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nowhere to stay.”
    She said, “Finish your coffee and come with me.” I did as I was told, and allowed her to lead me, away from the town centre, up a hill of old stone cottages and through an iron gate into her own home. There was a spare bedroom. In the tiny sitting room she lit the gas fire. She made tea and I drank it but couldn’t face anything to eat. Her name was Mrs Hastie.
    “You stay here as long as you need to,” she said. “Come in and go out whenever you like. I never lock the door.”
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “It’s a dreadful business,” she said. “A dreadful business.” The way she said it, did she know, before the thingwas a day old, did she know in her old bones, despite the caveats and cautions on the news bulletins, that the crash had not been caused by bad weather or mechanical failure but by some calculated, deliberate act of human hand? Of course she did. I did. We all did.
    I was exhausted from lack of sleep the night before, but now at least I had somewhere to collapse when I could no longer stand. I went back into the town. It was crowded with people, many of them in some uniform or other if they were not from the media. Everywhere I met shock, sympathy and offers of help. Anger, too, though the anger was not directed at me. The police had set up an emergency information centre and I went there, registering my name and other details, such as they were (this was long before the ubiquity of mobile phones, emails and laptops), but not gaining much new information. Relatives of other passengers arrived. Some of them wanted to share their grief and frustration and fear but I couldn’t do any sharing. I returned to Mrs Hastie’s, fell asleep, woke to watch the news on her television. I ate but did not taste the food she prepared. She was a kindly woman, with an instinct for knowing when to speak, when to stay silent. She did not ask questions, and I was grateful for that.
    Over the next few days I read every newspaper I could find; sat for hours in the café; stood on the edge of the field where the nose of the aircraft lay like a fish head with men crawling over it like yellow flies; looked into one half-vanished street and then turned away, because there was the greatest devastation, a deep blackened trench where the main partof the plane had hit and gone up in a fireball, taking several houses with it. I did not then know, but suspected, that I was looking into the extinguished funeral pyre of my family. I went back to Mrs Hastie’s to sleep for a fitful hour, returned to the café, read the same news in different shapes. I used Mrs Hastie’s phone to make calls to my parents and sister, to Emily’s parents in America, to Jim Collins. I tried to give Mrs Hastie money for the calls but she refused, with something close to violence, to take so much as a penny. I checked in regularly with the police, anxious for the moment when I would be called to the school gymnasium. But the call did not come. I was drowning in the intense activity going on all around me, in my own inability to act, in the huge media presence, in the kindness of the local people. Everything smelled and tasted of burning. I retreated again to Mrs Hastie’s but her gas fire began to nauseate me. Her spare bedroom was a kind of sanctuary but it too became oppressive. I thought, I will go mad if I stay in. But if I go out, I go out into another madness.
    I went out.
    When air traffic control lost contact with the plane it was flying in a north by northwesterly direction at 31,000 feet. A lot of experts had been found and placed in front of TV cameras to give their opinions on what had happened. There had been no Mayday call, nothing at all from the pilots. One second the aircraft was there, the next it was gone, its single radar echo multiplying, scattering and fading on the monitors. Thewide dispersal of wreckage on the ground indicated that the plane had come apart at a great height. The general consensus was that,