Before We Met(2)

After twenty-five minutes, she knew there must be some sort of hold-up. Mark was almost always among the first wave of passengers off a flight, and he’d only taken his small leather bag this time so he would have bypassed baggage reclaim. Perhaps he’d left something on the plane and gone back for it or perhaps he’d been stopped for a random customs check. She pushed back her sleeve and looked at her watch, the Rotary her mother had given her when she’d started university. Five past ten. She brought up Mark’s number on her BlackBerry then changed her mind: ringing him would spoil it. She’d wait another ten minutes and then call, if she had to.

By quarter past, however, the American accents had petered out and most of the people coming through the doors were talking to each other in rapid-fire Spanish. The only other person who’d been waiting as long as she had was a man in his fifties wearing a navy blazer and chinos, and now even his daughter appeared. Hannah wondered whether she’d got her wires crossed, but no, she was sure Mark had said Friday, the usual time.

She dialled his number. The call went straight to voicemail and she hung up without leaving a message. It wasn’t like him to miss a flight but maybe that was what had happened. Maybe he’d missed it and managed to get on a later one instead. He’d done that once before, coming back to New York from Toronto.

She consulted the monitors again. His flight wasn’t even shown any more. Scanning down, however, she saw two more flights from New York; one had just landed, the other was imminent. Perhaps he’d be on one of those. If he were, he’d call or send a text the moment he could turn his phone on.

The crowd was thinner now and this time she got the place at the barrier right opposite the doors – ‘the golden spot’, Mark called it. Checking her phone every couple of minutes, she waited until ten past eleven, almost another full hour. When the last of the second batch of Americans came through the doors, she phoned him and got voicemail again.

Hannah began to feel alarmed. If he was on a different flight, why hadn’t he called her? What if something had happened to his plane? She rang him one more time then gave up her place at the barrier and made her way towards the fire exit. The airlines’ information desks were in the departures hall, and crossing the courtyard between the two buildings was far quicker than schlepping through the network of tunnels and escalators.

Wind was swirling around the courtyard, driving the rain in bursts like shoals of tiny fish, lifting it for a moment then dashing it against the ground. The heavy door was snatched from her hand and slammed shut behind her. Overhead, another plane struggled through the cloud, its engines filling the air with harrowing thunder. Hannah put her head down and ran.

The dash took thirty seconds at most but she was pushing wet hair off her face as she came inside. Compared to the arrivals hall, departures at Terminal Three was the picture of well-lit, high-ceilinged modernity, but when she found the desk for American, the airline he usually used, the woman behind it was putting her jacket on.

‘I’ve already turned off the computer,’ she said, without looking up.

‘I just want to know if my husband was on a flight this evening.’

‘Oh.’ Now the woman looked up, her face brightening. ‘Well, I couldn’t have told you that anyway. Data protection, isn’t it?’

Hannah felt her usual surge of irritation at petty bureaucracy. ‘Seriously?’ she said. ‘He’s my husband.’

‘Sorry.’ The woman shrugged, looking pleased at the opportunity to wield her power, and Hannah’s irritation refocused itself on her. Working in close proximity to the duty-free shops was no excuse for wearing so much bloody make-up. How old was she anyway, under that death mask of foundation?

‘Look,’ said Hannah, laying her hands on the counter, ‘all I really need to know is that my husband’s safe. Can you at least tell me whether there have been any problems with the New York flights tonight?’

The woman sighed. ‘Nothing like that,’ she said. ‘Delays because of the wind, but that’s it.’

‘Thank God.’

Hannah was halfway back across the hall before she thought about where she was going. She tried Mark again. Still nothing. This time she left a message. ‘Hi, it’s me. I’m at Heathrow – where are you? I came to meet you but I don’t think you’re here. If you are, ring me.’ She hesitated. ‘I hope everything’s all right. Call me as soon as you get this – I’m worried about you.’ She laughed a bit, to tell him she knew she was being ridiculous: Mark was the last person to get into a mess, so if the planes were safe, he was.