Stay of Execution

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The big Scots detective stood in silence, because there was nothing to say. He was a mature man, over the crest of the hill that leads into middle age, and he had known his share of life’s inevitable sadness; indeed, if truth be told, more than his share. Yet the place in which he stood affected him in a way that he had not experienced before. He had seen it on television, and he had read of it, from the awful beginning and through the grim weeks and months that had followed, but nothing had prepared him for the actuality of it. It was vast, yet no greater than he had expected. There was no sepulchral silence about it: even on a Saturday the traffic rushed past nearby. And yet there was a sense of something all around, something that with very little imagination could have been the echoes of the screams of three thousand souls.

A voice broke into his meditation. ‘By sheer evil chance, I was on my way here when it began to go down,’ his companion said, quietly. ‘After the first plane had hit, I saw people standing, staring at it, like they didn’t believe it. Some of them even had camcorders. They stood there filming, like it was some movie special effect or whatever, and they’d got lucky. They were the tourists, though. Our guys, the New Yorkers, most of them were running for their very lives.’

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