The final verdict could take weeks, and the report a year, but Zoe and Lance were on their way up the mountain to look at the slit piece of hydraulic line. They’d call her when they’d assessed the likelihood of it having caused the accident. For now, she had enough to carry on with the inquiry on the basis that the deaths it had caused remained unresolved, and thus suspicious. In her world, there was no such thing as natural death, and Kelly wondered if she wanted to kill off the only thing in her life that was a source of good: the relationship with the father of her child.

Chapter 31

The vibration of her phone shook Kelly’s hand, which she held on to for dear life. She was being dramatic, she knew, but that wasn’t the point. She hated helicopters, and she’d seen first-hand what an accident looked like. The journey was short, and not enjoyable. She reckoned that even if they flew over all Seven Wonders of the World, she’d never enjoy another helicopter ride. She’d yet to discuss the casualties – or what was left of them – with her father. It wasn’t just the blunt force trauma, or the way human bodies were torn apart during accidents with all manner of vehicles, it was more the horror of what their last moments would have been like. Since having a baby, Kelly had felt her emotions soften a little – not too much; she wasn’t going rogue and feeling sympathy for criminal bastards, not just yet, it was more a pause before she judged, and a visceral need to protect the innocent. The death toll had crept up overnight to seventeen. To think that somebody might have caused this carnage on purpose was sickening.

She watched the footage sent to her by Rob on her phone, on repeat, to deafen the imaginary noises in her head of how the rotor blades would have pulled and pulled in the wrong direction without the tail rotor, exerting unsustainable torque pressure, ripping the cyclics out of the pilots’ control. They would have been pinned into whatever position they sat in, watching the earth race towards them, until impact.