“Did these other two speak to you?”
“They ordered bitters. It’s a manner of speaking.”
“I’ll make enquiries among our regulars,” Mrs Crewe promised. She seemed to recognise the urgency of proving she was on the right side.
“As a matter of curiosity, did you hear any of the men’s conversation?”
“Which men? I don’t know which men you’re talking about. First it’s four, then it’s three, now it’s the two bitters.”
“No, Raymond, not the two bitters. It’s the three whiskies,” Mrs Crewe said officiously.
“You give me time, Ethel, give me time. I know better than you what happened. There was a word about horses and Ireland, but next thing it was accidents and Australia, or it might have been South Africa, then I lost interest.”
“What did they say about horses?”
“Something about racing, it might be supposed,” Crewe said triumphantly, and smiled at last. “But we’ve agreed that’s not to be discussed. It was only the Grand National,” he added generously.
“Go on. What about the Grand National?”
“Some nonsense about a million people jumping the fences and ten thousand falling with every horse. No kind of sense in it at all.”
“And Australia?”
“Nothing about Australia.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, it might have been South Africa. It was a place like that.”
“New Zealand?”
“No, not New Zealand. It was South Africa or it was Australia. I’ll swear to one of them. I’ve an uncle in one of them and a cousin in the other, so I’m sure of my facts.”
“Canada?”
“It was Australia or South Africa, and there’s no one here can tell me different.”
“What about it, whichever it was?”
“One of them wanted to tell a story. It might have been about horses, following the talk of the Grand National, but it wasn’t. That’s all.”
“All?” asked the detective, bending forward, trying to compel the stubborn mind to spurt into action like a match. “Had the man who was telling the story been in Australia or South Africa himself? Mr Crewe, this might be important. Did one of these three men say he’d been in Australia?”
“He did, always remembering it might have been South Africa. He wanted to tell a story about – what was his word? – premonitions. He had feelings about something.”
“Feelings about what?”
“Ah, that’s when I went back to thinking about the three-thirty at Lingfield.”
“Raymond, not Lingfield again,” Mrs Crewe said humbly.
“What part of Australia?” asked the detective. “Did he say, as it were, when I was in Sydney, when I was in Adelaide, when I was in Alice Springs?”
“Alice Springs?” Crewe asked, bewildered once more.
“It’s a town in Australia, Raymond,” his wife said quickly, with apologetic nods to the police. “If only I’d been in the bar that morning.”
“You!” Crewe said contemptuously. “You’d have listened to more than was ever said. What I heard I stand by as the truth.
One of them says to another that reminds me – which I couldn’t see how it did – about something that happened to me once. I had a premonition, he says, or words to that effect, when I was in Australia, or South Africa, and you haven’t been there, have you, he says to that other, crushing the opposition. No, says the other. But I have, says the third man, interrupting. Isn’t it time we left, or something like that, but there was no getting away from the story, which I didn’t listen to, however much you sigh, and make faces,” he said malevolently to his wife.
He closed his eyes again, and gave very faint groaning answers to the interminable questions about cigarettes, bow ties, girth, height, complexion, and accent. Finally he heaved himself up slowly, like an overburdened camel.
“Listen, if I was Scotland Yard I’d photograph the customers on the way in and cut off a lock of their hair before I sold them a mild-and-bitter. Not being Scotland Yard or female, I got my own business to attend to and it’s not and never will be other people’s. Anxious as I am to help the law.”
Mrs Crewe went to the door with the detectives.
“If he knows anything more I’ll get it out of him,” she whispered. “And when I find the two bitters I’ll let you know.”
The detective-sergeant gave her a grim smile of gratitude as he got in his car.
“If the crooks were as slow-witted as that lot,” he said to his subordinate, “we’d have crime stamped out in a week.”
INVESTIGATION (2)
BRICKFORD AIRPORT wasn’t much more than a meadow cut by a tarmac path, with a few sheds clustering at one end. It had a primitive look, as though someone was about to take off in a bid to fly the English Channel. At week-ends, there were always a few little girls with dolls’ prams and boys with bicycles being driven away by angry mechanics, and sometimes a picnic party taking place on the fringes. It was the headquarters of the local flying club, but it was also regularly used by several small charter planes.
Too many questions had already been asked at the airport, and when the mechanic saw Detective-Sergeant Young he dipped his head at once into the engine of a small, red, open plane that might have been made for the Wright brothers.
Sergeant Young looked sentimentally at the innocent little plane, and sighed. “You’re William Douglas?” he asked the mechanic.
The mechanic raised his white, indignant face, and nodded. “Police?” he asked fiercely. “Or from the Daily Something or Other?”
“I’m from the police.”
“Right. Here it comes. I don’t need any questions. I don’t want any questions. I’ve had enough. You just listen. I saw the Ormond go. I heard Mr Lee speak to his three passengers. I heard him say: What, only three of you? And one of the passengers said: We’ve waited long enough. It seems he’s not going to turn up. We’ll have to go without him. And the three of them got in and Mr Lee walks over to me and says: I’m one short, Bill. Then he goes over to the caff to look but he comes back alone. Then he took off. This is the eleventh time I’ve been asked and I know the answers in my sleep.”
“And did you see what the passengers looked like?”
“I did not.”
“Was one of them taller or shorter than the others?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Did they wear hats?”
“Look! So far as they walked on two legs and wore trousers I can claim to have seen them, but I’d like it to be understood I won’t have words put in my mouth. I was working on a club crate at the time, as I’m trying to do now, and I didn’t look up, except after I heard Mr Lee say what he said. Then I lifted my head long enough to see their backs as they went in the plane, and three is the number I saw. I watched the plane go. He was a lovely pilot, Mr Lee, and I’ll never believe he lost that plane, except it was struck by lightning.”
Sergeant Young listened seriously, as though he hadn’t read all this at the station earlier that morning.
“A man called Joseph Ferguson chartered the plane,” he said. “Tell me, Mr Douglas, would the pilot have gone without him?”
“Couldn’t say. So long as the flight had been paid for. Mr Lee might not have been able to let the other passengers down.”
“The flight had been paid for in advance. But Mr Lee and Joseph Ferguson had met at least once. Wouldn’t it have been reasonable for Mr Lee to say: Good morning, Mr Ferguson?” Douglas straightened himself slowly, and began to twist the spanner round in his hand. “But he didn’t say it.”
“Was he a brusque kind of man – inclined to be a bit short with people, I mean?”
Douglas considered the spanner, tossed it once in the air, and then dropped it in his pocket. “No. He was a friendly type. He might have been feeling a bit off because they’d kept him waiting.” He looked sullenly at the sergeant, as though he was being forced into a game he didn’t want to play. “There’s another thing. Was what’s-his-name, Ferguson, the only one of the four Mr Lee knew?”