He took a breath, as if he was about to dive into a deep pool, and looked down.

They were all dead, of course.

The young, dark-haired man closest to him – the one in the red sweatshirt – had his head twisted to one side and his mouth open, as if he was asleep and snoring. There was blood around his mouth and nose where his lungs had imploded upon the sudden loss of pressure.

The older man beside him had lost an arm below the shoulder but his face was unperturbed.

Tom took a pace forward and looked across at a chubby man, whose head had dropped so far forward that he appeared to be closely examining the twin stumps his legs had become just above the knees. Two bits of shiny blue-white bone protruded rudely from the meat and the tattered remains of his beige old-man slacks.

The girl who sat beside him was Lucia’s sister.

Tom grunted as that certainty hit him like something physical.

Candice Holmes had been pretty in the same soft, unassuming way her sister still was. Her hair was pulled back in two neat clips and the leaves and pieces of twig that decorated it looked deliberate, rather than the result of her 120 m.p.h. fall through the forest at the end of a 27,000-foot drop. Her head was thrown back against the rest, and her golden-brown eyes were open and filled with rain that spilled over and ran, like little rivers of tears, across her cheeks. A smear of blood at one corner of her mouth had been almost washed away by the rain.

Tom sat down heavily beside Candice, feeling the cold wet earth tug at him, suddenly aware once more of the sound of the rain dropping through the trees around him. The girl’s slim brown arm hung gently beside her seat, a silver bracelet with a single charm on it falling over the back of her delicate hand. The charm was of a penguin. He reached out and touched it, the backs of his fingers sliding against her hand. Her skin was cold, but so was his in the unseasonable rain.

Tom let go of the penguin, then sat for a while and held the dead girl’s hand while the rain dripped from the peak of his cap, and cried from her eyes.

*

As soon as the progress meeting was over, and Munro and Ryland had gone to speak to the press and families, Tom went back to his room and called Lucia on the phone he’d picked up at the airport. He’d also taken out insurance, feeling smug that he would almost certainly be claiming at some point. He called three times, twice hanging up before the phone could start ringing in LA. Finally he found his balls.

‘Lucia?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Tom Patrick.’

Silence. Then, ‘Oh. Hello.’ Cold but polite.

‘I’m in Oklahoma.’

Instantly, the coldness left her, along with the strength, and when she spoke again it was with the voice of a frightened child already on the edge of tears. ‘Yes?’

Tom felt like a shit: Lucia had obviously thought he might be calling for more selfish reasons, even at a time like this. Apparently she thought he was that big an asshole.

‘Did Candice wear a silver bracelet, Lucia?’

‘She had a bracelet … with a penguin on it.’

He knew there was no easy way to do this, so went straight for the quickest. ‘Then we found her body. I’m sorry.’

Lucia started to cry and he waited in silence, hating this. He could tell she was trying to control it, and wanted to tell her not to bother, but she clearly wanted to talk through it, and made a reasonable job of it.

‘Was she… did she …’

‘There wasn’t a mark on her.’

‘Don’t lie to me!’ Her anger surprised him.

‘Lucia, I swear. She was still strapped in her seat. She looked like she was sleeping – I couldn’t believe it. She looked so alive, I sat and held her hand. That was when I noticed the penguin.’

Lucia sobbed, and suddenly Tom wished he’d flown back to LA to tell her.

‘Are you alone?’

‘… the Sawmill,’ he managed to decipher.

‘Is there someone at home you can be with?’

‘I have to tell my mom.’ She hitched painfully, ‘How can I tell my mom?’

‘You want me to call her?’

‘No. I need to do it. I need to tell her.’ She was crying loudly now, and Tom felt his own throat tighten at the sound of her raw grief.

‘Why don’t you speak to Louis first? Ask him to tell her. He’s right there with her, isn’t he?’

She made a little sound that he interpreted as agreement.

‘Go home, Lucia. Call Louis, then go to bed, okay?’

‘Okay,’ she gasped, between sobs.

‘Get drunk. Something. I’ll call you later.’

‘Okay.’ The word tailed off and she hung up in a burst of fresh weeping.

Tom stared at the phone in his hand, wondering why the hell he’d said he’d call her later. Wondering why the hell he didn’t regret saying it.

*

He went out to get food and ran into Munro, Carling, Potts and Jan Ryland in the lobby. The rain had stopped so they walked to a local steak bar where Tom ordered catfish – the only thing on the menu that wasn’t red meat.

Munro ordered beers and nobody questioned it when Tom ordered another just minutes later.

They’d all found bodies; they all understood.

Carling, Potts and Ryland continued a tease that had obviously been going on all day about another case in another town. Munro barely joined in, but smiled and nodded as he ate, and made sure they all had what they wanted.

Tom ate slowly and quietly, but was glad to be in the company of the others, who were keen to regain normality, if only for a couple of hours before bed. It rubbed off on him: he was soothed by the noises of the bar, the clinking of glasses, laughter from another table, the pan-piped Simon and Garfunkel, which, on any other night of his life, might have led to a scene with a waiter but tonight allowed him to feel like he was drowning gently in middle-American nothingness. It was the land that taste forgot, but it was a warm and cosy land, distant from vomity card-room carpets and guns in mouths and young girls who should have been in LA with their sisters but who were instead being zipped up in black rubber and trucked slowly to the makeshift morgue on the local high-school basketball court.

He even felt a wishy-washy sense of burgeoning goodwill towards Lenny Munro. The guy wasn’t all uptight asshole, after all.

He started to tell him about the Avia Freight connection, to check the batch number on the fan disc when he found it, but Munro waved it away. ‘Tomorrow, Tom. We’ll talk about it then. Have a drink.’

Tom ate half his fish, but drank all his beers, and laid his arm across Jan Ryland’s shoulders to steady himself as they strolled back to the Holiday Inn. Now that the rain had stopped, the returning heat was sucking it off the blacktop in wisps of steam; the humidity and the drink made him feel warm and flushed.