‘And we call this the elevator – what do you think it does?’
‘Up!’
‘Up and down, yes, and this is the rudder.’
‘Rudder goes left and right,’ said his daughter.
‘What’s that about a starfish?’
‘On the ground, a long way down, behind us. In the forest. Never mind!’
He must have misheard. They flew for another hour. The airfield was east of Chittlehamholt. They had flown ten miles north, above miles of lush green, until the houses arrived below them in singles, pairs, then clusters and lines, and then it was the ugly greys of Barnstaple. Easily he found the mouth of the River Taw. They took the river line west, heading south where it started to give into the Bristol Channel. They moved above and below the cloud cover, swapping warmth for a view of the landscape when he needed to find their way. Appledore and Bideford were below, and he swooped the Ikarus low to show Clara the work a group of enthusiasts were doing to restore the old train station at Bideford; not that the trains would ever run there again.
Now it was the River Torridge they were following, narrower and criss-crossed with heavy bridges. ‘Heading back,’ he said eventually, in his voice a pang of regret but also triumph. He was more confident than he expected.
He heard himself explaining the workings of the aircraft to Clara, and he could almost hear his daughter not listening. ‘Roll, pitch and yaw are the three key words.’
‘What about speed?’ she asked.
‘Well, yes, okay,’ he said. ‘Speed is this handle, the throttle.’ He knew it was more complicated – the throttle was a way of controlling altitude too. ‘You want to take it?’
They were blanketed by cloud now, and the cabin had cooled. He had the sudden sense of how mad this was, the art of flying – who ever thought you could suspend two armchairs three thousand feet in the air inside a tiny metal box, just by using an engine and some cute levers and buttons?Don’t look down, he told himself. As they broke back through the cloud, he placed her hand on the throttle.
‘If I speed up, I can show you the starfish.’
‘Nothing sudden. Here, just a push to make it slower.’ He eased off the trim – his instructor had called trim the ‘cheap man’s autopilot’, because it enabled you to maintain a set altitude without constantly adjusting the yoke – but when he took the trim off, the yoke was harder to move than he expected, and the plane dropped fifty feet with its tail down.
Clara screamed and took her hand off the throttle.
‘That’s okay, love, all is fine.’
She calmed quickly and then, as they approached the airfield via the forested area along its northern edge, his daughter said: ‘Look! There’s the starfish!’
This time he knew he had not misheard. He looked. She was right. It was the strangest thing. A starfish lying on the forest floor … but if it was a starfish, it was six feet wide. No, that large white object below them was not a starfish.
‘What the … holy …’ he began.
He was not experienced enough to do what he wanted to do – slow the plane and take it down in a single motion,a combination of yaw and yoke, pointing the nose up with a sudden stab to lower the throttle. He did not know the plane, but he tried it. She thought he had cut the engine by accident, and instinctively reached for the throttle, thinking she was helping by pushing it to maximum. The plane was suddenly upside down and she was screaming.
Andrew Coombs felt himself blacking out, with no sense of where the sky and where the ground were. He looked furiously out of the canopy and saw trees. He saw, in a single instant, like the snapping of an old camera shutter, that the starfish his daughter had seen was a human form. There was a body on the forest floor dressed all in white; as the plane fell, it was as if the father and daughter were being dragged towards it.
The sound of an aircraft throttling, stalling, falling – if an aircraft can be heard falling in an empty forest – was the last noise on earth to reach the ears of Jonathan Wrigley. Wearing his white linen suit, he lay on the forest floor, arms outstretched, legs akimbo. Moving in and out of consciousness for what could have been minutes or hours, he knew he could not survive. The noise of the plane reached his ears and he opened his eyes. He strained one last time for life, but it was like using a length of cotton to stop a truck pulling away. The crossbow bolt had been fired so close to him that it must have gone straight through his body, straight through the centre of his heart. He had felt his torso flood with adrenaline, enough to kill him on its own. And then the blood came, internal of course, a body drowning in its own rivers.
He wondered who would find him. That plane – could they see him? Could they see the red rose growing on his chest; would they try to get help?
He was conscious for only another second. Somewhere the plane engine cut and he felt his face move into an expression ofutter calm. Then the truck in his body pulled out with a roar and he was dead.
If the world had frozen at the exact moment of Dr Jonathan Wrigley’s violent death near Chittlehamholt Airfield, the Ikarus two-seater would have been silent in the air, upside down, directly above him. But of greater relevance to the subsequent police investigation was the position of Thor.
The superhero had been tied to the ceiling of a cave by his arch-nemesis Gorr the God-Butcher. Each time Thor resists, Gorr ties him tighter with heavy gags and bonds he conjures from the air. The confrontation came one hour and nineteen minutes intoThor: Love and Thunder.
The relevance of Thor’s position to Dr Wrigley’s death was that at the exact instant Andrew and Clara Coombs hung in the air above Jonathan Wrigley, and Jonathan breathed his last, his wife Wendy was watching the scene in Gorr’s cave – in a cinema in Barnstaple.
Her unshakeable alibi, as solid as the sinews on Thor’s forearms, would be very important for two reasons. Firstly, the life insurance payable in the event of Dr Wrigley’s death was just shy of seven hundred thousand pounds.
Secondly, his wife had bought the crossbow.
EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER
