95

OCTOBER 2007

The air stewardess was going through the safety demonstration. Norman Potting leaned over to Nick Nicholl, seated next to him near the rear of the 747, and said, ‘It’s all a load of rubbish, this safety stuff.’

The young Detective Constable, who was terrified of flying but hadn’t wanted to admit that to his boss, was hanging on to every word that was coming out through the speakers. Turning his face away to avoid the full blast of Potting’s bad breath, he peered upwards, working out exactly where his oxygen mask would be dropping from.

‘The brace position – you know what they don’t tell you?’ Potting went on, undeterred by Nicholl’s lack of reaction.

Nicholl shook his head, now watching and memorizing the correct way to tie the tapes on the life jacket.

‘It might save you in some situations, I grant you. But the thing they don’t tell you,’ Potting said, ‘is the brace position helps preserve your jawbone intact. Makes identifying all the victims from their dental records much easier.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ Nicholl muttered, observing the stewardess now pointing out where he would find his whistle.

‘As for the life jacket, that’s a laugh, that is,’ Potting carried on. ‘Do you know how many passenger airliners in the entire history of aviation have ever successfully made an emergency landing on water?’

Nick Nicholl was thinking about his wife, Julie, and his small son, Liam. He might never see either of them again.

‘How many?’ he gulped.

Potting touched the tip of his own thumb with his index finger, forming a circle. ‘Zero. Zilch. Nada. Not one.’

There’s always a first time, Nicholl thought, clinging tightly to the thought; clinging to it as if it were a liferaft.

Potting starting reading a men’s magazine he had bought in the airport. Nicholl studied the laminated safety card, checking the position of the nearest exits, glad to see that they were only two rows behind him. He was glad too that he was near the rear of the plane; he remembered a newspaper account of an air disaster in which the tail section broke off and all the passengers inside it survived.

‘Phoaaaawwww!’ Potting said.

Nicholl looked down. His colleague had the magazine open at a nude centre-spread. A blonde with pneumatic breasts was lying spread-eagled on a four-poster bed, her wrists and ankles secured by lengths of black velvet to the posts. Her pubic hair was a tidily shaved Brazilian and the pink lips of her vulva were prominently exposed, as if they were the buds of a flower placed between her legs.

A stewardess walked past, checking passengers had their seat belts on. She stopped to peer down at Nicholl and Norman Potting, then moved smartly on.

Nick felt his face burning with embarrassment. ‘Norman,’ he whispered, ‘I think you should put that away.’

‘Hope we find a few like her in Melbourne!’ Potting said. ‘We could have a bit of sport, you and me. I fancy that Bondi Beach.’

‘Bondi Beach is in Sydney, not Melbourne. And I think you embarrassed the stewardess with that.’

Unabashed, Potting traced his fingers over her curves. ‘She’s a bit of all right, she is!’

The stewardess was coming back. She gave both of them a cursory, rather frosty glance and hurried past.

‘I thought you were a happily married man, Norman,’ Nicholl said.

‘The day I stop looking, lad,’ he said, ‘that’s the day I want someone to take me out into a field and shoot me.’ He grinned and, to Nicholl’s relief, he turned the page. But the DC’s relief was only fleeting.

The next page was much worse.

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