Death of an Airman

by Christopher St. John Sprigg

  Creighton did so. He was favourably impressed by Harries, who was a quiet, solid sort of man with likeable eyes. The Inspector did not think he was the kind to hush things up under a mistaken idea he was being loyal to his friend. It was obvious that Furnace had not confided in him to any extent.

  The Inspector went through the papers, and to his pleasure he found a fairly recent bundle of Furnace’s cheques and among them several made out to “L. S. Parker.” The Inspector looked at the endorsement.

  “H’m, a woman’s handwriting!”

  He made a note of the bank whose stamp was on the cheques as bank of paying-in. It was the Bognor Regis branch of one of the big joint-stock banks. Evidently L. S. Parker had an account there, for all the cheques were stamped in the same way. If it was blackmail, not much attempt had been made to cover up the tracks. He dictated a letter to the bank and continued his search for evidence.

  He came on nothing else which was of immediate value, but one thing intrigued him so much that he decided to follow it up. It was a letter in a large envelope, marked “Private,” whose contents consisted almost entirely of family papers—Furnace’s birth certificate, death certificates of his father and mother, his R.F.C. commission, and the like. Its presence in this collection gave it its main interest, for the letter itself was ordinary enough. It was from a firm of analytical chemists at Market Garringham, Baston’s larger neighbour, and it read as follows:

  Dear Sir,

  We have now completed our analysis of the substance you left with us on the fifteenth instant. In the circumstances, we think it better if you would be so good as to call in and see our secretary when you are next in Market Garringham. He will be able to give you the results of the analysis, and there are certain points he wishes to raise which can best be discussed verbally.

  Yours faithfully,

  Swinton and Jackson.

  “Now what exactly lies behind this letter?” reflected the Inspector.

  ***

  The manager of the bank readily gave him Mrs. Parker’s address—3, The Way, Bognor Regis—and the Inspector found himself knocking at the door of a dismal grey-stuccoed house whose dejected air proclaimed “Apartments” even without the evidence of the card hung slightly askew in one of the windows.

  The Inspector had prepared himself in his mind’s eye for various possibilities, but when the authentic Mrs. Parker stood before him he was surprised. She was about thirty-five, with one of those perfectly vacant faces which generally only result from living in the country alone for years on end. She was dressed in a slovenly way, but had obviously been pretty once, with that blonde, ruddy-cheeked prettiness which tends to get a little blowsy with the passage of time, particularly if, as seemed to be the case here, the owner of it becomes bored with its upkeep. The only thing that confirmed the Inspector’s suspicion was that the woman was obviously frightened of him.

  She dropped into a chair. “What do you want, please?” she asked, nervously clasping her hands.

  “I come from Baston, in Thameshire, and I want to question you about certain matters arising from the death of George Furnace.”

  “Oh dear!” said Mrs. Parker forlornly. “I knew it would come out!”

  “Come out! What would?” asked the Inspector, a little surprised by her lack of caution.

  “That I am—that is to say—that I was—his wife!” answered Mrs. Parker.

  The Inspector performed a mental gymnastic. Perhaps it wasn’t blackmail after all, then. In fact, if she was his wife it couldn’t be, since it is legally impossible for a wife to blackmail a husband.

  “You knew he was dead?” asked the Inspector.

  Mrs. Parker nodded. “I saw it in the paper.”

  “Then why didn’t you get in touch with someone? You were his nearest relative.”

  “Well, it’s like this,” said Mrs. Parker, with a suspicion of a whine in her voice. “We’d been separated so long. During the war he married me, when he was staying on my mother’s farm to get over his wound. He was a bit above me, I suppose; I didn’t hit it off with his friends, I admit. It might have been different if there’d been a child, but there wasn’t, and we used to quarrel. I’m not a saint myself, and I reckon it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. Be that as it may, we agreed to separate seven years ago; and I’ll say this, he sent me money as regular as clockwork. I settled down here and went back to my maiden name, except I put a Mrs. before it, in case it ever came out accidental that I had had a husband.

  “Well, about six months ago my lord wrote to me begging me to fix up a divorce. I wrote back I was willing enough, for I guessed what was in the wind—another woman I suppose, and I don’t blame him. But look here, I said, before you take on more responsibilities, you fix me up properly. He wrote back quite pleasantly, and the upshot of it was he sent me fifteen hundred to buy this boarding-house and furnish it, and so forth, and I promised that I shouldn’t ask for anything from him when we were divorced, but I’d slip out of his life altogether. Well, almost before I could call on the solicitors here I read about his death. It gave me a turn, and I was thankful he’d sent me the money. Seeing that he’d asked me to slip out of his life I just kept quiet. Then when the maid said, ‘Inspector Creighton,’ I knew it had all come out.”

  After a little cross-examination Inspector Creighton accepted her story. He made the mental reservation, however, that so far from her silence being due to fine feeling, it was due to a fear that she might have to restore the fifteen hundred pounds that had been sent to her. This emerged from her frequent hints, and the Inspector was able to reassure her that she had every right to retain the money. After this she became cordial, and recollected that she had some drink in the house.

  The Inspector went back to Baston sorrowing. Undoubtedly he’d been barking up the wrong tree.

  It was therefore in a melancholy frame of mind that he called on Messrs. Swinton and Jackson. The secretary was a fussy little person in whom the sight of the Inspector’s card and the mention of Furnace’s name produced a nervous spasm. He stared at the Inspector like a frightened rabbit.

  “Dear, dear!” he panicked. “I told the chairman that we ought to have mentioned that business to the police.”

  “Indeed!” The Inspector removed his pince-nez and methodically polished them, the while he fixed the secretary with a cold eye. “Indeed, Mr. Thompson. Then perhaps you will now explain this letter, which I imagine has something to do with the business you mention, whatever that may be.”

  Mr. Thompson looked at the letter without reading it. Evidently he was only too familiar with its contents, and later the Inspector noticed its carbon duplicate on top of a bundle of correspondence on his desk.

  “I had better tell the story from the beginning. Major Furnace came in—let me see—well, it would have been about a month before his death. He brought a screw of white powder in an envelope and he asked us to analyse it. Naturally we asked him to give us some indication of what he expected it to contain. He could not help us at all, however. Our analysts got to work, and you can imagine our surprise, Inspector, when we discovered the powder to be cocaine.”

  The Inspector looked almost equally surprised.

  “As you may imagine, that put us in a very difficult position. On the one hand, we had been consulted professionally and in confidence; on the other hand, here was a layman in possession of a drug and, presumably, in illegal possession. I was very worried, but after talking it over with the chairman we wrote the letter you have in your hand. The chairman and myself both saw the Major. I must confess that he seemed astonished when we told him the result of our analysis. Naturally we pointed out our position, and told him that it was essential we should have some satisfactory explanation of how he came into possession of the drug if we were to let the matter rest there. He told us a very circumstantial story of how a total stranger had pressed a matchbox into his h
and and how he had found this inside. We told him that he must, of course, tell the police, and he agreed at once. In view of his assurance we left it at that.”

  “He certainly never told us,” retorted the Inspector.

  “Dear me!” said the secretary dismally. “And he seemed so straightforward about it. Well, as soon as I saw about his death, I said to the chairman, ‘Don’t you think, sir, we ought to tell the police?’ But the chairman was positive. ‘How can the two things possibly be connected, Thompson? We shall only stir up a lot of trouble.’ Very positive he was.” The secretary gave a placatory glance. “I can assure you if I’d guessed for a moment that Major Furnace hadn’t told you about the incident we should never have kept quiet.”

  “Well, you’ve told me now,” said the Inspector mildly. “Have you the paper and the cocaine?”

  “I’m afraid not. We gave it back to the Major. But here is the analyst’s report.”

  The Inspector was genial when he left, for undoubtedly he had at last come upon a clue of real importance.

  Sitting in his office, he turned it over in his mind. Major Furnace had somehow or other come upon a drug trafficker or addict. It must have been in such circumstances that he had been suspicious of something without being certain. Had he been certain, he would not have taken the risk of going to near-by analysts and giving his own address. Directly Furnace heard that it was cocaine he had evidently decided upon some plan of action, otherwise he would have gone at once to the police in accordance with his promise to the secretary. The Inspector dismissed at once the story of the matchbox. Furnace had only told it after being pressed for some plausible explanation of his possession of the drug, and had it been true there would have been no reason for him to conceal his story from the police.

  No, whatever the provenance of the drug, it had been such that it had given him a hold over some person. He had exploited that hold for blackmail, and thus the mysterious income was explained.

  Now blackmail at once gave a motive for the murder. The blackmailed person was evidently someone of unusual spirit, for apparently towards the end Furnace himself had begun to be afraid. The Inspector read his letter to Lady Laura carefully. He noted that Furnace did not definitely say that he was going to commit suicide. All that he said was that he was in a nasty mess and that he was going to end it. Naturally, in view of his death, they had interpreted the end as being suicide. But need it be? Mightn’t it be that he had begun to be afraid of the blackmailee—that that was the nasty mess—and that he proposed to end it by exposing the affair to the police? Then, assuming the blackmailee suspected this, wouldn’t it be explicable for the blackmailee to plan the crash of the machine and afterwards finish him off, knowing that the survival of Furnace must be prevented at all costs?

  As far as the Inspector could see this theory only left two loose ends. The Air Ministry man had insisted that the crash was either an accident or deliberate action on the part of the pilot. But, damn it, thought the Inspector testily, you can never trust these experts!

  The other loose end, if indeed it was a loose end, was that the only person who seemed to have been in a position to shoot Furnace was Sally Sackbut, and was it really possible that she was the ruthless criminal of his theory? He doubted it, and yet there was the undeniable fact that as manager of the club, and herself a pilot, she was in an exceptional position to plan the crash.

  However, the Inspector felt pleased, for he had cleared up so many conflicting features that a loose end or two might safely be left out for a moment.

  The next question that troubled the Inspector was—setting aside for the moment the possibility that Sally Sackbut was the mysterious unknown—how far was this cocaine business connected with flying? Had Furnace merely stumbled on it in his private capacity as a resident at Baston? The Inspector found difficulty in believing this. Whatever the vices of Baston, and the little town had its share of them, they were mostly bucolic, and drug-taking was not among them. In fact, the Inspector knew singularly little about this form of wrong-doing.

  Well then, was it a vice endemic to aviation? The Inspector imagined that a pilot would necessarily require to be physically fit, which ipso facto excluded drug-taking. But he was not sure, and for all he knew drug-taking might be a recognized aviation cult. He realized that here he would have to get advice. But from whom?

  His train of thought was momentarily interrupted by the tinkle of his office ’phone. He lifted the receiver.

  “Gauntlett here. You know you called in to see me about poor Furnace the other day? Look here, Inspector, can you come round and see me—at once? I’ve discovered something that I think will interest you. Yes, genuinely. No, I can’t very well explain on the ’phone. In half an hour? Right ho, come straight to my office.”

  Val Gauntlett was as delighted as a terrier with a rat as he led the Inspector to a portion of the aerodrome where lay a small block of wood. Over it a ground engineer in the scarlet-and-yellow overalls of Gauntlett’s Air Taxis was mounting guard.

  The ground engineer removed the block of wood, and the Inspector saw that it concealed a hole in the ground. He knelt down to inspect it. From the bottom of the depression projected a thin cylinder. The Inspector looked at it more closely and then gave a whistle of amazement.

  It was the muzzle of a revolver, and its position could be most readily explained by the fact that it had fallen from a great height, embedding itself in the soil of the aerodrome like a bomb.

  Very gently the Inspector loosened it. The firearm was rusty, as if it had been in the soil for some time. He examined it carefully, and measured the bore with his pocket callipers. Unless it was a remarkable coincidence, this was the revolver that had killed Furnace.

  “Well, anything important?” asked Gauntlett eagerly.

  The Inspector nodded. “It is. Extremely important, I fancy. Very good of you to have got in touch with me so promptly. Could this have been here long without being overlooked?”

  “Good lord, yes! See for yourself the size of the aerodrome! If my ’plane hadn’t happened to have been parked just here, Lumb would never have noticed it, and I know I shouldn’t have.”

  Creighton nodded, and walked slowly back to his car. Assuming that on further examination this proved to be the revolver which shot Furnace, did it alter his reconstruction? Not necessarily. After all, it wasn’t a bad way of getting rid of an incriminating weapon to take it up in an aeroplane and drop it.

  This, however, suggested still more strongly a link between flying, the murder, and the drug-taker. Not only did the murderer have something to do with flying, but almost certainly he was a pilot, for it would have been too risky for a passenger to throw it overboard. Ignorant as the Inspector was about aviation, he did know, from his solitary joy-ride, that in a two-seater aeroplane, such as the club used, the passenger sat in front of the pilot.

  A pilot.…Sally Sackbut’s image flitted again before the mind’s eye of the Inspector.…

  Chapter VIII

  Autorotation of an Ecclesiastic

  Meanwhile, Baston Aero Club had become the scene of activities which for a time obliterated the loose ends of the Furnace tragedy. The efficient cause was a remark made at breakfast by the Lord-Lieutenant of Thameshire, Lord Grunnage, to his sister, the Countess of Crumbles, to the effect that he hoped “that accident hasn’t affected the Aero Club I’m president of. Sally Sackbut’s a game little woman, and I should be sorry if she got into difficulties. Of course, the club’s always on the verge of bankruptcy in this one-eyed town.”

  Now Lady Crumbles lived in a passionate whirl of organization. Charity matinée succeeded to hospital ball with the inevitability of the seasons, and people instinctively (but vainly) put protecting hands over their cheque-books when she approached. Vainly, because Lady Crumbles’ masterful and obtuse personality had the effect of a tank, and to be perfectly candid, her figure was planned on simi
lar lines, which made the joint effect the more overpowering. Although Lady Crumbles was never in want of charitable objects for which to organize, or time in which to organize for them, she did sometimes find it difficult to originate new devices by which to abstract money from people under the show of giving them pleasure. Consequently she leapt at the remark thrown out, in all casualness, by Lord Grunnage.

  “Gillie, you’ve given me an idea!”

  “No, surely not,” said her brother nervously.

  “Positively! Baston Aero Club must have an air display.”

  “I don’t think they’ll like that at all.”

  “Of course they won’t. That’s not the point. It’s for a cause. For my Air Fairies!”

  “Your what?” asked Lord Grunnage incredulously.

  “My Air Fairies. You’ve heard of Brownies, I suppose?”

  “A particularly repellent breed of Girl Guide, aren’t they? Whenever I review a public function they seem to creep in on it somehow toward the end. They must be the most accomplished gate-crashers in this county.”

  “Gilbert,” said Lady Crumbles sternly, “I am the patron of the Brownies in this county!”

  “That, of course, explains it!”

  “The Air Fairies are the aerial equivalent of the Brownies,” went on Lady Crumbles. “In time of war they will do their duty for King and Country by assisting our gallant airmen.”

  “I don’t think the name is very happy,” he suggested.

  “And pray why not?”

  Lord Grunnage coughed. “It might give rise to misconception.”

  “I don’t follow you,” answered Lady Crumbles brusquely. “However, as you seem to have taken some absurd prejudice against the name—what about the Airies?”

  “That is better,” admitted her brother.