And then I was at the door and Farrow said, ‘Well, here you are. Here’s the guy you wanted to talk to.’ And as I jumped out on to the tarmac he was already walking away with a casual lift of his hand.
‘Where will I find you?’ I called after him. I didn’t want to lose him. The place looked so vast and desolate.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t forget you,’ he answered over his shoulder. His crew were waiting for him and when he had caught them up, they all went on together in a bunch. I heard the flight engineer’s rather high-pitched laugh, and then they disappeared into the hangar.
‘What did you want to see me about?’ Ledder’s voice was dull and flat and I turned to find him standing close beside me, his hands in his pockets and a bored look on his face.
I’d thought about this meeting all through the monotonous hours of the flight, but now that I was alone with him, I found myself at a loss for words. The references to him in my father’s log books had given him an importance in my mind I couldn’t reconcile with this morose-looking individual. ‘Do you recall the name Ferguson?’ I asked. ‘James Finlay Ferguson. He’s dead now, but — ‘
‘The expedition of nineteen hundred. Is that what you mean?’ There was a sudden flicker of interest in the eyes that peered at me through thick horn-rimmed lenses.
Intuition should have told me that a gap in the past was being bridged for me, but my mind was on Briffe and the things my father had written. ‘No, Station G2STO,’ I said. ‘It’s about those radio contacts you had with him.’ But the momentary flicker of interest had vanished from his eyes and his face was blank. ‘Your call sign is VO6AZ, isn’t it?’ I asked him.
He nodded, waiting.
‘G2STO contacted you three times in the past few weeks. Don’t you remember?’
‘Sure I do. It was six times to be exact.’ His voice sounded weary. And then he added, ‘What are you, Police or Air Force?’
I didn’t answer that. I thought maybe he’d talk more readily if he believed I had authority to question him. ‘Can we go somewhere where we can talk?’ I said. It was beginning to rain again and an aircraft had started warming up its engines farther along the apron. ‘There are one or two questions — ‘
‘Questions?’ That seemed to touch him off. ‘I’ve had nothing but questions about this darned ham for the past few days. G2STO! I’m sick of him. The crazy bastard claims he picked up a transmission from Paul Briffe. That’s what you’ve come about, isn’t it?’ His manner was openly hostile. ‘Well, I spent a whole day making out a report on him. The Station Commander here has a copy of it, if you want to see it. I’ve nothing to add. Nothing at all.’
I was too angry to say anything. To come all this way and find that Ledder was completely unco-operative… it was what I’d feared the moment I had seen him waiting there, sullenly, on the apron.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘do you want to see the report?’
I nodded and we began to walk across the tarmac.
‘You know about Briffe?’ He was looking at me. I think he was puzzled by my silence. ‘He couldn’t have made that transmission.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘How do I know? Why, the man was dead. How the hell can a man who’s been dead a week suddenly start sending?’
‘You don’t know he’s dead,’ I said.
He stopped then. ‘How do you mean?’
‘He’s been reported dead. That’s all.’
‘That’s all, you say.’ He was peering at me curiously. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘Just that you can’t be absolutely certain he didn’t transmit,’ I told him. ‘Not unless you were listening in for him on his frequency that day.’ I was facing him then. ‘Were you listening in for him at two o’clock on the twenty-ninth?’
‘The time I was given was nine twenty-five.’
‘Yes, of course.’ That was the four and a half hours difference. ‘It would have been nine twenty-five here. But you weren’t listening for him then, were you?’
He shook his head. ‘Why should I? The search had been called off three days before, and I’d no reason to think — ‘
‘Then you can’t be absolutely certain.’
‘I tell you Briffe was dead.’ I had touched his professional pride and he said it angrily. ‘If I thought there’d been a chance of any transmission, I’d have kept constant watch. But there wasn’t. He’d been dead since the twentieth.’
Perhaps he wasn’t so unlike my father when it came to radio. ‘You’ve only the pilot’s word for that,’ I said.
He stared at me and his face had a startled look. ‘Are you suggesting … Look, for Chrissake, Laroche is all right.’ He was looking at me with sudden suspicion. ‘You’re not the Police. You’re not Air Force either. Who are you?’
‘My name’s Ian Ferguson,’ I said. ‘The crazy bastard you spoke of was my father, and I happen to believe that he did pick up some sort of a transmission.’ My words had shocked him and I didn’t give him time to recover, but added quickly, ‘My father made several contacts with you.’ I pulled out the sheet of paper with the entries I had isolated. ‘The first time was on the twenty-third of September, and then again on the twenty-fifth of last month and again on the twenty-sixth. Did he seem crazy to you then?’
‘No, but that was before — ‘
‘He was perfectly rational, was he?’
‘He asked some odd questions,’ he answered evasively.
I hesitated. But this wasn’t the moment to find out what those questions were. ‘Forget for the moment that Briffe has been reported dead,’ I said, ‘and that my father ever picked up this transmission. Cast your mind back to the first time he contacted you. Can you remember what your reaction was?’
‘I tell you, he asked some odd questions,’ he answered uncomfortably. ‘Otherwise there was nothing to it, I guess. He was just another ham.’
‘Look,’ I said, trying to get my own urgency across to him. ‘My father was a radio operator, like you.’ Surely there was some sort of freemasonry between these men whose world was the ether, some sense of brotherhood. ‘I know he was contacting you W/T and that all you get is a lot of dots and dashes, but something must come through, some indication — ‘
‘It’s not the same as Voice, you know. And he always contacted me on Key — never Voice.’
‘Of course he did,’ I said angrily. ‘How else could he contact you? But even so,’ I added, ‘something must come through, surely — some indication of the sort of man he was, his mood, something?’
‘I tell you, it was all on Key. If I’d had a QSO — a Voice contact — then maybe…’ He gave a little shrug. ‘To tell you the truth I didn’t think much about him — not then.’
It was raining harder now, but he made no move to take shelter and I asked him again what he’d thought of my father. ‘You must have formed some impression.’ And when he didn’t answer, I said impatiently, ‘Don’t the men you contact on the air mean anything to you? Surely you must have got some impression — ‘
‘He was just another ham, that’s all.’ He said it irritably. ‘I pick up any number of hams.’
I felt suddenly tired of the whole thing then. My father had meant nothing to this morose Canadian operator, nothing at all. There seemed to be no point in my having made the trip to Goose. In desperation I said, ‘At least you didn’t think him irrational or irresponsible — at that time?’
‘I tell you, I didn’t think anything about him. I was puzzled by his questions. That was all.’
Over two thousand miles, and I was no further forward. I asked him about the questions then and he said it was all set down in the report he’d written. ‘All I could remember, anyway.’ And he added, ‘If you want to come back to the house I could show you the report there. I kept a copy.’
I hesitated because the invitation had been made so grudgingly, but then he looked at his watch and said, ‘It’s after five-thirty now. I guess the Station Commander will have left anyway.’