His voice still sounded calm.
A front?
A front?
Plummeting.
The shocking vibrations continued to ripple through the carriage as some of the overhead compartments burst open and began vomiting bags and jackets into the aisles, panels splitting from their moorings and crashing into passenger’s laps.
As the cabin’s odours increased with bodily accidents, an amalgamated truth crept stealthily between the passengers: the next few minutes of their lives were probably going to be their last.
She was yet to put on her mask, didn’t need it.
Plunging.
In a terrifying screech, a large section of the wing tore itself free from the plane and disappeared into the night.
This was it.
This was the end.
How much further could they fall before they hit the ground?
Falling.
Falling.
Falling.
The nose of the plane drove into the water, the carriage disintegrating. In the same second, water burst in through the port windows in an explosion of shards.
Propelled forward, the belt tore at her abdomen, dug into the soft flesh as the moorings above her head came loose and crashed brutally against her skull.
It was the last thing she remembered.
Almost.
1
London, England, 1992
Legend has it that in a remote corner of hell there is a solitary room reserved only for the blackest of souls. Very few are considered worthy; fewer still granted entrance...
Detective Sergeant Holly Newport stood quietly at the foot of the bed. She felt like throwing up. The two bodies were arranged side by side on the semen-stained sheets, glowing in their pallid nudity. Each body had been laid upon its back, interlocked fingers entwined between them like fleshy barbed wire.
Newport took in the precise carnage. She was physically small, but carried a big presence. And she’d seen many things.
This was something else.
In her gloved hand she held the small device her superior had found in the bathroom. Together they had listened to its eerily potent message. The individual who made the recording was disturbingly insane, that much was clear, yet from somewhere deep within the subject’s mind there was an obvious lucidity. Whoever this person was had planned this with precision, and he’d done so with an overview of toying with anyone who cared.
DS Newport looked back at the bodies. She cared.
At her side was her superior. He didn’t speak much, that was his way, and he seldom smiled. Tonight he looked gaunt and tired.
‘You want to listen to it again?’ DCI Nicolas York asked in his deep west end drawl.
Newport looked to her right and into the eyes of her boss. At forty-two, DCI York remained an attractive man. His thick head of black hair, usually stored beneath a tarnished trilby, helped to prop up his boyishness, despite the salt and peppering of stubble which flirted with his cheeks and the dark bags in which his eyes sat afloat.
Newport took a deep breath. She did want to hear the recording again. She wanted to listen to it until it made sense. Lifting the recorder, she hit the play button, an anticipation of static hissing in prelude…
‘Are we born insane, or are life’s twisted paths able to corrupt the deepest recesses of our psyches and turn us so? I was once taught of this thing called Free Will, which supposedly was bestowed upon us by the One some choose to worship. The One whose name I’m neither urged to utter nor care about. For is that level of worship not a tailored kind of insanity?
‘Some would say it is.
‘I would say it is.
‘You will label me insane and by your thesis claim that a sane person could not do the things that I have done. Perhaps you’re right. I’m of no authority to disagree, nor do I care to. I will not change your minds should I try. Once a person is labelled insane, every utterance upon his breath will be deemed crazy thereafter, no matter how much he insists on the contra.
‘So…’
Newport clicked the device off and looked back at York. His tired eyes told her nothing as usual.
The hotel room had been sealed off by a number of uniforms who were controlling the scene, but all were reluctant to linger. One kid, probably fresh out of training from the IPLPD, had run from the room and thrown up in the corridor. Forensics was going to love him.
At the feet of the victims, Newport pushed her spectacles up onto her nose and took in the macabre playhouse; the bodies, the bloody spectacle. She stayed like this, reeling in the dim light. This was indifference like she’d never seen.
‘You’ll go blind, staring like that,’ York admonished, flipping off his trilby and setting it gently down on the unit by the bathroom door.
Poking his head into the bathroom he already knew well, he flitted into the blue and red flash of lights from the patrol cars in the street. ‘Okay, Sergeant,’ he said aloud. ‘Tell me what you think.’
York did this sometimes, almost like he was testing her. It probably explained why he was so closed down, or why some of the other officers labelled him “genius”.
Tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, she took a mental inventory of the room for the tenth time: A white tiled bathroom, boxy and unclean; a few pieces of cheap furniture, chipped and scarred; a smashed wall mirror, shattered into infinitely accusing triangles; one grimy window looking out over the equally dour Peckham street; scabby carpet and nicotine yellowed and peeling wallpaper and one queen-sized bed which had recently become the dismal hotel suite’s focal point. That was it.
York waited, watching her with steady patience.
‘I don’t like it,’ Newport said finally.
‘No?’
‘No.’
Pause.
‘What’s to like?’
‘What I mean is,’ she added, ‘nothing
