by Nevil Shute
A sergeant in the gay red tunic of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was there to meet us; he knew Hennessey, and said, “Guess you folks ’ll have to sleep in the store tonight. Hotel’s full of summer visitors.”
In the fading light he took us to a sort of marine store, a wooden shed full of old ships’ ropes and other gear. There were big hooks down each wall, especially put there, it seemed, for slinging hammocks; it was frequently used as a dormitory. We slung ours, Stubbs assisting me and showing me how to do it, and made the seaplane fast at the pontoon; then we walked into the little town and sat down at the counter of the only café and ordered dinners of steak and onions and fried potatoes, from a girl who spoke nothing but French. Over the ice-cream and coffee we talked a little.
The crash was about four months’ old, but Hennessey had been up there within the last month as a guide to the party of Russians who had come from the Embassy to disinter the body of their Ambassador and carry him away. “Great big jars of stuff they had with them,” he said, “and a kind of zinc tank with a lid you could screw down on a rubber gasket. He didn’t smell so bad after they got him all sealed down. Eight handles it had, for carrying, but gee, that was a mean load. I never want another one like that again. Eleven miles, and a rough trail at that.”
He stared at his cup. “I’m not sure even now they got the right one. It was the right grave, but when we buried them they weren’t too easy to identify, and it didn’t seem to matter which got which cross; they were all there together. We tossed a dime for which cross to put on some of them. Still, it wouldn’t make a row of beans, anyway.”
We went back to the store in the soft darkness; at the pontoon near by the Norseman loomed with a great shadowy wing over the water. We undressed partially and got into our hammocks, but for a long while I could not sleep. I was overtired, and lay restless, wondering what the Director was saying to Honey in my absence, wondering what the next day would bring for me, wondering if corrosion would have destroyed the evidence for which I sought. Then, unhappily, I wondered if temperature did enter into this fatigue problem. If so, it might well mean a year’s investigation before we could say definitely if the Reindeer was, in fact, unsafe. In that case it would be quicker to take the aircraft out of service and modify them whether they were dangerous or not, but what a stinking row there would be about that!
I rolled insecure, sleepless, overtired, and unhappy for most of the night. The store was full of rats, who scurried all around incessantly.
Early in the morning we were up and breakfasting in the same café, served by the same French-speaking girl. Then we began the weary task of filling six forty-gallon drums of petrol into the tanks of the Norseman through a semi-rotary pump. Each barrel had to be rolled from the petrol store a hundred yards away down to the pontoon, and the empties rolled back again. It took us about two hours, and by that time the sun was high and hot and we were tired and sweating. At last it was finished, and we got into the machine and started up the engine, and took off.
Small Pine Water is about an hour’s flight from Ivanhoe. We left the St. Lawrence and flew approximately north-east, over a desolate country covered in fir woods and fallen timber like spillikins, on hills which grew gradually higher beneath us as we went on inland. Presently Russell asked me if I would like to see the scene of the accident from the air before we landed on the lake. I said I would, and Hennessey brought the Norseman down to about five hundred feet above the tree tops and began circling around. But there was very little to be seen from the air. I saw a cliff that the aircraft had evidently hit, but it was not very conspicuous or very high. I saw a few shells of dulled duralumin between the fronds of new vegetation, and there was a little clearing where a few trees had been felled; in this clearing there were planted two rows of neat white crosses. That was all that could be seen from the air, and we turned back and landed on the lake.
When we were down, we turned and taxied in to a beach. People had been here before us, for trees had been felled and undergrowth cleared at the landing. There were oil stains on the ground and a few empty tins, and burnt ashes in a fireplace built of stones, and stuck up in the fork of a tree there was a bundle tied around with sacking. The floats of the Norseman grounded upon rotting and decayed vegetation on the bottom of the lake about a couple of yards from the shore. We stopped the engine and got out on to the float, and walked along, and splashed through the shallow water to the shore. We took mooring lines with us and made the seaplane fast to screw pickets; immediately the flies were all around us in a cloud.
It was then about noon. We unloaded all the gear out of the Norseman on to the beach, and Stubbs set about cooking a meal. It was arranged that he should stay there at the beach to look after the aircraft while Hennessey and Russell and I walked the eleven miles up to the crash, carrying upon our backs the packs containing our hammocks, blankets, ammunition, and food for two days. In addition each of us carried an axe and Hennessey carried a rifle, Russell a shot-gun.
I am ashamed to say how much that walk distressed me. It was a very hot summer afternoon, for one thing. My pack weighed about fifty pounds and it was comfortable enough on a light duralumin frame carrier. But I was out of condition with years of office work, whereas both Russell and Hennessey were wiry and perfectly fit. They took an easy pace to avoid tiring me too much and several times they offered to carry my pack for me, but pride made me refuse. It took us nearly five hours to get there, blind and drenched with sweat and tormented by the flies.
The country that we passed through was appalling. It was a forest of spruce and alder; in some parts the trees were no more than three feet apart. It was full of the rotting trunks of fallen trees, and these trees and the decaying vegetation round them made a queer, stifling aroma that was more a gasp than a smell. For much of the way the ground was soft muskeg in which the feet sank up to six inches. It was impossible to see more than a few yards in any direction; at the same time the trees were fairly small, so that they gave little shelter from the sun. The trail wound in and out among the fallen trunks marked here and there by a fading blaze upon a standing tree, but it was difficult to discern except to the practised eye, and in no way resembled a path. In places it was swampy, and here if you put a foot down incautiously you would go in knee deep. And always the flies were an incessant torment.
When finally we came out into the clearing with the double row of wooden crosses I was practically foundered. I slid the pack from my back and sat down on it for a moment with my head swimming and the flies in a great cloud around me. I thanked God in my fatigue that circumstances had prevented Honey from coming on this trip; I might be quite unfit for it, but I was certainly a great deal fitter than he was. Russell and Hennessey set about making a fire and boiling up a kettle for tea; by the time that was well under way I was feeling better, and able to assist them a bit by gathering the wood.
Tea refreshed us all, though none of us could eat anything. While Hennessey put the things together and began to arrange a camp Russell and I walked over to the wreck. It lay about two hundred yards away, under the stony cliff that had appeared in the photographs. New vegetation had grown up and was covering it over; by next year it would have merged into the forest.
We came first to the bow, to the smashed cockpit where Bill Ward had died, to the broken control columns, the scattered instruments, the flattened and corroded boxes of the radio and radar gear. Then came the broken wing and the engines, and the cabin with smashed seats and burnt upholstery, and the galley stove and lavatory behind it, practically undamaged amongst all the wreckage. I reflected that Honey had been quite right about that; was it to prove that he was right about fatigue as well?
Then we came to the tail.
The starboard side was more or less intact; the port tailplane and elevator were missing completely, as in the photographs and the description of the accident report. I went straight to the broken stumps of the spars still attached to the rear fuselage, that in the tiny detail of the
photographs had suggested a fatigue fracture.
They were not as they had been in the photograph. A clean, recent saw-cut had been made to cut both spars through close up to the fuselage. The evidence had been removed.
Russell was dumbfounded, and shouted to Hennessey, who came running. We showed him what had happened. “Oh, aye,” he said, “the Russians did that. They cut them bits off with a hacksaw ’n took them away. They took some other bits as well.”
He eyed us with mounting anxiety. “We thought it was all so much junk,” he said. “Not important, were they?”
10
MR. HONEY TRAVELLED back across the Atlantic in a Lincoln of the Empire Air Navigation School that had been wandering about the north of Canada doing something or other with the lines of flux at the Magnetic Pole. Now it was on its way back to Shawbury and the R.A.F. navigators were glad to oblige by giving Mr. Honey a lift back to England. Originally they had been bound straight for their base in Shropshire, but being navigators they rather enjoyed going out of their way in bad visibility on tortuous courses that would test their skill. They landed Mr. Honey at Farnborough outside his own office door at half-past one in the morning, put him out upon the runway, kissed their hands to him, and took off again for Shawbury in the darkness. Mr. Honey was left holding his suitcase in the middle of Farnborough aerodrome in the middle of the night.
Characteristically, he went into the office. He walked in, blinking, to the bright lights of the old balloon shed where the night shift test upon the Reindeer tail was clattering and booming away, and there was young Simmons entering the routine hourly strain readings upon the routine graphs of the distortion of the structure, all of which went along as a perfectly straight horizontal line as the strain graphs of a safe structure should. He blinked at the great clattering thing, sniffed, savoured the familiar atmosphere; everything was all right, and he was home again.
He stayed about half an hour, examining the records; he had only been away for four days, but so much had happened in that time he felt that it was several months, that something must have changed, some catastrophe must have happened to his trial during his absence. But finally he satisfied himself that it was going on all right, and asked if Simmons had been posting the letters to Elspeth properly.
The boy hesitated. “Well, yes I have, sir,” he said, “but I don’t know that they’ve been getting to her. You know she fell downstairs the night you went away, and she’s been staying with Dr. Scott ever since, I think.”
He told Honey what he knew, which was not very much, and satisfied him that Elspeth was not very ill. Honey said warmly, “It was very kind of Dr. Scott to do that. Is he at home now?”
“I think he flew to Canada this evening, sir. He was going to, after his lecture on the ‘Performance of Aircraft flying at High Mach Numbers.’ We all went up to that. It was awfully good.”
It seemed to Honey that there was not much else he could do but to go home and go to bed; he could hardly burst in on Shirley in the middle of the night and demand to see Elspeth, who was apparently being well looked after. As regards getting home, there was a little difficulty. There were no buses at that hour and no R.A.E. transport. Simmons had a motor-bicycle, but Honey could not ride it and Simmons could not leave the Reindeer trial. In the end Honey left the suitcase in his office, and set out to walk the four miles to his home through the deserted lanes and streets.
He got there at about half-past three, walked up the path through the front garden, and let himself into the house with his latchkey. He went into the front sitting-room and snapped on the light. The familiar room was somewhat changed in the short time that he had been away; there was a smell of soap that he could not at first identify, and there was a vase of roses on the table. He wondered who could have done a thing like that, and then he remembered that something had happened to Elspeth and other people must have been in the house.
A door opened upstairs, and he heard someone moving on the landing. He went out into the hall and looked up the one flight, blinking, and at the head of the stairs there was a young woman standing looking down, a very pleasant-looking young woman in pyjamas and a kimono. He did not recognise her at first; I don’t know what he thought about it. Something that his Fairy Godmother had done for him, perhaps.
She said, “Mr. Honey! We didn’t expect you back so soon.”
He said, “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” she said. “Marjorie Corder,” She laughed a little awkwardly. “I’d have stayed up if I’d known that you were coming home tonight, but we didn’t think you could be here before tomorrow.”
She came downstairs to him. “You must think it terribly funny for me to be here,” she said. “But Elspeth was so anxious to get back here, and Mrs. Scott couldn’t have her for tonight. So I said I’d sleep here with her.” She broke off. “Did you know she had an accident?”
“They told me something at the office. What did happen?” he asked. “Simmons—he’s my assistant there—he said Mrs. Scott had taken her into their flat.”
She told him briefly what had been going on. “Dr. Scott wouldn’t let anybody cable you about it,” she said, “because you couldn’t have got home any sooner and he thought it would only worry you. She’s quite all right now—she’s upstairs, asleep. She’s going to get up a bit tomorrow.”
He said, “I’ll just go up and see her.”
She smiled. “Don’t wake her up, will you? She’s sleeping so nicely.”
“I won’t wake her up,” he said.
She stopped him as he turned to the stairs. “Have you had any supper?”
He thought back vaguely over the last few hours. “We had some sandwiches and things in the aircraft,” he said.
“But when did you have your last proper meal?”
He thought for a minute. “Gander, I suppose.”
She nodded. “I’ll get you something—you must be hungry. Scrambled eggs all right? Cocoa? Or Bovril?”
“Cocoa, please,” he said. “But please don’t bother—”
“But of course,” she said. “You must have something.”
He went upstairs and peeped in on Elspeth, who was sleeping, with the washing-up mop in bed with her. On the table by her bedside, pulled forward where she could see it, was another little vase of roses and the photograph of her mother, his Mary, that somebody had taken from the mantlepiece and arranged specially for his daughter, in case she should be lonely amongst so many strangers. Mr. Honey closed the door quietly with more moisture even than was usual in his weak eyes, washed his hands, and went down again to the kitchen.
He found Miss Corder at the gas-stove cooking for him; there was a cleaner, fresher air about the kitchen which seemed strange to him and which he did not understand. “Please let me do that,” he said. “There’s no need for you to stay up now. I’ll be all right.”
She turned half round from the stove. “I feel an awful pig going to bed at all,” she said. “If we’d thought that there was any chance of you getting back tonight I’d have had a decent meal ready for you.”
He said weakly. “It’s terribly nice of you,” and began to lay the table. “When did you get here?”
“Yesterday,” she said. “I brought your letter down to Dr. Scott and then I heard that Elspeth was in bed so I came round to see what I could do. And then she was so anxious to get back here, and Mrs. Scott wanted to be up in London tonight to see her husband off to Canada, so I said I’d sleep here with Elspeth until you came back. I do hope you don’t mind. It did seem the best thing to do.”
“Of course I don’t mind,” he said warmly. “It’s so very, very kind of you to take the trouble.”
She brought the scrambled eggs on toast to the table for him on a warm plate, and poured out cocoa for them both. As she supped she told him what they had been doing. “Dr. and Mrs. Scott have been so kind,” she said, “but really, Elspeth’s much happier round here. She likes being in her own room and her own bed. I was doing the stairs this
afternoon and we could talk, and then after that I made some toffee with her on the gas-ring in her room, and we played Sevens.”
Mr. Honey realised dimly that nobody had played with Elspeth like that for many years; perhaps that was what was wrong with her. He said, “You did the stairs? Do you mean, brushed them down?”
“I washed them,” the girl said. “They did need it. I hope you don’t mind. I did this room, too.”
Mr. Honey glanced around the kitchen; so that was what had happened to it. “It’s awfully nice,” he said ingenuously. “What did you do to the walls to make them like that?”
“I washed those, too,” she said. “It didn’t take long. An awful lot of dirt came off.”
He looked at her in slight distress. “I didn’t know it had got so bad.”
“Of course not,” she said gently. “One wouldn’t, living in the house the whole time. It’s only when you come in fresh that it hits you in the eye.”
“I did tell Mrs. Higgs to do some scrubbing, only last week,” he said. “Or sometime. I suppose she didn’t do it.”
“I don’t think she can have,” the girl said positively. “I should give her the sack if I were you. She doesn’t seem to be very reliable.”
“The one I had before used to steal things,” Mr. Honey said. “Mrs. Higgs is very honest, and she’s given me a lot of help with Elspeth’s clothes.”
The girl compressed her lips and took a drink of cocoa. “Do you think I might look through Elspeth’s clothes tomorrow?” she said. “I don’t want to barge in. But she tells me that she hasn’t got any light cotton frocks for summer. Not one.”
“Ought she to have?” asked Mr. Honey. “I wear the same myself all the year round. You mean, like her party frock? I told her she could wear that when it’s hot.”
Miss Corder moistened her lips and started off from the beginning to inform Mr. Honey what a child should wear. As they talked the cocoa cooled; the first streak of light appeared at the black window. Presently she gathered the cups together. “Let me have a look at her clothes while you’re at work tomorrow,” she said. “Then I’ll make you out a list of what she ought to have.”