'We can't be precise there. Drowning while unconscious is my guess. There was no evidence of physical damage.'
Butler looked round the table.
'And nobody spotted it for twenty-four years?'
Roskill shrugged. 'It was out of the search area. Overhanging trees, thick weed. God only knows how he put it down there. And the weather was poor for a week or more afterwards, the worst sort of search weather. It's not so surprising–it's well off the beaten track.'
Roskill added three more slim, identical files to those on the table.
'It's all in there. Plus my estimation of the probable course of the aircraft–he must have made a much wider turn than was assumed after the crew and the passenger baled out. That's what put the search off the scent, apart from the low cloud they had to contend with. He would have crossed the coast again a good ten miles south of the direct route–if he hadn't put down in the lake. Which was a damn good piece of flying, as I've said.'
dummy4
'Why did the plane crash?'
'It's in my report,' said Roskill, with the smallest suggestion of asperity.
Butler persisted. 'How well does it tally with what the crew said?'
Roskill shook his head. 'It's going to be very hard to say. It was the port engine they complained about, and it took a clout from a treetop coming in. That and twenty years under water–it doesn't make the detective work easy.'
He looked round the table. 'To be honest, we may never know.
There can be a million reasons. If it's plain human error, like fuel mismanagement, we'll certainly never know now. They'd been losing height–we know that from the survivors; I've known cases where a pilot had an engine malfunction and simply shut down the wrong engine. Not even a DC-3 would stay up then, and at that height it would have been fatal. Or maybe he simply misread his altimeter. I tell you, there are a million ways it might have happened.'
'All right, then,' said Fred, heading off any further technical argument. 'How does this fresh information change your interpretation of the original conclusions, Dr Audley?'
Audley looked up from his notebook to meet Fred's mildly questioning gaze, which in turn caused the other three men to look at him. He had been reflecting just a moment before, with satisfaction, that so far he had not said a word since arriving.
But then he really had nothing yet to say–nothing, at least, which he could say in front of strangers. He certainly couldn't say 'What dummy4
am I doing here, for God's sake?' at this stage in the proceedings.
'Dr Audley?'
It would be an interesting academic exercise to discuss the nature of an unknown object which was able to retain its value over so many years. No secret terror weapon, no list of traitors now in their graves or their dotage could last so long. Newer and far more terrible weapons had made the technology of the 1940s antediluvian. And a whole generation of younger and differently-motivated traitors had superseded the honest simpletons and rogues of Steerforth's day.
And no single Dakota could carry enough mere loot to hold the Russians' interest down the years. Or in the first place, when they were bulging with German valuables.
'I assume,' he said tentatively, carrying on his thoughts aloud, 'that the Russians
Fred smiled.
'They are indeed, Dr Audley. In fact I'm afraid they were down at the crash site pouring beer down navvies and interviewing talkative aircraftsmen before we were. But I meant have you anything to add to the Steerforth File in the light of his reappearance?'
Audley started to adjust his spectacles, and then stopped awkwardly. He had been trying to control that gesture for years, without real success.
'I mean, are the Russians still interested, after having learnt that those boxes contained rubble? Did they learn that? It's an important dummy4
distinction.'
'Assuming that they did–what then?'
'I should have to know rather more about Steerforth. There is a possible sequence of events, but I wouldn't like to advance it yet.'
'Why not?' This was Stocker at last. 'You have a reputation for drawing remarkably accurate deductions out of minimal information. I'd very much like to hear what you make of this.'
Audley felt a flush of annoyance spreading under his cheeks. It galled him that he had a reputation for understanding without reason. Intuition had its place, and was valuable. But only in the last leap from the ninth known fact to the inaccessible tenth, and never at the very beginning. And even at the last it was not to be trusted.
He knew he ought to control his feelings, and hold the only real card he possessed. But he couldn't.
'I'll tell you one thing I do know'–he tapped the Steerforth File with his index finger–'that Major Butler was more right than he knew when he said that this was non-information. I'd like to see the original file, for a start.'
'The original?'
