Death of an Airman (5 page)

“Certainly,” agreed the policeman with alacrity. “It's a do, my lord.”

Chapter VI

Shortage of Suspects

Inspector Creighton waited until the Bishop was safely down the stairs and out of the police station. Then he went quickly out of the back door, got into a police car, and drove to Baston Aerodrome. His purpose was the not very trustful one of getting to the aerodrome before the Bishop had time to tell anyone of the new development in the aerodrome accident.

It may be wondered why the Inspector did not request the Bishop himself not to reveal the information until asked to do so. It is unfortunately necessary to record that Inspector Creighton was deeply distrustful of everyone, even of clergymen, when engaged in the prosecution of an investigation. In excuse it must be admitted that the Inspector had had some experience of requesting persons to keep a confidence strictly, such persons invariably supposing that it is in their discretion to communicate the information in strict confidence to other persons, those other persons thinking the same.

His first call was on Miss Sackbut, who winced when she saw his familiar figure appear on the aerodrome.

“Who's been low-flying now?” she asked wearily. “I suppose it's Miss Miffin complaining that club members keep on banging against her roof and knocking her tiles down so that she has to take refuge under the drawing-room table.”

The Inspector gave a sickly grin at the recollection.

“I'm afraid it is more serious than that, Miss Sackbut. Certain facts have come to light,” he said formally, “that make it necessary for me to institute further enquiries into the case of George Furnace's decease.”

“Damn that Bishop!” exclaimed Sally warmly. “And I thought he was such a nice, kindly man! Damn Lady Laura too! I believe she forged that letter, Inspector.”

“Indeed, miss. Well, we might go into that later. First of all, I should like to interview the three gentlemen who got Furnace's body out of the aeroplane.”

“Let me see. Ness is giving a top overhaul to BT's engine. He'll be in the engine shop. That's the little lean-to behind the main hangar. Tommy Vane's up with our new instructor, Flight-Lieutenant Winters. He'll be down soon. I'm afraid Randall's not about. Wait a minute, though. He went out on a charter job for Gauntlett's Air Taxis. He'll be popping back this afternoon. It was only over to Paris, and he left early this morning, just after dawn.”

“Thank you, miss. Well, then, I'll go round and find them.”

“Right; I'll go with you,” said Sally, getting up.

“I needn't trouble you, thank you. No doubt you'll be very busy.”

“It doesn't matter,” she said.

“Very well.” The Inspector, purposely misunderstanding her, walked rapidly away before Sally could put on her hat.

Sally stared after him. “What the devil is he up to?” she muttered. “Wait till I see that Bishop!”

The Inspector came upon Mr. Ness grinding-in a valve to the mournful strains of some unrecognizable melody. He looked surprised when Inspector Creighton peered in with a murmured apology.

“May I have a word with you, Mr. Ness?” remarked the Inspector formally.

“Uh-huh,” agreed Mr. Ness.

The Inspector explained that he had decided to make further investigations into the death of George Furnace. It now appeared that it may not have been an accident.

The red-headed man grunted.

“Something has come to light which suggests that the cause of death might have been…” The Inspector hesitated and Mr. Ness looked up.

“Suicide,” finished Creighton. Under his scrutiny the ground engineer's face showed no sign of relief, or, in fact, of any emotion.

“Naturally, such a suggestion means we have to turn over everything from top to bottom once more. Now, Mr. Ness, you came on the scene after everything had happened; but even so, as a matter of formality, perhaps you will tell me what you remember?”

“I dunno I can say more than I said at the inquest,” said Ness, gloomily regarding the shining rim of the valve head.

“Afterwards you helped to transfer the body from the ambulance to the hangar, where it lay till the evening?”

“Yes,” the ground engineer admitted.

“Did you drive the van back after putting Furnace on it?”

He nodded.

“Did you watch beside the body at all?”

“No. Miss Sackbut did that. I went back to stand by the wreckage.”

“Did you go into the hangar again that evening?”

“No,” he said positively. “I was busy going over the bits with Mr. Sandwich and the insurance man.”

The Inspector closed his notebook regretfully and left. As he closed the door, Mr. Ness again burst into mournful melody.

“I reckon he knows less about it than I do,” thought the Inspector, “if that is possible.”

For ten minutes the Inspector sat bolt upright in a chair outside the club-house, waiting for Tommy Vane to descend. Eventually the scarlet-and-white Moth glided over the hangar. Before the wheels touched the ground, however, it shot upwards with a wild bound which made the Inspector clutch the sides of his seat. “Ride her, cowboy!” yelled a youth next to him cheerily.

“Whoopee! That was a good landing for Tommy,” he said communicatively to the Inspector.

The machine dropped towards the ground a second time. But on this occasion there was a roar from the engine and the 'plane ascended again.

“Very odd,” commented the Inspector.

At the next attempt the machine landed successfully, and Flight-Lieutenant Winters and Tommy Vane got out.

Winters was a lean man, with hair greying round the temples, and an air of gentle melancholy easily explicable by the fact that he had been a club instructor for ten years. Tommy Vane was now wearing large flannel trousers which trailed on the ground and an offensive canary-yellow pullover with a bright green scarf.

“I'm pretty ghastly, aren't I, boss?” he said cheerfully to Winters as they came up.

“As a matter of fact, Tommy,” answered the other seriously, “you'd be quite good if only you'd get over this casual manner of yours. You don't seem to have your mind on the job. You've got good hands and quick reaction. But there's something lacking here.” He touched his head.

“The truth is,” said Tommy confidingly, “I'm so scared all the time I'm up in the air that my mind just goes round and round!”

Flight-Lieutenant Winters smiled at Vane. “I should say you're singularly free from nerves.”

Creighton buttonholed Vane and managed to lead him aside. He gave the same explanation for his enquiries that he had given to the ground engineer.

“Can't you let poor old Furnace rest in his grave?” protested Vane. “Well, if you want to give me a once-over, let's do it elsewhere.”

In spite of the Inspector's protests, Vane insisted on going into the bar lounge. They sat at a table. The Inspector consented to accept a bitter, and Vane brought back a stiff-looking double Scotch for himself. Creighton was a little staggered to see the youth swallow it neat, almost at a gulp, and follow it with a mouthful of soda-water. In fact, he began to look at Vane more closely. At least he was a more promising suspect than the ground engineer, that quiet, peaceable body. Though the Inspector was a shrewd judge of character, Vane puzzled him.

He had one of those pale, noncommittal faces, with frank blue eyes and rather babyish red lips which show little trace of age, so that the Inspector found it genuinely difficult to decide whether he was twenty or twenty-seven. He spoke in an accent the Inspector found it equally difficult to locate. It was well-bred English basically, but overlaid with something else. Was it a trace of dialect? Behind his ingenuous bearing and boyish face there were occasional hard streaks that made the Inspector thoughtful. He had come across this type among young men who drove cars with such consistent and unreasonable recklessness that the Inspector's efforts had generally resulted either in a trial for manslaughter or a permanently suspended driving licence.

On the face of it, however, Vane got off as scot free as Ness. He had helped get the body out and had never been near it again.

“So he says. We'll see,” was the Inspector's mental comment.

He had lunch at the club, parrying with the skill of years Miss Sackbut's pressing enquiries. After lunch he went out with her on to the club lawn, and she pointed to the horizon, where a tiny speck could just be made out.

“That's a Gull,” she said. “Gauntlett is the only bloke with a Gull round here, so it's probably Randall.”

“You said he was on a taxi job,” remarked the Inspector. “What exactly does that mean?”

“An air-taxi flight,” answered Miss Sackbut. “Sixpence a mile or what-have-you. Valentine Gauntlett runs our air-taxi show and does very well. I'm damned if I know how he gets so much business from this one-eyed place. Of course, newspaper deliveries between Paris and London help a bit. Randall's doing a newspaper delivery job now.”

“I'm surprised an airman as well known as Captain Randall needs to do that sort of thing.”

“Good lord, there's not so much money in that kind of transatlantic business as people think. It's like getting blood from a stone to screw the bonuses out of the aircraft and petrol people now. Still, Randall needn't do it. It's only because he's got a half-share in Gauntlett's air-taxi business, so if he's down here and they're short of pilots he sometimes goes off on a job. It keeps his hand in, you see, and it isn't like regular work. That really would be fatal for Randall.”

By this time the Gull had arrived. Randall taxied it into the hangar, and then Creighton, deftly shaking off Miss Sackbut, intercepted him as he walked back to the Gauntlett Air Taxi's scarlet-and-yellow hut.

Randall, the Inspector felt, was the least likely candidate of the three. Whether the Inspector had been prejudiced by a long-standing admiration for the airman was another matter. Randall had, apart from his blond impressiveness, a certain direct manner, deprecating his own achievements, and resolutely insisting that commercial motives alone inspired him. This was refreshing, and the Inspector had liked him for it.

Randall continued to be frank and also disconcertingly penetrating. “Look here, Inspector,” he said, when he had heard the Inspector's story, “the suicide business doesn't wash. I'm sure you wouldn't come round here in full cry just because of a suspicion it was suicide. There's something more behind it, eh? Do you suspect someone of monkeying with the machine?”

“That's as may be,” answered the Inspector.

“I don't want to pump you, but look here, what the devil difference does it make what happened after the crash?”

“Everything counts,” said the Inspector with an air of innocence.

“Have it your way. Anyway, there's nothing much to tell. By the time I got there poor Furnace was laid out cold. I helped get him into the crash tender and drove back with him. We put out trestles in the hangar office—the room that's boarded off—and laid the poor bloke on it, with something over him, of course. Then Sally shooed us away and she was there all the morning, and like the dear he is, the Bishop was there in the afternoon.”

The Inspector groaned. The case seemed infernally free from any loophole for suspicion. He walked thoughtfully away.

The interview with Miss Sackbut was a little wearing. She returned with insistence to the point that the enquiries he was making were entirely irrelevant. The Inspector possessed himself in patience and extracted from her a confirmation of the stories of the other three. Furnace's body had been put in the hangar. She had never left it until the Bishop relieved her.

It was only then that the Inspector told her, as if incidentally, of their discovery.

“You see, it's all very difficult, miss. Major Furnace wasn't killed by the crash. He was shot afterwards.”

“Shot!” exclaimed Sally, turning white. “Do you mean murdered?”

The Inspector nodded. “I'm afraid so.”

“Then he wasn't dead when he was pulled out?”

“It seems so.”

“Poor George. We might have saved him. Oh, why didn't we try—”

The Inspector interrupted. “No; from what the doctor says, he wouldn't have lived anyway. That makes it all the more extraordinary, miss.”

“Oh, something is wrong!” exclaimed Sally. “For there were several of us with him up to the time he was put in the hangar. And then I was with him until the Bishop relieved me.”

“Exactly, miss,” said the Inspector. Their eyes met, Sally's sad, distracted, surprised; the Inspector's sharp and inscrutable. Then the Inspector made his exit.

Early next morning he left Baston for London and walked from Victoria to Gwydyr House. He climbed the stairs to the Department of the Inspector of Accidents thoughtfully. A lot depended on the clues he could pick up here, but after Flying Officer Felix Sandwich had listened carefully to his story his hopes were dashed.

“I'm sorry, Inspector,” said the expert, “but I can't hold out any hope at all. This was one of the few cases where we could be extremely sure about what happened. The machine was not much damaged by the spin and, in addition, it was watched by several people who were themselves pilots. The aircraft spun into the ground in an absolutely normal way. The engine had been deliberately throttled down and was in perfect condition. The control cables were unbroken and there was no sign of jamming. All the main members were structurally intact except for damage which could only have been caused by the accident. Quite frankly, I shouldn't waste any more time over any theory that includes the idea of sabotage. Either there was an error of judgment or a deliberate act. But the machine was in no way to blame.”

More thoughtful than ever, the Inspector returned to Baston.

He explained his doubts and difficulties to the Bishop with almost complete candour. The Bishop was recovering from a painful argument with Miss Sackbut, who, for some reason known only to herself, had decided that the Bishop was to blame for the whole deplorable affair. His episcopal blandness had been nearly shattered by her recriminations, and he had preserved his even temper with difficulty. While reproaching Miss Sackbut for her unreasonableness, he appeared to show a trace of the same failing by passing the blame on to the Inspector.