The sky was clear blue and it was the type of day in the Lakes when all you wanted to do was jump in a lake or run up a hill. She could do neither, and it was also fucking freezing. Her breath blew in clouds about her head. Activity on the mountain was still frenetic and she saw helicopters taking off and landing, as well as MRT members coming down the path with evidence bags, to be collected by the AAIB at the Wasdale car park, which had turned into an incident camp. From there, evidence was driven to a hangar in Penrith, where the AAIB would piece together the fuselage and begin their painstaking work of figuring out what happened up there. Their priority was finding the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder which, Zoe had told her, on these models was a combined digital unit called a CFDCVR. Unfortunately, it would take some digging out, as it was stuck in about three feet of boggy mud up there.

She spoke to Rob on the phone.

‘So, the article was written by a freelance journalist who, it appears, has made it his life’s work to expose Tactika Enterprises, amongst others, as a giant climate destroyer, in bed with powerful US companies. They pour billions a year into anything that will discredit scientific research into global warming. They create companies with names like “Eagle Freedom” and “Friends of the Hedgehogs” and filter funds through them, ostensibly producing papers on green issues and diverting attention away from the carbon footprint of their real enterprises.’

‘Friends of the Hedgehogs?’ Kelly asked.

‘I made that one up,’ Rob replied.

‘I get the idea. And fracking?’

‘So currently Tactika fund fifteen fracking explorations around the UK alone, several of them in Scotland, which was where Kennedy-Craig was heading after the Cumbria conference.’

‘But the flight plan was to land in London,’ Kelly said. The flight log had been downloaded digitally by Zoe, as soon as her team had been able to locate the port on the badly damaged control panel. Kelly was amazed at how robust these automated machines were, but at the same time, not quite enough to protect human flesh and bone.

‘I know, and from there, he’d chartered a flight to Glasgow the same afternoon. Why take the shortest route when you’re so rich you don’t have to?’ Rob asked.

‘Quite. So it makes sense that he was taking his friend on a sightseeing trip over the fells. That might explain why it looked as though Lord Reilly’s name was added last minute to the passenger list; it’s in different writing and untidy, like an afterthought. It also corroborates what Vivienne Kennedy-Craig said when she was first told of the accident; she was shocked that Lord Reilly was a passenger, he shouldn’t have been on that flight.’

‘Have you seen the footage I sent you of the conference?’ he asked.