The Man Who Didn't Fly

by Margot Bennett

  “Go on. What about the Grand National?”

  “Some nonsense about a million people jumping the fences and ten thousand falling with every horse. No kind of sense in it at all.”

  “And Australia?”

  “Nothing about Australia.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Well, it might have been South Africa. It was a place like that.”

  “New Zealand?”

  “No, not New Zealand. It was South Africa or it was Australia. I’ll swear to one of them. I’ve an uncle in one of them and a cousin in the other, so I’m sure of my facts.”

  “Canada?”

  “It was Australia or South Africa, and there’s no one here can tell me different.”

  “What about it, whichever it was?”

  “One of them wanted to tell a story. It might have been about horses, following the talk of the Grand National, but it wasn’t. That’s all.”

  “All?” asked the detective, bending forward, trying to compel the stubborn mind to spurt into action like a match. “Had the man who was telling the story been in Australia or South Africa himself? Mr Crewe, this might be important. Did one of these three men say he’d been in Australia?”

  “He did, always remembering it might have been South Africa. He wanted to tell a story about—what was his word?—premonitions. He had feelings about something.”

  “Feelings about what?”

  “Ah, that’s when I went back to thinking about the three-thirty at Lingfield.”

  “Raymond, not Lingfield again,” Mrs Crewe said humbly.

  “What part of Australia?” asked the detective. “Did he say, as it were, when I was in Sydney, when I was in Adelaide, when I was in Alice Springs?”

  “Alice Springs?” Crewe asked, bewildered once more.

  “It’s a town in Australia, Raymond,” his wife said quickly, with apologetic nods to the police. “If only I’d been in the bar that morning.”

  “You!” Crewe said contemptuously. “You’d have listened to more than was ever said. What I heard I stand by as the truth. One of them says to another that reminds me—which I couldn’t see how it did—about something that happened to me once. I had a premonition, he says, or words to that effect, when I was in Australia, or South Africa, and you haven’t been there, have you, he says to that other, crushing the opposition. No, says the other. But I have, says the third man, interrupting. Isn’t it time we left, or something like that, but there was no getting away from the story, which I didn’t listen to, however much you sigh, and make faces,” he said malevolently to his wife.

  He closed his eyes again, and gave very faint groaning answers to the interminable questions about cigarettes, bow ties, girth, height, complexion, and accent. Finally he heaved himself up slowly, like an overburdened camel.

  “Listen, if I was Scotland Yard I’d photograph the customers on the way in and cut off a lock of their hair before I sold them a mild-and-bitter. Not being Scotland Yard or female, I got my own business to attend to and it’s not and never will be other people’s. Anxious as I am to help the law.”

  Mrs Crewe went to the door with the detectives.

  “If he knows anything more, I’ll get it out of him,” she whispered. “And when I find the two bitters, I’ll let you know.”

  The detective-sergeant gave her a grim smile of gratitude as he got in his car.

  “If the crooks were as slow-witted as that lot,” he said to his subordinate, “we’d have crime stamped out in a week.”

  Investigation (2)

  Brickford Airport wasn’t much more than a meadow cut by a tarmac path, with a few sheds clustering at one end. It had a primitive look, as though someone was about to take off in a bid to fly the English Channel. At week-ends, there were always a few little girls with dolls’ prams and boys with bicycles being driven away by angry mechanics, and sometimes a picnic party taking place on the fringes. It was the headquarters of the local flying club, but it was also regularly used by several small charter planes.

  Too many questions had already been asked at the airport, and when the mechanic saw Detective-Sergeant Young he dipped his head at once into the engine of a small, red, open plane that might have been made for the Wright brothers.

  Sergeant Young looked sentimentally at the innocent little plane, and sighed. “You’re William Douglas?” he asked the mechanic.

  The mechanic raised his white, indignant face, and nodded. “Police?” he asked fiercely. “Or from the Daily Something or Other?”

  “I’m from the police.”

  “Right. Here it comes. I don’t need any questions. I don’t want any questions. I’ve had enough. You just listen. I saw the Ormond go. I heard Mr Lee speak to his three passengers. I heard him say: What, only three of you? And one of the passengers said: We’ve waited long enough. It seems he’s not going to turn up. We’ll have to go without him. And the three of them got in and Mr Lee walks over to me and says: I’m one short, Bill. Then he goes over to the caff to look but he comes back alone. Then he took off. This is the eleventh time I’ve been asked and I know the answers in my sleep.”

  “And did you see what the passengers looked like?”

  “I did not.”

  “Was one of them taller or shorter than the others?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Did they wear hats?”

  “Look! So far as they walked on two legs and wore trousers I can claim to have seen them, but I’d like it to be understood I won’t have words put in my mouth. I was working on a club crate at the time, as I’m trying to do now, and I didn’t look up, except after I heard Mr Lee say what he said. Then I lifted my head long enough to see their backs as they went in the plane, and three is the number I saw. I watched the plane go. He was a lovely pilot, Mr Lee, and I’ll never believe he lost that plane, except it was struck by lightning.”

  Sergeant Young listened seriously, as though he hadn’t read all this at the station earlier that morning.

  “A man called Joseph Ferguson chartered the plane,” he said. “Tell me, Mr Douglas, would the pilot have gone without him?”

  “Couldn’t say. So long as the flight had been paid for. Mr Lee might not have been able to let the other passengers down.”

  “The flight had been paid for in advance. But Mr Lee and Joseph Ferguson had met at least once. Wouldn’t it have been reasonable for Mr Lee to say: Good morning, Mr Ferguson?”

  Douglas straightened himself slowly, and began to twist the spanner round in his hand. “But he didn’t say it.”

  “Was he a brusque kind of man—inclined to be a bit short with people, I mean?”

  Douglas considered the spanner, tossed it once in the air, and then dropped it in his pocket. “No. He was a friendly type. He might have been feeling a bit off because they’d kept him waiting.” He looked sullenly at the sergeant, as though he was being forced into a game he didn’t want to play. “There’s another thing. Was what’s-his-name, Ferguson, the only one of the four Mr Lee knew?”

  “He’d met a man called Walters. Harry Walters.”

  “Right,” Douglas said triumphantly. “He might have said Hello Walters, or Hello Harry, but he didn’t say that either. As only one of them didn’t turn up, either Ferguson or Walters must have been there.”

  “He just wasn’t feeling sociable. So there’s nothing in that idea. Thanks, anyway. Is there another mechanic here called Clewes?”

  “In there.” Douglas picked up his spanner and jerked it towards one of the hangars. He was a man who would have liked to make a spanner do all his talking for him.

  Clewes was a fat little man, with a ring of black oil round his lips. He looked at the sergeant sorrowfully and begged his pardon, but what could he say? He’d had no reason to pay attention at the time, but he’d heard Mr Lee say something about being one short, an
d he’d seen the three go in.

  Sergeant Young strode gloomily over to the Customs shed. “If you ask me,” he said over his shoulder to the constable, “there’s no one in this place could tell the Pied Piper of Hamelin from Hopalong Cassidy.”

  The passport officer was bent over his desk with his tongue sticking out, like a schoolboy fighting with an examination. He was copying a list of French irregular verbs, and for all he knew or remembered of Friday morning, it seemed likely that this was his usual preoccupation.

  “There was a rush,” he explained. “Three or four planes went out that morning. I must have had fifteen or sixteen people through here. One of them had a beard, if that’s any help.”

  “One of the men on the lost plane?” Sergeant Young asked in surprise.

  “Oh, I don’t say that. I think it was an alien, returning to Belgium. It’s only that I noticed him, having a beard. For the rest, it’s faces, faces, faces all the day. In any case, if the plane was for Ireland, they wouldn’t pass through here at all. Have you tried the buffet?”

  Sergeant Young tried the buffet. The tea-lady, who had a contrived shade of red hair, and the new small waist with the old, spreading hips, smoothed one eyebrow with her little finger, and said she’d been talking to a gentleman from Sweden at the time, and she really couldn’t remember a thing, except that poor Mr Lee had looked in to ask about a passenger who wasn’t there. When she mentioned Lee’s name, her eyes moistened and she turned away, fumbling until she found a very dainty handkerchief.

  “Mr Lee was a true gentleman,” she said, snuffling. “And all your questions won’t bring him back.”

  Investigation (3)

  The short young man came through the door of the office with his head down, like a bull expecting to meet a matador. He was dark-complexioned, and although he was young, he already had wrinkles on his forehead from raising his eyebrows.

  He spoke in a high voice, but all he said at first was: “How do you do. My name’s Murray.” Then he sat in agitated silence, while the policeman stared at his slightly crumpled lightweight suit, and the place where the button was missing from his shirt.

  “I came in about Harry,” he said. “Walters, I mean.”

  “Yes?”

  Murray sat down, and elevated his head cautiously.

  “Things are pretty bare in here. Much as one had imagined.”

  “Are they, Mr Murray?”

  “Well, yes, they are. I’m not criticising, you know. All I mean is you haven’t got piles of letters and so on scattered over the floor.”

  “Is there something you wanted to say, Mr Murray?”

  “It’s about Harry Walters.”

  “Yes?”

  “I haven’t come to give myself up, or anything like that. I just know him. Do you mind if I smoke? The shades of the prison house don’t close around the police station? They must, of course, for some people.”

  He took out a blue packet, and, after some hesitation, chose a cigarette. He found a matchbox, opened it, inspected the matches, took one, and lit his cigarette. Then he began to speak at racing speed, like a cyclist swerving past obstacles on his way downhill.

  “I was talking to a man in a bar who reads all the papers. I mean really all of them, and he said they’d finished proving that flying was safer than riding a tricycle round the nursery and now they wanted to know about Harry and what was I going to do? I don’t want to get mixed up with newspapers, so I thought, there’s the police, what about that? You see all my inclinations were to shut up and say nothing. But then I thought everyone knows I know Harry, I’ve known him for years and if I shut up it might lead to getting involved. Then I rang Scotland Yard. Absolutely everything I’ve ever read suggested Scotland Yard would be the place to ring, but they said they positively weren’t touching it, and put me on to you. So here I am.”

  “You want to make a statement?” Inspector Lewis asked suspiciously.

  “In a way I don’t. Suppose I just talk, and then afterwards if I’ve told you anything at all, we could write down that bit and let the rest go? Because principally, you see, I don’t want to be one of those witnesses that are chewed up in court and tossed over some learned friend’s shoulder. I’m sorry about Harry, but I have a reputation—professional status—a wife. Then there’s the other side. It’s true I’m not excessively public-spirited—I mean if I saw bandits waving guns and snatching diamonds from a jeweller’s window I really think I’d just let them snatch—it’s a point, don’t you think, if one should risk one’s life to save someone else’s diamonds? I’ve given a lot of thought to it, and I realise that bandits should be discouraged, so I’d be willing to co-operate, like shouting: ‘they went that way,’ but nothing more.”

  “Are you trying to tell me about a jewel robbery, Mr Murray?” Lewis asked, carefully polite.

  “Are you trying to accuse me of something? I’ve never been within a mile of a jewel robbery,” Murray said fiercely. “I’m trying to make you see I wouldn’t be here saying what I had to say, unless I felt I had to do it. I don’t want to be mixed up in this at all, but I want to say if poor Harry was the man who missed that plane, I think it’s likely he was murdered.”

  “Why?”

  Murray looked intently at his cigarette, with the concentration of a watchmaker studying a broken hairspring. He took a matchbox from his pocket, carefully tipped the ash among the matches, and shut the box.

  “The truth is,” he said, “I’m an editor.”

  “Really, sir, and what do you edit?”

  “A magazine. You wouldn’t have heard of it. It’s called Vista.”

  “I don’t have much time for reading,” the inspector apologised.

  Sergeant Young tilted his head towards the inspector, who nodded.

  “I know it, sir. It’s a poetry magazine, with novelists reviewing each other’s books on the back pages.”

  “I say,” Murray exclaimed, looking disparagingly at the sergeant. “Have you ever bought it? For money, I mean?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “One of the very few,” Murray said. “If there were more of you, we wouldn’t be closing down. People think it’s easy, you know. They think it doesn’t matter, having to run at a loss. Find a tame millionaire, they keep telling me. I’ve looked everywhere, but I think they’re dying out. Some disease—have you ever heard of millionaire’s myxomatosis?”

  “Mr Murray, you wanted to tell us something?”

  “I’m not here for the fun of it, am I? If you’ve read Vista, you must have seen some of Harry’s poems.”

  “I can’t say that I remember them.”

  “Well, he was a poet, and not a bad one when he got around to it. But—do you really mind if I tell this my own way? The trouble is,” he said unhappily, “I can’t think of any other way to tell it. Or hadn’t you noticed I’m having difficulty?”

  “Just go ahead, sir, your own way.”

  “Then it’s about Harry. That’s why I’ve come. Harry was always short of money,” he said. “Other people can come back from places like Australia with gold dust clinging to the turn-ups of their trousers, but I don’t think Harry had even a clean shirt when he got off the boat four months ago. He stayed with us for a few weeks, but my wife got a bit restive. Harry wasn’t at all like the other people who wrote for Vista. I mean most poets today work for the B.B.C. and keep their trousers pressed, but Harry had a theory that poets should be poets and nothing more. So he got a bit short of money. I expect that people like yourselves, paid regularly, don’t understand how awkward that can be? Is there anywhere I could put this cigarette end? An old helmet, or something of the kind?”

  Lewis handed him an ashtray.

  “We’ve heard rumours about people who haven’t enough money,” he said heavily.

  Murray stubbed out the cigarette and lit another.

  Inspe
ctor Lewis watched him carefully, an old, knowing badger, peering from his sett before emerging.

  “Your friend Harry had been in Australia. Had he ever been in South Africa?”

  “I don’t know everything about Harry,” Murray protested. “But if he ever landed in South Africa, they probably bounced him out again. Harry would never be tactful enough for a place like that. He’d think of something to annoy, like opening a black-and-white matrimonial agency.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Then I’ll proceed. When Harry left us, he’d been writing some rather good verse—sentimental savagery about the middle-classes. Did you ever read one beginning: April’s always been the month for worry; Bills hissing through the letterbox like snakes?”

  “No,” said Sergeant Young. “No, I don’t remember that.”

  “He wrote a few like that. They were good, so I made the mistake of paying him in advance for some more. Well—I don’t suppose you’ve ever been an editor,” he said, looking thoughtfully at the inspector. “If you ever take it up, let me give you some advice. Don’t pay in advance. Because Harry, having the money, really didn’t have any inducement to do the work. It wasn’t very much money, but he knew that if he did finish his sequence of odes to the bourgeoisie, he wouldn’t get any more, so he thought he’d write something else instead. So, just when he was looking for an emotion to recall at boiling point, he met someone in a pub—a very amusing man, who’d been in and out of jail half-a-dozen times. So Harry thought: Why not be François Villon?”

  Inspector Lewis’s lower lip began to project like a railway signal.

  “Who was this amusing man?” he asked.

  “Actually, I’ve rather forgotten his name,” Murray said.

  “François Villon was a French poet, sir. He became a member of the criminal classes and some of his poetry was written from their standpoint,” Sergeant Young muttered.

  “Anyway, around then I thought it was my duty as editor to keep tapping Harry’s shoulder, saying, What about those verses we’ve paid for? But Harry had sold a couple of poems, about psychology I think, to an American magazine that paid in genuine unforged dollars, so he had drinking money. We had some pretty hideous nights, I can tell you.”