Rat Race

Chapter Eight

For most of that week I flew where I was told to, and thought about radio bombs, and sat on my own in the caravan in the evenings.

Honey didn’t come back, but on the day after her visit I had returned from Rotterdam to find a large bag of groceries en the table: eggs, butter, bread, tomatoes, sugar, cheese, powdered milk, tins of soup. Also a pack of six half pints of beer. Also a note from Honey: ‘Pay me next week.’

Not a bad guy, Honey Harley. I took up eating again. Old habits die hard.

Tuesday I took Colin and four assorted others to Wolverhampton races, Wednesday, after the Board of Trade departed, I took a politician to Cardiff to a Union strike meeting, and Thursday I took the racehorse trainer to various places in Yorkshire and Northumberland to look at some horses to see if he wanted to buy any.

Thursday evening I made myself a cheese and tomato sandwich and a cup of coffee, and ate them looking at the pin-ups, which were curling a bit round the edges. After I’d finished the sandwich I unstuck the sellotape and took all the bosomy ladies down. The thrusting pairs of heavily ringed nipples regarded me sorrowfully, like spaniels’ eyes. Smiling, I folded them decently over and dropped them in the rubbish bin. The caravan looked just as dingy, however, without them.

Friday morning, when I was in Harley’s office filing flight records, Colin rang Harley and said he wanted me to stay overnight at Cambridge, ready again for Saturday.

Harley agreed. ‘I’ll charge Matt’s hotel bill to your account.’

Colin said ‘Fine. But he can stay with me again if he likes.’

Harley relayed the message. Did I like? I liked.

Harley put down the receiver. ‘Trying to save money,’ he said disparagingly, ‘Having you to stay.’ He brightened: ‘I’ll charge him the hangarage, though.’

I took the Cherokee over to Cambridge and fixed for them to give it shelter that night. When Colin came he was with four other jockeys: three I didn’t know, and Kenny Bayst. Kenny said how was I. I was fine, how was he? Good as new, been riding since Newbury, he said.

Between them they had worked out the day’s shuttle. All to Brighton, Colin to White Waltham for Windsor, aeroplane to return to Brighton, pick up the others, return to White Waltham, return to Cambridge.

‘Is that all right?’ Colin asked.

‘Sure. Anything you say.’

He laughed. ‘The fusses we used to have when we used to ask this sort of thing...’

‘Don’t see why’ I said.

‘Larry was a lazy sod...’

They loaded themselves on board and we tracked down east of the London control zone and over the top of Gatwick to Shoreham airport for Brighton. When we landed Colin looked at his watch and Kenny nodded and said, ‘Yeah, he’s always faster than Larry. I’ve noticed it too.’

‘Harley will give him the sack,’ Colin said dryly, unfastening his seatbelt.

‘He won’t, will he?’ Kenny sounded faintly anxious. Quicker journeys meant smaller bills.

‘It depends on how many customers he pinches from Polyplanes through being fast.’ Colin grinned at me. ‘Am I right?’

‘You could be,’ I agreed.

They went off laughing about it to the waiting taxi. A couple of hours later Colin came back at a run in his breeches and colours and I whisked him over to White Waltham. He had won, it appeared, at Brighton. A close finish. He was still short of breath. A fast car drove right up to the aircraft as soon as I stopped and had him off down the road to Windsor in a cloud of dust. I went more leisurely back to Shoreham and collected the others at the end of their programme. It was a hot sunny day, blue and hazy. They came back sweating.

Kenny had ridden a winner and had brought me a bottle of whisky as a present. I said he didn’t need to give me a present.

‘Look, sport, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be riding any more bleeding winners. So take it.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘Thanks yourself.’

They were tired and expansive. I landed at White Waltham before Colin arrived back from Windsor, and the other four yawned and gossiped, opening all the doors and fanning themselves.

‘... gave him a breather coming up the hill.’

‘That was no breather. That was the soft bugger dropping his bit. Had to give him a sharp reminder to get him going again.’

‘Can’t stand that fellow Fossel...’

‘Why do you ride for him then?’

‘Got no choice, have I? Small matter of a retainer...’

‘... What chance you got on Candlestick?’

‘Wouldn’t finish in the first three if it started now...’

‘Hey,’ said Kenny Bayst, leaning forward and tapping me on the shoulder. ‘Got something that might interest you, sport.’ He pulled a sheet of paper out of his trouser pocket. ‘How about this, then?’

I took the paper and looked at it. It was a leaflet, high quality printing on good glossy paper. An invitation to all racegoers to join the Racegoers’ Accident Fund.

‘I’m not a racegoer,’ I said.

‘No, read it. Go on,’ he urged. ‘It came in the post this morning. I thought you’d be interested, so I brought it.’

I read down the page. ‘Up to one thousand pounds for serious personal injury, five thousand pounds for accidental death. Premium five pounds. Double the premium double the insurance. The insurance everyone can afford. Stable lads, buy security for your missus. Jockeys: out of work but in the money. Race crowds, protect yourself against road accidents on the way home. Trainers who fly to meetings, protect yourself against bombs!’

‘Damn it,’ I said.

Kenny laughed. ‘I thought you’d like it.’

I handed the leaflet back, smiling. ‘Yeah. The so-and-sos.’

‘Might not be a bad idea, at that.’

Colin’s hired car drove up and decanted the usual spent force. He climbed wearily into his seat, clipped shut his belt, and said ‘Wake me at Cambridge.’

‘How did it go?’ Kenny asked.

‘Got that sod Export home by a whisker... But as for Uptight,’ he yawned, “They might as well send him to the knackers. Got the slows right and proper, that one has.’

We woke him at Cambridge. It was a case of waking most of them, in point of fact. They stretched their way onto the tarmac, shirt necks open, ties hanging loose, jackets on their arms. Colin had no jacket, no tie: for him, the customary jeans, the rumpled sweat shirt, the air of being nobody, of being one in a crowd, instead of a crowd in one.

Nancy and Midge had come in the Aston Martin to pick us up.

‘We brought a picnic,’ Nancy said, ‘as it’s such a super evening. We’re going to that place by the river.’

They had also brought swimming trunks for Colin and a pair of his for me. Nancy swam with us, but Midge said it was too cold. She sat on the bank wearing four watches on her left arm and stretching her long bare legs in the sun.

It was cool and quiet and peaceful in the river after the hot sticky day. The noise inside my head of engine throb calmed to silence. I watched a moorhen gliding along by the reeds, twisting her neck cautiously to fasten me with a shiny eye, peering suspiciously at Colin and Nancy floating away ahead. I pushed a ripple towards her with my arm. She rode on it like a cork. Simple being a moorhen, I thought. But it wasn’t really. All of nature had its pecking order. Everywhere, someone was the pecked.

Nancy and Colin swam back. Friendly eyes, smiling faces. Don’t get involved, I thought. Not with anyone. Not yet.

The girls had brought cold chicken and long crisp cos lettuce leaves with a tangy sauce to dip them in. We ate while the sun went down, and drank a cold bottle of Chablis, sitting on a large blue rug and throwing the chewed bones into the river for the fishes to nibble.

When she had finished Midge lay back on the rug and shielded her eyes from the last slanting rays.

‘I wish this could go on for ever,’ she said casually. ‘The summer, I mean. Warm evenings. We get so few of them.’

‘We could go and live in the south of France, if you like,’ Nancy said.

‘Don’t be silly... Who would look after Colin?’

They smiled, all three of them. The unspoken things were all there. Tragic. Unimportant.

The slow dusk drained all colours into shades of grey. We lazed there, relaxing, chewing stalks of grass, watching the insects flick over the surface of the water, talking a little in soft summer evening murmuring voices.

‘We both lost a stone in Japan, that year we went with Colin...’

‘That was the food more than the heat.’

‘I never did get to like the food...’

‘Have you ever been to Japan, Matt?’

‘Used to fly there for B.O.A.C.’

‘B.O.A.C.?’ Colin was surprised. ‘Why ever did you leave?’

‘Left to please my wife. Long time ago, now, though.’

‘Explains how you fly.’

‘Oh sure...’

‘I like America better,’ Midge said. ‘Do you remember Mr Kroop in Laurel, where you got those riding boots made in a day?’

‘Mm...’

‘And we kept driving round that shopping centre there and getting lost in the one way streets...’

‘Super that week was...’

‘Wish we could go again...’

There was a long regretful silence. Nancy sat up with a jerk and slapped her leg.

‘Bloody mosquitoes.’

Colin scratched lazily and nodded. ‘Time to go home.’

We wedged back into the Aston Martin. Colin drove. The twins sat on my legs, leaned on my chest and twined their arms behind my neck for balance. Not bad, not bad at all. They laughed at my expression.

‘Too much of a good thing,’ Nancy said.

When we went to bed they both kissed me goodnight, with identical soft lips, on the cheek.

Breakfast was brisk, businesslike, and accompanied throughout by telephone calls. Annie Villars rang to ask if there was still a spare seat on the Cherokee.

‘Who for?’ Colin asked cautiously. He made a face at us. ‘Bloody Fenella,’ he whispered over the mouthpiece. ‘No, Annie, I’m terribly sorry, I’ve promised Nancy...’

‘You have?’ Nancy said. ‘First I’ve heard of it.’

He put the receiver down. ‘I rescue you from Chanter, now it’s your turn.’

‘Rescue my foot. You’re in and out of the weighing room all day. Fat lot of good that is.’

‘Do you want to come?’

‘Take Midge,’ she said. ‘It’s her turn.’

‘No, you go,’ Midge said. ‘Honestly, I find it tiring. Especially as it’s one of those rush from course to course days. I’ll go along to the meeting here next week. That will do me fine.’

‘Will you be all right?’

‘Naturally I will. I’ll lie in the sun in the garden and think of you all exhausting yourselves racing round in circles.’

When it turned out that there were two other empty seats as well, in spite of Nancy being there, Annie Villars gave Colin a reproachful look of carefully repressed annoyance and said it would have been useful to have had along Fenella to share the cost. Why else did Colin think she had suggested it?

‘I must have miscounted,’ said Colin happily. ‘Too late to get her now.’

We flew to Bath without incident, Nancy sitting in the right-hand seat beside me and acting as co-pilot. It was clear that she intensely enjoyed it, and there was no pain in it for me either. I could see what Larry had meant about practising short landings, as the Bath runways were incredibly short, but we got down in fair order and parked alongside the opposition’s Cessna.

Colin said ‘Lock the aeroplane and come into the races. You can’t forever stand on guard.’

The Polyplane pilot was nowhere to be seen. I hoped for the best, locked up, and walked with the others into the racecourse next door.

The first person we saw was Acey Jones, balancing on his crutches with the sun making his pale head look fairer than ever.

‘Oh yes. Colin,’ Nancy said. ‘Do you want me to send a fiver to the Accident Insurance people? You remember, the leaflet which came yesterday? That man reminded me... he got a thousand pounds from the fund for cracking his ankle. I heard him say so, at Haydock.’

‘If you like,’ he agreed. ‘A fiver won’t break the bank. May as well.’

‘Bobbie Wessex is sponsoring it,’ Annie commented.

‘Yes,’ Nancy nodded. ‘It was on the leaflet.’

‘Did you see the bit about the bombs?’ I asked.

Annie and Nancy both laughed. ‘Someone in insurance has got a sense of humour, after all.’

Annie hustled off to the weighing room to see her runner in the first race, and Colin followed her, to change.

‘Lemonade?’ I suggested to Nancy.

‘Pints of it. Whew, it’s hot.’

We drank it in a patch of shade, out on the grass. Ten yards away, loud and clear, Eric Goldenberg was conducting a row with Kenny Bayst.

‘... And don’t you think, sport, that you can set your guerrillas on me and expect me to do you favours afterwards, because if you think that you’ve got another think coming.’

‘What guerrillas?’ Goldenberg demanded, not very convincingly.

‘Oh come off it. Set them to cripple me. At Redcar.’

‘Must have been those bookmakers you swindled while you were busy double crossing us.’

‘I never double crossed you.’

‘Don’t give me that crap,’ Goldenberg said heavily. ‘You know bloody well you did. You twisty little bastard.’

‘If you think that, why the frigging hell are you asking me to set up another touch for you now?’

‘Bygones are bygones.’

‘Bygones bloody aren’t.’ Kenny spat on the ground at Goldenberg’s feet and removed himself to the weighing room. Goldenberg watched him go with narrowed eyes and a venomous twist to his mouth. The next time I saw him he was holding a well-filled glass and adding substantially to his paunch, while muttering belligerently to a pasty slob who housed all his brains in his biceps. The slob wasn’t one of the two who had lammed into Kenny at Redcar. I wondered if Goldenberg intended mustering reinforcements.

‘What do you think of Kenny Bayst?’ I asked Nancy.

‘The big little Mister I-Am from Down Under,’ she said. ‘He’s better than he used to be, though. He came over here thinking everyone owed him a living, as he’d had a great big successful apprenticeship back home.’

‘Would he lose to order?’

‘I expect so.’

‘Would he agree to lose to order, take the money, back himself, and try to win?’

She grinned. ‘You’re learning fast.’

We watched Colin win the first race. Annie Villars’ horse finished third from last. She stood glumly looking at its heaving sides while Kenny’s successor made the best of explaining away his own poor showing.

‘Annie should have kept Kenny Bayst,’ Nancy said.

‘He wanted out.’

‘Like Colin doesn’t want in,’ she nodded. ‘Annie’s being a bit of a fool this season.’

Before the third race we went back to the aeroplane. The Polyplane pilot was standing beside it, peering in through the windows. He was not the stand off merchant from Redcar, but his colleague from Haydock.

‘Good afternoon,’ Nancy said.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Ross.’ He was polite in the way that is more insolent than rudeness. Not the best method, I would have thought, of seducing Colin’s custom back from Derry-downs. He walked away, back to his Cessna, and I went over the Cherokee inch by inch looking for anything wrong. As far as I could see, there was nothing. Nancy and I climbed aboard and I started the engine to warm it up ready to take off.

Colin and Annie arrived in a hurry and loaded themselves in, and we whisked off across southern England to Shoreham. Colin and Annie again jumped into a waiting taxi and vanished. Nancy stayed with me and the Cherokee, and we sat on the warm grass and watched little aeroplanes landing and taking off, and talked now and then without pressure about flying, racing, life in general.

Towards the end of the afternoon she asked ‘Will you go on being a taxi pilot all your life?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t look far ahead any more.’

‘Nor do I,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘We’ve been happy, these last few weeks, with Midge being so much better. I wish it would last.’

‘You’ll remember it.’

‘That’s not the same.’

‘It’s only special because of what’s coming,’ I said.

There was a long pause while she thought about it. At length she asked, disbelievingly, ‘Do you mean that it is because Midge is dying that we are so happy now?’

‘Something like that.’

She turned her head; considered me. ‘Tell me something else. I need something else.’

‘Comfort?’

‘If you like.’

I said ‘You’ve all three been through the classic progression, these last two years. All together, not just Midge herself. Shock, disbelief, anger and in the end acceptance...’ I paused. ‘You’ve come through the dark tunnel. You’re out in the sun the other end. You’ve done most of your grieving already. You are a most extraordinarily strong family. You’ll remember this summer because it will be something worth remembering.’

‘Matt...’

There were tears in her eyes. I watched the bright little dragonfly aeroplanes dart and go. They could heal me, the Ross family, I thought. Their strength could heal me. If it would take nothing away from them. If I could be sure.

‘What was Colin’s wife like?’ I asked, after a while.

‘Oh...’ She gave a laugh which was half a sniff. ‘A bit too much like Fenella. He was younger then. He didn’t know how to duck. She was thirty-three and bossy and rich, and he was twenty and madly impressed by her. To be honest, Midge and I thought she was fabulous too. We were seventeen and still wet behind the ears. She thought it would be marvellous being married to a genius, all accolades and champagne and glamour. She didn’t like it when it turned out to be mostly hard work and starvation and exhaustion... so she left him for a young actor who’d just had rave notices for his first film, and it took Colin months to get back to being himself from the wreck she’d made of him.’

‘Poor Colin.’ Or lucky Colin. Strong Colin. Months... it was taking me years.

‘Yeah...’ She grinned. ‘He got over it. He’s got some bird now in London. He slides down to see her every so often when he thinks Midge and I aren’t noticing.’

‘I must get me a bird,’ I said idly. ‘One of these days.’

‘You haven’t got one?’

I shook my head. I looked at her. Straight eyebrows, straight eyes, sensible mouth. She looked back. I wanted to kiss her. I didn’t think she would be angry.

‘No,’ I said absentmindedly. ‘No bird.’

Take nothing away from them. Nothing from Midge.

‘I’ll wait a while longer,’ I said.

Several days, several flights later I telephoned the Board of Trade. Diffidently. Sneering at myself for trying to do their job for them, for thinking I might have thought of something they hadn’t worked out for themselves. But then, I’d been on the flight with the bomb, and they hadn’t. I’d seen things, heard things, felt things that they hadn’t.

Partly for my own sake, but mainly because of what Nancy had said about the bomb merchant still running around loose with his motives still rotting away inside him, I had finally found myself discarding the thought that it was none of my business, that someone else could sort it all out, and coming round to the view that if I could in fact come up with anything it might be a profitable idea.

To which end I wasted a lot of brain time chasing down labyrinths of speculation, and fetched up against a series of reasons why not.

There was Larry, for instance. Well, what about Larry? Larry had had every chance to put the bomb on board, right up to two hours before I set off to collect the passengers from White Waltham. But however strong a motive he had to kill Colin or ruin Derrydowns, and none had so far appeared bar a few trivial frauds, if it was true it was a radio and not a time bomb he couldn’t have set it off because when it exploded he was in Turkey. If it had been Larry, a time bomb would have been the only simple and practical way.

Then Susan... Ridiculous as I thought it, I went over again what the Board of Trade man had said: she was going out occasionally with a demolitions expert. Well, good luck to her. The sooner she got married again the better off I’d be. Only trouble was, the aversion therapy of that last destructive six months seemed to have been just as successful with her as it had been with me.

I couldn’t believe that any executive type in his right mind would bump off his occasional girl friend’s ex-husband for the sake of about six thousand pounds of insurance, especially as the longer I lived, the greater would be the sum she eventually collected. I had three years ago stopped paying any more premiums, but the value of the pay-off automatically went on increasing.

Apart from knowing her incapable of the cold-blooded murder of innocent people, I respected her mercenary instincts. The longer I lived the better off she would be on all counts. It was as simple as that.

Honey Harley... had said she would do ‘anything’ to keep Derrydowns in business, and the blowing up of the Cherokee had eased the financial situation. One couldn’t sell things which were being bought on the hire purchase, and if one couldn’t keep up the instalments the aircraft technically belonged to the H.P. company, who might sell it at a figure which did little more than cover themselves, leaving a molehill for Derrydowns to salvage. Insurance, on the other hand, had done them proud: paid off the H.P. and left them with capital in hand.

Yet killing Colin Ross would have ruined Derrydowns completely. Honey Harley would never have killed any of the customers, let alone Colin Ross. And the same applied to Harley himself, all along the line.

The Polyplane people, then? Always around, always belligerent, trying their damnedest to put Derrydowns out of business and win back Colin Ross. Well... the bomb would have achieved the first object but have put the absolute dampers on the second. I couldn’t see even the craziest Polyplane pilot killing the golden goose.

Kenny Bayst... livid with Eric Goldenberg, Major Tyderman and Annie Villars. But as I’d said to Colin, where would he have got a bomb from in the time, and would he have killed Colin and me too? It didn’t seem possible, any of it. No to Kenny Bayst.

Who, then?

Who?

Since I couldn’t come up with anyone else, I went back over the possibilities all over again. Larry, Susan, the Harleys, Polyplanes, Kenny Bayst... Looked at them up, down, and sideways. Got nowhere. Made some coffee, went to bed, went to sleep.

Woke up at four in the morning with the moon shining on my face. And one fact hitting me with a bang. Up, down and sideways. Look at things laterally. Start from the bottom.

I started from the bottom. When I did that, the answer rose up and stared me in the face. I couldn’t believe it. It was too darned simple.

In the morning I made a lengthy telephone call to a long lost cousin, and two hours later got one back. And it was then, expecting a fiat rebuff, that I rang up the Board of Trade.

The tall polite man wasn’t in. He would, they said, call back later.

When he did, Harley was airborne with a pupil and Honey answered in the tower. She buzzed through to the crew room, where I was writing up records.

‘The Board of Trade want you. What have you been up to?’

‘It’s only that old bomb,’ I said soothingly.

‘Huh.’

When the tall man came on the line, she was still listening on the tower extension.

‘Honey,’ I said. ‘Quit.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Board of Trade.

Honey giggled, but she put her receiver down. I heard the click.

‘Captain Shore?’ the voice said reprovingly.

‘Er, yes.’

‘You wanted me?’

‘You said... if I thought of any angle on the bomb.’

‘Indeed yes.’ A shade of warmth.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said, ‘about the transmitter which was needed to set it off.’

‘Yes?’

‘How big would the bomb have been?’ I asked. ‘All that plastic explosive and gun powder and wires and solonoids?’

‘I should think quite small... you would probably pack a bomb like that into a flat tin about seven inches by four by two inches deep. Possibly even smaller. The tighter they are packed the more fiercely they explode.’

‘And how big would the transmitter have to be to send perhaps three different signals?’

‘Nowadays, not very big. If size were important... a pack of cards, perhaps. But in this case I would have thought... larger. The transmissions must have had to carry a fairly long way... and to double the range of a signal you have to quadruple the power of the transmitter, as no doubt you know.’

‘Yes... I apologise for going through all this the long way, but I wanted to be sure. Because although I don’t know why, I’ve a good idea of when and who.’

‘What did you say?’ His voice sounded strangled.

‘I said...’

‘Yes, yes,’ he interrupted. ‘I heard. When... when, then?’

‘It was put on board at White Waltham. Taken off again at Haydock. And put back on again at Haydock.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It came with one of the passengers.’

‘Which one?’

‘By the way,’ I said. ‘How much would such a bomb cost?’

‘Oh... about eighty pounds or so,’ he said impatiently.

‘Who...?’

‘And would it take a considerable expert to make one?’

‘Someone used to handling explosives and with a working knowledge of radio.’

‘I thought so.’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘look, will you please stop playing cat and mouse. I dare say it amuses you to tease the Board of Trade... I don’t say I absolutely blame you, but will you please tell me which of the passengers had a bomb with him?’

‘Major Tyderman,’ I said.

‘Major...’ He took an audible breath. ‘Are you meaning to say now that it wasn’t the bomb rolling around on the elevator wires which caused the friction which persuaded you to land...? That Major Tyderman was carrying it around unknown to himself all the afternoon? Or what?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘And no.’

‘For God’s sake...’ He was exasperated. ‘I suppose you couldn’t simplify the whole thing by telling me exactly who planted the bomb on Major Tyderman? Who intended to blow him up?’

‘If you like.’

He took a shaking grip. I smiled at the crew room wall.

‘Well, who?’

‘Major Tyderman,’ I said. ‘Himself.’

Silence. Then a protest.

‘Do you mean suicide? It can’t have been. The bomb went off when the aeroplane was on the ground...’

‘Precisely,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘If a bomb goes off in an aeroplane, everyone automatically thinks it was intended to blow up in the air and kill all the people on board.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Suppose the real intended victim was the aeroplane itself, not the people?’

‘But why?’

‘I told you, I don’t know why.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Let’s start from the beginning. You are saying that Major Tyderman, intending to blow up the aeroplane for reasons unknown, took a bomb with him to the races.’

‘Yes.’

‘What makes you think so?’

‘Looking back... He was rigidly tense all day, and he wouldn’t be parted from his binocular case, which was large enough to contain a bomb of the size you described.’

‘That’s absurdly circumstantial,’ he protested.

‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘Then it was the Major who borrowed the keys from me, to go over to the aircraft to fetch the Sporting Life which he had left there. He wouldn’t let me go, though I offered. He came back saying he had locked up again, and gave me back the keys. Of course he hadn’t locked up. He wanted to create a little confusion. While he was over there he unscrewed the back panel of the luggage bay and put the bomb behind it, against the fuselage. Limpet gadget, I expect, like I said before, which came unstuck on the bumpy flight.’

‘He couldn’t have foreseen you’d land at East Midlands...’

‘It didn’t matter where we landed. As soon as everyone was clear of the aircraft, he was ready to blow it up.’

‘That’s sheer guess work.’

‘He did it in front of my eyes, at East Midlands. I saw him look round, to check there was no one near it. Then he was fiddling with his binocular case... sending the signals. They could have been either very low or super-high frequencies. They didn’t have very far to go. But more important, the transmitter would have been very low powered... and very small.’

‘But... by all accounts... and yours too... he was severely shocked after the explosion.’

‘Shocked by the sight of the disintegration he had been sitting on all day. And acting a bit, too.’

He thought it over at length. Then he said, ‘Wouldn’t Someone have noticed that the Major wasn’t using binoculars although he was carrying the case?’

‘He could say he’d just dropped them and they were broken... and anyway, he carries a flask in that case normally as well as the race glasses... lots of people must have seen him taking a swig, as I have... they wouldn’t think it odd... they might think he’d brought the flask but forgotten the glasses.’

I could imagine him shaking his head. ‘It’s a fantastic theory altogether. And not a shred of evidence. Just a guess.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Shore, I’m certain you’ve done your best, but...’

I noticed he’d demoted me from Captain. I smiled thinly.

‘There’s one other tiny thing,’ I said gently.

‘Yes?’ He was slightly, very slightly apprehensive, as if expecting yet more fantasy.

‘I got in touch with a cousin in the army, and he looked up some old records for me. In World War II Major Tyderman was in the Royal Engineers, in charge of a unit which spent nearly all of its time in England.’

‘I don’t see...’

‘They were dealing,’ I said, ‘With unexploded bombs.’