Margot Bennett - The Man Who Didn't Fly

“He just wasn’t feeling sociable. So there’s nothing in that idea. Thanks, anyway. Is there another mechanic here called Clewes?”

“In there.” Douglas picked up his spanner and jerked it towards one of the hangars. He was a man who would have liked to make a spanner do all his talking for him.

Clewes was a fat little man, with a ring of black oil round his lips. He looked at the sergeant sorrowfully and begged his pardon, but what could he say? He’d had no reason to pay attention at the time, but he’d heard Mr Lee say something about being one short, and he’d seen the three go in.

Sergeant Young strode gloomily over to the Customs shed. “If you ask me,” he said over his shoulder to the constable, “there’s no one in this place could tell the Pied Piper of Hamelin from Hopalong Cassidy.”

The passport officer was bent over his desk with his tongue sticking out, like a schoolboy fighting with an examination. He was copying a list of French irregular verbs, and for all he knew or remembered of Friday morning, it seemed likely that this was his usual preoccupation.

“There was a rush,” he explained. “Three or four planes went out that morning. I must have had fifteen or sixteen people through here. One of them had a beard, if that’s any help.”

“One of the men on the lost plane?” Sergeant Young asked in surprise.

“Oh, I don’t say that. I think it was an alien, returning to Belgium. It’s only that I noticed him, having a beard. For the rest, it’s faces, faces, faces all the day. In any case, if the plane was for Ireland, they wouldn’t pass through here at all. Have you tried the buffet?”

Sergeant Young tried the buffet. The tea-lady, who had a contrived shade of red hair, and the new small waist with the old, spreading hips, smoothed one eyebrow with her little finger, and said she’d been talking to a gentleman from Sweden at the time, and she really couldn’t remember a thing, except that poor Mr Lee had looked in to ask about a passenger who wasn’t there. When she mentioned Lee’s name her eyes moistened and she turned away, fumbling until she found a very dainty handkerchief.

“Mr Lee was a true gentleman,” she said, snuffling. “And all your questions won’t bring him back.”

THE short young man came through the door of the office with his head down, like a bull expecting to meet a matador. He was dark-complexioned, and although he was young he already had wrinkles on his forehead from raising his eyebrows.

He spoke in a high voice, but all he said at first was: “How do you do. My name’s Murray.” Then he sat in agitated silence, while the policeman stared at his slightly crumpled lightweight suit, and the place where the button was missing from his shirt.

“I came in about Harry,” he said. “Walters, I mean.”

“Yes?”

Murray sat down, and elevated his head cautiously.

“Things are pretty bare in here. Much as one had imagined.”

“Are they, Mr Murray?”

“Well, yes, they are. I’m not criticising, you know. All I mean is you haven’t got piles of letters and so on scattered over the floor.”

“Is there something you wanted to say, Mr Murray?”

“It’s about Harry Walters.”

“Yes?”

“I haven’t come to give myself up, or anything like that. I just know him. Do you mind if I smoke? The shades of the prison house don’t close around the police station? They must, of course, for some people.”

He took out a blue packet, and, after some hesitation, chose a cigarette. He found a matchbox, opened it, inspected the matches, took one, and lit his cigarette. Then he began to speak at racing speed, like a cyclist swerving past obstacles on his way downhill.

“I was talking to a man in a bar who reads all the papers. I mean really all of them, and he said they’d finished proving that flying was safer than riding a tricycle round the nursery and now they wanted to know about Harry and what was I going to do? I don’t want to get mixed up with newspapers, so I thought, there’s the police, what about that? You see all my inclinations were to shut up and say nothing. But then I thought everyone knows I know Harry, I’ve known him for years and if I shut up it might lead to getting involved. Then I rang Scotland Yard. Absolutely everything I’ve ever read suggested Scotland Yard would be the place to ring, but they said they positively weren’t touching it, and put me on to you. So here I am.”

“You want to make a statement?” Inspector Lewis asked suspiciously.

“In a way I don’t. Suppose I just talk, and then afterwards if I’ve told you anything at all, we could write down that bit and let the rest go? Because principally you see I don’t want to be one of those witnesses that are chewed up in court and tossed over some learned friend’s shoulder. I’m sorry about Harry, but I have a reputation – professional status – a wife. Then there’s the other side. It’s true I’m not excessively public-spirited – I mean if I saw bandits waving guns and snatching diamonds from a jeweller’s window I really think I’d just let them snatch – it’s a point, don’t you think, if one should risk one’s life to save someone else’s diamonds? I’ve given a lot of thought to it, and I realise that bandits should be discouraged, so I’d be willing to co-operate, like shouting: ‘they went that way,’ but nothing more.”

“Are you trying to tell me about a jewel robbery, Mr Murray?” Lewis asked, carefully polite.

“Are you trying to accuse me of something? I’ve never been within a mile of a jewel robbery,” Murray said fiercely. “I’m trying to make you see I wouldn’t be here saying what I had to say, unless I felt I had to do it. I don’t want to be mixed up in this at all, but I want to say if poor Harry was the man who missed that plane, I think it’s likely he was murdered.”

“Why?”

Murray looked intently at his cigarette, with the concentration of a watchmaker studying a broken hairspring. He took a matchbox from his pocket, carefully tipped the ash among the matches, and shut the box.

“The truth is,” he said, “I’m an editor.”

“Really, sir, and what do you edit?”

“A magazine. You wouldn’t have heard of it. It’s called Vista.”

“I don’t have much time for reading,” the inspector apologised.

Sergeant Young tilted his head towards the inspector, who nodded.

“I know it, sir. It’s a poetry magazine, with novelists reviewing each other’s books on the back pages.”

“I say,” Murray exclaimed, looking disparagingly at the sergeant. “Have you ever bought it? For money, I mean?”

“Yes, sir.”

“One of the very few,” Murray said. “If there were more of you, we wouldn’t be closing down. People think it’s easy, you know. They think it doesn’t matter, having to run at a loss. Find a tame millionaire, they keep telling me. I’ve looked everywhere, but I think they’re dying out. Some disease – have you ever heard of millionaire’s myxomatosis?”

“Mr Murray, you wanted to tell us something?”

“I’m not here for the fun of it, am I? If you’ve read Vista, you must have seen some of Harry’s poems.”

“I can’t say that I remember them.”

“Well, he was a poet, and not a bad one when he got around to it. But – do you really mind if I tell this my own way? The trouble is,” he said unhappily, “I can’t think of any other way to tell it. Or hadn’t you noticed I’m having difficulty?”

“Just go ahead, sir, your own way.”

“Then it’s about Harry. That’s why I’ve come. Harry was always short of money,” he said. “Other people can come back from places like Australia with gold dust clinging to the turn-ups of their trousers, but I don’t think Harry had even a clean shirt when he got off the boat four months ago. He stayed with us for a few weeks, but my wife got a bit restive. Harry wasn’t at all like the other people who wrote for Vista. I mean most poets today work for the B.B.C. and keep their trousers pressed, but Harry had a theory that poets should be poets and nothing more. So he got a bit short of money. I expect that people like yourselves, paid regularly, don’t understand how awkward that can be? Is there anywhere I could put this cigarette end? An old helmet, or something of the kind?”