Catherine Steadman - Something in the Water - A Novel

Our honeymoon feels a million miles away and yet just within reach, if only we could—

Mark breaks through the waves on my starboard side. He fins toward the boat. His expression blank, controlled. For the first time, I truly appreciate how useful his masked emotions actually are. I think if I ever saw him truly scared, then I’d know for sure that we were done for.

He drags himself up the ladder at the stern of the boat, exhausted.

“Water, please,” he says as he jiggles his tank off onto the deck. He peels off his suit, discards it like mine, and drops heavily onto the teak seating. I fetch a water bottle from the cooler box and hand it across to him. His eyes are tight in the sunlight, brow tensed against the glare.

“You all right?” he asks. He’s watching me, concerned.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Sorry. I just…” I’m not sure how to finish that sentence, so I stop.

“No, it’s fine. God. It’s good that you came up.” He takes a long pull on the water bottle and looks out over the waves, his wet hair dripping slowly onto his bare shoulders.

“Fucking hell,” he says.

I wait but he doesn’t continue.

“Are they in there?” I ask. I have to ask. I have to know.

“Yeah,” he says.

He takes another long swig of water.

“Two pilots up front, three passengers. That I could see. One of them was a woman, the rest men.” He looks out again at the waves, his jaw tight.

“Fucking hell.” I realize too late that I’ve echoed him. I don’t know what else to say.

“They weren’t good people, Erin,” he says, looking at me now.

What the fuck does that mean?

I want to know more, I want to know everything he saw, but it doesn’t seem right to ask. He’s processing. I wait for him to tell me.

But nothing comes. He drinks more.

His words still hang in the air. I try to catch them before they disappear. “What do you mean, they weren’t good people, Mark?”

“The things they had with them. Down there. They weren’t good people. Don’t feel too sad, is all I mean.” With that he stands. Grabs a towel and wipes his face, rubs his hair.

I realize that’s probably the most I’ll get from him right now, and I don’t want to linger too long on the thought of the people down there. I’m trying my hardest to stay focused as it is. I change the subject. Well, sort of.

“It’s flotsam, Mark.”

He stares at me blankly for a moment. I think he’d forgotten all about the bag until now. I continue.

“Well, sort of flotsam, lost by accident in an emergency—it can be claimed by the owners. But you’ve just met the owners and I don’t think they’ll be claiming it anytime soon. Will they?” My stab at dark humor. I’m not sure it sounded quite right.

“No, no, they won’t.” He says it flatly.

I move on quickly. “Mark, did you get the plane’s tail number? Anything we can use to identify them? Who they were? Anything helpful?”

He pulls the dive slate off his tank strap and hands it to me. The plane make, model, and tail number. Of course he got it!

“They’re Russian,” he says as I jot the slate information down in my notepad and wipe it clean again.

I look up. “How do you know that?”

“There were Russian snack packets.”

“Right.” I nod slowly.

“Listen, Erin. You said no one will claim the bag. Does that mean you’re suggesting we don’t report this? We don’t report a plane crash?” He’s scowling at me.

Shit. Yes. I thought that’s what we both were suggesting. Weren’t we? To keep the shiny pretty diamonds and the free money. To pay off our mortgage and have a family, right? Or am I crazy? Maybe I am crazy.

My mind flits to the people below us. The dead people, rotting in the water. The bad people. Should we keep the bad people’s money?

“Yes. Yes, that is what I’m suggesting,” I say to Mark.

He nods slowly, processing what that means.

I continue, carefully. “I am suggesting that we get back to the hotel, find out if they’ve been reported missing, and if anyone is missing them at all, then we forget it all. Drop it back here. But if not, if they’ve just evaporated into thin air, then yes, I say we keep the bag. We found it floating in the sea, Mark. We keep it and use it for a better purpose than I’m sure it was meant for.”

He looks at me. I can’t quite tell through the blaze of sun what his expression means.

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s find out who they are.”

It turns out there’s a live online feed of every registered airborne flight in the world. I’m watching it now as different-sized purple triangles flicker across a lo-fi black and yellow map of the world. A real-life version of the video game Asteroids.

A brief touch of the cursor arrow over each of the larger triangles displays its flight number, its origin, and its destination. The smaller triangles—private planes, jets—simply display their craft type: Gulfstream G550, Falcon 5X, Global 6000.

Our plane was, and still is I suppose, a Gulfstream G650. I look up its specifications online. The G650 can fly eight thousand miles without refueling. That’s pretty much the distance from London to Australia. That’s a really long way for a small business jet. Its top speed is Mach 0.925, transonic. That means traveling at nearly the speed of sound. The speed of sound. It would have been a short flight if they’d made it, wherever they were going. I guess they thought they could outrun the storm.

I look up the most common causes of small-craft accidents. Wikipedia tells me:

Severe instability can occur at transonic speeds. Shock waves move through the air at the speed of sound. When an object such as an aircraft also moves near to the speed of sound, these shock waves build up in front of the plane’s nose to form a single, very large shock wave. During transonic flight, the plane must pass through this large shock wave, as well as contend with the instability caused by air moving faster than sound over parts of the wing and slower in other parts.

That might have been it. Mightn’t it? They just hit the storm and at that speed it knocked them out of the sky. I guess we’ll never know.

—

I need to look up the tail number next. R-RWOA. I’m hoping it’s a similar system to the car registration system; hopefully, there’s some kind of database online.

After a couple of searches it becomes evident that the “R-R” element of the registration is the country prefix. Registered in Russia. Mark was right. People do get quite nationalistic about their choice of snacks, it’s true.

I check the national aviation database for Russia and somehow, somehow it works. It just works. The details come up. There’s nothing solid, of course. It was registered in 2015 to a company called Aegys-Mutual Consultants. Possibly the least glamorous company name that I’ve ever heard. Sounds a bit like a recruitment company in Basildon. Except small businesses in Basildon can’t usually afford $60 million planes. Yeah. Yeah, that’s how much that plane was worth. Over $60 million. Our house is the most expensive thing we own and it’s only worth $1.5 million. And we haven’t even paid off the mortgage yet. I’m starting to wonder if, whoever these people are, they’d even miss the contents of the bag. It’s obviously not their main business, if it’s even a sideline? But it does make me wonder if they have been missed. There must be someone out there looking. Sixty-million-dollar planes, their crews, and their owners don’t just vanish. They leave a hole, don’t they?