Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘These accounts…’ I began guardedly,’… is there a problem?’

  ‘Yes, I think there is.’ I could picture Dennis scowling at the telephone. ‘Come over and I’ll show you.’

  It was three days before Jamie could take the time off and I saw no point going without him. Another trip to Jersey wouldn’t do his navigation any harm and if Dennis insisted on the normal boozy lunch, then my pupil could fly me back as well.

  We left at eight in the morning. The crossing was a delight - a big high-pressure zone emptying the sky of clouds - and it was barely half past nine by the time Dennis picked me up at the Aero Club. On the way in to St Helier, he enquired about Harald and my trip out to Standfast. I told him a little about what we’d got up to - the flying, the facilities, the fighter pilot school he seemed to run - then said that Harald hadn’t been in touch since.

  ‘He’s in Kiev,’ Dennis grunted. ‘Buying aeroplanes.’

  ‘The Russian Shuttle thing?’

  ‘Yeah, and lots else. The Shuttle was the key to the door. Just now he’s inside, emptying all the cupboards.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Anything that flies. Anything that goes bang. Jesus, you know the guy. He’ll end up owning an air force at this rate.’ He eyed me across the car, openly curious. ‘He make any moves on you?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Nothing you’d understand.’ I patted him on the knee. ‘Tell me about these accounts. I have to be back at the airport by three.’

  Dennis parked the Porsche and we took the lift to his new suite of offices on the Esplanade. They looked out across the harbour, a glorious view, and I was still watching a couple entwined around each other on the sun deck of a big fifty-foot motor cruiser when Dennis passed me a stapled sheet of papers.

  ‘These are Adam’s Amex statements. The key date’s February the eleventh.’

  I stared down at the list of credit-card transactions. The twelfth of February was the day Adam had speared in, the day I’d waited by the phone, hoping against hope that the radar people had got it wrong. My eyes went from purchase to purchase, following the footprints that Adam had left across those first ten days of the month: £12 to a garage in Newport, petrol probably; £19.27 to the off-licence we used near Mapledurcombe; £198.50 to settle his monthly invoice for landings at Sandown Airport. After Monday, the ninth, he’d been on Jersey. There was the charge from the sushi restaurant on the night of the eleventh, and then the bill from the Bon Accueil, settled on the morning he’d left in the Cessna. I’d thought of these places nonstop for months. Seeing them listed here, so cold, so matter-of-fact, was the strangest experience. Was this how Adam had ended up? As a list of entries on a credit card statement?

  Dennis was getting impatient.

  ‘Next page,’ he said. ‘Turn over.’

  I flipped the page. The settlement date on Adam’s account happened to fall on the twelfth of every month. The next page should have been empty. It wasn’t.

  I stared at the single line of type. On Friday 13 February, Adam had bought £83 worth of Avgas from the refuelling agency at Hurn Airport.

  Hurn Airport serves Bournemouth. I looked up.

  ‘He couldn’t have done,’ I said. ‘He was dead.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘Then it must have been a mistake. Wrong card, wrong account, whatever.’

  ‘It wasn’t a mistake. I’ve been through it with the Amex people. Twice.’ He jabbed at the statement with his finger. ‘On Friday the thirteenth of February, someone used his card at Hurn.’

  ‘And you don’t think it was Adam?’

  Dennis shot me one of his looks. From the start, he’d dismissed any thought that Adam might have staged some kind of disappearance. He’d known him well, he’d rated his judgement, and in his book Adam didn’t play games like that.

  ‘He’s dead, Ellie,’ he grunted. ‘That’s the bottom line.’

  Suddenly, something occurred to me.

  ‘Did Adam have more than one card?’

  ‘Not according to Amex.’

  ‘But that’s impossible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because his card was in the bag they fished out, the one that Harald’s people found in the Channel. Harald showed me himself. They found the bag over a week later.’

  ‘I know.’ Dennis was nodding. ‘You told me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘February 22nd.’ He tapped his diary. ‘I made a note.’

  I sat back, overwhelmed. The implications were horrible. I didn’t want to think about them. I looked out at the sunshine, at the yachts in the harbour, half-listening to Dennis. Accountants, I thought, live in a very black-and-white world. Doubt wasn’t a commodity they had much use for.

  ‘Harald showed you the bag, Adam’s bag… right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the card in the side pocket was definitely his… right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So the bag couldn’t have been in the aeroplane, could it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So Harald’s blokes couldn’t have found it, could they?’

  ‘No.’

  Something was snagging in my mind, something I’d half-felt at the time but had never pursued. I had my address book in my bag. The man I’d met from the AAIB was a Mr Grover and I’d made a note of his telephone number.

  ‘May I?’

  Dennis passed me the phone. When I got through to Grover’s office, they said he was out on an investigation. They gave me a mobile number. He answered on the first ring.

  ‘It’s Ellie Bruce, Mr Grover. We had tea at Southampton airport a while back. My husband, Adam…’

  The name finally registered. We swapped courtesies. Dennis was standing behind me, staring out of the window. The rattle of change in his pocket meant he was getting impatient. Mr Grover asked me how he could help.

  ‘That bag I gave you,’ I said. ‘Have you still got it?’

  ‘The Jaguar bag? The one they found in the sea?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  There was a long silence. From his end, I could hear the whine of an engineering tool.

  ‘I think I do,’ he said at last. ‘I think it’s in a locker at the office. I’ll check when I get back.’

  ‘When’s that?’

  I listened to his answer, then thanked him and said I’d ring again. The moment I put the phone down, Dennis was back behind his desk.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He’ll be in his office next week, fingers crossed.’

  ‘Next week? Phone him again. I’ll talk to him.’

  He pushed the phone at me but I shook my head.

  ‘I have to think about this,’ I said. ‘I want a bit of time.’

  ‘What is there to think about? We either go to the police or we don’t.

  If we don’t, we’ve got to have a bloody good reason why not.’ He picked up the statements I’d left on the desk. ‘This is prima facie, Ellie. The least we’re looking at is fraud.’

  I thought of the entry again. Eighty-three pounds buys you a tankful of Avgas. Provided it’s a small plane.

  ‘Give me a week,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  ‘To do what? Have a think? Bit of a wobble? You don’t need it, Ellie. What you need are the guys who know what they’re doing. Round here we call them policemen.’

  ‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Can I have a photocopy of this?’

  Dennis left the office. When he came back, he was carrying two sheets of paper. The second photocopy was a duplicate of the sales chit. The name of the agency at Hurn was Wessex Refuelling and the date, beyond any shadow of a doubt, was Friday 13 February. I peered hard at the signature but it really told me nothing. Anyone could have forged Adam’s scrawl.

  Dennis folded the photocopies and held them out. They might have been the Crown Jewels, the way he watched me slipping them into my bag.

  ‘What about the AAIB guy’s mobile
number? You’ve still got that?’

  ‘Of course.’ I patted my bag.

  Dennis looked at me a moment, then shook his head.

  ‘Thank Christ for that.’ He sank into his chair again. ‘Phone me the moment anything happens.’

  Jamie flew me back to Sandown that afternoon. He didn’t ask me what Dennis had said and I didn’t tell him. For the time being, I wanted to keep this shattering development to myself. If I’d misinterpreted Adam’s death, if I’d got the circumstances all wrong, then I needed to be the first to know why.

  That night, I tracked Mr Grover down to a small country hotel near Shrewsbury. He was investigating a series of hot-air balloon accidents and I told him just enough to make it plain that I needed the bag back in a hurry. The tests he’d done on it had all been completed so there was no problem in releasing it. When he finally offered to get someone to fish it out and put it in a Jiffy bag, I said I had a better idea.

  ‘I’ll fly up tomorrow and pick it up,’ I said. ‘Just tell me where to go.’

  I flew up to Farnborough in the Moth next morning, alone this time. Mr Grover’s secretary met me at the foot of the control tower. She was carrying a black plastic dustbin liner, held slightly away from her body. The bin liner was heavier than I’d expected and I strapped it down in the front cockpit. When she offered me coffee in her office, I thanked her but said I had to get back.

  An hour later I was downwind in the circuit at Sandown. It says a great deal about my state of mind that I’d overflown the strip twice. I was looking for a red Yak trainer. The last person on earth I wanted to meet was Harald Meyler. According to Dennis Wetherall, he was in the Ukraine but even accountants can - just sometimes - be wrong.

  Once I’d landed, I taxied over to the hangar, pulled the Moth into wind, and shut down the engine. This was almost exactly the spot where Harald had first given me the bag. I remembered his face when he’d handed it over, that expression of stony regret when he’d told me to look in the side pocket. I’d found the American Express card myself. I’d turned it over, seen the name, drawn the inevitable conclusion. Only then had he stepped across and put his arms round me. I remembered with absolute clarity how grateful I’d felt for his sympathy and his rough compassion, and I remembered too the very next thing he’d said. He’d offered to fly at the funeral. In Adam’s Mustang.

  I reached into the Moth’s front cockpit and released the harness. I held the bin liner gingerly, just like Mr Grover’s secretary, and when I upended it and shook the bag on to the grass, I stepped smartly back, as if it might explode.

  It still felt damp to the touch when I picked it up. I turned it over and over, examining it from every angle, then I did what I’d been wanting to do since I’d sat in Dennis’s office, staring at the sales slip from Hurn Airport. I found the zip fastener and pulled it up and down. The fact that it ran smoothly, and then made a snug fit with the little tongue of metal on the other side, told me everything I wanted to know. The zip on Adam’s old bag had broken just before Christmas. One of the jobs I’d never got round to was mending it.

  Chapter seventeen

  That night, it took me nearly an hour to find the photograph album. Before I flew off to Florida, I’d had a giant sort-out, clearing the decks for what I wanted to be a brand-new start, and a lot of the treasures from my marriage had been boxed away in the little upstairs room we use for storage. Andrea had also been reorganising Mapledurcombe and it was gone eight before I laid hands on the battered cardboard box that held all the photographs.

  I carried it downstairs to Adam’s office, clearing a space on the desk and making it plain to Andrea that I’d welcome a little privacy. I’d have preferred to have used the tiny snug where Adam and I had so often spent our evenings, but this - like every other room in the house - seemed to have been annexed by the guests.

  The album went way back to Gander Creek. I leafed slowly through the carefully stuck-on snapshots, following the path we’d trodden from the Falklands, back to the UK, up to Aberdeen, and then finally down here to Mapledurcombe. This was a journey I’d promised myself I’d never retrace - too upsetting, too self-indulgent -but what came back to me time and time again was the simplicity of the love affair we’d turned into a marriage.

  From photograph after photograph came the sound of laughter, and that glad embrace of life that had been both Adam’s strength and his weakness. His appetite for fun, for adventure, for getting things done, was limitless, while his patience for people or circumstances that got in his way was nonexistent. In this latter respect he was a bit like Harald, and I lingered over a particular shot I’d taken only last year.

  They’d both been flying in the big Air Tattoo up at Fairford. Adam had just landed and taxied back to the flight line and Harald was up on the wing, squatting beside the open cockpit. It was a marvellous shot, full of sunshine and excitement and that special satisfaction pilots get from a nice display. At the time it seemed to me to capture exactly the bond between these two very different men - Adam passionate, disorganised, far too candid for his own good; Harald remote, obsessive, incredibly buttoned-down - but looking at it now I began to wonder. Harald, asI knew, never did anything without at least six ulterior motives. What really lay behind that rare smile he’d managed to conjure up for my camera?

  The business with the bag was incredibly disturbing. At best, it meant that Harald had lied to me. He must have known that it wasn’t Adam’s holdall. Worse, given the tests that Mr Grover had carried out, he must have submerged the thing in saltwater and kept it there for days to get the right result. But what was the point in going to all this trouble? Why should he want to return something as grotesque and final as a replica of Adam’s old kit bag? And how come he’d managed to lay hands on Adam’s Amex card?

  The answer, I imagined, was to convince me that my husband really was dead, and if I wanted to be benevolent I suppose it was just possible that he was trying to save me from myself. It was certainly true that the absence of a body had been extremely hard to accept. Maybe Harald believed that a lookalike bag - plus my husband’s credit card - was the next best thing.

  Really?

  I flicked through the rest of the album, not beginning to believe it. I knew Harald was a control freak. I knew he’d tried to lay hands first on our Mustang, then on me. But there were lengths, surely, to which even he wouldn’t go. Not unless there was something infinitely more sinister behind it.

  I went back through the album, hunting for my favourite shot of Adam, and I was still gazing at it when Andrea walked in. The cup of tea in her right hand was nothing more than a pretext. Eternally nosy, she wanted to know what I was up to.

  I felt guilty at once. I’d gone solo in the Mustang. I was reborn. Mooning over curling snapshots belonged to the old Ellie.

  ‘Just looking,’ I muttered. ‘You know how it is.’

  Andrea took the bait at once. Hamish, her estranged husband, had just initiated divorce proceedings and our conversations more or less revolved around the series of bitter little tableaux that seemed to represent her marriage. How he’d never lifted a finger around the house. How he never wanted to share her passion for modern art. How he’d never cared a stuff about anything she did. I was still looking at Adam, his face turned back towards the camera, and as I listened to Andrea banging on, the conviction grew that I’d badly misjudged him. He hadn’t, after all, been unfaithful. He hadn’t gone galloping after some windsurfing sexbomb in a tight-fitting wetsuit. I’d been right to trust him, right to believe he loved me, and now was the time to make amends. I thought of Harald again, and the scene I’d made in the restaurant on Sanibel Island. Adam had been buying me a Spitfire, for God’s sake. Is that the kind of present you give a wife you’re bored to death with?

  Andrea had got to the bit where she was about to instruct her own solicitor to counter-sue for adultery. I reached for my tea, interrupting her.

  ‘I’m going over to Jersey for a while,’ I said. ‘I don’t know exac
tly how long.’

  Andrea looked horrified.

  ‘But Jamie’s so busy,’ she said at once. ‘I couldn’t possibly spare him.’

  ‘Who said anything about Jamie?’

  ‘You mean you’re going by yourself?’

  ‘Yes, tomorrow.’

  She looked at me for a long moment. When she bothers to take any notice of other people, Andrea can be much shrewder than she seems.

  ‘You’re not in any kind of trouble, are you?’

  It was a good question. I put the tea down and then closed the photograph album.

  ‘Not me, Andrea.’ I smiled at her. ‘Not yet.’

  I was back on Jersey by lunchtime next day. I’d thrown enough clothes in the front of the Moth to last me for a week and I booked myself into the Bon Accueil, the little French-run hotel where Adam and I used to stay. The woman who ran it even gave me the room we always used, number 7. The sight of the double bed and the glimpse of geraniums behind the half-closed wooden shutters made me feel inexplicably better. Maybe Adam wouldn’t limit his visits to the back seat of the Mustang. Maybe he’d deign to join me here tonight.

  I’d brought the snap of Michelle La Page over from Mapledurcombe and I propped it against the vase of flowers beside the bed. I’d no idea where the next few days would take me but I definitely knew where I intended to start. I’d hired a small Renault from the Budget desk at the airport and after lunch I drove back to St Ouen’s Bay. The high pressure was still with us, and when I got down to the windsurfing school the car park was nearly full. It was hot, way up in the high seventies, and I mingled with the students on the beach, hiding behind an enormous pair of sunglasses. Michelle was down by the water, rigging a board. A group of young kids were hanging on to her every word and I propped myself against a rock on the beach, watching from a distance, trying to work out what to do.

  What I wanted was a specimen of her handwriting. Before I did anything else, I needed to be sure that the message on the back of the photograph had really come from her. But how could I lay hands on a sample of her script?