim Duggan, 22, a postgrad college student and his sister Fay, 19, together with her twenty-year-old boyfriend Terry Bassini, who worked in his father’s motorcycle customising business.
As far as Ben could see, all twelve had been just ordinary people, pursuing their ordinary lives. Whether it had been work or pleasure that had brought them together on board the doomed aircraft that day, there was nothing whatsoever to suggest anything more than just a horrible coincidence for all concerned.
‘What do these figures here mean?’ he asked Tamara, pointing at the six-digit numbers next to each name or group of names.
‘Booking references,’ she replied. ‘Nick always believed in keeping the system simple and easy. When a customer makes a booking, we issue them with a number. All they have to do is show up, quoting it when they give their name, for the flight steward to check against the records. That way there’s no hassle with issuing printed tickets. We also take a phone number and an address on the island, for security reasons. It all goes down together on our records.’
‘Okay,’ Ben murmured, and went on searching the screen.
‘What are you looking for exactly?’ she asked him.
‘I don’t know. But there’s something we’re missing here. I’m sure of it.’ He reached for his coffee. It was cold but he took a slurp anyway. ‘Tell me about the co-pilot, Brady.’
‘Mark? What’s to tell? He joined CIC just a few months after it started up. Before that, he was with a charter outfit in Nassau. He often rode co-pilot with Nick, sometimes the other way round.’
‘What else?’
Tamara sighed. ‘I think I told you already that he and Cindy – that’s Cindy Masterton, the flight attendant – were going to be married in the Fall. Nick was going to be their best man. What are you shooting at?’
‘Ghosts and shadows, so far.’ Ben said. ‘How many Trislanders does CIC have left? Two?’
‘Just one flying. The other’s grounded. Business is that bad.’
‘Who are the crew?’
‘Jack Burgess is the chief pilot, his co is Mort Clegg. Jo Sundermann is the flight attendant. They’ve all been with the company since the beginning. So have the flying school instructors, most of the office staff, even the nice old man who tends the grounds. CIC’s like a little family, Ben. Nothing sinister or corrupt going on. No secrets.’ She paused. ‘Well, just the secret that you already know about.’
There was a soft knock at the door, and a man Ben hadn’t seen before stepped nervously into the office. Mid thirties or thereabouts, thin and weedy, balding with thick glasses and protruding front teeth. He had three ballpoint pens in the breast pocket of his shirt and was clutching a sheaf of papers to his chest.
Tamara said, ‘Ben, this is Grant Singer, the company accountant. Grant, Ben was a good friend of Nick’s.’
Singer gave Ben a handshake like a damp facecloth. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt,’ he said hesitantly. ‘But I was just going through the bank records for the last month and there’s a discrepancy here that I need to run by you.’
Tamara hesitated, then said, ‘All right, I have a minute.’ The accountant spread his sheaf of papers across the far side of the desk and began going through them with her.
Ben got up from the desk, walked aimlessly around the office, thought about a cigarette. His mind was swirling with thoughts and questions, and he was only half-aware of what Singer was saying in his insistent, whining voice.
‘I don’t see anything,’ Tamara said.
‘There on the statement printout,’ Singer whined. ‘The payment reference number. Now look on our own records. How come it’s not there?’
‘Ask Wendy. She does all the data entry.’
‘I already did. She’s no idea what happened here. Without that information, we can’t refund the customer if he was booked on one of the cancelled flights.’
‘It’s only a few dollars, Grant,’ Tamara said. ‘Can’t we deal with this some other time? I’m kind of in the middle of something here. Tell you what, you leave the papers with me and I’ll go through them afterwards.’
‘Only a few dollars,’ the accountant muttered under his breath as he left the office. ‘Sorry about that,’ Tamara said when he’d gone. ‘Grant’s a valued member of the team but he gets a little anal sometimes. What’s up?’ she added, noticing Ben’s expression of puzzlement.
‘Can I have a look at those?’ he asked, walking around the desk to examine the accounts paperwork.
‘Why?’
‘Just a feeling.’
‘I shouldn’t let you see confidential business documents,’ Tamara said. ‘But hey, you’ve already seen everything else, so why not?’
Ben was already studying the anomalous figures that Singer had underlined in ballpoint. The payment in question had been made on July 21, two days before the crash: the sum of eighty-eight Cayman Islands Dollars, paid by credit card by a Mr L. Moss. As Singer had pointed out, there was no mention of an L. Moss on CIC’s own records. No payment, no payment reference, no phone, no address.
‘What flight did this Moss book on?’ Ben asked.
Tamara shrugged. ‘Well, that’s the whole point. There’s no way we can tell that right now.’
‘The information’s lost?’
‘It’s not lost,’ she said irritably. ‘I’m sure it’s just mislaid. Things are a little screwy at the moment, as you can imagine.’
‘Does CIC often mislay booking data?’
‘Of course not. Grant would have a heart attack.’
Ben was silent for a minute, then asked, ‘When did flights start running again after the crash?’
‘Jack and Mort went out again for the first time the day before yesterday,’ Tamara said. ‘They’re out right now, as we speak. But we’re still only firing on one cylinder. We’ve had to make a load of refunds, hundreds of customers either pissed off about losing their flights or scared to get on one of our planes. It’s pretty dire.’
‘But this L. Moss hasn’t come forward for his refund?’
‘There’d be a record of it if he had.’
‘Then maybe Moss was on one of the flights before the crash?’
‘Could have been anytime between the twenty-first and the twenty-third,’ she said, nodding. ‘Or else it could have been in the last couple of days.’
‘Then even if his name and booking details somehow got accidentally wiped off the computer records, the flight steward would still have had a record of him boarding the plane.’
‘Theoretically. Why are you asking all this?’
‘Can you check?’ Ben asked.
‘I can try.’ Tamara glanced at her watch. ‘Jack and Mort will have landed on Little Cayman around now. I don’t think they’ve got more than a couple of passengers. Let me see if I can call the flight attendant direct on her cell.’ She put the desk phone on speaker and hit a speed dial button. ‘Hi, Jo, got a moment? Need to confirm a boarding reference to see if we need to refund this person or not, but I can’t find any record of it at this end. Customer’s name is Moss, Mr L. Moss. If he did fly, it was sometime before we shut down, or sometime since we started up again.’
‘L. Moss?’ a woman’s voice said over the speaker. ‘Nope. Don’t think so. Wouldn’t be any of mine.’
‘You sure you don’t remember him?’
‘Pretty sure. You know me.’
‘Okay, thanks, Jo.’ Tamara ended the call. ‘You know, he could still turn up,’ she said to Ben. ‘He might call anytime, yelling for his money back along with all the others.’
‘I can think of one reason why he wouldn’t do that,’ Ben said.
‘What reason?’
‘We could be looking at the crash flight’s thirteenth passenger.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Tamara stared at him. ‘Moss couldn’t have been on board,’ she protested. ‘They recovered all the bodies … except for Fay Duggan and the little Dutch boy.’
‘In an ocean full of sharks and barracuda, that doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t there,’ Ben said.
Tamara blanched and sat down heavily in the desk chair. ‘But …’ she began, then fell silent and bit her lip in agitation. ‘The security video,’ she said suddenly. ‘That would tell us right away. Everyone boarding an inter-island flight gets filmed on surveillance camera at either end. Nick hated the idea, but the authorities insisted on it after 9/11. Not that anyone ever checks the footage.’
‘Can we view it on here?’ Ben said, pointing at the computer.
Tamara nodded. ‘I can narrow it right down to the date and time.’ While she was clicking keys, Ben got up and went over to the coffee machine for a fresh cup.
‘Christ,’ she said after a few moments.
He turned. ‘Found it?’
‘Hold on.’ She clicked more keys. ‘
Shit
. I don’t believe this.’