Death Drops the Pilot

by George Bellairs

  ‘I’ve forgotten how to start it…’

  The old woman never tired of talking about when her father had a carriage and pair, but she knew nothing of motor vehicles.

  ‘I’ve forgotten the ignition key…’

  She ran indoors, rummaged in a drawer, found the key, and this time got the engine turning over.

  ‘Don’t you have to put the lights on?’

  She fumbled with the dashboard again and this time illuminated the whole of the car, inside and out. The head-lights shone full and fair into the road, with moths flitting about in the beams.

  Dorothy went through the drill, like a child practising something. It was nearly two years since she had tried to learn to drive. Dodd used the car quite a lot himself and took the women with him now and then. Dorothy had once taken a fancy to driving, but could never pass the tests. Finally, she had abandoned it.

  ‘What if you’re caught? You haven’t got a licence. It’s not fair of Dodd…’

  Clutch out, gear in, brake off, accelerate, clutch in…Dorothy ran through the routine and then tried it out.

  ‘I say, it’s not fair of Dodd. What if…?’

  ‘Oh, shut up, mother. It’s bad enough…’

  The car leapt forward, down the drive and into the road with a wide sweep. It was a good job nothing was coming in the other direction. Dorothy was scared about changing gears. She decided to run downhill in bottom. They progressed uncertainly down to the village, Dorothy clinging tightly to the wheel, keeping unsteadily to the left.

  The headlamps blinded oncoming traffic and cars began to signal frantically. Dorothy didn’t know what it was all about…

  Then, near the bottom of the hill, they saw Dodd. He was not a tall man, but now he looked like a little hunchback. His arms swung limply in front of him, his head was bowed, his shoulders sagging. He could hardly put one foot after the other.

  Dorothy frenziedly tried to remember how to stop. But before she could act, Dodd had fallen on his face in the road. his arms spread out above his head, his hat in the dust. More by good luck than good management, Dorothy stalled the engine and found the brake in time.

  It was only when they picked him up that the pair of them discovered that Dodd had been stabbed in the back. Whimpering, they struggled to get him to his feet, and then they found the blood. All they could think about was how to get him in the car. He was a heavy little man, and they tussled and dragged him between them and finally sat him on the floor. Not another vehicle passed, or else it might have been a different tale. As it was, Dorothy contrived to get the car home by taking a loop road instead of turning, and when they got Dodd to his own fireside, he was dead.

  Although the Nicholls women drove Dodd home just before eleven, it wasn’t until hours later that they finally did something about it. P.C. Wilberforce Buckley had long been in bed and was annoyed when they roused him. Dr. Vinter, the police surgeon from Helstonbury, who had just retired after a rather hectic night at the Medical Ball, was even more annoyed.

  ‘Why did you put it off till now, Mrs. Nicholls? ‘asked Willie Buckley.

  Willie was a young officer whose father had been in the force before him. He was a tall, heavy, red-faced constable, with the beginnings of quite a formidable moustache on his top lip, and heavy black eyebrows, which looked like little moustaches as well. He had a comfortable wife and four children. The youngest had started to howl when the telephone rang, and Buckley had left him yelling his head off.

  ‘We didn’t realise he was dead…We didn’t quite know what to do…It was so sudden, like…’

  Frantically Mrs. Nicholls tried to find excuses, whilst her daughter, alternately scared by the situation and anxious about the future, wandered from room to room, weeping now and then, with a wet handkerchief screwed tight in a ball in the palm of her hand.

  At first, the women hadn’t believed Dodd was dead. They had put him in his pyjamas, fixed up his wound with plaster and lint, and put him to bed. Then, they’d realised he had died quietly whilst in their hands. It troubled them, not so much out of affection, although, in a way, it was nice to have him about the place. What bothered them was what was going to happen to them now that supplies were cut off.

  Harry Dodd had been a genial enough man, but very self-contained. He never mentioned his family, they never visited him, and the Nicholls pair didn’t even know their address, except that it was somewhere in a suburb in Cambridge. He had an only brother, too, somebody well known in politics. Dodd had betrayed that once when Dorothy had found his brother’s picture in the paper and had asked Dodd if he were any relation. He had been the image of the man in the paper; you would have said it was Dodd himself. Harry Dodd had grown annoyed and impatient whenever asked about his personal affairs, but Dorothy had looked it up in the reference books at the library, and as Harry and William Dodd were both from Cambridge and had both gone to the same school, she had put two and two together.

  The Nicholls women were anxious to know if Harry had left a Will. If he hadn’t, it meant they would soon be out of Mon Abri without a cent.

  ‘It’s not good enough,’ said the old woman. ‘Here he’s died and made no provision for you. And you as good as his wife, and more good to him than his beastly family…’

  They started to turn the place upside down to find any documents Dodd might have left behind. He seemed to have had no private papers. A cheque-book—all stubs and no forms—a lot of old sweepstake and lottery tickets, some seed catalogues and a few paid bills were all they could find in his desk, and when they forced open the only locked drawer, they found it full of homemade dry-flies for Dodd’s fishing trips. In the loft it was the same, except that there they found a locked trunk which resisted all efforts to open it.

  ‘He’s done it on us proper, the rogue,’ panted Mrs. Nicholls after their fruitless exertions.

  ‘He was good to us while he was with us, mother…’

  ‘Good to us! I like that. Do you know you’ll have to find a job again…’

  And she started to pace the room muttering, ‘I can’t believe it’, until finally her voice rose to a hysterical shriek and she began to beat the walls in temper.

  To tell the truth, Dorothy was standing it better than her mother. At first, taking a man from his wife and family had seemed quite a conquest, especially when he was rich and decent. Somehow she had imagined in those days a life of elegant ease, servants at her beck and call, cruises and the Riviera…All the stuff she read about in the novelettes she gobbled up. But it hadn’t turned out that way. How was she to know that Dodd’s business really ran on his wife’s money? Or that Dodd still loved his wife after his lapse, in spite of the fact that his family wanted to get rid of him and pushed through a divorce? And then Dodd had said nothing about marriage, but taken her on as a kind of housekeeper at Mon Abri, where he retired from the world. He’d even suggested she bring her mother along for company!

  Dorothy had long been fed-up with it. Dodd had never been her idea of a romantic lover, but after the divorce, he’d behaved like someone who had done wrong and was anxious to make amends to his former wife. He’d started to treat Dorothy, too, as if he’d wronged her! He’d given her all she needed in the way of money, never put anything in the way of her enjoying herself, but had retired with his personal secrets to his bed in the cockloft. It had suffocated Dorothy sitting at Mon Abri with her mother when Dodd was out in the evening with his vulgar pals at the local pub, or away for a day or two, fishing somewhere with nobody knew whom. Dorothy was still under forty, romantic, passionate and comely. She wanted a taste of life before she grew like her mother, bitter, querulous and parsimonious. Sooner or later she wouldn’t be able to stand the hot-house imprisonment of Mon Abri, and Dodd and her mother…She’d kick over the traces and go…Now she was free again, although the way she’d secured her release made her weep for poor Harry Dodd.

  ‘What are we going to do? There’s only ten pounds in his wallet. He must have put his remittance in the
bank. We can’t get that out…’

  ‘Oh, shut up, mother. We can work. I can get a job. I’m not too old…’

  ‘Well, I’m not taking any more lodgers in to please you or anybody else. It’s a dirty, mean trick lie’s played…’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘What do you mean…?’

  ‘With him…With Harry…?’

  They had been too busy wondering how the affair was going to affect them to get in a panic. Now they faced each other in fear.

  ‘He’s been stabbed by somebody. Likely as not by one of them Dodds, his family. They always hated him. And here we are, holding the baby. It’s not fair.’

  ‘We’d better get a doctor, mother.’

  ‘What’s the use? He’s dead. It’s a police job, my girl. But before we get the police in here messing about, we’ve got to think things out.’

  ‘Police!’

  Dorothy hadn’t thought of that. She started to cry noisily, tears like glass peas running down her cheeks.

  ‘Shut up! I’ve got to think.’

  The old woman’s face was as hard as a rock. She’d had plenty of troubles of her own in her time, and it needed a lot to put her out. Dorothy had inherited her father’s amorous propensities. He’d had two girls in the family way on his hands at the same time, and then drowned himself in the canal. There wasn’t much Mrs. Nicholls didn’t know after Nicholls had finished with her.

  They turned the house upside down again, looking for the Will, but nothing more came to light except a little diary with a list of investments from which Dodd seemed to derive his income. And they were in the hands of a firm of London solicitors! Mrs. Nicholls solemnly took the photograph of Dodd which stood in a silver frame, beaming on Dorothy’s bed, flung it across the room, and then followed it and ground it under her heel.

  ‘The swine!’

  ‘We ought to do something…The police ought to know…’

  It was three in the morning, Dodd was lying dead in the old woman’s bed, and they weren’t a bit nearer getting his money.

  ‘Has it dawned on you, my girl, the police might think we did it?’

  Dorothy’s mouth opened wide and she emitted a loud, high-pitched scream.

  ‘No…No…They know we wouldn’t…Besides, why should we?’

  ‘You never know, when the police get about, what they find out, and if they don’t find out, they make up. However, there doesn’t seem any way out. If we bury him in the garden and keep on drawing his income, it’ll mean getting round the bank and them solicitors. It just wouldn’t work. And if we ran off, they’d find us, you being too dumb to drive even the car. No, better get in the police. We’ve clone nothin’ wrong. They can’t say we did it. Who’s goin’ to do it, you or me? What shall we tell Buckley when he gets here? He’ll want to know what we’ve been doin’ all this time with the body.’

  ‘I can’t think…’

  ‘You never could. I’d better ring them, and we’ll say we didn’t know he was dead or the formalities in cases like this. We’ll just act dumb. And that won’t be difficult for you, my girl. You’re never any help…’

  But Dorothy didn’t seem to hear. She was actually smiling a kind of smug, feline smile at her own thoughts. Freedom and adventure again…

  ‘Well…? What are you smilin’ at? Go and phone Buckley at the police station. Just tell him Mr. Dodd died suddenly and will he come up. Don’t say any more. You hear me? Not another word. Now get goin’…’

  Dorothy undulated to the hall. There was a new provocative swing of her hips and her lethargy was gone. Mrs. Nicholls suddenly changed her mind and took up the phone before her daughter could get to it. She never knew what Dorothy would say with a man at the other end! She dialled a number, after looking it up in the book. At the police house in Brande the bell began to ring, the dog barked, P.C. Buckley turned and grunted, and Charles Buckley, aged ten months, awoke and started to howl.

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