V
The surface indications were of course of the very slightest. So far they consisted merely of the photograph in the Roundabout, my speculations whether Hodgson had anything up his sleeve, and similar trifles. But others were pending. The danger of the coroner's inquest might be safely past, but at least half a dozen other rocks loomed immediately ahead. The Aiglon Company, for example, would want to know what had gone wrong with their machine, and the manufacturers would be even more interested. The same with the parachute people. The Aero Club and the Royal Aeronautical Society both have their Accidents Investigation Committees, and it was quite likely that claims against various Insurance Offices had already been lodged. You cannot thrust a finger into the close web of modern life without stirring up all manner of complexities. I suppose it was these that I had already begun to fear.
Perhaps most immediate of all was the question of unauthorized flying. What had that machine been doing over London at all? Military machines come and go under orders, but not commercial planes piloted by civilian aeronauts. Setting such things as Murder and Manslaughter entirely on one side, was it not probable that Smith would be called to book on this account? From our point of view it was obviously most undesirable that he should be brought into Court on any charge at all; but what if we couldn't prevent it? What if, in the inhuman collision of powerful business interests behind, the lawyers were to get to work—an Insurance Company resist a claim, say, or the Aiglon people proceed against the manufacturers on a point of warranty? You may think I was seeing lions in the path, but it is never safe to reckon on meeting nothing more formidable than a sheep. And I have nothing against lawyers as a class. I don't think Billy Mackwith would pick my pocket of a single sixpence. But I do believe they are like the road-mender with the stone. He hit it with his hammer ten times without breaking it, and was then asked whether he did not think he would have a better chance of splitting it if he turned it splitting-edge uppermost. "How do you know I want to split it?" he replied. I suspect even Billy of not wanting to split it sometimes.
"Willett!" I called as I entered my office after lunch that day. "Just get me out the latest thing about Air Navigation, will you?"
"Is the new one out yet?" Willett replied, walking to the big glass-fronted cupboard where we keep the current papers of this kind; the others are on the library shelves downstairs. "I think they were withdrawn. I seem to remember sending to the Stationery Office and being told there'd been a muddle of some sort."
"There must be something in force," I said. "I want that, whatever it is."
"Just a moment—ah, here we are!"
Willett was both right and wrong. A certain issue of Statutory Rules and Orders had as a matter of fact been withdrawn, but an amended reprint was now available. He handed the slender white booklet to me. It was dated April 30th, 1919, and had therefore been in force for some days at the time of the Lennox Street accident.
I walked to my desk and settled down to the study of it.