Free Permissible Limits by Graham Hurley Page B

an aircraft called a Yak-52, and he’d been only too happy to ask Steve to check them out. The aircraft had been ferried in from an airbase in Romania, and Steve had spent days going through each one before Harald sold it on.
    I’d never heard of a Yak. I asked Harald what they were like.
    ‘ Wonderful little planes, very tough, very forgiving. Fully aerobatic, too. The guys on the Yaks went straight on to jet fighters. That’s how good a plane it is.’
    He said he’d sold every aircraft he could get his hands on. Except one.
    ‘ And what happened to that?’
    ‘ I’ve kept it.’
    ‘ It’s with Steve?’
    ‘ You got it.’
    ‘ In his hangar?’
    ‘ Sure. And why? Because, like I say, I trusted the guy.’
    He knotted his hands on the tabletop, squeezing hard. The Yak had been in Steve’s hangar the night of the fire. Harald had turned up next day to find the airport fire chief sifting through the remains of Harvey Glennister’s Spitfire. The Yak, hard up against the far wall, had mercifully escaped serious damage.
    ‘ What does that mean?’
    ‘ A little blistering on the paintwork. Nothing structural. Nothing expensive.’
    ‘ But you talked to the fire chief?’
    ‘ You bet.’
    ‘ And?’
    Harald took his time answering. When he spoke again, his voice had a harsher quality, an anger I’d never associated with him before.
    ‘ Steve phoned for the fire guys the moment he was inside the hangar. When they got there, they found the aircraft hot.’
    ‘ You mean on fire?’
    ‘ No. She’d gone up, sure, but they meant she was plugged in, powered up. Everything on the goddamned Spit was live. Filaments. Contacts. Instruments. Electrics. The lot.’
    I was getting out of my depth. I tried to visualise our own mechanic, Dave Jeffries, over in the hangar at Sandown. I’d seen a lot of him during the rebuilds on the Harvard and the Mustang and I knew Harald was right. Without electricity to bring the plane to life, an engineer was dealing with a corpse.
    ‘ You’re saying Steve was working on the plane? In the middle of the night?’
    ‘ I’m saying it looks that way.’ He nodded, sombre now. ‘Number one, you’ve got the aircraft powered. Number two, they found a bowl under the starboard fuel pipe. When they looked hard at the fuel pipe, they found a fracture. Number three, someone had run a lead light out to that same place.’
    A lead light is a little inspection lamp with a wire guard over the bulb. That, at least, I knew.
    ‘ And the lead light was on, too?’
    ‘ It runs off a twelve-volt transformer. The transformer was live, yes.’
    I looked at him a moment, wondering why Steve hadn’t been franker. The answer, of course, was all too obvious. Harald spread his fingers wide, tallying the probable chain of events. More numbers, I thought grimly. More grief for Steve Liddell.
    ‘ What do you need for an aircraft fire? One, fuel. Two, some kind of wick. And three, a spark, or a heat source, or some damn thing to get it going.’
    ‘ Wick?’ I was lost again.
    ‘ Yeah, an oily rag will do. Just anything to kindle the fire.’
    ‘ And they found a rag?’
    ‘ No, but they wouldn’t. Avgas burns at a thousand degrees C. You saw the roof?’
    I stared glumly at my untouched drink, remembering the melted panels in the hangar roof. There were implications here, not just for Steve but for me too.
    ‘ So what do you think happened?’ I said slowly.
    ‘ You want my theory?’
    ‘ Yes please.’
    ‘ I think Steve was working on that plane. I think he was in the middle of a repair job on the fuel pipe. And I think he went outside to get his head down for an hour or so.’ He frowned. ‘Did he mention that van he’s got?’
    ‘ Yes.’
    ‘ Then I guess that’s where he was. The last month or so he’s been sleeping rough, poor guy.’
    ‘ And the plane caught fire?’
    ‘ Sure.’ He made a brisk gesture with one hand. ‘Work it out for yourself. A fuel leak. A lead light. The