‘Or I’m gonna call security.’

‘Okay.’ He didn’t stand up. It had to be here somewhere. It had to be …

He’d hoped Dexter would have to go somewhere else to call security, but instead the man pulled out a phone and stood with one hand on his cocked hip while he asked them to come on down. No chance for Tom to stuff paperwork down the back of his pants.

A small, depressing part of Tom recognized how far he had fallen at this precise moment, but he forced it to the back of his mind as he scooped up handfuls of paper in his impossible quest.

Dexter snapped his phone shut and put his other hand on his other hip, looking like a puny, petulant Clark Kent. He was too nervous to come over and snatch the paperwork from Tom until reinforcements arrived.

Tom’s eyes found disc. Disc. Fan disc. There it was!

He made himself riffle past it a few pages, all too aware of Dexter’s burning gaze, but leaving the document protruding from the pile. From the corner of his eye he saw two uniformed men walk briskly into the room, both shorter than him, but a lot wider. He stood, holding the sheaf of papers.

‘Okay, okay, I’m going.’

‘Without the papers, please, Mr Patrick.’ Dexter was enjoying his power-by-proxy to the full, now that someone had his back, front and both sides.

Tom dropped them back into the box. They hit his espresso on the way down and half a cup of black sludge poured into the box with them.

‘Fuck!’ yelled Dexter and hurried over, trying to shake coffee off the maintenance records.

‘Shit. I’m sorry.’ And Tom genuinely was sorry – sorry that he hadn’t bought a mucho grande cappuccino from the crappy machine. Then Dexter could’ve made himself some nice papier-mâché hats from the wet pulp in the box. As it was, there was only enough spillage to create a distraction, but that was all Tom needed. As Dexter fussed over the boxes, Tom fed a single folded sheet of white paper up his sleeve with the skill of a grifter.

Then the security guards gripped him by the arms and showed him the door.

*

The white docket was the ‘Serviceable’ tag, and told Tom a story just as if it had been a novel.

His ability to picture a whole series of events suggested by the briefest of information had always been a joy to him. As a boy, an old English racing almanac he’d found in a thrift store had consumed him for the best part of a year as he deciphered its archaic shorthand: ‘Ld 1 to 8; blndrd 9; went 2nd rdly run-in; just fld, shhd.’ Eventually it revealed to him that a horse named Rum Shooter had led from the first fence to the eighth, blundered at the ninth, come back to take second place readily after the last fence and was gaining on the leader before being beaten by the then smallest of racing margins – a ‘short head’. The book was his Rosetta Stone and fostered an addiction to gleaning the whole picture from the bare minimum of seemingly meaningless information. The fact that the race referred to was an amateur steeplechase that had taken place twenty years earlier some six thousand miles away in a muddy English field for a purse of twenty-five pounds and a pewter mug was immaterial: it ran fresh in his head every time he read the summary. Everything he needed to know was there in that old cold print. It was all about knowing how to read it, and imagination.

No wonder he missed air crashes, he thought, with a pang. His favourite part of the job was when every piece of wreckage that could be found was laid out on the floor of a hangar in an exploded view of the aircraft it had once been. Tom felt his stomach clench in excitement just at the thought of it. The knowledge that somewhere among the thousands of twisted, charred scraps of metal and foam, rubber and cabling lay the solution to a puzzle that seemed to have been devised and presented for his exclusive gratification.

Other investigators preferred the computer-aided reconstructions, the simulator rides, the eyewitness accounts, the cockpit voice-recorders of pilots reacting to the unexpected, spiralling from professionalism into panic as their planes shuddered and screamed towards the ground. Other investigators hated picking painstakingly through the wreckage looking for tiny, sometimes microscopic, clues, but Tom lived for it. Holes in oil pipes didn’t compare – didn’t even come close.

He sighed at the aching, plane-shaped space he realized it had left in him, and slid onto his back on the beat-up leather couch, careless of his sneakers scuffing the armrest. He twitched a lip in a self-mocking half-smile. He hadn’t even felt this miserable when Ella left. What kind of man was he? Lying here alone, friendless, sexless, and mourning not his girlfriend but a hangar filled with scrap metal that held secrets in its very molecules.

Tom sighed and rubbed a hand over his face.

Loser.

He picked up a doughnut – the fastest coffee-sponge he’d been able to think of after his unceremonious exit from CalSuperior – and got back to the task at hand.

The scrappy white Pride of Maine print-off, annotated here and there with biro and oily mechanics’ fingerprints, told him the story of the fan disc.

It was a short story.

Tom was surprised to see that this was a replacement fan disc, two years old. That worried him on two levels. Either it meant he was hopelessly wrong to suspect that the fan disc had had anything to do with the Pride of Maine or the South African crash – or it meant the replacement fan disc had been badly flawed. The mechanic who’d installed the replacement disc had signed the job: N. Alvarez.

The phone rang and Tom looked at it suspiciously. The answering machine kicked in and he heard Lenny Munro’s tight, angry voice.

‘Patrick? What the fuck are you doing, you piece of shit? You fucking second-guess me to Pete, then go poking around my investigation like I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing? You go anywhere near that investigation again and this time I’ll see your ass kicked clean out of the board! Asshole!’ And he slammed the phone down so hard that Tom winced a whole continent away.

His only emotion was relief that he hadn’t picked up. He still felt queasy from the so-called espresso and had no stomach for trading insults.

He ran his eyes down the docket again.

The new fan disc had been supplied by Avia Freight and installed by CalSuperior. Nothing unusual about that. It was common for big companies like Avia to keep a stock of parts, and for smaller companies, like CalSuperior, to buy from them. CalSuperior had bought the plane itself from Avia: it was only logical they’d go back to them for parts.

The fan disc had spun through nearly five thousand cycles since then. Around seven start-ups a day for two years, with time off for maintenance. Not enough to fatigue, not enough to shift out of alignment, not enough to get scored in any way, shape or form. Not nearly enough.

Tom was frustrated by the paucity of information on the docket. If the fan disc had been the original, it would have run to six pages. As it was, all he had was the installation date, the disc serial number – B501-7776512 – the initials and signature of the mechanic who had performed the task, and three subsequent maintenance checks, each one unremarkable, adding more to his well of knowledge about dirty fingerprints than about the possible causes of the failure of the number-two engine.

The original manufacturers’ paperwork wasn’t even attached, although it might have been in the box he hadn’t finished searching. At least he had the serial number. If Lowell Dexter hadn’t been a prick, he could have checked that on their computer records.

It was frustrating to have to rely on ephemera like paper and digital records when what he really wanted was to hold the fan disc in his hands and run his thumbs and eyes over its surface, checking for imperfections.

He frowned. The Pride of Maine wreckage was long gone.

But there was still the South African jet.

The phone rang and he looked at the ceiling while he waited to hear if Lenny had anything else to say.

‘Hi, Tom. Want to play some cards?’

*

Tom had lost sixteen thousand dollars when Ness put her hand on his neck. He felt himself flush with embarrassment. He was being pulled out of the game, stuck on the bench.

He’d played a stinker.

Outside she hitched one perfect shoulder and half smiled. ‘That’s just the way it goes sometimes.’

She was wrong and they both knew it. He’d been beaten by his own arrogance. Any pocket pair in Hold ’Em was a big deal; kings were even better. But he’d hung in there too long with too much pouring into the pot, not wanting to believe the low straight that was unfolding on the table. His ego refused to let him throw in pocket kings: he wanted to beat someone with them, to be called and flip them over and see the looks on the faces of the other players.

Tom felt the sun warming his shoulders after the cool air of the club, and shivered.

‘You want to get a drink or something?’

He grimaced. ‘A pity drink? No, thanks.’

She smiled. ‘You have your pride,’ she teased, and the Lotus beeped and flashed as she unlocked it.

He held the door open and watched her slide in and drive away.

‘Yeah,’ he said, under his breath, ‘for whatever that’s worth.’

15