No Highway (6 page)

“It was good of you to come round,” he said. He came with me to the front door, and then he stopped me just as I was going out to the car. “There’s just one thing I wanted to ask you, if you could spare a minute …”

“Of course,” I said.

He hesitated. “I wonder if you could tell me where you got that hot-water-heater? Are they very expensive things?”

“Why, no. They’re very cheap. I don’t know what they cost to buy outright, but you can hire them from the electricity company, you know. We hire ours. I forget what it costs—something quite small. Two bob a quarter, or something like that.”

“Really—so little as that? They’re very useful, aren’t they? I mean, with one of those you’ve got hot water all the time.”

“That’s right,” I said. “We couldn’t do without ours. You can get a big one for the bath, you know.”

“Can you!” He paused in thought. “I think I must see about getting one for the kitchen, anyway. It’s stupid to go on boiling up kettles to wash up with.”

“It makes everything much easier,” I said. “You know the electricity office in the High Street? Go in and tell them that you want to hire one. They’ll fix you up all right.”

“I’ll do that,” he said. “Thank you for telling me. It does seem to be a thing worth having.”

I got into my car and drove home, and put it in the garage at the back of the flats, deep in thought. It seemed long odds to me that the tailplane of the prototype Reindeer would be still lying where it fell, in some Labrador forest. It was most urgent to get hold of it for technical examination; we must have a report on it within a week at the very latest, unless we were prepared to ground the Reindeers upon Mr. Honey’s word alone. One thing I was resolved upon, that no Reindeer should go on flying after seven hundred hours unless this
thing had been cleared up. But to achieve that end, to stop the whole British Transatlantic air service before another accident happened, I should have to show some better evidence than I had got up to date that Reindeers were unsafe.

Shirley was waiting for me in the flat, “Did Mr. Honey take it seriously?” she asked.

“And how!” I said, sinking down into my chair. “He was as pleased as Punch about it. He thought it was a wonderful thing to have happened.” And I told her all about it.

She heard me to the end. “He
is
a funny little man.” And then she said, “Tell me, Dennis—do you really think, yourself, that Honey’s right? Are the Reindeer tails dangerous?”

“There’s not a shred of evidence that you can hang your hat on that there’s anything wrong with them at all,” I said evenly. “But—yes, I think he’s probably right.”

“Why do you think that,” she asked quietly, “if there isn’t any evidence?”

“Fifteen years in the aircraft industry,” I said. “One gets to know the smell of things like this.”

I reached for the cigarettes and gave her one, and lit one myself. We sat in silence for a time; I lay back in my chair and watched the blue clouds rising slowly to the ceiling, deep in thought. And presently she asked, “What’s Mr. Honey going to do about it?”

I grinned at her. “He’s going to hire an electric hot-water-heater,” I said. “He’s already bought a mop.”

I went up to the Ministry in London first thing next morning and saw Ferguson; I told him the whole thing. He was inclined to regard it as a mare’s nest, having had some experience of Mr. Honey over the lunch-table while he had been at the R.A.E. himself. “I don’t want to say anything against a member of your staff, Scott,” he remarked. “But there may be things you wouldn’t know about, that you really ought to know. Poor old Honey had a lot of trouble at the end of the war, you know—he lost his wife. That changed him a lot—he’s never been the same man since. It was very distressing, that.”

He paused, and glanced at me. “Did he ever tell you about his experiments with planchette?”

I was not now surprised at anything to do with Mr. Honey. “You mean, spiritualistic stuff?” I asked. “I’ve heard a lot about him, but I hadn’t heard that one.”

He hesitated. “I dare say it’s all over now. It was probably
an effect of the distress he suffered at the time. But he used to do a lot with that.”

I was suddenly deeply sorry for the uncouth little man. “Trying to get in touch with her, and all that sort of thing?”

He nodded.

I thought about it for a minute. “I hadn’t heard of that,” I said at last. “I knew that he was religious, in an eccentric sort of way. But I don’t think any of that really concerns us now. What I feel is this—that we can’t let this thing slide, even if we both think that Honey’s as mad as a hatter. He
has
made this forecast, for what it’s worth, and the prototype did crash about that time. We’ve got to get to the bottom of it, now.”

“Oh yes, of course we have,” he replied. “But in the meantime, I shan’t lose much sleep myself.”

He rang through to Group-Captain Fisher in the Accidents Branch, and we went down to see him. After the preliminary greeting, I said:

“Look, sir—I’ve come up because we want to know a bit more about that accident to the prototype Reindeer.”

He nodded. “You rang me up for the flying time. Just under 1,400 hours, if I remember right.”

“That’s right, sir. We’ve been studying fatigue down at Farnborough, and a suggestion has been made that the tailplane might have failed on that machine.” I started in and told him the whole thing again, of course omitting the gossip about Mr. Honey. I was getting to know my story off by heart by that time, from having told it to so many people.

As I talked, the frown deepened on his face. I came to the end, and he said, “Do I understand, then, that there is a suggestion that my staff have been completely in error in their analysis of this accident?”

I hesitated. I did not want to get on the wrong side of the Group-Captain at the start. “I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” I said. “We feel down at our place that this new evidence requires consideration alongside of all the evidence you have gathered up to date.”

He glowered at me. “I don’t know about new evidence,” he said. “If I understood you correctly, you have an estimate from a research worker of what he hopes will happen in a trial which is in progress now. Is that right?”

I said, “That’s about it. We have been very much impressed with the way his estimate coincides with the flying time to crash of this first Reindeer.”

“Well, I’m not,” he said. “There’s no magic in the figure 1,400.” He rang a bell upon his desk. “In this department, when we speak of evidence we mean evidence, sworn testimony that can be proved and that would stand up in a court of law. Not supposition and impressions.” A girl appeared, and stood in enquiry at the door. “Get me the report upon the Reindeer accident, Miss Donaldson,” he said.

We sat in silence while the girl fetched the report; he did not seem to be in a very genial mood and I did not want to put my foot in it again, so I was saying as little as possible. She brought in a bulky folder bound up in the manner of a final report and handed it to him, and went away. He turned over the pages of it on his desk in silence for a time.

He said at last, “Well, this is the report. The actual investigation was carried out by Ottawa, of course, with our representative assisting. I suggest you take it away and read it, as a first step. Then if you want any more information, we can have another talk.”

“That’s very kind of you, sir,” I said. “I’ll read this through at once and get in touch with you again.”

I went back with Ferguson to his office. When we got there, “What’s eating the old boy?” I asked. “I’ve always found him very helpful in the past.”

Ferguson said, “Well, of course—this is a final report.” He took it in his hands thoughtfully, considering it. “It’s gone to the Minister, and there was a question in the House of Commons—the Minister based his reply on this. Because of the Russians, you know.” I nodded. “Naturally, Fisher won’t exactly jump for joy if you turn up and prove that it’s all wrong.”

I said irritably, “But damn it, man—we all make mistakes. I make them, so do you, and so does every living being in the world. One just has to admit them—Fisher’s not a child. If this report is based on a misapprehension it’ll have to be corrected—we can’t hide things up. There’s no future in that.”

“I know,” he said thoughtfully. “The trouble is that Fisher’s department has been making rather a lot of mistakes recently.” He paused. “You heard about the Zulu crash at Whitney Sutton?”

“I heard the wings came off, or something. I didn’t hear why.”

“That’s right,” he said. “It was diving at round about Mach unity, and the wings came off. The ailerons came off first and then the wing broke up. Fisher’s party got it all
buttoned up as pilot’s error of judgment. But then Cochrane from the Medical Research came in and proved pre-impact head wounds on the pilot’s body. The windscreen broke up and crashed into the pilot’s face—that’s why it dived. It didn’t do Fisher any good with the R.A.F. types.”

I was interested. “Is that established? Is that what really happened to it?”

He nodded. “Keep it under your hat, old boy. No point in spreading things like that about.”

I settled down in Ferguson’s armchair to read the report upon the accident to the prototype Reindeer.

It had flown from London Airport on the night of March 27th with a crew of nine and a passenger list of twenty-two persons, including the Russian Ambassador to Ottawa, thirty-one people in all. It had been diverted from Gander on account of fog and had landed at Goose at about 7 a.m. G.M.T. on the morning of the 28th. It had refuelled there, and had taken off for Montreal at 9.17 in weather that was overcast and raining; the temperature was above freezing, unusual for the time of year. The crew had not reported any trouble at Goose. One wireless message of a routine character was received at 9.46 reporting that the aircraft was on course at 16,500 feet. That was the last that was heard of it.

It was three days before it was reported by one of the search aircraft, though the spot where it was finally located had been flown over several times. It was another two days before a party succeeded in getting to the wreckage. They flew up in a Norseman fitted with skis and landed in deep snow on a frozen lake called Small Pine Water; the landing was a hazardous one because of the alternate thaw and freeze: the skis mushed in beneath the icy crust. The party then had to force their way eleven miles over the snow-covered hills, thickly covered with a, forest of spruce and alder. The night temperatures were as low as –45° Fahrenheit, making it a most difficult search: several of the party suffered from frostbite. In the deep snow and the forest growth they would never have found the crash at all but for the continuous guidance given by the aircraft working with them.

In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that their investigation was, in some respects, perfunctory.

The spot where the Reindeer crashed was about 250 miles from Goose, about 50 miles west of the Moisie river and about 100 miles north of the sea coast in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was just in Canada, in the Province of Quebec.

The bulk of the aircraft was found lying in deep snow among trees at the foot of a cliff, the estimated height of which was 340 feet. It had been on fire after the crash, and everything in it was totally destroyed. All the bodies were found within the flattened shell of the fuselage, indicating that nobody had survived the accident. The cliff face at that point ran approximately east and west along the aircraft’s course, and the Reindeer had hit first at the top of this cliff, very near the edge. It had knocked down three trees, and here the starboard wing had been torn off; the wing was found at some distance from the rest of the machine, at the foot of the cliff. Two propeller blades and portions of the engine cowling were found on top of the cliff. The fuselage had then toppled over the cliff and had crashed down into the forest below, and burnt out.

From the damage to the trees it seemed that the original impact, the first touch, had been with the machine at a small angle of descent, probably not more than ten degrees below the horizontal. From that the investigators had deduced that the machine was under control up to the moment of impact, and from that that the pilot had been deliberately losing height through the overcast in order to check his position by a sight of the ground.

Ferguson, reading all this over my shoulder, said doubtfully, “Well, that could be. But it sounds a bit odd to me. He was only an hour out from Goose. What should he want to check his position for?”

I shrugged my shoulders and turned to the photographs bound up with the report. The photographers were technicians, not sensation-mongers, and they had not gone out of their way to photograph the horrors; but it was not a pretty scene. The wreckage, of course, was hardly recognisable as an aircraft at all; in modern accidents it never is. It looked like the scrap head of a tin factory. I turned the pages one by one, examining each photograph in turn minutely.

“I don’t see the port tailplane anywhere,” I said at last.

“If it’s missing, it’ll be referred to somewhere in the text,” said Ferguson. “Let me have a look.”

He turned the pages till we found what we were looking for. The passage read:

I glanced at Ferguson. “Port tailplane and elevator,” I said. “There we are.”