Death of an Airman

by Christopher St. John Sprigg

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the display is concluded. I am sure you will agree it is one of the finest and most entertaining and most instructive that it ’as hever been our lot to witness. I am sure you will go away realizing what a wonderful thing haviation is and ’ow it affects our daily lives. I believe the day is not far distant when we shall all be buzzing across the Atlantic at four hundred miles an hour and popping in and hout of our back gardens in our little aeroplanes. Which just shows us what a wonderful thing haviation is, and I’m sure hall of you who’ve witnessed this very excellent show will agree.

  “You were probably puzzled by the little incident that ’appened with the police, and I am ’appy to assure you that it ’as all been satisfactorily settled, and you will read about it in your papers to-morrow. Just another proof of ’ow aviation is haffecting our daily lives in all sorts of ways! Before you go I am sure you’ll like to hear me record our thanks for the work put in by the pilots and voluntary staff, but above all by the Countess of Crumbles, who as horiginator of the scheme and Chairman of the Executive Committee ’as worked wonders, and I’m sure the Hairies, God bless ’em, will be set up for life. Thanking you for your kind support, ladies and gentlemen, good-bye. Put on a record, George, while I go and get a drink.…”

  A record ground out some desperate gaiety, and there was a mighty scuffle and murmur as the sheeplike crowd pushed and shoved out of its pens. Motors started up, tired children bawled, and ‘good-nights’ were bidden. The sun was already beginning to get near its setting, and one by one, with the roar of an opened engine, the visiting ’planes rose from the aerodrome and hurried for their home hangars before darkness fell.

  It was Vane who broke the silence. He had moved from the chair and was looking out of the window of the room, which faced on to the aerodrome.

  “Good lord!” he exclaimed. “Laura’s Dragon is still out there!”

  He opened the window and a policeman sprang forward to hold his arm, but he was only opening it to speak to Sally Sackbut as, escorted by a policeman, she passed by them.

  “Where’s Lady Laura?” he yelled. “Why hasn’t she taken her machine?”

  “She left it for Winters to try,” shouted back Sally. “She borrowed a club Moth and went back to Goring in that.”

  Vane looked dazed. “Heavens, what an ironic thing!” he muttered.

  “Why?” asked Bray. “Does it matter?”

  “Matter!” said Vane dully. “Laura’s going to kill herself in that ’plane—and I put the Bishop in there after I’d drugged him.

  “Damned funny,” he added, in the horrified silence that followed. “Our dear Bishop will have the honour of dying with my wife, while I am left behind. Pretty shaming, eh?”

  Chapter XX

  Kind Consideration of a Killer

  The little red-and-silver biplane had slipped away quietly from Baston Aerodrome. The oblong pattern of the flying field, with its car park looking like a swarm of beetles, and its mass of insect heads, and its aeroplanes poised on the ground with outspread wings like butterflies, had receded below the wheels. At the same time the weather began to worsen.

  It had been fine all day, although the south-west wind and the oppressive pallor of the sky had always been threatening. Now clouds were coming up on the wind, and the fleecy lumps of haze tore past the wings, dissolving as they moved.

  The biplane climbed.

  “A bit sluggish,” thought Lady Laura, looking at the rev. counter, which, however, showed full revolutions when she opened the throttle. They climbed persistently, and presently the aeroplane’s shadow no longer chased it as they flew towards the sun, towards the bad weather, for they were muffled in the clouds.

  The clouds soon parted and rippled below them like a loosely-woven counterpane. Roads, railways, streams, suddenly appeared sharp-edged across a gap in the billowing clouds. Or perhaps there loomed the firmly-rounded dark green of a copse.

  The windscreen in front of Lady Laura spattered suddenly with beads of moisture and rain. Water began to trickle steadily, flying backwards in a curve from the trailing edge of the upper wing.

  Soon the aeroplane was hung suspended in a world of its own. Below, a white sea of cloud rippled. Around it other clouds flew past, tattered, ragged, and allowed frequent glimpses of the sun which, when it appeared, painted the vague blue of shadow from the aeroplane in fantastic magnification on the grey screen of the more solid cloud-banks below.

  Lady Laura looked round her, drinking in the sense of solitude which is one of the profound experiences of flying.…

  The Bishop, huddled up on the floor of the front cockpit, was sleeping heavily at first, but later in a fitful dreamfulness. In his dream he was pursued through endless corridors by some strange insect which assumed a different shape every time he saw it. He hurried across the floors of monstrous halls, plunged into caverns, and shot up lifts, but his retreat was continually cut off by the threatening cry of his pursuer and the dreadful buzzing of its wings. At last he was involved in utter peril, in which the nightmare had him at his mercy and was enveloping him with fold after fold of its convolutions. He awoke and found himself struggling with a rug in which he was wrapped. The menacing buzz of his attacker had become the peaceful drone of the aero engine. It came back to him that he had gone to sleep in the cockpit of an aeroplane which, therefore, must now be in flight. Meanwhile his head was almost split in two by a headache in which the Bishop, had he not been a temperate man, would have recognized all the symptoms of a “morning after.”

  He half stood up, turned, and saw himself looking into a face which, even behind the streaming wind-screen and gnome-like goggles, he recognized as that of Lady Laura. And as he looked at it, he saw an expression of horrified surprise flash over it. The figure gesticulated at him. He looked down and saw nothing but cloud.

  Lady Laura was shouting, but the words were snatched out of her mouth by the slipstream and drowned by the roar of the engine. But at last he gathered from her gesticulations what she meant. He put his hand up to his head. He still wore the flying helmet that he had put on to diminish the noise of the engine while he slept, and he now plugged in the telephone and heard Lady Laura’s disembodied voice.

  “How on earth did you get in here?”

  “I must apologize,” answered the Bishop. “I felt extraordinarily drowsy and looked round for somewhere to sleep. I was persuaded by Tommy Vane to climb in here, and I must slowly have sagged down on to the floor. It was rather surprising that I did not foul the rudder-bar.”

  “Why didn’t I see you when I got in?”

  “Vane appears to have thoughtfully covered me with a rug, so perhaps it is not surprising that you did not see me. But I cannot understand why I was not wakened by an aero engine starting up a foot away from me. It seems almost incredible.”

  “You were drugged,” answered Lady Laura succinctly.

  The Bishop turned it over in his mind. “Drugged? But how? And why? I must confess my head feels rather like it. But I took nothing all afternoon, except—yes, let me see—a small lemonade from Tommy Vane.”

  “That was it.”

  “Surely you were joking? Why on earth should Tommy Vane—”

  “Because you knew too much, Bishop.” Lady Laura’s voice was precise and cold—a still, small murmur in the telephone. “You had barged into that nuisance of a Judge person who had married us in Hollywood. We thought that would never come out. Tommy had done his best to hide it by pretending to make a dead set at Mrs. Angevin. But the Judge had apparently told you of our marriage. So with his usual wild impetuousness, Spider drugged you and put you in a safe place. Unfortunately, Spider always bungles everything when he does not consult me. He put you in this club Moth, intending no doubt to dispose of you at a convenient time, but in the note he succeeded in getting into my hand in the Announcer’s tent, he omitted to tell whereabouts he had hidden you
. So, you see, I have committed the stupidity of running off with the machine in which he put you.”

  The Bishop was unable to grasp for a moment what Lady Laura meant. The words mixed with the dizziness of his drug-dazed brain and danced about, full of all kinds of sinister implications.

  “Dispose of me?” he faltered. “I am afraid I am still a little drowsy, because I simply cannot understand what you mean.”

  “It doesn’t matter very much now,” she said carelessly. “You see, everything’s blown up. So it doesn’t matter if our marriage does come out.”

  A sudden premonition filled the Bishop’s brain with the same sensation of evil he had felt so many days before when standing by the body of Furnace. He shivered.

  The aeroplane leaped and wallowed suddenly with a gust from the face of an advancing cloud, and Lady Laura was silent for a moment as she righted the ’plane. Then she spoke in the same cold voice.

  “I believe the condemned criminal usually is expected to make a confession before he goes to the gallows to the clergyman who is on duty for that purpose. I seem specially lucky—I’ve got a Bishop for my confessor. You see it was I who was the head—the brains—of the dope distribution organization about which Inspector Creighton has doubtless told you. Does it surprise you? You flatter me! It was I who found it necessary to shoot Furnace and devise a satisfactory way of disposing of his remains. Finally, it was I who killed Ness. Comparatively simple, you see, in his case, as he never knew who the Chief was. I merely asked him to come up for a flight with me, as I had bought a machine from Gauntlett and was troubled by a noise in the engine. We got up into a cloud, and while he was listening I did a half roll.…Probably my husband had in mind a similar scheme for getting rid of you, but I certainly should not have been a party to anything so clumsy. One should never do the same thing twice. It is as inartistic as it is dangerous.”

  The Bishop was utterly unable to speak for a few minutes. “Have you no compunction whatever for what you have done?” he said at last.

  The small voice hesitated. “Yes, I don’t know whether I can describe exactly why I disliked shooting Furnace. Only I did. It was so revolting chiefly because the poor brute thought he was in love with me and, what was worse, even imagined I loved him! He was actually preparing to divorce his wife for me. Poor George, and he was so dreadfully ugly and stupid! He hadn’t the least idea I was the Chief and wasn’t even aware of my connection with the dope organization. He thought I was as brainless as the Society butterfly of the novelist, and as good as gold at heart.” She laughed rather horribly. “Do you know, I really believe that what made him get restive more than anything else, when he found it was cocaine that he was carrying, was the idea that it might make him despicable in my eyes! Rather ironical, isn’t it? Like the plot of one of those Russian plays, or Ibsen or something.

  “That, of course, was what made it so dangerous. I got a letter from him in which he told me, what he’d already half hinted at to Ness in conversation, that he was going to clear out of his entanglements at any cost. Tell the police, in fact. And he still didn’t know that I was responsible for his entanglements! I saw then that it was necessary to eliminate him. The truth was that he’d been a continual anxiety to the organization from the moment he found out that we were smuggling. I’d rather any of the other pilots, or even Gauntlett or Randall or Sally, had found out about the dope than Furnace. He had a queer sort of honesty that nothing would eradicate, I’m afraid.

  “In his letter he talked about ‘ending the mess,’ and it struck me that the phrase might equally be used for committing suicide, though, of course, anyone who knew George and his deep-grained pugnacity would realize that he would never, never commit suicide. However, it gave me the idea for my murder, and the whole thing went through without a hitch. But I really hated doing it. Honestly I did, Doctor Marriott. I made an appointment with George for the evening before the crash, alone, and I can’t somehow forget the way the smile on his face at seeing me changed suddenly when I pulled the revolver out and shot him.…Just for a moment…but it was horrid.” A disembodied sigh came down the ear-phones. “Well, there it is, and you see it was all no good. Just the tiniest little flaw, and the whole organization broken up! Luckily I was warned in time to get away, and I certainly don’t propose to go through the business of a public trial. But you are a fresh problem.”

  “Why?” asked the Bishop.

  “I don’t believe in wasteful murder,” she explained. “There is no reason for killing you now, and it would be rather inartistic to do it.”

  “Is it necessary to deceive even yourself?” asked the Bishop gently. “If your better feelings urge you not to take yet another human being’s life, need you disguise from yourself that it is your better feelings that are prompting you?”

  “Don’t cant, for heaven’s sake!” said Lady Laura shrilly. “And don’t cherish the idea that anything you say will persuade me to face the mob and the public. No, I’m going to end things quietly and neatly. Don’t you think suicide is justifiable in the circumstances?”

  “Less than ever in these circumstances,” said the Bishop positively.

  “Would you try to stop me?”

  “I most certainly should.”

  “Confound it! That means I daren’t land somewhere and put you down or else you’d try to grab me or do something silly. How unreasonable you are!”

  They flew on in silence for a time. The worst of the weather had passed, and breaks were now visible in the clouds below them, through which the Bishop saw at first the sandy outline of the coast and then the grey oozing surface of the sea. The sun was getting very low, and the clouds were beginning to be dyed with a spreading flood of orange.

  The Bishop was endeavouring to arrange his thoughts preparatory to making a final struggle with the refractory mind of Lady Laura. His head sang with the after-effects of the drug, and the sudden revelations of the last few minutes gave him the impression of having been transported to a nightmare world.

  “Perhaps you are right,” said Lady Laura unexpectedly. “I’ll go back and face it. I’m feeling so tired too. Reaction I suppose! Can you take charge for a little?”

  “I have no controls here,” said the Bishop absently, his mind puzzled by the strange change of mind on the part of the woman.

  “You’ll find the dual control stick in a clip on the cockpit side. Put it in the socket. The rudder-bar is already there.”

  “I see. I have the column in place now.”

  “All right. Don’t touch it for a moment. I’ll tell you when I want you to take over. Have you got your safety-belt fastened?”

  “Yes. I did it up after that last bump.”

  The wings slid across the horizon as the machine turned back on its course, and the Bishop sighed with relief. He still found himself unable to grasp the reason for Lady Laura’s change of spirit.

  The wings straightened on the new reciprocal course, and they were heading for the coast again—for the point from which they had started out. The nose sank. Evidently they were about to go through the cloud, and presently its fleecy whiteness was all around them.

  The Bishop could never recapture a clear sequence of the remainder of events. He only knew that suddenly the machine was on its back. The control column struck his knee sharply as it was tilted hard over. He thought he heard a cry behind him, and a momentary rustle. Hanging with his full weight on his belt while the aeroplane lurched and fluttered upside-down like a mad thing, he turned his head. The cockpit behind him was empty.…

  But almost instinctively the Bishop was giving his main attention to righting the ’plane. He put the stick over and a little forward, with some dim idea of diving from the inverted position or rolling back. He apparently did the right thing, for, as he came through the bottom of the cloud, a couple of thousand feet above the sea, the machine righted itself and he was able to check it before it rolled
again and hold it on a steady course.

  The Bishop flew over the tossing and tumbling surface of the water, flew in continuous circles, clumsily but pertinaciously. But there was no sign of a human being there, no black, bobbing figure, not even an arm flung desperately in the air.

  At last the Bishop decided to return and, with his back to the sun, flew steadily, close to the sea, until the coast of Kent, with its white slash of chalk, came into sight.

  The Bishop had already resolved in his dazed mind what he would do. He kept steadily on, flying below the cloud until at last he saw to his right a great stretch of turf with the welcome white circle in its centre. Sooner or later, he had felt sure, he must strike an aerodrome. Here was one.

  The Bishop shut off the engine and turned. He turned again as the machine glided parallel with the boundary of the aerodrome, and presently the ground was coming up to him. “The first check…” he muttered dizzily to himself.

  Nearer.…Then, “Back with the stick,” repeated the Bishop under his breath, his face set. “Back! Back!”

  There was a sickening drop, and the Bishop realized he had landed about ten feet too high. With a wrenching, splintering noise and a crash which shook him cruelly, the ’plane struck the ground and collapsed, heeling over on one wing-tip.

  The Bishop undid his belt and began to walk, a little unsteadily, toward the hangars. He was met by the ambulance. With a strange feeling of unreality he saw Miss Sackbut step out and heard her exclamation of relief as she saw him.

  “I am afraid I have crashed the second club ’plane,” he said, walking waveringly towards her.

  “It’s not a crash if you can walk away from it,” she answered, smiling.

  “Where am I?” he said, putting his hand to his forehead.

  “This is Sankport. Lady Laura flew over here on her way, but without circling, and although they couldn’t see the registration letters, they recognized the club colours and ’phoned us. I was desperately worried when I heard from Creighton what had happened. Luckily he and Bray decided that we were telling the truth when we said we didn’t know what had been happening under our noses. So he let me go and I jumped into a machine and flew out here. I’ve been out twice to try to find some trace of you, but I haven’t been able to find a thing.” She looked at the ’plane. “Where is Lady Laura?”