Distracted by the way her nipples showed through the thin cotton top in the half-light of the bedside lamp, it took Tom a second to realize she was holding her phone.

‘Calling Richard?’

She ignored the little edge to his question and smiled. ‘No, I was just turning it off.’ She put it on her woodworm-ridden nightstand, then gracefully threw herself across the bed on her back so she could reach his phone, which he’d left on the non-matching nightstand on his side. She turned that off too and he looked at her questioningly.

She shrugged almost shyly, and for a second time, Tom was moved to arousal by her sudden vulnerability. He turned to hide it from her and slid quickly into the bed, rolling onto his side to face away from her. He felt the mattress move as she slid beneath the covers beside him.

He felt her warmth seeping across the cool sheets towards him, and had to battle a compulsion to turn and take her there and then, rolling onto her, pressing her into the mattress, pushing her legs apart … He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed. He thought about the plane. The wreckage. The fan disc. Think about the fan disc.

He focused and found it depressingly easy …

Scoring and grazing.

Where each of the blades had ripped loose, the edge of the disc was torn and jagged – sudden failure written all over it. But there, over the site of the graze – in that one place alone – the disc must have shifted ever so slightly before it tore free. The fretting showed there had been movement between the flanges of the disc and the shaft. Small movement, but not sudden, one-time movement. Rather a sliding, rubbing motion.

Tom felt his body begin to relax as his mind picked up the slack. His breathing was easier now, the pressure in his groin lessening. Just as he had replayed that muddy English steeplechase in which Rum Shooter always just failed to catch the winner, a clear view of the spinning fan disc now filled his head. Somehow moving off-centre despite the ring of bolts gripping it to the shaft. Somehow shifting, taking the fan blades with it. And one of those fan blades digging into the abradable lining of the engine casing – digging in just enough to touch metal. A chaste metal kiss just a hair’s breadth deep. And, a nanosecond later, another. Slightly deeper but still not enough to notice without mathematical instrumentation.

And what was causing this sudden imbalance? The integrity of the disc itself? Or something else, which had made the disc shift? Something like an insecure fan blade? A faulty flange bolt?

He needed to see the fan disc again, with this moving picture now playing in his mind. He needed to look more closely at the point of attachment. They didn’t have the flange bolts, but there should be clues in the X-rayed metal of the disc as to whether it or the bolts were at fault. He had to see it. He had to go back there. He had to touch it, feel the movement. He—

Ness’s fingers slotted gently between his ribs. Fire spread from them across his chest, down his belly, while his mind continued to feed him the wrong pictures – pictures he’d tried so hard to see that now he couldn’t look away …

Tom mentally braced his hands on the fan disc and felt it move minutely against the face of the shaft – maybe a couple of thou of play …

She sighed against his hot skin.

Play.

Not sudden and catastrophic tearing of metal, but a slow, repeated movement where the imbalance increased exponentially and inevitably …

Play.

Just enough to throw the whole assembly out of alignment, for the blade to hit the casing, for the engine to rip apart …

Play.

A funny little word for what had caused 124 people to die screaming in the wreckage of a stricken Boeing 737.

He was out of bed before he could think, pulling on his jeans in a frenzy.

‘Tom?’ She sat up and he turned on the lamp to see her looking hurt and a little startled.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I have to go back there.’

‘Now?’ Her voice was tense with disbelief.

‘I’m sorry,’ he offered again, uselessly. His fingers were awkward and he flinched as he realized she was watching him trying to button his jeans over his erection. ‘Shit.’ He left it for a moment, pulling on his shirt and shoes instead. He knew he looked like an idiot. But he also knew that this thing would burn in his mind until he saw it. Saw the evidence he was certain was there. Felt the probable cause under his fingers.

He had to go.

‘I’ll come with you.’ She flung back the sheets and swung her legs off the bed.

Tom hesitated. Was she nuts?

Then he picked up the car keys and managed – finally – to button his pants.

*

The flurry of the bedroom gave way to the far more difficult silence of the car as he swung away from De Rust.

Tom glanced at Ness in the pale green glow of the dials and couldn’t read her expression as she stared at the tunnel of illuminated brown dust that raced towards them out of blackness, became darkroom red behind them under the tail-lights, then died away into blackness once more.

The further they got from De Rust, the more uncomfortable Tom felt.

His desperation to see the fan disc again was still there – the need to know whether the play had been caused by one bad bolt or a weakness in the integrity of the entire disc – but the thought of advancing a mere hunch as an excuse for choosing work over her was pathetic. He couldn’t insult her by attempting to give it validation, so he said nothing, instead feeling the silence smoulder between them. He couldn’t look at her face, but her hands were clenched on her thighs, and he wished he could reach out and take one – the way he would if this were a movie and he were a hero, instead of a fucking asshole.

Sudden headlights lit them up and lasered at him off the rear-view mirror.

‘Tom!’

Her shout and the sudden blindness hit him together. A bang of metal on metal, and he wrenched the wheel violently to the left to avoid worse. He felt the Honda slide and grip and slide again, then came the spin and the thuds and bumps of hitting the surprisingly solid desert tufts, as sand spewed over the windshield like a dry brown wave.

They came to rest facing the direction in which they’d been travelling and, as the clearing dust brought the night back into focus, he could see the tail-lights of the other car speeding away.

‘Jesus! Where the hell did he come from?’ He looked at Ness, who was panting, her hands braced on the dash. ‘You okay?’

She turned frightened eyes towards him, but nodded slowly.

The car had stalled. Tom turned the key but the engine choked apologetically. In the vast and sudden silence he could hear it ticking like a quiet little bomb.

He tried again. ‘Shit. Come on.’

She touched his hand. ‘Give it a minute.’

Tom sighed and turned off the headlights to conserve the battery, for what that was worth, and they were plunged into blackness.

He looked at his watch: twelve forty-three. Pam and the team wouldn’t be out until six or seven at the earliest.

Tom checked his phone. Shaking it didn’t help it find a signal. ‘You got your phone?’

Ness gave a wry half-smile.

This was just great – worth halting sure-fire sex with the hottest woman he’d ever known. He wished feverishly that she’d stayed at the guesthouse and not been witness to this latest display of incompetence.

He got out and went round to the front of the car, shivering in the cold desert night.

The stars here were extraordinary; they seemed so close and bright, and were thickly spread in places as if someone had spilled a packet of star seeds and they’d grown haphazardly where they fell. Clustered in places and bare in others. A patch immediately overhead was naked indigo with only a single lonely point in the middle of it, light years away. Tom wished he were there.