Permissible Limits

by Hurley, Graham

‘It’s Steve’s. He wouldn’t part with it.’

  ‘Shit. We need the police.’

  ‘No, we don’t.’

  I stood up again, my one small moment of glory in this whole wretched story. I dug deep in my jeans pocket and produced the small oblong of stainless steel. Dennis turned it over several times. The metal was pitted on one side and there were strange shearing marks around the jagged edge.

  ‘What’s this?’

  I sat down again. I felt indescribably weary.

  ‘It’s part of Adam’s Cessna,’ I said. ‘My little souvenir.’

  Chapter eighteen

  I flew back to Sandown that evening. Jamie met me at the airfield and we stopped for a drink at a quiet country pub on the way back to Mapledurcombe. I told him more or less what had happened and the rest of it he was pretty much able to work out for himself.

  ‘You think Harald had something to do with Adam going down?’ Good question. I’d asked it myself, a thousand times. I didn’t know why and I didn’t know how but that made absolutely no difference to the answer.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think he did.’

  ‘And you think that Steve’s involved too? And this Michelle?’

  ‘Steve, yes. Michelle, I don’t know.’

  ‘So why did she leave him?’

  ‘Because he’s a wimp.’

  ‘You’re sure about that? You don’t think that Harald… she’s a pretty girl…’ He shrugged. He’d seen the photo of Michelle and it amused me that he’d drawn the obvious conclusion.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Harald’s a one-woman man,’ I said softly. ‘He’s quite principled that way.’

  ‘But he’s alone, isn’t he? Unattached?’

  ‘No, he’s not. Not as far as he’s concerned.’ Jamie had put his Guinness down. There were bits of America I’d yet to share with him and this was one of them. ‘You were right,’ I said simply. ‘He’s got a thing about me.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘He thinks he’s in love with me. In fact he wants to marry me. He dresses it up in all kinds of ways but that’s what it boils down to. He’s an obsessive, Jamie. He lives in his head. He makes assumptions, and then just presumes you’ll go along with them.’

  I described our last evening together, the proposal he’d put to me. He wanted me in his team. He wanted me very close. The word he’d used was wingman.

  When I’d finished, Jamie sat back and shook his head.

  ‘Sad,’ he said. ‘Spooky and sad.’

  ‘But he meant it, Jamie.’

  ‘I’m sure he did.’ He looked away, frowning. He was starting to put the clues together, just like me. ‘You think he killed Adam? Because of… ?’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘Because of me.’

  ‘You think he did something to the plane? The Cessna?’ ‘Either him or Steve.’ I nodded again. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bit extreme, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but typical too. He’s a means-and-ends person, Jamie. You have to be with him, to be around him, to pick it up. If something matters enough, he’ll do anything to get it. He’s like that in training. Chuck says he was like that in Vietnam. He says he’s the classic fighter jock. Brilliant hand-and-eye skills. Bucketfuls of nerve. And absolutely no conscience.’

  ‘Dangerous.’

  ‘Very.’

  I told him about Monica, about the ritual with the cage. What had really disturbed me, I said, wasn’t this mad old woman feeding bunnies to her pet alligator but the fact that Harald had been part of it. The days when she couldn’t be bothered to fetch out the offerings herself, Harald was the one playing God in the rabbit hutch.

  I nodded.

  ‘Never gave it a second thought. Never bothered him at all.’

  Jamie shuddered. He liked small fluffy things and all Andrea’s plans to take an air gun to Mapledurcombe’s squirrels had come to absolutely nothing.

  ‘Evil,’ he said. ‘The man’s evil. You can see it in his eyes. It’s a kind of blank look.’

  I disagreed. I’d seen that look, too, but it wasn’t evil.

  ‘No? What was it then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s a kind of autistic thing. There’s a bit of him that never got properly developed, never got a chance to grow. Things that would matter to you and me make no impact on him at all. He just doesn’t think they’re important.’

  ‘You’re making excuses.’

  ‘Far from it. He killed my husband.’

  It was the first time I’d said it so bluntly and the implications chilled me. If he could kill once, he could kill again. That’s what fighter pilots did. That’s what they were for.

  ‘You really think he’d try?’

  ‘I think he might.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s obsessed with me. Because he wants me.’

  ‘But can’t have you? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Jamie looked at me a moment then shook his head.

  ‘Jesus.’ He pushed his glass away. ‘So what do we do now?’

  I sat back a moment, looking at him. Then my hand went to my jeans pocket and found the comforting little oblong shape buried amongst all that oil-stained denim. Dennis had insisted I put it in a polythene bag and he’d probably been right.

  ‘There’s a man called Grover,’ I said softly. ‘He works for the Air Accidents people.’

  I flew up to Farnborough the following morning. Mr Grover was back in his office and the last thing I intended to do with my precious fragment of wreckage was entrust it to the post. By now, in twenty-four brief hours, it had acquired an almost religious significance. Not only might it defend me from the wrath of Harald Meyler, it was also, in a rather grotesque way, a very real link to Adam. This scrap of pitted steel had accompanied him to his death. It had been there at the end. It had a tale to tell.

  Mr Grover was fussing around with a tray of tea when I laid it carefully on his desk. Busy making sure I got exactly the right amount of milk, he gave it barely a second glance. Only when I was settled in my chair did he pick it up. He turned it over several times, then produced a magnifying glass. I began to apologise for it being so small but he said it didn’t matter. Size wasn’t the problem. Its provenance was.

  ‘Provenance?’

  ‘Where it’s come from. The fact that it is from the same plane.’ He looked up. ‘Can we prove that?’

  This little detail hadn’t occurred to me. I hadn’t told him a great deal about my adventures aboard the Frances Bevan but he’d certainly picked up enough to gather that things hadn’t been easy.

  ‘Will they co-operate, these people? Will they testify to… ah… this little chap’s origin?’

  I said I’d no idea. The metal contained no serial numbers, nothing in the way of what Mr Grover termed ‘positive identification’.

  I held out my hand, wanting it back. I felt angry, as well as foolish. I’d wasted this man’s time. I was sorry.

  ‘Don’t be, don’t be, it’ll tell us lots. In fact it looks remarkably promising.’ He had the magnifying glass out again and he passed it across. ‘You see where the metal’s fractured? At the edges? Normally in an impact we’re looking for a nice clean break, something like forty-five degrees.’

  One flat hand sliced through the air. ‘Here we’ve got something very different. See how crinkly that edge is? And see how the very tips are almost rounded off?’

  I looked. He was right. The torn metal was saw-toothed, the tips a soft blue colour, knurled over.

  ‘We call it braising.’ I looked again. ‘See how the metal is all curling over in the same direction? That’s pretty interesting too.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it may indicate an event of some kind. I’m not pre-judging matters, please don’t get me wrong, but it’s certainly worth a proper look.’

  Event? What was he saying? Mr Grover shook his head, refusing to be drawn. Most of the analysis would b
e handled in-house at Farnborough. If he thought it appropriate, extra tests would be organised through a specialist facility down in Kent.

  ‘Fort Halstead,’ he said. ‘Fascinating place.’

  ‘What do they specialise in?’

  ‘Explosives.’ He beamed at me. ‘Care for another biscuit?’

  It was more than a fortnight before Mr Grover got in touch again. That first week, to my intense annoyance, I surrendered to Jamie’s nagging and walled myself in behind a series of what he called ‘sensible precautions’. We had the locks changed on the front and back doors at Mapledurcombe. I took unusual routes when I went shopping or drove over to the airfield. I even thought seriously about getting a dog. As the days went by, though, and nothing happened, my guard began to drop, and when Andrea darted upstairs one morning with news of a mystery voice on the phone, my heart barely skipped a beat.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said. ‘And he sounds lovely.’

  It turned out to be an old flying chum of Adam’s, someone we’d put on the list of stand-by pilots for Old Glory. His name was Trevor and he now flew commercial jets for a living, ferrying holidaymakers to far-flung corners of the Mediterranean.

  We nattered about the display circuit for a minute or two. He was flying a Spitfire for a wealthy owner and he’d heard all about my exploits over in Florida.

  ‘How? Who told you?’

  ‘Harald.’

  Just mention of his name brought the conversation to a halt.

  ‘You still there, Ellie?’

  ‘Yes, sorry.’

  ‘Something the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He wants me to fly in the Fighter Meet, I thought. He wants me up in the sky with Harald Meyler. My fears, though, were unfounded.

  ‘We’re having a get-together over at Goodwood,’ he said cheerfully. ‘They’ve got an event in August. Commemoration of Eagle Day. Battle of Britain. Usual piss-up.’

  Goodwood is a lovely little aerodrome just east of Chichester, a fifteen-minute hop from Sandown. The flying programme, Trevor said, was pretty modest, nothing on the scale of Harald’s September Fighter Meet, and he wondered whether I might be up to adding the Mustang to the afternoon’s entertainments.

  ‘You mean send it over?’

  ‘I want you to fly it.’

  ‘You mean display it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t, Trevor, you know I can’t. I’d need a CAA permit. They’d need to check me out. They send an inspector, an examiner, God knows who. It takes forever.’

  I could hear him laughing at the other end of the phone.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I am the inspector. It’s guys like me they send to do the evals.’

  Evals means evaluations. Trevor flew over three days later. He had CAA authority to check me out for what’s technically called a Display Authorisation. The most basic of these would clear me for a simple fly-by - no bells, no whistles, just a simple pass in front of the crowd at a height no lower than 300 feet. A Stage Two authorisation, on the other hand, would permit me to indulge in simple aerobatics including various rolling manoeuvres in what we flying types call ‘an upward vector’. For me, that would mean climbing rolls and barrel rolls, and I spent most of that morning putting our Mustang through my recently acquired repertoire of aerial tricks.

  Trevor was waiting for me by the hangar when I got back. With the engine shut down, I unbuckled my seat harness and clambered out. Trevor had already expressed his admiration for Harald’s paint scheme. Now he was even more effusive.

  ‘He’s taught you well,’ he said. ‘That was bloody impressive.’

  I gave him a kiss. Life was getting back to normal.

  ‘So what’s the verdict?’

  ‘Stage Two, definitely.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll be in touch with the details.’

  Three days later, beginning to wonder whether Mr Grover had lost my precious scrap of metal, I got a call from Farnborough. I recognised his voice at once. He said the report was complete.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘The metal was part of the fire wall, that’s the bulkhead between the cabin and the engine bay.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It exhibits all the signs of blast damage. Halstead found explosive residues. The direction of the blast indicates we should be looking in the engine bay.’

  ‘Looking for what?’

  ‘A device, Mrs Bruce. What kind of device, I’m afraid I can’t say. The 172 isn’t a big aircraft. It wouldn’t take much to bring it down.’

  I was still tussling with the first two words.

  ‘A device?’

  ‘Call it a bomb if you like. You’d only need a couple of ounces of explosive, some kind of detonator, it’s pretty simple stuff.’

  ‘And you’re sure? You’re absolutely certain?’

  There was a brief silence. Andrea was upstairs with the Hoover, chasing elderly guests around.

  ‘I’m certain there was an explosion of some kind, yes,’ he said carefully. ‘The residues indicate commercially available explosives. As far as I’m aware, these aren’t standard issue on the 172’. I wasn’t sure whether this was Grover’s idea of a joke. Not that I was in the mood for laughter. ‘The front of the aircraft would probably have separated from the cabin,’ he was saying. ‘If it’s any consolation, your husband would have known very little about it. Fix a device to the fire wall, and he’d have been killed by the blast.’

  I thanked him for the information, trying not to think about Adam.

  ‘What happens now?’ I heard myself ask.

  ‘The analysis will form part of my report. In the mean time I’ll be talking to the Jersey police.’

  ‘You will?’

  ‘Of course, Mrs Bruce. But remember what I said about provenance. The item we analysed tells a very clear story. Exactly where it came from will still be very hard to establish.’

  It was Dennis, of course, who insisted that I, too, went to the Jersey police. He was so concerned that he flew over the day before and spent the night at Mapledurcombe, trawling through the evidence, drawing up a week-by-week diary listing everything that had happened since 12 February. Into this chronology, we wove all the loose ends that comprised Adam’s estate - the guarantee on Steve Liddell’s overdraft, the £70,000 he’d laid aside for my surprise Spitfire, Harald’s extraordinary generosity over the Harvard, the telltale fuel bill someone had run up at Hurn Airport. We finished way past midnight. What we were now calling ‘the brief’ ran to ninety-three pages.

  My own contribution lay chiefly in the exchanges I’d had with Steve Liddell and Michelle La Page. I’d wanted to put in much more about Florida and my weeks with Harald but Dennis had limited this to a couple of brief paragraphs establishing that the man had expressed a desire to marry me. When I questioned this decision, trying to argue that motivation was important, Dennis told me to get a grip.

  ‘We’re talking facts,’ he said, ‘figures, dates, sums of money. This is a deposition. Not a bloody novel.’

  Dennis had a contact at Jersey police headquarters, a cheerful-looking inspector called Alastair Roper, and I flew back with him for a formal interview. Forewarned by Dennis, Roper had already been through the file on the accident and was now waiting to speak to Grover. Dennis had been right. All my in-depth analyses of Harald Meyler - fascinating though they may have been - were strictly for the birds. As far as Roper was concerned, the investigation was about evidence.

  ‘You say there’s more wreckage?’

  I explained about the sack I’d found aboard the Frances Bevan. The inspector scribbled notes.

  ‘And you say Liddell has this material?’

  ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘Did you see him remove it? Take it away?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So it might still be aboard?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ I shrugged. ‘Though I doubt it.’

  I watched his pen racing across the notepad. He look
ed up.

  ‘And what about…’ he glanced down, ‘… Mr Meyler? Where do we find him?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea. He’s an American. He flies around a lot on business. The last thing I knew, he was in Kiev. To be honest, he could be anywhere.’

  ‘You haven’t talked to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  I gazed at the man. Dennis had turned his head away. He loved rows, but only if he started them.

  ‘I’m absolutely positive,’ I said carefully. ‘Mr Meyler and I really don’t have a lot to talk about. We were friends, once. But what do you say to a man who probably killed your husband?’

  Inspector Roper had a kind smile. He’d done his best to make me feel comfortable but his courtesy and good humour clearly didn’t extend to wild assumptions like this.

  ‘Can you prove that?’ he asked. ‘Because if you can’t, you ought to be just a little bit careful.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’ The smile at last returned. ‘Disappointment can be a terrible thing, Mrs Bruce.’

  I stayed two more days on Jersey. That same afternoon, according to Dennis, the Jersey police searched Steve Liddell’s hangar, his camper van and the little house in St Helier that belonged to his parents. They took a number of items away and spent the best part of the next day interviewing Steve. Whatever came out of those conversations didn’t include anything incriminating, because Steve was back at his parents’ place by early evening. I know that because I went to see him. I wanted to know what he’d done with the rest of the stuff in the sack.

  ‘I left it on the boat,’ he said.

  He was standing on the front door step. He couldn’t wait for me to go.

  ‘And the police? They’ve found it?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘They’ve looked?’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘So where’s it gone?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Maybe the guys ditched it. You know what they’re like.’

  I nodded. It was like talking to a child. Lies, lies, lies, I thought. And then more lies.

  Back at the Bon Accueil, I phoned Dennis Wetherall. He’d asked me out to supper but I wasn’t sure I could take another three hours of ear-bashing. I told him briefly about my encounter with Steve. Dennis listened without saying very much then told me not to worry. Roper might look like a bumpkin, he said, but in fact the guy was very sharp.