Rat Race (18 page)

‘I ought to see to . .’ she looked vaguely in my direction, and back to the Cherokee.

‘Colin and Matt will see to everything.’

‘All right, then…’ She let herself be taken off by Annie Villars, who had recovered her poise and assumed total command as a good general should. Kenny and the other jockey and trainer meekly followed.

‘Now,’ said Colin. ‘How on earth did you know we needed you?’

‘I’ll show you,’ I said abruptly. ‘Come and look.’ I walked him back to the little Cherokee, climbed up on to the wing and lay down on my back across the two front seats, looking up under the control panel.

‘What on earth…?’

The device was there. I showed it to him. Very neat, very small. A little polythene-wrapped packet swinging free on a rubber band which was itself attached to the cable leading to the master switch. Nearer the switch one wire of the two wire cable had been bared: the two severed ends of copper showed redly against the black plastic casing.

I left everything where it was and eased myself out on to the wing.

‘What is it? What does it mean?’

‘Your electric system was sabotaged.’

‘For God’s sake… why?’

‘I don’t know,’ I sighed. ‘I only know who did it. The same person who planted the bomb a month ago. Major Rupert Tyderman.’

He stared at me blankly. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Not much. No.’

I told him how the Major had set off the bomb while we were safely on the ground, and that today he had thought I was flying Nancy’s Cherokee and could get myself out of trouble.

‘But that’s… that means…’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘He’s trying to make it look as though someone’s trying to kill me.’

I nodded. ‘While making damn sure you survive.’

The Board of Trade came down like the hounds of Hell and it wasn’t the tall reasonable man I faced this time in the crew room but a short hard-packed individual with an obstinate jaw and unhumorous eyes. He refused to sit down: preferred to stand. He had brought no silent note-taker along. He was strictly a one man band. And hot on percussion.

‘I must bring to your attention the Air Navigation Order Nineteen sixty six.’ His voice was staccato and uncompromising, the traditional politeness of his department reduced to the thinnest of veneers.

I indicated that I was reasonably familiar with the order in question. As it ruled every cranny of a professional pilot’s life, this was hardly surprising.

‘We have been informed that on Friday last you contravened Article 25, paragraph 4, sub section a, and Regulation 8, paragraph 2.

I waited for him to finish. Then I said ‘Who informed you?’

He looked at me sharply. ‘That is beside the point.’

‘Could it have been Polyplanes?’

His eyelids flickered in spite of himself. ‘If we receive a complaint which can be substantiated we are bound to investigate.’

The complaint could be substantiated, all right. Saturday’s newpapers were still strewn around the crew room this Monday morning, all full of the latest attempt on Colin Ross’s life. Front page stuff. Also minute details from all my passengers about how we had led him out to sea and brought him home under the 700 ft cloud base.

Only trouble was, it was illegal in a single engine aeroplane
like the Six to take paying customers out over the sea as low as I had, and to land them at an airport where the cloud base was lower than one thousand feet.

‘You admit that you contravened Section…’

I interrupted him. ‘Yes.’

He opened his mouth and shut it again. ‘Er, I see.’ He cleared his throat. ‘You will receive a summons in due course.’

‘Yes,’ I said again.

‘Not your first, I believe.’ An observation, not a sneer.

‘No,’ I said unemotionally.

A short silence. Then I said, ‘How did that gadget work? The nitric acid package on the rubber band.’

‘That is not your concern.’

I shrugged. ‘I can ask any schoolboy who does chemistry.”

He hesitated. He was not of the stuff to give anything away. He would never, as the tall man had, say or imply that there could be any fault in his Government or the Board. But having searched his conscience and no doubt his standing orders, he felt able after all to come across.

‘The package contained fluffy fibreglass soaked in a weak solution of nitric acid. A section of wire in the cable to the master switch had been bared, and the fibreglass wrapped around it. The nitric acid slowly dissolved the copper wire, taking, at that concentration, probably about an hour and a half to complete the process.’ He stopped, considering.

‘And the rubber band?’ I prompted.

‘Yes… well, nitric acid, like water, conducts electricity, so that while the fibreglass was still in position the electrical circuit would be maintained, even though the wire itself had been completely dissolved. To break the circuit the fibreglass package had to be removed. This was done by fastening it under tension via the rubber band to a point further up the cable. When the nitric acid dissolved right through the wire and the two ends parted, there was nothing to stop the rubber band contracting and pulling the fibreglass package away. Er… do I make myself clear?’

‘Indeed,’ I agreed, ‘you do.’

He seemed to give himself a little mental and physical shake, and turned with sudden energy towards the door.

‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘Then I need a word with Mr Harley.’

‘Did you get a word with Major Tyderman?’ I asked.

After the merest hiatus he said again, ‘That is not your concern.’

‘Perhaps you have seen him already?’

Silence.

‘Perhaps, though, he is away from home?’

More silence. Then he turned to me in stiff exasperation. ‘It is not your business to question me like this. I cannot answer you any more. It is I who am here to enquire into you, not the other way round.’ He shut his mouth with a snap and gave me a hard stare. ‘And they even warned me,’ he muttered.

‘I hope you find the Major,’ I said politely, ‘before he plants any more little devices in inconvenient places.’

He snorted and strode before me out of the crew room and along to Harley’s office. Harley knew what he was there for and had been predictably furious with me ever since Friday.

‘Mr Shore admits the contraventions,’ the Board of Trade said.

‘He’d be hard pushed not to,’ Harley said angrily, ‘considering every R.A.F. base across the country told him about the low cloud base at Cambridge.’

‘In point of fact,’ agreed the Board of Trade, ‘he should then have returned immediately to Manchester which was then still within the legal limit, and waited there until conditions improved, instead of flying all the way to East Anglia and leaving himself with too small a fuel margin to go to any cloud-free airport. The proper course was certainly to turn back right at the beginning.’

‘And to hell with Colin Ross’ I said conversationally.

Their mouths tightened in chorus. There was nothing more to be said. If you jumped red traffic lights and broke the speed
limit rushing someone to hospital to save his life, you would still be prosecuted for the offences. Same thing exactly. Same impasse. Humanity versus law, an age-old quandary. Make your choice and lie on it.

‘I’m not accepting any responsibility for what you did,’ Harley said heavily. ‘I will state categorically, and in court if I have to, that you were acting in direct opposition to Derry-downs’ instructions, and that Derrydowns disassociates itself entirely from your actions.’

I thought of asking him if he’d like a basin for the ritual washing of hands. I also thought that on the whole I’d better not.

He went on, ‘And of course if there is any fine involved you will pay it yourself.’

Always my bad luck, I reflected, to cop it when the firm was too nearly bankrupt to be generous. I said merely, ‘Is that all, then? We have a charter, if you remember…’

They waved me away in disgust and I collected my gear and flew off in the Aztec to take a clutch of businessmen from Elstree to The Hague.

By the time, the previous Friday, that Colin and I had locked Nancy’s Cherokee and ensured that no one would touch it, the first cohorts of the local press had come galloping up with ash on their shirt fronts, and the Board of Trade, who neither slumbered nor slept, were breathing heavily down the S.T.D.

Aircraft radios are about as private as Times Square: it appeared that dozens of ground-based but air-minded Midlands enthusiasts had been listening in to my conversation with Birmingham radar and had jammed the switchboard at Cambridge ringing up to find out if Colin Ross was safe. Undaunted, they had conveyed to Fleet Street the possibility of his loss. His arrival in one piece was announced on a television news broadcast forty minutes after we landed. The great British media had pulled out every finger they possessed. Nancy and Annie Villars had answered questions until their throats were
sore and had finally taken refuge in the Ladies Cloaks. Colin was used to dealing with the press, but by the time he extricated himself from their ever increasing news hungry numbers he too was pale blue from tiredness.

‘Come on,’ he said to me. ‘Let’s get Nancy out and go home.’

‘I’ll have to ring Harley…’

Harley already knew and was exploding like a firecracker. Someone from Polyplanes, it appeared, had telephoned at once to inform him with acid sweetness that his so highly qualified chief pilot had broken every law in sight and put Derrydowns thoroughly in the cart. The fact that his best customer was still alive to pay another day didn’t seem to have got through to Harley at all. Polyplanes had made him smart, and it was all my fault.

I stayed in Cambridge by promising to foot the bill for hangarage again, and went home with Nancy and Colin.

Home.

A dangerous, evocative word. And the trouble was, it
felt
like home. Only the third time I’d been there, and it was already familiar, cosy, undemanding, easy… It was no good feeling I belonged there, because I didn’t.

Saturday morning I spent talking to the police face to face in Cambridge and the Board of Trade in London on the telephone. Both forces cautiously murmured that they might perhaps ask Major Rupert Tyderman to help them with their enquiries. Saturday afternoon I flew Colin back to Haydock without incident, Saturday night I again stayed contentedly at Newmarket, Sunday I took him to Buckingham, changed over to the Aztec, and flew him to Ostend. Managed to avoid Harley altogether until I got back Sunday evening, when he lay in wait for me as I taxied down to the hangar and bitched on for over half an hour about sticking to the letter of the law. The gist of his argument was that left to herself Nancy would have come down safely somewhere over the flat land of East Anglia. Bound to have done. She wouldn’t have hit any of the radio
masts or power station chimneys which scattered the area and which had stuck up into the clouds like needles. They were all marked there, disturbing her, on the map. She had known that if she had to go down at random she had an average chance of hitting one. The television mast at Mendlesham stretched upwards for more than a thousand feet… But, said Harley, she would have missed the lot. Certain to have done.

‘What would you have felt like, in her position?’ I asked.

He didn’t answer. He knew well enough. As pilot, as businessman, he was a bloody fool.

On Tuesday morning he told me that Colin had telephoned to cancel his trip to Folkestone that day, but that I would still be going in the Six, taking an owner and his friends there from Nottingham.

I imagined that Colin had changed his intention to ride at Folkestone and gone to Pontefract instead, but it wasn’t so. He had, I found, flown to Folkestone. And he had gone in a Polyplane.

I didn’t know he was there until after the races when he came back to the airport in a taxi. He climbed out of it in his usual wilted state, surveyed the row of parked aircraft, and walked straight past me towards the Polyplane.

‘Colin,’ I said.

He stopped, turned his head, gave me a straight stare. Nothing friendly in it, nothing at all.

‘What’s the matter?’ I said puzzled. ‘What’s happened?’

He looked away from me, along to the Polyplane. I followed his glance. The pilot was standing there smirking. He was the one who had refused to help Kenny Bayst, and he had been smirking vigorously all afternoon.

‘Did you come with him?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I did.’ His voice was cold. His eyes also.

I said in surprise, ‘I don’t get it…’

Colin’s face turned from cold to scorching. ‘You… you… I don’t think I can bear to talk to you.’

A feeling of unreality clogged my tongue. I simply looked at him in bewilderment.

‘You’ve properly bust us up… Oh, I dare say you didn’t mean to… but Nancy has lit off out of the house and I left Midge at home crying…’

I was appalled. ‘But why? On Sunday morning when we left, everything was fine…’

‘Yesterday,’ he said flatly. ‘Nancy found out yesterday, when she went to the airfield for a practice session. It absolutely overthrew her. She came home in a dreadful mood and raged round the house practically throwing things and this morning she packed a suitcase and walked out… neither Midge nor I could stop her and Midge is frantically distressed…’ He stopped, clenched his jaw, and said with shut teeth, ‘Why the hell didn’t you have the guts to tell her yourself?’

‘Tell her what?’

‘
What
?’ He thrust his hand into the pocket of his faded jeans and brought out a folded wad of newspaper. ‘This.’

I took it from him. Unfolded it. Felt the woodenness take over in my face; knew that it showed.

He had handed me the most biting, the most damaging, of the tabloid accounts of my trial and conviction for negligently putting the lives of eighty seven people in jeopardy. A one-day wonder to the general public; long forgotten. But always lying there in the files, if anyone wanted to dig it up.

‘That wasn’t all,’ Colin said. ‘He told her also that you’d been sacked from another airline for cowardice.’

‘Who told her?’ I said dully. I held out the cutting. He took it back.