Free Permissible Limits by Graham Hurley

had given me a key to the front door and I let myself in, trying to remember what she’d said about leaving the door on the latch. I was still wrestling with the lock when I heard someone calling my name. For a second or two I thought I was dreaming. Then I turned round, knowing it had to be true. Sitting on the chair by the fish tank was Harald Meyler.

Chapter four
    At Harald’s insistence, we went out again. As tired as I was, he said he had news for me. He’d been hanging around for the best part of an hour for my return and there were pressing phone calls waiting for him back at the hotel where he was staying. When I asked him how on earth he’d found me, he smiled and said he’d talked to Dennis. His phone calls to Mapledurcombe hadn’t been returned. He’d guessed I’d probably come over to Jersey.
    He had a hire car outside. We drove slowly out of St Helier, the fog still thick, while he briefed me on the latest reports he’d received from the skipper of the boat he’d chartered. The vessel, he said, had been out in mid-Channel now for the best part of twenty-four hours, trawling up and down around the position the radar people had calculated as Adam’s point of impact. The word made me flinch and I half-listened to Harald’s quiet speculations about tidal drift, knowing in my heart that both of us had given up any hope of finding him alive. When I said as much, Harald simply nodded. Adam, in his view, would have been dead within minutes, if not from his injuries, then from hypothermia. So far, there’d been no sign of the wreckage that the search-and-rescue people had reported, and as far as he knew the naval frigate on the scene had also drawn a blank.
    ‘ Isn’t that unusual?’ I wondered aloud.
    Harald nodded. We were still driving through the suburbs of St Helier. An entrance to some kind of drive loomed through the fog and I glimpsed a hotel sign as Harald drove in under a big stone arch.
    ‘ It’s very unusual,’ he said at last. ‘Which is why we have to keep looking.’
    ‘ But what does it suggest? To you?’
    I could see lights ahead. Harald had slowed the car to walking pace, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.
    ‘ He could have bellied in, stayed intact. That happens sometimes.’
    ‘ But didn’t the chopper crew report wreckage?’
    ‘ They did. But they might have got it wrong. The Channel’s full of trash, all kinds of garbage. Fly low enough, choose the right day, it looks like the logging season.’
    ‘ But wouldn’t the aircraft float? If it was still in one piece?’
    ‘ For a while, yes. Then…’ he shrugged, ‘… the cabin fills with water, the fuselage too. There’s a bit of buoyancy in the wings, of course, but he had full tanks on departure. I checked.’
    ‘ With who?’
    ‘ Steve.’ He glanced across at me. ‘You were up there today.’
    ‘ That’s right. How did you know?’
    ‘ Dennis told me. He said Steve looked wrecked.’ He frowned. ‘What did you make of him?’
    I thought hard about the question. Beyond a line of parked cars, the headlights picked out the front of what must have been Harald’s hotel.
    ‘ I agree,’ I said bleakly. ‘I thought he looked terrible. In fact I thought he looked ill.’
    Harald brought the car to a halt and switched off the engine.
    ‘ You’re right,’ he said. ‘That’s why we have to talk.’
    The hotel turned out to be an old manor house, beautifully furnished. It had a look and a smell that reminded me, on a much grander scale, of Mapledurcombe: wood-panelled walls, swagged curtains, oriental rugs and some lovely antique furniture. Harald led me through the reception hall. From a bar at the end, I could hear laughter.
    Heads turned as we went in. For a second or two they were strangers, these men, then I began to put names to the faces. Duggie Peterson. Alan Jessop. Miles Brenton. Display pilots from the airshow circuit. Men I’d bumped into at the weekends when Adam had been part of the same