Death of an Airman

by Christopher St. John Sprigg

  He now gave Bray a perfunctory smile and extended his hand. “The message is late, Mr. Robinson. The notice to subscribers has already appeared in La Gazette, and I am surprised that the circulation department was not informed first.”

  “There were difficulties,” said Bray with a studied vagueness. “It was considered advisable, for some reason I do not know, not to send the message through the usual channels.”

  “I see. I am disturbed to hear it. It is strange this idea also, for you to travel through with the consignment.” Grandet’s uplifted eyebrows invited further explanation.

  “There is reason. There is just a possibility of an attempt at robbery—not by the authorities, you understand, but by enemies.”

  Grandet made a clucking noise. “That is regrettable. I trust the Chief will deal with the matter. It is not a danger we want even to risk. You will be armed?”

  Bray nodded.

  “You must report here at two a.m. on Friday. I shall not be present, but my assistants will be. One will wait for you outside. He will see you into the van, and then our department’s responsibilities will, I hope, be over.”

  “Certainly,” Bray reassured him.

  “While you are here, I had better take you in to see my assistants, so that they will recognize you on Friday.”

  “You are admirably cautious, monsieur.”

  “It is necessary in the foreign publishing business,” said Grandet dryly. “This way.”

  Grandet led him to a flight of stairs marked with injunctions of privacy. They went up these and came to a door on which was a small notice:

  Bureau de la Poste Aérienne Défense à Entrer

  Grandet gave a peculiar knock and opened the door, which, Bray noticed, it was necessary for him to unlock first with a key he took from his watchchain. Four men were inside, in trousers and dirty shirt-sleeves, whom Bray instinctively placed as the dregs of the Paris underworld.

  He looked quickly and unobtrusively round him. A shelf on one wall was burdened with a row of large stone jars. Scissors, paste-brushes, brown paper, string, and copies of La Gazette were strewn about the floor. Almost immediately Grandet introduced him to the smallest of the four men. This was a fellow with a little bristly beard and one glass eye which looked heavenward with a pious fixity contrasting somewhat oddly with the fierce cast of the rest of his features.

  “This is Mr. Robinson, Leon,” said Grandet. “He is a representative of the firm. He will travel with a consignment to England to-morrow. He has been sent to us by headquarters. Look at him carefully. He will meet you at two a.m. on Friday. Put him into the van and leave the rest to him.”

  The man looked at Bray with his sound eye and nodded. “Very well, Grandet. And, look here; about the German consignment to-morrow—is that definite?”

  “Certainly,” said Grandet. “You will have to work hard to get it through in time. You were ten minutes late with the Swiss packages this morning.”

  “The printers were late,” grumbled the little man.

  “That is hardly an excuse. It is an extremely small consignment. Remember this is a newspaper, and newspapers are always punctual about consignments. It is not only myself—you know the High Command is ruthless about efficiency, and rightly so. We have a reputation for our foreign publishing, and shall probably get a complaint from the Chief to-morrow.”

  “Cattle,” muttered Grandet a little later to Robinson, who had maintained a discreet silence, as they went down the stairs again. “A pity we have to employ them. This way out.”

  When Bray got home, he found a long telegram waiting for him from Sergeant Finch.

  Called on Theodosius Vandyke’s office. This appears to be little more than an accommodation address. No one there. Charwoman told me office is rarely used. Porter said Vandyke is pleasant-spoken young man believed to be American. Seems to be rich. When he wants secretarial help he gets it from a bureau. Turns up not more than once a week and then only for an hour or so. Address not known. Landlord referred me to M. Roget notary of Paris as Vandyke’s agent. This end you will look after I suppose. Vandyke calls himself an importer in ’phone book but not known to any of credit enquiry agencies. Please advise me if further investigation required.

  “I’ll attend to that myself when I get back to England,” Bray told himself that night.

  He had acquainted Durand with the success of the plan, and the Frenchman was now inclined to be worried.

  “Supposing they were to get into touch with the Chief between now and Friday and discover your fraud. It might be extremely dangerous!”

  “There is hardly time,” retorted Bray. “Besides, everything seems to point to communication with the Chief being one-sided. In any case, I must take my chance.”

  Durand looked at him with a worried frown. “At least let me put an agent on to watch you when you meet.”

  “Thanks awfully, Durand, but if they do anything it will be when I’m actually travelling with the stuff. And your agent won’t be much use then!”

  On Thursday evening Bray sent a further telegram to Sergeant Finch.

  Find out all you can about Valentine Gauntlett head of Gauntlett’s Air Taxis. Also Captain Randall the well-known pilot who is Gauntlett’s partner. Criminal record or associations of Gauntlett if any particularly important.—Bray.

  This done he slept, and rose at the unearthly hour of 1 a.m. to dress and keep his appointment. Its hooter silent in deference to Paris’s bye-laws, his taxi swept like a ghost through the streets. He dropped it round the corner and walked to the office door, where the glass-eyed little man was waiting beside a van.

  “I have arranged with the driver,” he said to Robinson quietly. “Jump in.”

  The van reversed, turned, and the light from a lamppost shone on the scarlet and yellow colours of Gauntlett’s Air Taxis.

  Then Bray climbed in, and the French driver—a youngster with dark eyes and an ingenuous smile—sped like a demon through the quiet streets out to Le Bourget.

  Chapter XII

  Inevitability of Self-Murder

  Inspector Creighton looked at Dr. Marriott with an air of stupefaction on his honest face which the ecclesiastic thought almost too good to be true.

  “My lord, you amaze me, really you do! You seem to know more about this business than I do!”

  The Bishop of Cootamundra endeavoured to look modest. “Ah, has my little suggestion proved fortunate? That interests me. What is the result?”

  Inspector Creighton opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a folder.

  “Bastable agreed to consult with the Home Office expert,” he explained. “I raised some small point as an excuse so as not to hurt his feelings. A query about the force of impact of the wound.…Then I dropped a quiet word to the Home Office man. He spotted something at once.” Creighton looked at the Bishop impressively. “The revolver wound was made before the blow on the head was received!”

  The Bishop nodded. “The possibility had occurred to me some time ago, and that was why I raised the point. It is the only hypothesis that makes sense after all.”

  “I’m glad it makes sense to you,” exclaimed the detective. “I’m blessed if it does to me. For the Home Office fellow swears that it was the revolver bullet that killed Furnace, so that he must have been shot dead just before he hit the ground! No wonder he went such a bump against the cockpit dashboard. He would have been as limp as a sack. He must have been shot dead in the air. But how?”

  “Not very difficult, surely?” ventured the Bishop.

  “Not difficult—with him alone in the air and not another aero-plane near! Why, it seems to me impossible!”

  “Only too possible,” said the Bishop with a quiet smile. “I fear you have the whole story now, Inspector. You remember the letter Furnace wrote to Lady Laura?”

  “I do. And very misleading it was too.�
��

  “On the contrary. It was the simple truth,” answered Dr. Marriott gravely. “Furnace, poor fellow, did kill himself. He shot himself in the air. A touch of imagination that, which one must admire, although one reprehends the essential cowardice of the act. It was a suicide which was the airman’s equivalent of the Viking’s funeral: death in a crashing ’plane. He shot himself in the head, and fell back, pulling the ‘stick’ back with him. The machine stalled, and then span. In the spin the revolver doubtless fell out of the machine. If you make a search of the fields you will probably find it.”

  “I did find it—fallen in the middle of the aerodrome,” admitted the Inspector.

  “You see?” said the other triumphantly. “Additional proof! Well, he span into the ground, dead, and his forehead struck the dashboard, accidentally obliterating the original wound.”

  “Then there was no murder?” said Creighton with an air of disappointment.

  “No, I am glad to say,” replied the Bishop. “None. Have you the Home Office expert’s estimate as to the time between the bullet wound and the dashboard wound?”

  “Yes, here we are.” Creighton picked up a few folio sheets of neat typescript. “He says one must have followed within about two minutes of the other, perhaps less. The blood had no time to coagulate before the head struck the dashboard. That, of course, is what led Bastable wrong, to give him his due. The Home Office man said that only microscopical examination of the tissues revealed what had happened, and any doctor would have made Bastable’s mistake. But, of course, these doctors hang together so much anyway, and he may just have been saving Bastable’s face. Bastable more or less admitted that he’d made a very hurried examination of the body as the whole thing seemed so obvious.”

  “Well, at any rate that is final,” remarked the Bishop. “We were watching the machine, and we should certainly have seen if anyone was flying near enough to shoot him just before the crash.”

  “Certainly, my lord. But if you’ll excuse me, aren’t you leaving some loose ends? I mean, I shan’t feel happy in my mind unless I clear up the matter of that extra money made by Furnace, for instance. And that cocaine.”

  “I refuse to regard those loose ends as important, Inspector,” said Dr. Marriott firmly. “Still, how does this do? Furnace is making money for certain services rendered. He knows them to be illegal and consequently he gets heavily paid for them, but he does not know what their illegality consists in. However, just before his death he becomes suspicious, and, after investigation, finds they are connected with the drug traffic. Now lots of quite decent men think it perfectly legitimate to do illegal things—to cheat the Revenue, for instance. I can’t feel very indignant about it myself when I get my income tax assessment. But there is something abhorrent about the drug traffic, with its trade in demoralizing human souls and drawing them into a slough of degeneracy. A decent man, such as I think Furnace to have been, may well have been horrified to find that he had concerned himself in such a filthy business. But he may have thought himself too deeply involved to be able to get out of it. And so he killed himself.”

  “Ay, that’s about it,” admitted the Inspector, as he turned it slowly over in his mind. “It all fits in.”

  He felt a little sorry that the fine case he was working on had turned out to be not much more than the verdict at the inquest stated it to be, but there would be satisfaction in presenting the Chief Constable with a solution in this tangled case that cleared up everything. Not everything, though, because there was still the matter of the cocaine that Furnace had found. There were drugs at Baston, how or why he did not know, but it was a matter that had to be cleared up. If only his little trip to Glasgow with Bray had solved the mystery!

  “If there is nothing more, Inspector, I must be getting back.” There was real misery in the Bishop’s voice as he added: “There is a meeting of the Executive Committee to the Baston Flying Display, to which I now belong.”

  “I am sorry to hear it, my lord,” said the Inspector simply, “but I saw it was bound to happen. I know Lady Crumbles!”

  Chapter XIII

  Interesting Contents of a Newspaper

  Bray arrived at Le Bourget Aerodrome, and the van drove over the tarmac up to the scarlet and yellow biplane which was waiting for them, its two propellers flicking over with a quiet gurgle. A faintly familiar figure stood beside the biplane’s nose, wearing a leather coat and grey trousers. As Bray came closer he recognized it. It was the same woman whom Creighton had tried to dodge at Sankport Aerodrome, Miss Sackbut he thought the name had been. She stared at him while the van-driver explained that he was to travel with the ’plane. Then she called to him.

  “Hi, haven’t I seen you before somewhere?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Bray, hoping that the recognition would not be mutual.

  “Funny, I thought I had. Where are you going, in front or in the cabin?”

  “In the cabin,” answered Bray without hesitation, and Miss Sackbut made no protest. The van was being unloaded. He watched carefully, but they put nothing but bundles of newspapers in the ’plane.

  Was this the “consignment”? He felt oddly baffled, afraid that the fiasco of their Glasgow trip would be repeated.

  Meanwhile Sally spoke.

  “This is the second time I’ve had to do this damned early morning trip for Gauntlett,” she explained confidentially. “Thorndike piled up in a car in Paris last night. Tough luck, wasn’t it? I always seem to be the ministering angel in these affairs. I don’t know why Gauntlett doesn’t get a B licence himself for emergencies, he’s had enough flying experience.”

  “What is the weather going to be like?” said Bray politely.

  Sally eyed the dawn growing on the eastern sky. Layers of vapour were drifting in front of it like horizontal trails of chimney-smoke. “A bit sticky, I’m afraid. Damned early time to start off in doubtful weather. I shall take the long Channel crossing all the same. This compass is fairly decent and I trust these engines.”

  She looked at her watch. “We’d better be getting off now.…”

  Bray climbed into the cabin. The seats had been removed to make room for the bundles of newspapers which were scattered on the floor, but he piled one package upon another and made a seat of it.

  The creaking rumble from the undercarriage faded into the shout of the engines as the grass sped past, fell away, tilted below the left wing-tip, and then fell away again. They were flying over the neat fields of France, still shadowed by the retreating fog of night.

  The coastline, with the silver and gold edging of the Channel’s low tide, opened ahead after about an hour’s flying, with the sun, now risen, on the right. But Bray was oblivious of the view. He was carefully cutting the bundles of newspapers and examining their contents. His back was to the pilot, in case she glanced in at him through the window at the back of the cockpit.

  He opened one and then gave a little gasp.…

  He took out two or three newspapers and folded them carefully into his inside pocket. Then he tied up the package from which he had taken them.

  Meanwhile the Channel had dropped behind them, together with the chalk hills of Kent, cut off abruptly, like a relief map, and with a similar artificial regularity in their curves. Almost before he had time to work out the bearings of his discovery, he found himself staring at the letters Sankport on a green field, as they banked in a tight circle and slipped over the edge of the aerodrome towards the hangars and bumped over the ground to the Customs Office.

  It was this part that interested Bray, and he stayed to watch it. Two Customs men came out, and with the most perfunctory of glances at the contents, scrawled their approval on them. Suddenly Bray realized how glaringly he had neglected the obvious. Of course, it was only necessary to have one pair of confederates, and wait till they were on duty to run the stuff through.…Bray thanked Sally for his trip and went into
the waiting-room to ’phone for a taxi to the nearest station. He had breakfast in Victoria and then walked to New Scotland Yard. Here a message was awaiting him, marked “Urgent”—to come up at once and see Superintendent Learoyd. “Urgent” was not used lightly in the Yard, and he went up to the Superintendent’s without waiting to take off his hat or coat.

  Superintendent Learoyd was more troubled than Bray had ever seen him. Such a panic could only be aroused from “Up Above,” and so it proved.

  “Look here, Bray, what’s this business about investigating Valentine Gauntlett’s life to find if he has any criminal associations? Your man, Finch, has been nosing around, and he said you told him to do so.”

  “They were my instructions, sir,” answered Bray, surprised. “While I was in Paris following up a certain line of investigation, evidence came my way which seemed to throw considerable suspicion on Gauntlett. So I wired the usual message.”

  The Superintendent exploded with a kind of hissing noise, his grey moustache blowing away from his lips. “You delightful idiot! Do you realize who Gauntlett is?”

  “No—since I gather from your tone that he is somebody important,” replied Bray a little resentfully. “I know he is head of Gauntlett’s Air Taxis, that’s all.”

  “Oh, Bray, Bray!” implored the Superintendent. “Please read the Social and Personal column of The Times! Lord knows what trouble you may get us into. Valentine Gauntlett is our new Home Secretary’s nephew. And we’ve been poking round at his house and so forth trying to find his criminal associations! Ye gods, if the Big Chief heard of it!”

  “The Home Secretary’s nephew!” echoed Bray, and the Superintendent was gratified to observe an expression of real and not perfunctory horror on his subordinate’s face. Bray had not thought of associating Lord Entourage, formerly Sir Joseph Beatson, the pillar of Evangelicalism and Temperance and Anti-Gambling, with Valentine Gauntlett, but now he vaguely remembered that Entourage’s sister had married some South African millionaire whose name began with a G. It probably was Gauntlett.