A frozen instant of time was trapped under the glossy surface of the picture, and in that unique instant half a dozen aircraft fitters had passed behind the smiling girl at whom the camera had been aimed. They were all perfectly normal men, but one was carrying a wing unit mounting plate which was too big for him. He was a small man but that was not the reason the plate appeared too large. It would have been outsize even on a tall person—it was, in fact, a plate which could only have been used on the cancelled twenty-metre wing!
The implications were so vast that Garnett refused even to consider them before making; one or two elementary checks.
“I’ll be in the Number Three drawing office,” he said as he burst through the outer office. Miss Fleet, his secretary, and her two assistants glanced up in surprise as he passed. He took the lift to the third floor of the Technical Block and went in to the co-ordinating section which occupied the rear of Number Three. The grey-coated clerks who ran the section were flustered at seeing him and stood back respectfully and yet challengingly as he hauled out master assembly drawings and register books. But Garnett knew the complex system and it took him only several minutes to establish the part number of the mounting plate and to trace its history. The plate had been schemed, stress approved and detailed early in the year, but the stop-work order had been issued before the drawings reached the shops. As far as Pryce-Garnett was concerned the mounting plate existed on paper only.
Garnett left the drawing office and walked down the stairs thoughtfully. One approach would have been to find the foreman in charge of the production centre where the component had been made and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. This was Garnett’s first impulse, then he began to think about what was involved. There was the baffling question of motive—the company as a whole had only a distant and very faint possibility of profit from the twenty-metre wing project, so there was no point at all in individuals tinkering with it under cover. Security angle? There might have been at one time, but shortly before he died Clifford Pryce had insisted on publishing full details of his system. Pryce-Garnett had a comfortable head-start, of course, but every country in the world which had sufficiently advanced aircraft and electronics industries was travelling at full speed along the same technological highway. In any case, spies did not work in this way.
The rain had stopped by the time Garnett left the Technical Block and the air was heavy with the smell of moistened dust. He began to walk towards the main shops. There was also the question of how many individuals were involved and who they were. It was not comparable with a case of two or three shop floor personnel getting together to make and smuggle out, say, a component for a broken washing machine. The fitter who had been carrying the mounting plate would only be one link in what must be a very long chain. There would be his immediate foreman and the shop supervisor above him; someone in Supplies must have ordered in the expensive, ultra high tensile steel; someone in Stores must have received and issued it; at least two men in the jig and tool drawing office must have been involved in preparing the tooling drawings and instructions, which in turn brought in the Tool Room superintendent; someone in Accounts must have covered up as much as possible from that end, but it would be impossible to conceal it from the management for very long …
Ian Dermott!
Garnett recalled Dermott’s unexpected and completely uncharacteristic reaction on the day he had called him from the clinic to cancel the twenty-metre wing. His discovery provided an explanation for that, but it was of a sort that only necessitated further explanations. He realised he had stopped walking as his vaulting brain had robbed his body of blood, and he picked up his step again, feeling his heels stick to the warm tarmac. Beyond the saw-tooth roof of the main shop a T.6 screamed across the airfield on full boost, the red glow of recombining calcium ions trailing from its jet pipes.
Passing into the comparative darkness of the shop Garnett moved through the banks of tape-controlled sculpture milling machines which gnawed patiently into billets of gleaming alloy. Although there were eight thousand people in the company he had been able to half-identify the fitter carrying the plate in the photograph simply because he was one of the few men in the place who were not taller than Garnett. No amount of self-discipline had ever been able to prevent him being specially aware of others his own size, feeling that much in common with them and hating them for it.
He headed for the area indicated in his memory as the region in which he had previously seen the fitter, then realised he was going towards the experimental machine shop. Garnett nodded his approval of the conspirators’ choice—the experimental shop was a small and completely self-contained unit with a full range of modern tools. It was a place where unusual jobs were the order of the day and where it would be easy to conceal unauthorised work. As he neared the doors it occurred to Garnett that he ought to be more circumspect than to rush in and collar his man, but his initial astonishment was giving way to a reckless fury.
An electric truck burst its way through the heavy sheet rubber doors and Garnett walked in behind it, avoiding the noisy slap of the doors as they closed. He looked around, ignoring the curious glances of the machine operators, and recognised the small figure of the fitter seated at a wall bench with his back to the door. Garnett walked across to him and, hearing his footsteps, the fitter turned. His eyes widened as he saw Garnett and he froze on the stool, cigarette drooping from his lips.
A definite reaction, Garnett thought with satisfaction. “I want to have a word with you,” he said.
The other man’s oil-streaked face remained immobile, staring.
Garnett became impatient. “Let’s go into the office.”
Saliva gleamed at the corners of the fitter’s mouth. He rolled gently forward on to the tool-cluttered bench, mashing the burning cigarette against his face, then slipped sideways to the floor. Several of his workmates came running as Garnett caught the falling body and lowered it.
“Ring the medical department,” he ordered, ‘and carry him into the supervisor’s office.” The stocky, white-coated figure of Raine, the experimental shop super, appeared and directed the strangely difficult operation. Garnett was puzzled for a moment at the awkwardness of the grunting men doing the carrying, then he noticed the fitter’s body was still in the sitting attitude with rigid arms and legs. He stood by until a young doctor and two male nurses arrived with a stretcher. The doctor looked surprised at Garnett’s presence in the workshop but he cleared the office efficiently and began to examine the inert fitter.
Garnett felt a touch on his sleeve and looked round to see a worried-looking boy in the green overalls of a graduate apprentice. “Excuse me, sir. I’m Jack Elkin. That’s my uncle in there. Victor Elkin. Is he all right? I came round from Centre 83 when I heard he had collapsed.”
“I don’t know,” Garnett replied. “You’d better wait and speak to the doctor. He may want to question you about your uncle’s medical history.”
The boy hesitated. “Well, he isn’t an epileptic or anything like that, but he’s been working very long hours in the last couple of months—ever since the firm sent him down to Harlech on that special training course. He might be suffering from nervous exhaustion.”
Garnett frowned. “The firm sent him where?”
“Harlech, sir.”
“You mean in Wales?” Garnett felt slightly silly. “Where the Men come from?”