Death of an Airman

by Christopher St. John Sprigg

  “I suppose it would be the ordinary two-seater things—Moths, aren’t they—that the club uses?”

  “No, it couldn’t be those either,” she explained, “because the centre section of the wing is always just above the passenger’s head, and he would be kept in by that. At any rate he’d be able to grab it as he slid out and cling there.”

  Creighton looked despondent. “Are you telling us you think it impossible? Because it has happened, you know.”

  “It is possible, but it seems to me only with an open two-seater low-wing monoplane. There aren’t many of those about, you know. Gauntlett’s Air Taxis have got a Klemm and a Hawk, either of which would do.”

  “Perhaps you can help us with a fact that has puzzled me,” interjected Bray. “Wouldn’t it be an extraordinary risky thing to do it, so near an aerodrome?”

  Lady Laura shook her head. “Not to-day. The clouds are very low. I was hedge-hopping all the way from Goring. You’ve only got to rise to about two thousand, I should think, to get out of sight of the ground. Somebody might have seen Andy falling, of course, but the chances are against it. You can see for yourself there’s hardly anybody at the aerodrome. The visibility has been too bad for instructional flying today.”

  The two detectives looked at each other, and, after thanking Lady Laura, walked over to the hangars.

  “An intelligent girl,” said Creighton. “I don’t know why one is surprised when a good-looking woman has brains.

  “A low-wing monoplane,” he added. “Do you know enough about these noisy contraptions to recognize that?”

  “I think so. I know that’s not one, anyway,” Bray answered, pointing to a bulky machine in the corner.

  “Of course it isn’t. That’s the aerodrome mowing-machine,” replied Creighton seriously.

  “Is it? So it is. You seem to know more about these things than I do, Creighton,” Bray chaffed him. “Look here, what about this scarlet-and-orange object? I feel sure that’s a low-wing monoplane. Anyway, if it isn’t, it’s the sort of thing we want, because it’s obvious there’s nothing to stop you falling out if it turns upside down.”

  “Except the safety-belt,” the other reminded him. “That’s a teaser, you know. How on earth could the murderer persuade Ness not to do up his safety-belt? Even little Red Riding Hood wouldn’t be such a fool as to fall for that.”

  Bray was bending over the aeroplane and looked up triumphantly. “Wait a moment, though; look at this! Here’s a belt in the rear seat. I assume this canvas business is the belt. But the belt’s been taken out of the front seat, and that’s usually the passenger’s seat I believe. Look, the fastenings have been absolutely wrenched out.”

  Creighton looked round, and saw a youth with a spanner in one hand regarding them curiously. “Are you anything to do with this show?” he asked.

  “I’m an apprentice,” answered the youth.

  “Well, can you tell me why this belt’s missing?”

  The youth stared at the missing belt with widened eyes.

  “It looks as if someone’s wrenched it off.”

  “Of course they have. But when?”

  “Must have been to-day. I went up in it yesterday, and it was there.”

  “That’s something,” said Bray. “Has the machine been up to-day?”

  “No, sir.”

  Bray went round to the nose and laid his hand on the exposed engine cylinders. “Feel these cylinders,” he said to the apprentice.

  The boy did so. “Crummy, that engine must have been running fairly recently!”

  “How long ago, do you think?”

  “Couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours,” answered the boy decisively.

  “Where were you a couple of hours ago?”

  “In town, sir.”

  “That’s not much help then. Whose machine is this, by the way?”

  “Gauntlett’s Air Taxis, sir. They don’t use it much except for joy-riding over the week-ends.”

  “Right-ho,” answered Bray. The boy trickled off with a backward glance of pleasantly thrilled horror. Bray stared at the aeroplane, whistling gently to himself.

  “Any ideas, Bray?” said Creighton.

  “Fingerprints on the stick-control thing,” suggested the Yard man.

  “Good idea. I’ll get Murgatroyd on to that. He ought to be in the club-house by now.”

  Murgatroyd was there and was despatched to test the aeroplane for fingerprints while Creighton and Bray examined the various people on the aerodrome for information. Miss Sackbut had been in her office and seen nothing. The instructor had been taking a navigation class, and neither he nor his pupils, which included the Bishop, Thomas Vane, and two or three other club members, had noticed the scarlet-and-yellow monoplane take off. In fact, it is doubtful if they could have done so, as their window did not look out directly over the aerodrome. Mrs. Angevin had been sitting in the bar.

  At the mention of Mrs. Angevin’s name Creighton hesitated.

  “The Bishop told me something about a violent quarrel between Furnace and Mrs. Angevin shortly before he was killed,” he said to Bray. “Do you think she could be mixed up with it?”

  “Might be,” answered the other thoughtfully. “We can’t prove anything, can we, if she says she was sitting in there? What about the bar-tender?”

  “Well, the bar itself was closed, although the room is sometimes left open for members to sit in. So she was by herself.”

  The two policemen sat down with somewhat gloomy thoughts. Both had a guilty feeling they should have anticipated the present fatality. “Here’s Murgatroyd!” said Creighton, jumping to his feet. “Perhaps he’s discovered some fingerprints.”

  Murgatroyd’s report was, however, negative. The grip of the control column had either been carefully wiped or else the last pilot had worn gloves.

  “Damnation! No luck anywhere!” exclaimed Creighton irritably.

  Chapter XV

  Simulation of a Suicide

  Inspector Bray was walking thoughtfully round the edge of the aerodrome when he encountered Lady Laura. She was wearing white overalls and a white flying helmet, and Bray was struck anew by the contrast between the calm efficiency of her flying and her fragile, almost porcelain, beauty.

  He was about to pass by, when Lady Laura stopped him with a gesture. “Have you found your low-wing monoplane yet?” she asked.

  Bray nodded. “Yes. The safety-belt in the passenger’s seat was missing.”

  Lady Laura’s wide blue eyes looked straight into his. “Whose aeroplane was it?”

  Bray hesitated. “It belonged to Gauntlett’s Air Taxis,” he said after a pause.

  “Oh, their Klemm, I suppose,” she commented. She turned her head and looked out towards the edge of the aerodrome, where a school aeroplane was taking off. “Do you think there is anything connecting the two things—George’s death and Andy’s?” she asked, with a not very convincing attempt at casualness.

  “We think there is,” answered Bray gravely.

  “I’m not asking you all this without a purpose,” went on Lady Laura. “Tell me, is it quite definite that George was killed? The Bishop tells me he thinks George killed himself, and naturally I have thought so ever since I received that letter from him. But from something Creighton said, I gathered that you people felt fairly sure it was murder.”

  Bray studied Lady Laura’s famous profile carefully. She had been with the Bishop and Miss Sackbut when Furnace had crashed, and again she had discovered the dead body of Ness. Her sharp eyes might well have discovered some fragment others had overlooked. He decided to be frank.

  “I personally am certain that Major Furnace was murdered, Lady Laura,” he said, “but we are not at the moment in a position to decide how the murder was done. He was shot and he crashed. That is all we can be certain of.”


  “You must be able to tell from the medical evidence how long before the crash he was shot,” commented Lady Laura shrewdly.

  “A matter of seconds,” answered Bray.

  Lady Laura nodded. “I rather feared it,” she said in a low voice. “So he was shot while in the air?”

  Bray smiled with a hint of patronage. “That is the obvious suggestion. But you see, it is ruled out because he could not have had a passenger, and no one saw another aeroplane anywhere near him. That is why we are unable, at the moment, to understand how the murder took place.”

  Lady Laura looked at him. There was a trace of irony in her smile, the answer to the suggestion of patronage in his tone. “I appreciate that. All the same, I see no reason why he should not have been shot just as the medical evidence suggests.”

  “If you can suggest any means whereby a pilot in full view of the ground can be shot dead without the murderer being seen, then I will agree with you!” answered Bray, a little annoyed.

  “Certainly I can,” she said calmly. “Have you studied the contour charts of this aerodrome and the surrounding district?”

  “I can’t say I have,” he smiled. “No doubt Sherlock Holmes would not have overlooked such an essential point, but I forgot it.”

  Lady Laura pulled out a sheaf of maps from the pocket of her overalls and sat down on the running-board of a car parked near the edge of the aerodrome. Bray sat down beside her. She opened the map and indicated the aerodrome with the point of a pencil.

  “Here’s Baston Aerodrome. As you can see from the shading, it is a plateau on three sides, but when standing on the aerodrome you don’t notice how rapidly the ground falls away because the beginning of the slope is hidden by the fringes of trees in the meadows beyond. It used to be a favourite joke of club members to dive straight down past the edge of the aerodrome into the dip of land and fly round there for a little while out of sight. To anyone on the aerodrome it looks exactly as if they had dived straight into the ground and crashed. In fact, when I saw the aeroplane vanish on the day George was killed I thought that it was some silly pupil doing the same thing. Then I realized it was George, and of course it was a thing he would never do.”

  Bray studied the map, a puzzled expression on his face, and then stood up to look at the aerodrome and the country beyond.

  “I can understand all that,” he said at last, “but for the moment I don’t quite see how it would have made it any the easier to kill Furnace in full view of people on the ground.”

  “George was flying a club machine,” said Lady Laura slowly. “There are two club aeroplanes, both of exactly the same colour scheme. When they are too far away for their registration marks to be seen it is impossible to tell one from the other.”

  “Good God,” exclaimed Bray, “that opens up possibilities, certainly! You think that the aeroplane we saw crash—”

  “Was not George’s aeroplane at all. It was the murderer’s,” answered Lady Laura with a quiet smile.

  “Let’s work this out!” exclaimed Bray excitedly. “I believe we’ve really got it! Furnace goes up for a flight before anyone is on the aerodrome except Ness, who is in the game, anyway, and doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh, is he?” murmured Lady Laura. “That explains the one thing I couldn’t understand.”

  “The murderer sees his chance and follows in another club machine, either as passenger or piloted by someone else who is also in the game. He flies alongside Furnace and shoots him. Would that be possible?”

  “Oh, quite,” answered the girl positively. “If Furnace had just gone up for a flight to enjoy himself and to throw the aeroplane about, he would be quite ready to let another aeroplane formate beside him, particularly if he recognized the pilot. He would let him get quite close.”

  “Right,” said Bray. “Then Furnace is shot while he is turning to look at the other aeroplane. Hence the wound is in front. Of course, the ’plane crashes, out of control, into the dip you have just shown me. Then the murderer flies round again, just as if he were Furnace, until he sees that there are plenty of witnesses on the aerodrome so that he can safely stage the last act. Perhaps Ness took care to tell them that Furnace was in the machine they saw?”

  “He did,” confirmed Lady Laura.

  “Then, as far as I can see from what you tell me, all the murderer then had to do was to spin down over the point where Furnace had crashed and, as soon as he was hidden in the dip, correct the spin and fly along the valley, and so away. It would be quite easy for him to return, in the resulting confusion, and put the aeroplane quietly back into the hangar, I suppose?”

  “Yes, that is my idea,” admitted the girl. “But I ought to tell you that it would have to be a fairly good pilot. The dip of the ground doesn’t leave much room to come out of a spin, and then the pilot would have to hedge-hop round the plateau to get away afterwards. But it is possible. I shouldn’t mind having a stab at demonstrating, if you are doubtful.”

  “It’s very sporting of you, Lady Laura. But I don’t think we need ask for that yet.” He grinned. “You seem to have found in two minutes what we couldn’t find in two weeks.”

  “Oh, I’ve been thinking about it pretty solidly for the last few days,” said Lady Laura seriously, rising from the running-board.

  “You didn’t, I suppose, happen to notice the club aeroplane coming back after the crash?” asked Bray, without any real hope.

  “Yes,” was the quiet answer.

  “You did! Who was the pilot?”

  “What an awful business this is,” muttered Lady Laura miserably. “It was Dolly Angevin.”

  “Mrs. Angevin!” exclaimed Bray.

  “Yes; and that was why, when you told me that Ness was killed in a Gauntlett Air Taxis’ aeroplane, I wanted to know more.”

  The detective was puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t quite see the connection.”

  “Well, I suppose you would hardly have heard the club gossip, but, Good lord, everyone knows it here. Poor Dolly has a desperate crush on Valentine Gauntlett. It’s pathetic, of course, because he’s ten years younger than she is—at least. Probably more.”

  Bray turned over the evidence in his mind. Everything seemed to fit in. Gauntlett was implicated in Ness’s murder through Mrs. Angevin, which is what they would have expected. If Gauntlett had influence over Mrs. Angevin, it was not so surprising that she should have been dragged into the affair. Bray remembered, with growing excitement, that Mrs. Angevin had been the only person found on the aerodrome after Ness’s crash who could offer no check on her movements. She had said that she had been sitting in the deserted bar, but there was no one to confirm this.

  It was, of course, hard to believe that a woman could cold-bloodedly carry out two murders and yet seem a normal woman. But then, in Bray’s experience, murderers generally seemed normal people, and, he reflected, there must be something a little abnormal about a woman like Mrs. Angevin, who was prepared to undergo appalling risks for illusory rewards. Of course, the identification of Mrs. Angevin as the murderer was still extremely hypothetical. He felt no great confidence in it. Nothing like the confidence, for instance, that he felt in the method of the murder as suggested by Lady Laura. That seemed as certain as such things could be, for it fitted like a glove every fact but one of those known to them, and also accounted for the short time between the fatal shot and the crash. It is true that it still did not account for the most puzzling item in the medical evidence, the fact that rigor had not set in when the Bishop was watching beside the body, but here Bray was beginning to veer round to Creighton’s opinion, which in turn had been inspired by a muttered hint from Dr. Bastable, that, after all, the Bishop, excellent man as he was, was not a fully qualified doctor, and may have been mistaken on this point. “Rigor,” explained Bastable, “is not always as marked as the layman supposes.”

  Lady Laura seemed to him to be looking very desp
ondent as she swung her flying helmet gently by its strap. He looked at her curiously.

  “You’ve helped us a lot,” he said, “and we’re grateful to you. Too often the general public think it’s the business of the police to trace the wrongdoer, and that they needn’t take the slightest trouble themselves.”

  “I don’t consider myself a member of the general public in this particular case,” answered Lady Laura, looking up. “You see, they killed George. I should have been sorry enough, anyway, that a man who loved me as George did, a man I didn’t treat fairly—oh, I admit it now—was killed in that way. And it would be rather worse, because I sometimes wonder if George would ever have got into the trouble he spoke of in his letter if he hadn’t known me. But the worst of all is”—she hesitated, and seemed to go on with an effort—“George meant more to me than anyone I’d met.…”

  She gave Bray a decisive little nod which seemed to close the conversation and walked away, as little perturbed outwardly as if they had been discussing a subject no more exciting than that of the weather.

  Bray walked slowly back to the club-house. “Extraordinary creatures women are,” he reflected. “Some women. She led this poor bloke the most awful life, and now she says she was in love with him all the time. And she walks about looking unutterably calm and faintly bored, and yet I do believe she’s really upset and worried.” He sighed philosophically and addressed his mind to the problem of Mrs. Angevin.

  ***

  Meanwhile, in London, an apparently unimportant incident was taking place which yet, when Bray afterwards came to review the affair, was the most vital factor in clearing up the complications of this mystery in which Mrs. Angevin, Sally Sackbut, Captain Randall, Valentine Gauntlett, and Tommy Vane were so perplexingly involved.

  The incident was this. The Bishop was a guest of the Transatlantic Society at their annual Anglo-American banquet. Beside him was a silver-haired American with the face of a wise child and those crinkles round the eyes which come from a cheerful disposition.

  They got into conversation.…