Permissible Limits (10 page)

Heads turned as we went in. For a second or two they were strangers, these men, then I began to put names to the faces. Duggie Peterson. Alan Jessop. Miles Brenton. Display pilots from the airshow circuit. Men I’d bumped into at the weekends when Adam had been part of the same circus, hauling the Mustang around the sky in front of ten thousand people. He’d loved the opportunity to show off the plane, to stretch the flight envelope to its limits and pop in a trick or two that took even these veterans by surprise. On those summer days, the sky was Adam’s stage, and I remembered his face afterwards, the moment when he taxied back towards the line of parked aircraft, sliding back the canopy and waving to the crowd. At first, to my surprise, the gesture had made me slightly jealous. Now, it was a memory I treasured. My pilot. My prince.

Harald did the introductions at the bar, before returning to reception to check for messages. Everyone did their best to tell me how sorry they were about Adam, and I swallowed hard, amazed at how public the knowledge had already become, and touched by how tongue-tied these men could be.

Harald returned and led me to a table in the corner. Without checking, he bought me a large Scotch. When he sat down, he had his back to the pilots at the bar.

‘
The guys flew in this morning,’ he explained. ‘We get together around now to sort out the schedule for the summer. That’s why I stayed over. That, and Adam.’

He began telling me about a Fighter Meet planned for September and I half-listened, still watching the men at the bar, their body language, how easy they were with each other, recognising the breed to which Adam had belonged. They were like no other group of men I’d ever met. They had that self-confidence, that inner calm, that I’d only seen - oddly enough - in the Falklands. Shepherds have it, and drovers too. It comes with the knowledge that you’re doing something challenging and difficult that makes you entirely happy. Not once, I thought, are these men ever bored. To the frustrations and tedium of real life, like gravity itself, they seem immune.

I looked again at Harald. He was one of them too, very definitely, and I bent towards him, trying to concentrate. The Fighter Meet, he said, was to end with a tribute to the Little Friends.

‘
You know the phrase?’

I nodded. Ralph Pierson had used it only a couple of weeks ago. It was the nickname the American bomber crews used for the escorting Mustangs which shepherded them to Berlin and back. On the big daylight raids, Ralph said, the Little Friends took care of the men in the B
-
17S.

‘
You’re putting up lots of Mustangs?’

‘
Double figures. Fourteen at least.’

‘
Sounds a brilliant idea. Adam would have loved it.’

‘
You’re right.’ he nodded. ‘That’s why we’re dedicating the Meet to him. Good weather, we should pull a huge crowd.’

I felt my eyes filling with tears and I turned my head away. It was a lovely gesture but Adam’s death was too close, too recent, for me to say anything as trite as thank you.

Harald touched me lightly on the arm.

‘
Steve Liddell,’ he murmured.

I blew my nose, wondering where Steve could possibly fit in Harald’s plans for this pageant. ‘Steve?’

‘
Yes.’ Harald took a sip of his grapefruit juice. ‘You’ve seen the state he’s in. What did he tell you about Harvey’s Spit?’

I recounted what little Dennis and I had picked up. Harald never took his eyes off me for a second. When I’d finished, he sighed.

‘
There’s more,’ he said, ‘and if he hasn’t told you then I guess I should.’

‘
You know what happened?’

‘
Yes.’

‘
How?’

Harald studied me for a moment. I put the shadows under his eyes down to exhaustion. And concern.

‘
Steve’s been under a lot of pressure,’ he said. ‘Personal. Business. You name it.’

This was the first time I’d realised that the two men might be close. When I asked, Harald nodded.

‘
I like the guy,’ he said softly. ‘He’s young, he’s gutsy, he’s not afraid of hard work. And when it comes to aircraft, I’d trust him with my life.’

He explained about the work he’d put Steve’s way. Lately he’d been importing ex-Soviet military trainers, an aircraft called a Yak-52, and he’d been only too happy to ask Steve to check them out. The aircraft had been ferried in from an airbase in Romania, and Steve had spent days going through each one before Harald sold it on.

I’d never heard of a Yak. I asked Harald what they were like.

‘
Wonderful little planes, very tough, very forgiving. Fully aerobatic, too. The guys on the Yaks went straight on to jet fighters. That’s how good a plane it is.’

He said he’d sold every aircraft he could get his hands on. Except one.

‘
And what happened to that?’

‘
I’ve kept it.’

‘
It’s with Steve?’

‘
You got it.’

‘
In his hangar?’

‘
Sure. And why? Because, like I say, I trusted the guy.’

He knotted his hands on the tabletop, squeezing hard. The Yak had been in Steve’s hangar the night of the fire. Harald had turned up next day to find the airport fire chief sifting through the remains of Harvey Glennister’s Spitfire. The Yak, hard up against the far wall, had mercifully escaped serious damage.

‘
What does that mean?’

‘
A little blistering on the paintwork. Nothing structural. Nothing expensive.’

‘
But you talked to the fire chief?’

‘
You bet.’

‘
And?’

Harald took his time answering. When he spoke again, his voice had a harsher quality, an anger I’d never associated with him before.

‘
Steve phoned for the fire guys the moment he was inside the hangar. When they got there, they found the aircraft hot.’

‘
You mean on fire?’

‘
No. She’d gone up, sure, but they meant she was plugged in, powered up. Everything on the goddamned Spit was live. Filaments. Contacts. Instruments. Electrics. The lot.’

I was getting out of my depth. I tried to visualise our own mechanic, Dave Jeffries, over in the hangar at Sandown. I’d seen a lot of him during the rebuilds on the Harvard and the Mustang and I knew Harald was right. Without electricity to bring the plane to life, an engineer was dealing with a corpse.

‘
You’re saying Steve was
working
on the plane? In the middle of the night?’

‘
I’m saying it looks that way.’ He nodded, sombre now. ‘Number one, you’ve got the aircraft powered. Number two, they found a bowl under the starboard fuel pipe. When they looked hard at the fuel pipe, they found a fracture. Number three, someone had run a lead light out to that same place.’

A lead light is a little inspection lamp with a wire guard over the bulb. That, at least, I knew.

‘
And the lead light was on, too?’

‘
It runs off a twelve-volt transformer. The transformer was live, yes.’

I looked at him a moment, wondering why Steve hadn’t been franker. The answer, of course, was all too obvious. Harald spread his fingers wide, tallying the probable chain of events. More numbers, I thought grimly. More grief for Steve Liddell.

‘
What do you need for an aircraft fire? One, fuel. Two, some kind of wick. And three, a spark, or a heat source, or some damn thing to get it going.’

‘
Wick?’ I was lost again.

‘
Yeah, an oily rag will do. Just anything to kindle the fire.’

‘
And they found a rag?’

‘
No, but they wouldn’t. Avgas burns at a thousand degrees C. You saw the roof?’

I stared glumly at my untouched drink, remembering the melted panels in the hangar roof. There were implications here, not just for Steve but for me too.

‘
So what do you think happened?’ I said slowly.

‘
You want my theory?’

‘
Yes please.’

‘
I think Steve was working on that plane. I think he was in the middle of a repair job on the fuel pipe. And I think he went outside to get his head down for an hour or so.’ He frowned. ‘Did he mention that van he’s got?’

‘
Yes.’

‘
Then I guess that’s where he was. The last month or so he’s been sleeping rough, poor guy.’

‘
And the plane caught fire?’

‘
Sure.’ He made a brisk gesture with one hand. ‘Work it out for yourself. A fuel leak. A lead light. The aircraft already hot. That’s not a situation you walk away from. Not if you’re sensible.’

‘
But Steve is sensible. You said it yourself.’

‘
I said he’s a regular guy. These are irregular circumstances.’

‘
What do you mean?’

I’d remembered the photo on the desk in Steve’s office, the face of the child. Was this what lay behind it all? Had something in Steve’s private life driven him to the edge?

Harald was looking at my glass.

‘
You don’t want that Scotch?’

I shook my head, struck by something else.

‘
What about the insurance people? They’ll be talking to the fire chief, bound to.’

‘
Of course.’

‘
So what will that mean? For Steve?’

‘
On paper, not much. If I’m right about the fire then it’s negligence, sure, but that’s why you take out insurance in the first place.’

‘
They wouldn’t blame him? They’d still pay out?’

‘
Yeah. Problem is, he went for the cheapest deal.’

Harald bent towards me again, more bad news. Steve, like any engineer running his own business, had taken out cover. The policy, called ‘hangar/keeper insurance’, protected the premises, the quality of his own work, plus any damage that might occur to aircraft in his keeping. To keep his premium down, Steve had agreed to a limit of £500,000 on any single aircraft.

‘
And the Spitfire?’ I asked.

‘
It was a Mark IX, really neat rebuild. Glennister had the hull insured for seven hundred and fifty grand.’

‘
That means Steve’s…’ I frowned, doing the sums, ‘… two hundred and fifty thousand short.’

‘
You got it.’

‘
So where does that leave Glennister?’

‘
If he’s smart, and he is, he’ll claim on his own insurance. They’ll pay out in full. Then they’ll instruct a lawyer to reclaim costs from Steve’s insurers.’

‘
But Steve’s underinsured.’

‘
Exactly.’

‘
So what happens?’

‘
I guess they’ll claim against him. They’re a quarter of a million in the hole. It’s figures, Ellie. Money. They have no choice.’

‘
So where does that leave Steve?’

Harald drew a finger across his throat, then leant back in the chair, emptying his glass. I began to regret ever leaving the B&B. I should have stayed, I thought. I should have tumbled into bed, pulled up the covers and won myself a decent night’s sleep.

Harald was watching me again. I had the feeling he’d got something off his chest. His manner had softened.

‘
You had some exposure to Steve,’ he said.

It was a statement, not a question.

‘
You mean business dealings?’

‘
Yeah.’

I nodded, wondering how he knew. Advice wasn’t something Adam had ever been keen on, but I knew he admired Harald’s judgement and it was conceivable the two men might have talked.

‘
Did Adam ever mention it?’

‘
Sure.’

‘
And what did he say?’

‘
He told me he wanted to take a stake in Liddell’s outfit.’

‘
And what did you say?’

‘
I told him to be damn careful.’

‘
Why?’