Rat Race (12 page)

‘She has been going out occasionally with an executive from a firm specialising in demolitions.’

He kept his voice dead even, but he had clearly expected more reaction than he got. I wasn’t horrified or even much taken aback.

‘She wouldn’t do it. Or put anyone else up to doing it. Ordinarily, she was too… too kind hearted. Too sensible, anyway. She used to be so angry whenever innocent passengers were blown up… she would never do it herself. Never.’

He watched me for a while in the special Board of Trade brand of unnerving silence. I didn’t see what I could add. Didn’t know what he was after.

Outside on the airfield the trainer started up and taxied away. The engine noise faded. It was very quiet. I sat. I waited.

Finally he stirred. ‘All in all, for all our trouble, we have come up with only one probability. And even that gets us no nearer knowing who the bomb was intended for, or who put it on board.’

He put his hand in his inner pocket and brought out a stiff brown envelope. Out of that he shook onto the crew room table a twisted piece of metal. I picked it up and looked at it. Beyond the impression that it had once been round and flat, like a button, it meant nothing.

‘What is it?’

The remains,’ he said, ‘of an amplifier.’

I looked up, puzzled. ‘Out of the radio?’

‘We don’t think so.’ He chewed his lip. ‘We think it was in the bomb. We found it embedded in what had been the tail-plane.’

‘Do you mean… it wasn’t a time bomb after all?’

‘Well… probably not. It looks as if it was exploded by a radio transmission. Which puts, do you see, a different slant on things.’

‘What difference? I don’t know much about bombs. How does a radio bomb differ from a time bomb?’

‘They can differ a lot, though in many the actual explosive is the same. In those cases it’s just the trigger mechanism that’s different.’ He paused. ‘Well, say you have a quantity of plastic explosive. Unfortunately that’s all too easy to get hold of, nowadays. In fact, if you happen to be in Greece, you can go into any hardware shop and buy it over the counter. On its own, it won’t explode. It needs a detonator. Gunpowder, old-fashioned gunpowder, is the best. You also need something to ignite the gunpowder before it will detonate the plastic. Are you with me?’

‘Faint but pursuing,’ I said.

‘Right. The easiest way to ignite gunpowder, from a distance, that is, is to pack it round a thin filament of fuse wire. Then you pass an electric current through the filament. It becomes red hot, ignites the gunpowder…’

‘And boom, you have no Cherokee Six.’

‘Er, yes. Now, in this type of bomb you have a battery, a high voltage battery about the size of a sixpence, to provide the electric current. The filament will heat up if you bend it round and fasten one end to one terminal of the battery, and the other to the other.’

‘Clear,’ I said. ‘And the bomb goes off immediately.’

He raised his eyes to Heaven. ‘Why did I ever start this? Yes, it would go off immediately. So it is necessary to have a
mechanism that will complete the circuit after the manufacturer is safely out of the way.’

‘By a spring?’ I suggested.

‘Yes. You hold the circuit open by a hair spring on a catch. When the catch is removed, the spring snaps the circuit shut, and that’s that. Right? Now, the catch can be released by a time mechanism like an ordinary alarm clock. Or it can be released by a radio signal from a distance, via a receiver, an amplifier and a solonoid, like mechanisms in a space craft.’

‘What is a solonoid, exactly?’

‘A sort of electric magnet, a coil with a rod in the centre. The rod moves up and down inside the coil, when a pulse is passed through the coil. Say the top of the rod is sticking up out of the coil to form the catch on the spring, when the rod moves down into the coil the spring is released.

I considered it. ‘What is there to stop somone detonating the bomb by accident, by unknowingly transmitting on the right frequency? The air is packed with radio waves… surely radio bombs are impossibly risky?’

He cleared his throat. ‘It is possible to make a combination type release mechanism. One could make a bomb in which, say, three radio signals had to be received in the correct order before the circuit could be completed. For such a release mechanism, you would need three separate sets of receivers, amplifiers and solonoids to complete the circuit… We were exceptionally fortunate to find this amplifier. We doubt if it was the only one…’

‘It sounds much more complicated than the alarm clock.’

‘Oh yes, it is. But also more flexible. You are not committed to a time in advance to set it off.’

‘So no one had to know what time we would be leaving Haydock. They would just have to see us go.’

‘Yes… Or be told you had gone.’

I thought a bit. ‘It does put a different slant, doesn’t it?’

‘I’d appreciate your thinking.’

‘You must be thinking the same,’ I protested. ‘If the bomb could be set off at any hour, any day, any week even, it could have been put in the aircraft at any time after the last maintenance check.’

He smiled thinly. ‘And that would let you half way off the hook?’

‘Half way,’ I agreed.

‘But only half.’

‘Yes.’

He sighed. ‘I’ve sprung this on you. I’d like you to think it over, from every angle. Seriously. Then tell me if anything occurs to you. If you care at all to find out what happened, that is, and maybe prevent it happening again.’

‘You think I don’t care?’

‘I got the impression.’

‘I would care now,’ I said slowly, ‘If Colin Ross were blown up.’

He smiled. ‘You are less on your guard, today.’

‘You aren’t sniping at me from behind the bushes.’

‘No…’ He was surprised. ‘You’re very observant, aren’t you?’

‘More a matter of atmosphere.’

He hesitated. ‘I have now read the whole of the transcript of your trial.’

‘Oh.’ I could feel my face go bleak. He watched me.

‘Did you know,’ he said. ‘That someone has added to the bottom of it in pencil a highly libellous statement?’

‘No,’ I said. Waited for it.

‘It says that the Chairman of Interport is of the undoubtedly correct opinion that the First Officer lied on oath throughout, and that it was because of the First Officer’s own gross negligence, not that of Captain Shore, that the airliner strayed so dangerously off course.’

Surprised, shaken, I looked away from him, out of the window, feeling absurdly vindicated and released. If that postscript was there for anyone who read the transcript to see,
then maybe my name hadn’t quite so much mud on it as I’d thought. Not where it mattered anyway.

I said without heat, ‘The Captain is always responsible. Whoever does what.’

‘Yes.’

A silence lengthened. I brought my thoughts back from four years ago and my gaze from the empty airfield.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

He smiled very slightly. ‘I wondered why you hadn’t lost your licence… or your job. It didn’t make sense to me that you hadn’t. That’s why I read the transcript, to see if there was any reason.’

‘You’re very thorough.’

‘I like to be.’

‘Interport knew one of us was lying… we both said the other had put the ship in danger… but I was the Captain. It inevitably came back to me. It was, in fact, my fault.’

‘He wilfully disobeyed your instructions…’

‘And I didn’t find out until it was nearly too late.’

‘Quite… but he need not have lied about it.’

‘He was frightened,’ I sighed. ‘Of what would happen to his career.’

He let half a minute slip by without comment. Then he cleared his throat and said ‘I suppose you wouldn’t like to tell me why you left the South American people?’

I admired his delicate approach. ‘Gap in the dossier?’ I suggested.

His mouth twitched. ‘Well, yes.’ A pause. ‘You are of course not obliged…’

‘No’ I said. ‘Still…’ Something for something. ‘I refused to take off one day because I didn’t think it was safe. They got another pilot who said it was. So he took off, and nothing happened. And they sacked me. That’s all.’

‘But,’ he said blankly, ‘It’s a Captain’s absolute right not to take off if he thinks it’s unsafe.’

‘There’s no B.A.L.P.A. to uphold your rights there, you
know. They said they couldn’t afford to lose custom to other airlines because their Captains were cowards. Or words to that effect.’

‘Good gracious.’

I smiled. ‘Probably the Interport business accounted for my refusal to take risks.’

‘But then you went to Africa and took them,’ he protested.

‘Well… I needed money badly, and the pay was fantastic. And you don’t have the same moral obligation to food and medical supplies as to airline passengers.’

‘But the refugees and wounded, coming out?’

‘Always easier flying out than in. No difficulties finding the home base, not like groping for some jungle clearing on a black night.’

He shook his head wonderingly, giving me up as a bad job.

‘What brought you back here to something as dull as crop spraying?’

I laughed. Never thought I could laugh in front of the Board of Trade. ‘The particular war I was flying in ended. I was offered another one a bit further south, but I suppose I’d had enough of it. Also I was nearly solvent again. So I came back here, and crop spraying was the first thing handy.’

‘What you might call a chequered career,’ he commented.

‘Mild compared with some.’

‘Ah yes. That’s true.’ He stood up and threw his empty coffee beaker into the biscuit tin which served as a waste paper basket. ‘Right then… You’ll give a bit of thought to this bomb business?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ll be in touch with you again.’ He fished in an inner pocket and produced a card. ‘If you should want me, though, you can find me at this number.”

‘O.K.’

He made a wry face. ‘I know how you must feel about us.’

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Never mind.’

For most of that week I flew where I was told to, and thought about radio bombs, and sat on my own in the caravan in the evenings.

Honey didn’t come back, but on the day after her visit I had returned from Rotterdam to find a large bag of groceries en the table: eggs, butter, bread, tomatoes, sugar, cheese, powdered milk, tins of soup. Also a pack of six half pints of beer. Also a note from Honey: ‘Pay me next week.’

Not a bad guy, Honey Harley. I took up eating again. Old habits die hard.

Tuesday I took Colin and four assorted others to Wolver-hampton races, Wednesday, after the Board of Trade departed, I took a politician to Cardiff to a Union strike meeting, and Thursday I took the racehorse trainer to various places in Yorkshire and Northumberland to look at some horses to see if he wanted to buy any.

Thursday evening I made myself a cheese and tomato sandwich and a cup of coffee, and ate them looking at the pin-ups, which were curling a bit round the edges. After I’d finished the sandwich I unstuck the sellotape and took all the bosomy ladies down. The thrusting pairs of heavily ringed nipples regarded me sorrowfully, like spaniels’ eyes. Smiling, I folded them decently over and dropped them in the rubbish bin. The caravan looked just as dingy, however, without them.

Friday morning, when I was in Harley’s office filing flight records, Colin rang Harley and said he wanted me to stay overnight at Cambridge, ready again for Saturday.

Harley agreed. ‘I’ll charge Matt’s hotel bill to your account.’

Colin said ‘Fine. But he can stay with me again if he likes.’

Harley relayed the message. Did I like? I liked.

Harley put down the receiver. ‘Trying to save money,’ he said disparagingly, ‘Having you to stay.’ He brightened: ‘I’ll charge him the hangarage, though.’

I took the Cherokee over to Cambridge and fixed for them to give it shelter that night. When Colin came he was with four other jockeys: three I didn’t know, and Kenny Bayst. Kenny said how was I. I was fine, how was he? Good as new, been riding since Newbury, he said.

Between them they had worked out the day’s shuttle. All to Brighton, Colin to White Waltham for Windsor, aeroplane to return to Brighton, pick up the others, return to White Waltham, return to Cambridge.

‘Is that all right?’ Colin asked.

‘Sure. Anything you say.’

He laughed. ‘The fusses we used to have when we used to ask this sort of thing…’

‘Don’t see why’ I said.

‘Larry was a lazy sod…’

They loaded themselves on board and we tracked down east of the London control zone and over the top of Gatwick to Shoreham airport for Brighton. When we landed Colin looked at his watch and Kenny nodded and said, ‘Yeah, he’s always faster than Larry. I’ve noticed it too.’

‘Harley will give him the sack,’ Colin said dryly, unfastening his seatbelt.

‘He won’t, will he?’ Kenny sounded faintly anxious. Quicker journeys meant smaller bills.

‘It depends on how many customers he pinches from Poly-planes through being fast.’ Colin grinned at me. ‘Am I right?’

‘You could be,’ I agreed.

They went off laughing about it to the waiting taxi. A couple of hours later Colin came back at a run in his breeches and colours and I whisked him over to White Waltham. He had won, it appeared, at Brighton. A close finish. He was still short of breath. A fast car drove right up to the aircraft as
soon as I stopped and had him off down the road to Windsor in a cloud of dust. I went more leisurely back to Shoreham and collected the others at the end of their programme. It was a hot sunny day, blue and hazy. They came back sweating.

Kenny had ridden a winner and had brought me a bottle of whisky as a present. I said he didn’t need to give me a present.

‘Look, sport, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be riding any more bleeding winners. So take it.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘Thanks yourself.’

They were tired and expansive. I landed at White Waltham before Colin arrived back from Windsor, and the other four yawned and gossiped, opening all the doors and fanning themselves.

‘… gave him a breather coming up the hill.’

‘That was no breather. That was the soft bugger dropping his bit. Had to give him a sharp reminder to get him going again.’