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