The Man Who Didn't Fly

by Margot Bennett

  “No, stay,” the inspector said. “We haven’t finished, have we, Mr Wade?”

  Wade turned his handsome, muddled face to the inspector. “Poor Maurice,” he said, sighing.

  “But I don’t understand,” Hester said. “Do you, Father?”

  “I—actually, I haven’t been following at all. I see something’s there, but I can’t see how it proves anything. Poor Maurice!”

  “I’ll explain,” Inspector Lewis said, very glad of the opportunity. “Listen. Harry had been in Australia, but not South Africa. Morgan was the reverse. He’d been in South Africa, but not Australia. Mr Ferguson had been in neither. Maurice Reid had been in both. Now what’s the evidence? One of the three men in the Fairway Arms, and these three were certainly the three who flew in the plane, one of them made a remark that showed he had been in South Africa or Australia. The second man hadn’t been there. The third man stated he had been in the country referred to. Now, as we couldn’t get the landlord to be more explicit, we can’t know who made the remark, or even who answered it, but we can prove Maurice Reid was present.”

  “Please wait. Oh, if only I’d had a pencil, I’d have seen it first,” Prudence said.

  “One of the four men who were supposed to have travelled in the plane must have made the initial remark,” Lewis continued implacably. “Joseph Ferguson had been in neither country, so he can be excluded. Any of the other three could have said it. If Harry Walters made the initial remark, saying, for instance, ‘It happened when I was in Australia, have you been there?’ only Maurice Reid could have said, ‘Yes, I have.’ So if Harry made the remark, Maurice Reid was present. If Morgan Price said: ‘It happened to me in South Africa, have you been there?’ only Maurice Reid could have said, ‘Yes, I have.’ And if Maurice made the initial remark, either Harry or Morgan could say, ‘Yes, I’ve been there!’”

  “I see. Don’t tell me. I’ve got it,” Prudence cried. “Maurice has to be there, in that Brickford pub I mean, every time. Because Uncle Joe didn’t say it, and if Harry said it Maurice was there, and if Morgan said it, Maurice was there, and if Maurice said it, he was there too. But are you sure the three men in the Brickford pub were the three men on the plane?”

  “They were waiting in the Fairway Arms, together, three of them. When they got to the plane they said they’d been waiting for someone who hadn’t turned up. It’s a certainty.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry about Maurice,” Hester said miserably. Marryatt stared at her, then jabbed his cigarette in the ash-tray, and pressed on it until it disintegrated.

  “Yes, Maurice,” Prudence agreed, and dismissed the thought quickly. “I think it’s terribly clever of you, Inspector Lewis. But it doesn’t prove anything more, does it? I mean it shows Maurice was on the plane, but not who was off it.”

  Hester looked up. “Don’t enjoy yourself so visibly, Prudence,” she muttered.

  Inspector Lewis was examining the typescript again. “I think we can work out the rest now, don’t you, Sergeant Young?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But first of all I need some more help from all of you. Which of these four men was interested in fishing?”

  “Fishing?” Moira said. “Certainly not Joe.”

  “Not Harry,” Hester said quickly. “He—he didn’t like anything like that. I’m sure he’d never fished in all his life—not his adult life, anyway. Maurice? I’m certain I once heard him say he hadn’t fished since he was a boy. Morgan—I can’t be so definite about Morgan, but he wasn’t the kind of man you could imagine with a fishing rod.”

  Lewis scowled. “But two of these men were enthusiasts!”

  “But they weren’t,” Prudence protested. “They just simply weren’t.”

  Lewis looked at the typescript again. “I’m exaggerating when I say enthusiasts. One of them said he’d satisfied his curiosity and he didn’t like it, and another said he hadn’t had an opportunity until the beginning of last season. When’s the close season for fishing, Sergeant Young?”

  “Well, sir, it depends on the fish, and the place. If it’s coarse fishing, it’s more or less in the spring, ending about the middle of June. Salmon close a bit earlier, owing to their habits. About December, say, and open again—is it March?”

  “So two of these men had gone fishing, one of them at the beginning of Spring or Summer. I ask you all to think again.”

  They thought again, but none of them could produce a word of evidence about fishing.

  Explanation (2)

  Prudence was in the kitchen, making tea and cutting sandwiches, when Marryatt walked in. He looked disparagingly at the dishes that lay in the sink like an irregular monument.

  “You haven’t been doing much dish-washing lately, have you?”

  “And you haven’t been knocking on many doors, have you?” Prudence retorted. “If you’d like the information, a thing that people simply can’t stand is other people to come in their kitchens to see if the bottoms of their saucepans are shining like a domestic science department.”

  Marryatt took off his coat. “I’ll wash the dishes for you,” he said. “I suppose you haven’t had much time.”

  “We’ve been living on fried eggs and tea since Friday,” Prudence said. “And every time I go near the sink I begin to cry. I’m getting over that, now. I can’t spend my whole life crying for people who’ve been killed. I suppose I’m callous,” she added with a certain satisfaction, her mind already racing ahead to the time when she would move, hard-hearted, disdainful, mysterious, through a wondering world.

  “The kettle’s boiling. Don’t worry about the policemen. They’ve gone to The Running Fox for a meal, in their prim way, afraid of being corrupted by a sandwich. Prudence—”

  “You wouldn’t like to call me Miss Wade?” Prudence asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t. You can call me Tom. Prudence, you’re getting over this. What about Hester?”

  “You’d better ask her yourself. Of course, she did rather like Harry,” Prudence said cautiously.

  “She was going to marry him? Do you have something for drying dishes?”

  “There’s a clean tea towel somewhere. Oh, I’m sorry, it has a hole in it. She wasn’t going to marry him. It’s the kind of news people do tell their sisters. But she did in a way rather like him. Do you want cheese or some cardboard out of a tin on your sandwiches?”

  “Cheese. Harry told me he was going to marry her.”

  “Harry was always making plans that didn’t come off,” Prudence said scornfully. “He didn’t have real purpose in life. Only poetry, and he didn’t work at that. He told me once he didn’t want to be one of those people who choose the longest road they can find and sweat along it at top speed with their graves travelling beside them on oiled wheels. He said the brow was for laurel wreaths, not sweat.”

  “But Hester liked him?” Marryatt put the last of the cups carefully on the table.

  Prudence sighed. “I know absolutely what you’re getting at. Don’t be so—so oblique. If Hester’s given half a chance she’ll spend the rest of her life with his memory, bringing out hand-printed editions of his poems. People do seem to get a bit soppy when they’re twenty. But I shan’t. Anyway, she hasn’t made up her mind. She thinks he might be alive, she thinks he might be the man who didn’t fly.”

  Marryatt’s brows came down. He had features that lent themselves easily to the expression of anger. “If she finds that he did fly? That he’s dead? She wouldn’t enjoy having that proved? Whether she enjoys it or not, she’s going to get it. I’m not going to have the shadow of Harry, neither dead nor alive, hanging around for the rest of my life.”

  Prudence’s face darkened. “Kill him if you like, if it makes you feel happier. I’d sooner he was alive. I dare say I’m being sentimental,” she added faintly.

  “Prudence, put down that tray. You’re going to help me. You know that
Harry was after Morgan. He was searching for something he believed Morgan was hiding. He was doing it inefficiently and recklessly—like a boy who’s looking for gulls’ eggs only because he enjoys climbing a cliff,” he said, going back to his own experience for the metaphor. “Now, when Jackie came here, what did Morgan do? He shut himself up in his room and didn’t come down to meals. Jackie was a crook. Don’t you think there’s a chance Morgan was afraid of being recognised by Jackie—because he was a crook himself?”

  “I think Morgan was just mad,” Prudence protested.

  “Keep to the point. Morgan was hiding something. Harry was looking for it. For all I know, Jackie was looking for it too. If Morgan went to Ireland, Harry went too, because he was trailing Morgan.”

  “They were all mad,” Prudence suggested.

  “People who hide something aren’t necessarily mad. I’m not calling you mad, for instance,” Marryatt said carefully.

  Prudence’s pink and brown face became entirely pink.

  “You’ve been pretty vague about that brooch, haven’t you? Jackie went away, and the brooch isn’t mentioned any more.”

  Prudence’s face was so red now that it seemed possible she might cry. “It isn’t your business. None of it’s your business. You’re here only because of Maurice. We know what happened to Maurice, so now you can go away. Hester hates you anyway, and so do I, and if you won’t go out of the kitchen I will.”

  She began to walk to the door. He caught her roughly by the arm and swung her round. She had no brothers: she wasn’t used to physical violence: she wondered for a moment if she could kill him.

  “You still have the brooch, haven’t you?”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “Let go my arm.”

  He let her go. “Now fetch the brooch.”

  “I’m not sure if I can find it,” she muttered, watching his face.

  “You’d better find it. The police will want to see it. I don’t know why you kept it. That’s not my business. Perhaps you just wanted an expensive-looking brooch.”

  “It’s not true. It’s simply not true. I was going to give it back, then Jackie went away and everything happened and I forgot.”

  “Now you’ve remembered. Go and get it.” He was quite offensively uninterested in her explanations. He treated her simply as a nonentity with an interesting brooch. “You’ll have to get it sooner or later. The police will make you.”

  “The police would never bully me like this,” she said angrily. “They have better manners. I’ll go and look for the brooch. If I throw it out of the window, that’s my business.”

  “And if the police throw you in Borstal or approved school that’s your business too. Come on. So far as I’m concerned, you forgot about the brooch and you’ve just remembered it.”

  Prudence went sullenly from the room.

  Marryatt picked up the tray and took it to the sitting-room, where Hester and her father sat in the kind of exhausted silence that might overtake people who have drifted too long alone, helpless, in a lifeboat in an empty ocean.

  He poured the tea and offered it to both of them. Wade tasted it, and put the cup down heavily.

  “It’s cold,” he said, with the painful resignation of a man almost totally inured to misfortune.

  Explanation (3)

  Inspector Lewis and Sergeant Young looked particularly out of place on the chintz sofa where they now sat side by side, menacing but professionally uncomfortable, like bailiffs.

  “This fishing,” Lewis said. “Everything else is fixed now, it’s only the fishing. We’ve worked out the rest, you see, we’ll get to that in a minute, but if we can’t get something out of the fishing, we can’t see the end of this at all. If one of those bus conductors, one of those railwaymen, would stop telling us it’s August and the place is full of strangers and how can they be expected etcetera, we might get somewhere, but it’s like asking a slot machine to identify a penny. So it’s back to the fishing. Now this old man Smith who was drinking bitter with his mind on the stars and talking about how they might have been fishing in Ceylon or they might not, I told you he kept bringing astrology into it. We haven’t any inside knowledge to explain this. You people, who knew all the men well, absolutely must try again. Did you ever hear any of those men who were to fly to Dublin discuss astrology?”

  Hester looked at her father hopelessly, and shook her head. She was about to speak, when suddenly an expression of the deepest concentration, followed almost instantly by doubt and irresolution, crossed her face. She was like a novice playing chess, who sees a good move and realises almost at once that it may be a bad one.

  “I had an idea,” she said weakly, “then it went away. But I have thought of something. Wherever this fishing happened, if it took place last season, it can’t have been in Ceylon. I knew that was ridiculous. Morgan, Maurice, Uncle Joe—none of them has been out of England for at least a year. And I don’t believe people go fishing in Ceylon anyway.”

  “Except the people who have to earn their living by it,” Marryatt said.

  Wade looked up, and smiled faintly at his daughter.

  “Don’t forget the pearl-fishers,” he said. “Bizet.” He relapsed into his private agony.

  “Bizet?” Lewis turned on Sergeant Young. “Have you ever heard of Bizet, Sergeant?”

  “Sir, he wrote Carmen. Tor—eee—a—dor. You know. And an opera called The Pearl-Fishers. I haven’t heard it.”

  “Yes,” Hester said. “That’s it. Oh, I nearly had it before, when you were talking about astrology. It has to be The Pearl-Fishers. The hero’s called Nadir, that’s your astrological term, and he falls in love with a priestess and goes away for five years and comes back and he finds she saved his life when she was a child—or was that his friend? Yes, it must have been. The friend is the chief and the other two are going to be burnt and the friend lets them escape and is burnt on the pyre instead. Why, we have some records here, if you want.”

  Lewis shook his head. “It sounds very confused,” he said guardedly. “Opera is not my subject.”

  “When did you see this opera?” Sergeant Young asked quickly.

  “I think it was Sadler’s Wells. Covent Garden has never done it, or not for a long time. I went with—with Maurice.”

  “At the beginning of last season?” Young asked, knowing the answer.

  “Yes. A lot of people went, because it was the first chance they’d had to hear it. Maurice liked it more than I did.”

  “Ceylon?” Lewis said impatiently. “Where does Ceylon come in?”

  “It’s set in Ceylon.”

  “And Maurice Reid liked it. So he was the man who said it had its merits.”

  “Not necessarily,” Marryatt interjected. “What if the others had seen it too?”

  “Morgan was tone deaf,” Prudence said. “He wouldn’t go to opera.”

  “I don’t think Harry liked opera. But he couldn’t have gone anyway. He was in Australia when it was put on. I know he only came back four months ago. So—” She looked at Moira and checked herself quickly. “I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry,” she said in a stricken voice.

  Moira stood up. “Yes, Joe and I saw it together,” she said. “Only he could have discussed it with Maurice. You’re right, all of you. You’ve proved what you set out to prove. Joe is dead. It makes no difference to me,” she said in a shuddering voice. “I knew it. He’d never hide himself from me.” Her expensive pink-and-white complexion remained inexorably pink-and-white. She walked to the door, holding her hands a little before her, as though she was groping her way through the darkness.

  Hester ran forward and touched her gently on the arm.

  “Moira, shall I go home with you?”

  Moira looked rigidly ahead. “Why should you? We never liked each other. You’ve been trying to arrive at the truth: that’s part of it.”

  Mar
ryatt stood up. “If you’ve a car outside, I’ll drive you home,” he said impersonally. “Otherwise, we’ll walk. Have you a car here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come on, then.”

  When they had left the room Hester sat, holding on to the sides of the chair as though she was afraid of being thrown out of it.

  “Please, Miss Wade…” she heard the inspector say, and from far away her father’s voice interrupted: “Let her alone. Don’t speak to her now. I insist…”

  Her head was churning into a wild clarity. She tried to think of Uncle Joe, but all she saw was Harry, standing by the door, asking her to marry him, then, not waiting for an answer, running to get in the Fergusons’ car. He could have come back; instead he had remained with them for hours, cards in his hand and money on the table; innocently cunning as he always was when he gambled; reckless, gay, oblivious of her existence. That was Harry; then, now, and for ever.

  “He’s dead,” she said weakly, struggling back into consciousness of the room, as though she was coming out of an anaesthetic.

  Inspector Lewis made preparatory noises with his throat.

  “Are you feeling all right, Miss Wade?”

  “Yes.” She had to be all right, she had to be excessively normal; humiliation is an emotion that demands its own interment.

  “Astrology isn’t one of my subjects. I didn’t see…”

  “Nadir,” she said. “That was the astrological term your witness couldn’t remember. At least it means something in astronomy, so I suppose it does in astrology. It’s the opposite to the zenith, I think. It also means a time of depression, like this, I suppose,” she said sadly. “Nadir is the name of the hero in The Pearl-Fishers, but he escaped.”

  Lewis glanced again at his notes. “Time of depression. Yes, I see. It fits. And you’re all reasonably satisfied that only Maurice Reid and Joseph Ferguson could have seen this opera—that they are the only two of these four men who could have discussed it?”