Chapter 3
We had a quick pit stop on the Riviera to replenish our depleted tanks, and the petrol pump attendant nearly had a heart attack when I taxied up to the re-fuelling point, with twenty four others behind me, raised the hood, leaned out of the cockpit, handed him my piece of plastic and said ‘llenar veinticinco aviones porfavor’, (fill up twenty-five aircraft please) in almost fluent Spanish, and I was quite proud of myself until Natasha pointed out that we were in France. ‘Oh well, better luck next time’, and as ‘actions speak louder than words’ he got the idea and started pumping away, after first muttering something along the lines of ‘those nice people in the control tower didn’t tell me you were coming, I think I will castrate them later’ – but I might be wrong though - I didn’t understand a word he said either. As I sat there patiently waiting for Llewellyn to be topped up I absentmindedly wondered what Av he was putting in, was it avtur, avcat, avtag, avpin, ava-nice-day, ava-go-joe, then I decided that as long as it burst into flames when it got into the middle of my engine I didn’t really care very much.
When we arrived back at El Campo Topsy was there to greet me, with a ping pong bat in either hand; he was stood at the side of the runway guiding me in, and I thought ‘pity I can only fire you once’, but it did bring a smile to my face.
As I taxied in the smile was soon removed, I was quickly surrounded by David and his finest, and bundled into a new car, that had even more armour than my Maybach, and most probably a main battle tank. I had forgotten, but he hadn’t, that someone close-by wanted me dead.
When I was safely in my private quarters, which had been swept for explosive devices (and every other foreign object), and would be again regularly, I was told (this apparently was not a time for me to have an opinion) that I would not be leaving them until the perpetrator/s had been apprehended – it really had become a prison.
After a quick shower and a change of clothes I was quickly sat in my office with a mass off stony faces staring back at me, ‘well, what have you found out?
The CAA had phoned and they had good news, and bad news, ‘which did I want first?’
‘The good news,’ I think I deserved some cheering up.
‘They are not going to ground every commercial aircraft in the free world’ John said.
‘That’s good news – for them’ I said, ‘what’s the bad news?’
‘Someone is trying to kill you – big time’. I suppose that can be seen as bad news, especially if you are me.
Following my first ‘incident’ the CAA at Heathrow had, on receipt of the radar altimeter and all the extraneous bits and pieces, had re-assembled it on a test bench, and the same thing happened, it was out by four hundred and ninety-five feet. Then they checked every item individually and narrowed it down to the Radar Altimeters ‘sensor box’ that had been mounted in the new equipment bay (where the gun pack had once been). It was then checked for continuity, and other such technical things but nothing obvious was found, until some clever person, obviously with nothing better to do shone a fluoroscope at it, and the first thing that it picked up was that it wasn’t my sensor box, the serial number had been changed to my units one. Then they found that one of its side panels had been replaced by an identical looking panel but not made of the same non-magnetic material, and it had been magnetized, it was as simple as that, with the right amount of magnetism and sufficient time a person could alter the reading by any amount.
‘Put that to one side’ John said, ‘now, your brake failure – a small piece of hard araldite was found close to where you tested your brakes as you taxied out, and the more I thought about it, the less I liked it, as it sat in my draw, so I sent it for forensic analysis and this is what they discovered’, and handed me a very technical looking report.
‘The ‘bottom line’ please John,’ I said, I had no intention of wading through the report at this stage.
‘What it boils down to then, is that after the two parts had been mixed together and partially hardened, a small blob had been placed over one side of a pipe that had had a line of minute holes drilled in a manufactured ‘dent’, sealing them, and as it quickly dried a small tie-lock plastic fastener had been wrapped around it, holding it in place, and although it was virtually dry when it was tested with hydraulic fluid under pressure, fluid had impregnated it slightly – that’s how we can say that it came from the pipe. Then it had been cleaned with de-greaser, sprayed with identical coloured paint and finally it had been fitted to your aircraft by someone who knew the basics of ‘locking wire’, but had little, if any practical experience of using it in difficult locations’.
‘Surely you mechanics would have noticed the tie-wrap’ I angrily retorted, ‘I am placing my life in their hand, and they missed a bit of plastic’.
‘Where it was on the pipe was out of their ‘line of sight’, and my maintainers cannot check every inch of every pipe and cable that is hidden from their view’, he was not going to let me besmirch his mechanics, they were under-valued enough as it was, he thought, ‘but you are missing the main point, both of these attempts were made by at least two people’ and that calmed me down a bit, ‘the first person with the technical knowhow, skill, money, and more importantly, with the facilities to experiment and test, prior to implementing them, which I doubt very much could have been done at El Campo – we only replace items, we don’t manufacturer them, and the second person, who made stupid mistakes, to actually physically get to the Lady S’. What we think is that someone ‘airside’ is working with someone outside El Campo, either close by or at the other side of the world’.
That narrows it down a bit, I thought, and then Maria came in and handed John a message, and told him that ‘David has a copy’.
‘Excuse me one moment’ he said ‘this is from the George Bush’ and quickly scanned the document.
‘Right’ he finally said, ‘I asked the NCIS team to check certain areas for fingerprints (along with the CAA at Heathrow) and we have just got the results back, David I am sure will be here in a moment to tell us more’, and with that he walked in.
‘Jenny Wren’ he said as he sat down. NCIS had checked the Equipment bay, the starboard wheel well and around the Destructor panel, both inside and out for finger prints, and there had been a lot of them, but only Jenny, one of my armourers, had fingerprints in all three areas, ‘but couldn’t they have gotten there legitimately’ I asked?
‘Starboard wheel well?’ John asked, and then answered his own question, ‘She would have an excuse to go into the port one if she helped with re-fuelling, but not the starboard, there is nothing in it remotely armour-ish’.
‘Equipment bay’, he continued ‘again nothing remotely of interest to an armourer’.
‘But it was a gun pack in its previous life’, I put in, then I answered my own stupid statement, ‘but it had been converted long before she ever met her’ (Lady S).
‘And finally the destructor panel, which seals her fate, her fingerprints are all around, and on it, as she removed the panel – she must have done it the previous night after the Lady S had been wiped down and polished – and only hers were found on the inside of the panel, it’s called the Aircraft Destructor Panel but it was a military thing, nobody has any reason to go in there following the conversion.
David then came back into the conversation, ‘I asked the CAA to have the box dusted for prints but so many people have handled it there was nothing on the ‘outside’ that was usable’.
‘But?’ I said.
‘On the inside were three excellent prints’.
‘Jenny’s?’
‘Nope – Teddy Heslop’s’.
‘Well bugger me with the blunt end of a rag-man’s trumpet’ Topsy said.
‘Well put’ I said, and I now knew what I had to do before I fired him.
How did David know all this, well anybody wishing to have employment within the bounds of el Campo has to, among other things, give finger and palm prints for security checks, and to give them access to
various ‘fingerprint controlled’ access areas, if they thought it was an invasion of their privacy then they could always look elsewhere for employment. David then went off to locate Miss Wren, after first summonsing in the police, it was too delicate a situation to mess anything up on a technicality, but ‘surprisingly’ – or not - she was nowhere to be found.
Miss ‘Jenny’ Elizabeth Wren had never been in the WRNS’s (Wrens), she had been an armourer (with a sub-speciality in ejection seats – the bits that went bang ‘or in my case - not’) in the RAF, where she met her ‘partner’ ‘Ginger’ Strachan, an airframe fitter. They never got around to tying the knot, ‘perhaps if I fall pregnant’ was her standard reply, and both had been in the right place, at the right time, to be taken on by me, but they had only stayed an ‘item’ for a short time, then they had gone their separate ways, him literally as two weeks later he took off for pastures new. The general consensus of opinion around the room was that she was perhaps a little lazy, but no worse than a few others. ‘She would never set the world on fire – but would be ok in a topless bun fight’ was Topsy’s expert assessment. When Ginger disappeared he hadn’t handed his notice in, one day he was doing his job, the next he was apparently in Scotland, and as Maria had started making enquiries (P45, final salary etc.) Teddy had come into her office and told her ‘everything is OK, just give his stuff to Jenny, she will pass it on’ and left it at that.
Over the next few hours, as more enquiries were made, the picture then started to become clearer, the altimeter would have been their primary attempt, but magnetism is a funny thing, and hard to predict, so Teddy had a back-up plan as well, the brake pipe. Jenny had indeed sabotaged my ejection seat - NCIS confirmed that (and it would have looked like a tragic malfunction), and she had been spotted ‘late night jogging’ the evening before the brake failure (according to the ‘gate log’), when she must have fitted the sabotaged pipe (that Teddy had manufactured), although she wasn’t sufficiently experienced with wire locking to do the ‘hard-to-get-to’ union correctly. It also transpired that she had rather ‘out of character’ volunteered to be brake number (in the cockpit) when Lady S had been towed out of the hangar that fateful day, We all doubted if she had even touched the brakes, apart from gently easing them ‘on’ on the hard-standing, as the hangar floor and my special hard-standing were perfectly flat. If someone else had yanked them on then that would have spoiled everything as the araldite and tie wrap were intended to fail when I did my ‘quickie’ squeeze on the brake lever as I taxied out. It had all held together for the hoped for length of time (perhaps even less than a second), just long enough for me to see Lady S’s nose start to dip down in response in front of me, then I released them again, but they hadn’t taken into account the loss of a small quantity of hydraulic fluid that let gravity take it down the undercarriage leg, the rising sun, and my inquisitive Plane Captain (ess). I hadn’t noticed the pressure drop on the braking systems ‘triple pressure gauge’, I was too busy with things outside the cockpit, which I think they were banking on. All the evidence would hopefully be incinerated in the ensuing pyre as Lady S careered into the first plane on the main line, Avon still roaring away. If I had managed to eject in time then it was a belt and braces situation for them, they got me both ways.
After that failed attempt they obviously had to act fast as the CAA would eventually confirm the sabotage so they cobbled together the explosives plan. It wouldn’t have taken them long as it wasn’t a very large or sophisticated device, she had access to explosives (fireworks for use around El Campo and Natasha’s ‘special display’) & he would have done the technical bits, it was a brilliantly simple plan for a last minute attempt, but unfortunately I was flying in manual.
The police in England went to Teddy and Beryl’s cottage in the Cotswolds and found Teddy and Jenny in a large workshop at the bottom of their garden, trying to clear out the incriminating evidence, but there was just too much of it. Teddy was the sort of person that knew that he was much too clever to ever get caught (that was reserved for stupid criminals) so the police not only found physical evidence but also receipts for the specialist equipment, the replaced serviceably brake pipe, (who on earth keeps evidence like that – I bet he doesn’t watch CSI Miami), and two lap tops, with all their E-mails still on them, including step-by-step instructions on how to replace the black box and brake pipe, but why had they wanted to see me dead? - Because of Beryl.
When Beryl had decided to stay on at el Campo, it wasn’t all to do with her new found freedom, Teddy was a bombastic pig - out of earshot of other people of course, and she should have left him years ago, but he intimidated her, and she also literally had nowhere else to go, so she just put up with it - life in a gilded cage - and all that, so for giving her her freedom, it was the second strike against me – the first one was for sacking him in the first place - for absolutely no reason. Around that same time I had noticed that Eddy was getting through an alarming number of female assistants, more than one of them pregnant, so I’d had a brilliant idea, would Beryl like to look at the bigger picture and consider becoming the Assistant Estate Manager in her spare time (and hopefully becoming a calming influence on Eddy’s hormones at the same time), which was a spectacularly failure, within a month she was pregnant.
‘It’s impossible’ she told everyone, ‘I stopped having my monthly’s, months ago’ (TMI, TMI) but we already had one ‘Immaculate Conception’ at El Campo, and that was more than enough, so Beryl becoming ‘preggers’ was strike three. Strike four was that he hadn’t been able to get near her since he was a Squadron Leader (!!!) and strike five was when she filed for divorce, using my Solicitors (which every member of staff can use - perks) – he really did have a thing against me, but how had Jenny gotten herself involved, and we had no definitive answer to that until Sally stepped forward. One of the times that she had been piloting Zebedee, alongside Peter Frost, chauffeuring Teddy around the skies as he terrified the newly formed display team, she was ‘taken short’ (needed to go to the loo), but as she made her way past Teddy’s ‘office’ she glanced in, and saw Jenny doing a’ Monica Lewinsky’ on him as he continued to berate the pilots. She was mortified, and too embarrassed to tell anyone – even Peter, after all what people did in their private lives was none of her business, although she wished that they had closed the door first. ‘With all the rumours that are now flying around, I thought I had better come and tell someone’, she told me, and ‘I understood where she was coming from’ concerning their behaviour, this wasn’t the military, although I suppose I would have to have a self-closing door fitted to the ‘office’ - but Sally hadn’t quite finished - listening to all the stories now circulating around the place, apparently Ginger had been in a foul mood the day before he disappeared, and was going to ‘sort it out’ that evening, and then after his disappearance he never contacted anyone at El Campo ever again, not even his very good friends from his RAF days, or even the one that owed him quite a lot of money, so no one ever found out what, or who, was to be sorted out.
I then asked Maria to come in, and asked her what she remembered about Ginger leaving, and all that she could remember was that Teddy had told her to just ‘go through Jenny’ about anything, and that a couple of days later she had receive a call from Scotland from Mr Strachan telling her the same thing.
‘Did it sound like him?’ I asked her, not liking where this was taking me.
‘I had never spoken to him before; anyway it was such a terrible line I doubt if I would have recognised him even if I had, it was like he was in a workshop’.
‘Did the voice sound Scottish?’ I pushed.
‘That’s why I can remember the conversation now; although he said he was in Scotland and had a Scottish name I thought he sounded very ‘English’ – even over all the interference’.
‘Please ask David to come in, and when he arrives, please come in with him’ I asked her, and giving me a very quizzical look she disappeared into her office.
?
??How did Jenny get into Zebedee’ I asked Sally, ‘didn’t you confront Teddy about a stowaway?’
‘She wasn’t a stowaway, anytime that we are on a trip like that anyone at El Campo is more than welcome to come along, it helps break the monotony ‘up front’, in fact being a maintainer she would most likely have been invited to sit in the co-pilots seat when life wasn’t too hectic and try her hand at being a real pilot, not just a hangar pilot, although now that you mention it she was a bit strange, she always spent the flight with Teddy’.
‘Now we know why’ I thought.
With that David and Maria came in, and I recounted my fears, and then David was again contacting the police, ‘although’, he said before departing, ‘if I was right then what are the odds that Teddy had signed out a light aircraft on the day that Ginger had disappeared’. We were now of the unanimous opinion that Jenny was the one to be ‘sorted out’, but she had ‘sorted him out’ first, and then Teddy had come along and cleaned up the mess by dumping poor Ginger way out to sea. After Teddy had left my employ she became a regular passenger on the ‘dirty weekend’ clipper service between El Campo and London City Airport (it was now an almost daily service), taking weekends (and mid-week - weekends) off whenever she could, so they must have continued their relationship. When Teddy had finally flipped she was either a willing participant, or blackmailed into being his accomplice, well that was my theory anyway, the police might find him happily running a ‘chippie’ in Elgin, and as David turned to leave my Office that evening he reluctantly said ‘I suppose we will have to release you from ‘house arrest’, sorry, ‘protective custody’ now’.
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