advance to set it off.’
‘So no one had to know what time we would be leaving Haydock. They would just have to see us go.’
‘Yes… Or be told you had gone.’
I thought a bit. ‘It does put a different slant, doesn’t it?’
‘I’d appreciate your thinking.’
‘You must be thinking the same,’ I protested. ‘If the bomb could be set off at any hour, any day, any week even, it could have been put in the aircraft at any time after the last maintenance check.’
He smiled thinly. ‘And that would let you half way off the hook?’
‘Half way,’ I agreed.
‘But only half.’
‘Yes.’
He sighed. ‘I’ve sprung this on you. I’d like you to think it over, from every angle. Seriously. Then tell me if anything occurs to you. If you care at all to find out what happened, that is, and maybe prevent it happening again.’
‘You think I don’t care?’
‘I got the impression.’
‘I would care now,’ I said slowly, ‘If Colin Ross were blown up.’
He smiled. ‘You are less on your guard, today.’
‘You aren’t sniping at me from behind the bushes.’
‘No…’ He was surprised. ‘You’re very observant, aren’t you?’
‘More a matter of atmosphere.’
He hesitated. ‘I have now read the whole of the transcript of your trial.’
‘Oh.’ I could feel my face go bleak. He watched me.
‘Did you know,’ he said. ‘That someone has added to the bottom of it in pencil a highly libellous statement?’
‘No,’ I said. Waited for it.
‘It says that the Chairman of Interport is of the undoubtedly correct opinion that the First Officer lied on oath throughout, and that it was because of the First Officer’s own gross negligence, not that of Captain Shore, that the airliner strayed so dangerously off course.’
Surprised, shaken, I looked away from him, out of the window, feeling absurdly vindicated and released. If that postscript was there for anyone who read the transcript to see, then maybe my name hadn’t quite so much mud on it as I’d thought. Not where it mattered anyway.
I said without heat, ‘The Captain is always responsible. Whoever does what.’
‘Yes.’
A silence lengthened. I brought my thoughts back from four years ago and my gaze from the empty airfield.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
He smiled very slightly. ‘I wondered why you hadn’t lost your licence… or your job. It didn’t make sense to me that you hadn’t. That’s why I read the transcript, to see if there was any reason.’
‘You’re very thorough.’
‘I like to be.’
‘Interport knew one of us was lying… we both said the other had put the ship in danger… but I was the Captain. It inevitably came back to me. It was, in fact, my fault.’
‘He wilfully disobeyed your instructions…’
‘And I didn’t find out until it was nearly too late.’
‘Quite… but he need not have lied about it.’
‘He was frightened,’ I sighed. ‘Of what would happen to his career.’
He let half a minute slip by without comment. Then he cleared his throat and said ‘I suppose you wouldn’t like to tell me why you left the South American people?’
I admired his delicate approach. ‘Gap in the dossier?’ I suggested.
His mouth twitched. ‘Well, yes.’ A pause. ‘You are of course not obliged…’
‘No’ I said. ‘Still…’ Something for something. ‘I refused to take off one day because I didn’t think it was safe. They got another pilot who said it was. So he took off, and nothing happened. And they sacked me. That’s all.’
‘But,’ he said blankly, ‘It’s a Captain’s absolute right not to take off if he thinks it’s unsafe.’
‘There’s no B.A.L.P.A. to uphold your rights there, you know. They said they couldn’t afford to lose custom to other airlines because their Captains were cowards. Or words to that effect.’
‘Good gracious.’
I smiled. ‘Probably the Interport business accounted for my refusal to take risks.’
‘But then you went to Africa and took them,’ he protested.
‘Well… I needed money badly, and the pay was fantastic. And you don’t have the same moral obligation to food and medical supplies as to airline passengers.’
‘But the refugees and wounded, coming out?’
‘Always easier flying out than in. No difficulties finding the home base, not like groping for some jungle clearing on a black night.’
He shook his head wonderingly, giving me up as a bad job.
‘What brought you back here to something as dull as crop spraying?’
I laughed. Never thought I could laugh in front of the Board of Trade. ‘The particular war I was flying in ended. I was offered another one a bit further south, but I suppose I’d had enough of it. Also I was nearly