Permissible Limits (19 page)

‘
How do you know?’

‘
I don’t. But he’s very, I don’t know, solid. I can’t imagine him ever being very different somehow. He’s lumbered, like we all are. Once Harald, always Harald.’

‘
Do you like him?’

I suppose I should have anticipated the inflection in Andrea’s question. It went with a lifting of the eyebrow and the lightest of nudges in the ribs. ‘Like’ meant ‘fancy’. Divorcees’ talk. Widows’ talk.

‘
Yes, I do,’ I admitted after a second or two. ‘I like him a lot. But not that way.’ I looked across at Andrea. She had the grace to nod. ‘I like his seriousness,’ I went on, ‘and I like his weight.’

‘
He’s fat?’

‘
God, no. He’s lean, really trim. Not thin, not fat, but just…’ I studied my teacup,’… right. He keeps himself together, you can see it. He probably works out, weights and jogging and all the rest of it. That would be his style, actually. I can imagine him doing it. Same time every day. Early mornings, probably. There’s something very spartan about him.’

‘
You’re telling me he’s boring?’

‘
Not at all. Quiet, yes. But not boring.’

‘
And will you… take him up?’

‘
On what?’

‘
On this offer of his. This Mustang thing. Learning to fly it.’

I paused again, weighing the question, recognising the subtext. Say yes, and I’d be getting myself out of Andrea’s hair, giving her what she wanted, what she needed, a clear run at making Mapledurcombe tick. Say no, and I’d probably be consigning both of us to a summer of nonstop rows. That Andrea could cope with our little enterprise was beyond doubt. One of her real gifts was a talent for organisation, and she’d never been frightened of hard work. She knew her way around a lot of excellent cookery books, and when the mood took her she could be surprisingly hospitable. With her catwalk figure and her throaty laugh, our Americans would love her.

But would I really be able to master the Mustang? I looked out at the view. The morning’s cold front had gone through and the weather was clearing from the west, the blue foam-flecked Channel
waters
pocked
with
the fat black
shadows
of the racing
clouds.
I thought of the last time Adam and I had been together in the air, one icy day just after Christmas, flying back from an impromptu celebratory lunch at a little country airfield near Bordeaux. Typically, Adam had insisted on taking the Mustang, telling me to forget the expense, telling me it was the least he could do to celebrate my thirty-sixth birthday. Maybe Ralph Pierson was right, I thought. Maybe Adam hadn’t, after all, been in love with some sex-mad bimbo. Maybe he wasn’t forever squandering our hard-earned money. Maybe he really was the man I’d always assumed I’d married. Loyal. And tender. And hopelessly, gloriously, over the top.

‘
Yes.’ I turned round, half-convinced. ‘I’ll give it a shot.’

At the weekend, to my surprise, I got a call from the AAIB, the accident investigation people up at Farnborough. The caller said his name was Grover. He happened to be passing through Southampton that afternoon and he wondered whether he might pop across for a chat. Popping across, as far as Mapledurcombe’s concerned, isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. Add up the time you spend waiting for the ferry, making the long haul down Southampton Water, then negotiating the queues of geriatric drivers that choke the island’s roads, and you’re probably looking at a journey of not less than a couple of hours.

I glanced out of the window. It was a beautiful day.

‘
I’ll fly over,’ I said on impulse, ‘I’ll meet you by the BA ticket desk at three.’

‘
Ticket desk where?’ Mr Grover sounded surprised.

‘
Southampton Airport.’ I heard myself laughing, ‘Will that be OK?’

Grover turned out to be a small, rotund, cherry-faced man in his mid-fifties. The shoulders of his suit were flecked with dandruff, his shirt collar was slightly too tight for his neck and he had a nervous habit of continually feeling for his watch. The fact that I’d rolled out my beloved Moth and hopped across from Sandown seemed to have put him at a disadvantage, because he insisted on taking me across to the restaurant and buying me a huge cream tea.

I was halfway through my second scone before we abandoned the inevitable small talk and turned to the real reason he’d asked to meet me.

‘
Your husband,’ Grover sounded almost apologetic, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t quite got a fix on his background.’

I began to work my way through Adam’s flying career, beginning with his years in the Fleet Air Arm. Across the table, Grover was making notes. When I got to the bit about the Falklands War, he looked up.

‘
Did you bring his log books by any chance?’

‘
Yes.’

‘
May I?’

‘
Of course.’

I dipped into my bag and laid them carefully on the table. Log books tally every hour of a pilot’s flying career, an exhaustive A to Z listing every aircraft flown, every journey made, every landing survived. In Adam’s case, the total hours flown exceeded seven thousand, and I watched Grover thumbing through the entries for 1996, taking tiny sips of tea as he did so.

Finally, he stole a look at his watch and then glanced up.

‘
I’m afraid I’m going to have to hang on to these. I’ll give you a receipt, of course.’

I began to protest but thought better of it. Over the last ten days, Adam’s log books had acquired an almost religious significance. They were sacred to me, relics I’d guard with my life. In the absence of the real thing, they were the closest I could get to that succession of adventures that had been the story of our marriage. Open these pages, and I could hear Adam’s voice, see him grinning as he capped his biro, and undid his harness, and levered himself upwards out of the cockpit.

‘
Will I get them back?’

‘
Of course you will. I just need to go through them properly.’ He gestured around. ‘This isn’t really the place. Nor the time.’

We looked out across the concourse, suddenly busy with dozens of newly arrived passengers. I watched one woman standing on tiptoe, searching for a familiar face. When she saw him, she waved, and plunged through the crowd, throwing her arms around him, and I turned away, engulfed again. Grover was talking about the trips he’d made to Jersey. So far, he’d been twice.

‘
How well do you know young Liddell?’ he enquired.

‘
A little,’ I said, hunting for a tissue. ‘Adam knew him much better than I did.’

‘
And the Cessna he was flying?’

‘
That was Steve’s. Or in Steve’s care.’

‘
But your husband hadn’t flown it before?’ Grover’s hand tapped the log book he’d been examining.

‘
No, not to my knowledge. He’d flown Cessnas before, of course, but not that one.’

Grover nodded. He had a little smear of cream at one corner of his mouth. I wanted to tell him, to point it out, but there was something about the man that slightly intimidated me. DC Perry, I thought, had talked to me this way. Endless questions. Serious eye contact.

‘
So what do you think happened?’ I asked.

Grover was frowning at the last of the scones.

‘
To tell you the truth I don’t know. The 172’s a simple enough aeroplane. Your husband had lots of experience. There’s nothing that stands out.’ He took a last look at the scone then screwed his napkin into a ball and stowed it neatly on his plate. ‘We got an aftercast from Bracknell as well. That didn’t tell us much either.’

‘
A what?’ I’d never heard the term before.

‘
An aftercast.’ For the first time, Grover smiled. ‘It’s the opposite of a forecast. We ask for the weather at a particular time and place and the Met people at Bracknell do the honours.’

‘
And what did they say?’

Grover gazed at me a moment then flipped back through the pad beside his plate.

‘
Broken cloud,’ he said. ‘Ten knots of wind from the west. Sea state moderate.’ He looked up. ‘Nothing dramatic there, I’m afraid.’

We gazed at each other for a moment, another avenue blocked, another explanation off the list. The air/sea rescue search had been abandoned after the first forty-eight hours. To the best of my knowledge, Harald’s chartered fishing boat was still out in the Channel, but so far they’d found nothing.

‘
Say there’s no wreckage,’ I began. ‘Say nothing ever turns up. What then? Do you look on the seabed? Send a submarine down?’

Grover shook his head and sighed.

‘
I’m afraid not. A passenger aircraft? Something off the public transport list? Almost definitely. On this occasion? A Cessna? One on board? Sadly not. If resources permitted, I dare say I’d give you a different answer but the way things are just now…’

He trailed off and I looked out at the concourse again. The man and woman I’d seen earlier had disappeared. Grover, meanwhile, had changed tack. He wanted to know about Adam’s state of health. I reached for my bag again and produced the envelope I’d found in one of the files in Adam’s office. The envelope contained his licences, complete with all his ratings certificates, the results of the various exams he’d taken, plus copies of his medical reports.

‘
My husband had an ATPL,’ I said. ‘The last time the medic saw him was back in October.’

An ATPL is an Air Transport Pilot’s Licence. To stay in compliance, Adam had to undergo a medical examination every six months. I watched Grover thumbing quickly through the contents of the envelope. These, too, he said he’d have to take away.

He glanced up.

‘
GP?’

‘
What about him?’

‘
I just wondered whether your husband was registered or not.’

‘
Of course.’ I tried to remember our GP’s name. In three years at Mapledurcombe, we must have been to the surgery - at most - a couple of times. ‘His name’s Jennings,’ I said at last. ‘Why do you ask?’

Grover took his time pinning the documentation together and returning it to the envelope. Then he frowned. ‘It’s just that sometimes the GP has a different story,’ he said. ‘To who?’

‘
To the CAA medic, the chap who does the ATPL test. The one may know more than the other. It’s a question of disclosure, really.’

‘
You’re suggesting my husband may have kept something back?’ I was beginning to resent this conversation.

‘
Not at all. Though it does happen, Mrs Bruce.’ Grover’s fingers were back on his watch, twisting the metal strap. ‘Stress, of course, is something we can’t properly measure. But equally it’s something we shouldn’t ignore.’

‘
You’re saying he was under stress?’

‘
Not saying, no. It’s a question, not a statement.’ He shook down the cuff of his shirt, hiding the watch. ‘You see, there’s no such thing as an inexplicable accident. In fact, strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as an accident. Everything has a cause. Causes have effects. There’s a logic tree, an order of events. Stress can be a component, often is.’ He frowned. ‘Were there any signs at all? Something you might have noticed? Looking back?’

I thought long and hard. Not about whether Adam had been under stress or not. But whether I owed this man the truth.

‘
He wasn’t under any stress,’ I said at last. ‘At least, not as far as I know.’

‘
No financial problems?’

‘
None.’

‘
Business going OK?’

‘
Yes.’ I returned his smile as best I could. ‘Our business was fine.’

Grover nodded and reached for his pen. After scribbling a line or two he closed the notebook and returned it to his briefcase. The moment we’d met he’d said how sorry he was to hear about my husband. Now he said it again. In his line of work, he met all too many widows, women whose lives had suddenly been changed utterly. Thirteen years back, when he’d joined the
Branch,
he
thought
he’d get used to the trauma and the heartbreak. Now, older and wiser, he knew better. Sudden, unexpected death, he said, was beyond comprehension. Some women never got over it.

‘
Thanks,’ I said.