Free Skinner's Ordeal by Quintin Jardine Page B

on the flight deck, in a stewardess's arms, and it kept him alive.'
    As Skinner finished speaking, he heard his colleague explode into tears. 'Okay, Ali, it's okay,' he said quietly. 'Why don't you go and look after your pal. Take a uniformed officer with you too, to keep the press at bay. On you go now.' He handed the phone back to the Sergeant.
    Maggie Rose was looking at him, concerned. But all he could do was shrug his shoulders and turn away. 'On days like this you have a surfeit of emotion, Maggie. Not just in you, but all around you.' He forced himself back to business. 'What have you done here?'
    `My role is co-ordination, sir, and that's what I'm doing, but I'm determining priorities as well. Chief Superintendent Radcliffe is directing the recovery of victims — that's objective number one. Once it's complete he'll move on to gathering in personal effects.
    `The CAA people are on the scene. Their first job is looking for the flight recorder, the Black Box thing. They say it's in the cockpit, in the reservoir, so our divers are going down again to bring it out.

    Ì'm focusing on identification. Look here: this is what I've done.' She led him across to a large pinboard, on the wall facing the door. Several sheets were fixed to it. 'This is the full passenger list, in seat order, and the crew list.
    Ì've got three Constables — two old-stagers and a lad who volunteered — moving between here and the mortuary tents, checking each body as it's brought in, then coming back here to enter details on the lists. Those with the wee stick-on dots beside them have been identified by possessions found on them: driving licences, credit cards, that sort of thing. If the dots are yellow, that means that the bodies will be visually identified easily by next of kin. If they're red, we may need dental records.'
    `This big sheet here represents the floor of the mortuary tent, where the bodies are laid out in rows of six. Each square blue sticker represents a recovered victim. Where they've been identified their seat number is written on the sticker. Obviously, the body bags are being labelled in the tent as well.'
    `That's important,' said Skinner. The last thing we want to do to a distraught relative is to show them the wrong body. What about photography?'
    `Taken care of, sir. We have six photographers here. Every body is being photographed where it's found, and is given a number as it's bagged. Then it's being photographed again inside the tent.'
    `That's good work, Maggie. With about two hundred or so bodies lying about, we have to move them as fast as possible. But this is looking like a murder investigation, so we have to cover every detail. When this thing gets to court, we don't want to wind up in the witness box with our shirt-tails flapping in the breeze.'
    He peered at the list again, and pointed to Roy Old's name. There was no dot next to it. As he looked the door opened, and a Constable entered, a young man whom Skinner recognised. His face was drawn, but his expression was determined and composed. He carried a clipboard with a sheaf of papers. The top sheet was a copy of the mortuary plan.
    The DCC guessed that the boy had aged three years in three hours. 'Afternoon, PC Pye,'
    he said. It was twelve minutes past noon.
    The young officer stood to attention. 'Sir!'
    Skinner smiled. 'Stand easy, boy. You volunteered for this duty, did you?'
    `Yes, sir.'
    `Well, good for you. I'll remember that. You have more details to enter?'
    `Yes, sir.'
    He stood back, allowing PC Pye to approach the pinboard. The Constable looked at his notes and placed six blue stickers on the master plan of the mortuary. On four of them, he wrote numbers. Skinner read the first number and tensed. It was 28A. Silently he watched as Pye unpeeled a yellow dot from its sheet and placed it beside Roy Old's name.
    The young man placed yellow dots against two more passenger names and a red against the fourth, then turned, and with a final salute to Skinner,