The Finnish ship had gone from the berth opposite and another small freighter had taken her place. A limp flag swung fitfully at her mast head, red and white horizontal stripes with a navy blue triangle and a white star. I looked across at the nationality chart on Simon’s wall. Puerto Rico. Well, well, one lived and learned. Three alphabetical flags lower down, when checked, proved to be E, Q and M. Mildly curious, I turned them up in the international code of signals. ‘I am delivering.’ Quite right and proper. I shut the book, twiddled my thumbs, watched a police launch swoop past doing twenty knots on the ebb, and reflected not for the first time that the London river was a fast rough waterway for small boats.
After a while I picked up the telephone and rang up Fenland to book a plane for Sunday.
‘Two o’clock?’
‘That’ll do me fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Wait a minute, Harry. Mr. Wells said if you rang that he wanted a word with you.’
‘O.K.’
There were some clicks, and then Tom’s voice.
‘Harry? Look, for God’s sake, what is this job of yours?’
‘I work for... a travel agency.’
‘Well, what’s so special about it? Come here, and I’ll pay you more.’ He sounded worried and agitated, not casually inviting as before.
‘What’s up?’ I said.
‘Everything’s up except my planes. I’ve landed an excellent contract with a car firm in Coventry ferrying their executives, technicians, salesmen and so on all round the shop. They’ve a factory in Lancashire and tie-ups all over Europe, and they’re fed-up with the airfield they’ve been using. They’re sending me three planes. I’m to maintain them, provide pilots and have them ready when wanted.’
‘Sounds good,’ I said. ‘So what’s wrong?’
‘So I don’t want to lose them again before I’ve started. And not only can I not find any out-of-work pilots worth considering, but one of my three regulars went on a ski-ing holiday last week and broke his leg, the silly bastard. So how about it?’
‘It’s not as easy as you make it sound,’ I said reluctantly.
‘What’s stopping you?’
‘A lot of things... if you’ll be around on Sunday, anyway, we could talk it over.’
He sighed in exasperation. ‘The planes are due here at the end of the month, in just over a fortnight.’
‘Get someone else, if you can,’ I said.
‘Yeah... if I can.’ He was depressed. ‘And if I can’t?’
‘I don’t know. I could do a day a week to help out, but even then...’
‘Even then, what?’
‘There are difficulties.’
‘Nothing to mine, Harry. Nothing to mine. I’ll break you down on Sunday.’
Everyone had troubles, even with success. The higher the tougher, it seemed. I wiggled the button, and asked for another number, the charter airline which Patrick worked for. The Gatwick office answered, and I asked them if they could tell me how to get hold of him.
‘You’re in luck. He’s actually here, in the office. Who’s speaking?’
‘Henry Grey, from Yardman Transport.’
I waited, and he came on the line.
‘Hullo... how’s things? How’s Gabriella?’
‘She,’ I said, ‘is fine. Other things are not. Could you do me a favour?’
‘Shoot.’
‘Could you look up for me the name of the pilot who flew a load of horses to Milan for us a fortnight last Thursday? Also the names of the co-pilot and engineer, and could you also tell me how or when I could talk to one or all of them?’
‘Trouble?’
‘Oh, no trouble for your firm, none at all. But one of our men went over on that trip and didn’t come back, and hasn’t got in touch with us since. I just wanted to find out if the crew had any idea what became of him. He might have told one of them where he was going... anyway, his work is piling up here and we want to find out if he intends to come back.’
‘I see. Hang on then. A fortnight last Thursday?’
‘That’s it.’
He was away several minutes. The cranes got busy on the freighter from Puerto Rico. I yawned.
‘Henry? I’ve got them. The pilot was John Kyle, co-pilot G. L. Rawlings, engineer V. N. Brede. They’re not here, though; they’ve just gone to Arabia, ferrying mountains of luggage from London after some oil chieftain’s visit. He brought about six wives, and they all went shopping.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘When do they get back?’
He consulted someone in the background.
‘Sometime Wednesday. They have Thursday off, then another trip to Arabia on Friday.’
‘Some shopping,’ I said gloomily. ‘I can’t get to see them on Wednesday or Thursday. I’m racing at Cheltenham. But I could ring them up on Wednesday night, if you can give me their numbers.’
‘Well...,’ said Patrick slowly. ‘John Kyle likes his flutter on the horses.’
‘You don’t think he’d come to Cheltenham, then?’
‘He certainly might, if he isn’t doing anything else.’
‘I’ll get him a member’s badge, and the others too, if they’d like.’
‘Fair enough. Let’s see. I’m going to Holland twice tomorrow. I should think I could see them on Wednesday, if we all get back reasonably on schedule. I’ll tell them what you want, and ring you. If they go to Cheltenham you’ll see them, and if not you can ring them. How’s that?’
‘Marvellous. You’ll find me at the Queen’s Hotel at Cheltenham. I’ll be staying there.’
‘Right... and oh, by the way, I see I’m down for a horse transport flight on Friday to Milan. Is that your mob, or not?’
‘Our mob,’ I agreed. ‘What’s left of it.’
We rang off, and I leaned back in Simon’s chair, pensively biting my thumbnail and surveying the things on his desk: telephone, tray of pens, blank notepad, and a pot of paper clips and pins. Nothing of any help. Then slowly, methodically, I searched through the drawers. They were predictably packed with export forms of various sorts, but he had taken little of a personal nature to work. Some indigestion tablets, a screwdriver, a pair of green socks, and a plastic box labelled ‘spare keys’. That was the lot. No letters, no bills, no private papers of any sort.
I opened the box of keys. There were about twenty or more, the silt of years. Suitcase keys, a heavy old iron key, car keys. I stirred them up with my finger. A Yale key. I picked it out and looked at it. It was a duplicate, cut for a few shillings from a blank, and had no number. The metal had been dulled by time, but not smoothed, from use. I tapped it speculatively on the edge of the desk, thinking that anyway there would be no harm in trying.
Chapter Nine
Simon’s home address, obtained off his insurance card via the dim typist, proved to be located in a dingy block of flats in the outer reaches of St. John’s Wood. The grass on patchy lawns had remained uncut from about the previous August, which gave the graceless building a mournful look of having been thoughtlessly dumped in a hayfield. I walked through spotted glass entrance doors, up an uninspiring staircase, met no one, and came to a halt outside number fifteen in white twopenny plastic letters screwed on to cheap green painted deal.
The Yale key slid raspingly into the lock as if it had never been there before, but it turned under my pressure and opened the door. There was a haphazard foot-high pile of newspapers and magazines just inside. When I pushed the door against them they slithered away, and I stepped in and round them, and shut the door behind me.
The flat consisted only of a tiny entrance hall, a small bedroom, poky kitchen and bathroom and a slightly larger sitting-room. The prevailing colour was maroon, which I found depressing, and the furniture looked as if it had been bought piece by piece from second-class second-hand shops. The total effect could have been harmonious, but it wasn’t: not so much through lack of taste as lack of imagination. He had spent the minimum of trouble on his surroundings, and the result was gloomy. Cold dead air and a smell of mustiness seeped up my nose. There were unwashed, mould-growing dishes on the draining board in the kitchen, and crumpled thrown-back bedclothes on the bed. He had left his shaving water in the washbasin and the scum had dried into a hard grey line round the edge. Poor Simon, I thought forlornly, what an existence. No wife, no warmth: no wonder he liked pubs.