Permissible Limits Read online

  REVIEWS FOR GRAHAM HURLEY

  ‘First class’

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  ‘An eye for character and fluid, intelligent prose’

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  ‘Hurley’s twists and action are electrifying’

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  Permissible

  Limits

  Also by Graham Hurley

  Fiction

  Rules of Engagement

  Reaper

  The Devil’s Breath

  Thunder in the Blood

  Sabbathman

  The Perfect Soldier

  Heaven’s Light

  Nocturne

  Non-Fiction

  Airshow

  Permissible Limits

  Graham Hurley

  ORION

  Copyright © 1999 Graham Hurley

  The right of Graham Hurley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner

  This edition first published in Great Britain in 1999 by Orion An imprint of Orion Books Ltd Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane London WC2H 9EA

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Typeset in Great Britain at The Spartan Press Ltd, Lymington, Hants

  Printed and bound byClays Ltd, St Ives pic

  For Darina and Erik with love

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to those individuals whose generosity and knowledge helped make this book possible.

  Carolyn Grace, with whom I made a number of films, planted the seed for the idea. Her gutsiness, and her airmanship, have been a constant inspiration and she won’t mind me saying that absolutely none of what follows has any connection with any events in her own life.

  Paul Bowen, Director of the Royal International Air Tattoo, opened countless doors in the aviation world. Rod Dean, Mustang pilot extraordinaire, gave me an enormous amount of time and help, as did Bernie Forward, recently of the Air Accidents Investigation Branch. Tony Houghton and Eddie Seagrave of Goodwood Aerodrome offered invaluable advice, while John Tilling, Simon Howells and Andrew Edie explained the mysteries of aviation insurance. Paul Coggan, of Warbirds Worldwide, took a lively interest in the project, as did Brendan Walsh and Norman Chapman of Intrepid Aviation, who introduced me to the glories of the Harvard, the YAK, and a stripped-down Merlin. My thanks, as well, to Susie Cameron and Roger Edwards for sharing their memories of life in the Falklands.

  My agent, Antony Harwood, and my editor, Simon Spanton, have been unflagging in their support, as has Christina Waugh, a good friend and a shrewd critic. To Bill Flynn, Ellie Bruce and I owe a special debt. He believed in both of us and for his faith this book is all the richer.

  Lastly, a huge thank you to my wife, Lin. Wingman is too small a word…

  Find the enemy and shoot him down. All else is nonsense.

  Baron Manfred von Richthofen

  Prelude

  People who came to say goodbye to Adam always talk about the swans.

  We held the memorial service in a lovely little church within sight of the sea. It was a cold March day with fitful sunshine and a bitter wind. After the service, we gathered in groups on the gravel path that led down to the lane. Drifts of early daffodils brightened the shadowed gravestones and I remember how empty the service had seemed without a coffin or a body. The fly-past had been scheduled for half past three. Already, we could hear the Mustang coming.

  The aircraft appeared a minute or so later. Harald was at the controls and I could see his face looking down at us as he dipped a wing in salute. Some of us bowed our heads. One or two of the men were weeping. For that single moment, even the wind seemed to stop.

  After the Mustang had peeled off to the south, it was quieter again. Conversation seemed somehow pointless. There was nothing to say, nothing to add. We began to walk towards the gate, little black clusters of us, grim-faced, awkward, and it was then that I heard the swans.

  They were on exactly the same heading as the aircraft. I saw their shadows first, dancing across the pale stones of the church, then I looked up, catching my breath at their beauty and their grace. There were nine of them in all and they disappeared towards the undercliff and the sea in perfect V formation, untroubled, leaving us to the cold and the single tolling bell.

  The memory of those swans has never left me. I can hear the beat and sweep of their wings as I write. Adam, I think, would have loved them.

  Chapter one

  I got the news about Adam by phone. It was a Thursday afternoon. The builders had been in since Christmas and our latest extension for yet more guest suites was nearly complete. For once, we looked like being ready for the new season.

  The nearest phone extension was in the kitchen. A man’s voice I didn’t recognise asked whether I was Mrs Ellie Bruce. Bad news is like a smell. You scent it.

  ‘My name’s Clark, Mrs Bruce. I’m a police officer. We’ve had a call from the Distress and Diversion Cell up at West Drayton.’ He paused. ‘Do you know what these people do?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I bent to the phone, trying to fight the waves of panic. The Distress and Diversion Cell co-ordinate the rescue services when an aircraft gets into trouble.

  ‘Sandown have reported your husband overdue,’ the policeman was saying. ‘Jersey booked him out at 10.45.It seems his flightplan gives an ETA of 11.40.’

  I did the computations in my head. Sandown is our local airfield, a single grass strip tucked beneath the shoulder of St Boniface Down. Transit time from Jersey to the Isle of Wight in the Cessna Adam had borrowed would be around fifty-five minutes. Eleven forty sounded exactly right.

  ‘He hasn’t turned up?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  I glanced at the big clock on the wall over the sink. Five to four. Adam had phoned only this morning. Weather permitting, he’d promised he’d be back in time for a late lunch, though that - I knew - could have meant anything.

  There was an ominous silence at the other end of the line. I could sense there was worse news to come.

  ‘Is your husband an experienced pilot? Do you mind me asking, Mrs Bruce?’

  I blinked. Six years in the Fleet Air Arm. Supply work out to the North Sea rigs. Contract after contract in southern Africa. Helicopters. Fixed-wing. Single-engined. Twins. Even, for a couple of months, an ancient DC-3.

  ‘He’s got thousands of hours,’ I said, ‘God knows how many.’

  ‘And he’s used to flying over water?’

  ‘Of course. He does it all the time.’

  I was sitting down now. One of the builders gave me an inane grin through the window. Four o’clock was time to put the kettle on.

  ‘West Drayton are in the process of reviewing the radar tapes, Mrs Bruce,’ the policeman muffled a cough, ‘and I’m afraid it’s not looking brilliant.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  It was a stupid question. I’d once paid a visit to the Distress and Diversion Cell, a small, darkened, busy room at the main air-traffic control centre near Heathrow. There’s a big display screen on one wall and smaller consoles facing it. The guys behind the consoles can pinpoint an aircraft to within a couple of hundred metres, anywhere in UK airspace. Impressive, unless you happen to be on the end of a conversation like this.

  ‘What’s happened?
What did they see?’

  ‘Apparently your husband’s aircraft was carrying a transponder.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Would you happen to know what it was squawking? They’re saying seven thousand.’

  I had my eyes shut, trying to visualise the big wall display. A transponder is a little radio transmitter carried on board an aircraft. It sends out a coded four-digit signal which registers as a trace on the radar screen; 7000 is the code you enter in transit when your aircraft is no longer receiving an air-traffic service. The people in the Distress Cell were right. Once he’d left Jersey’s air-traffic control zone, Adam’s transponder should definitely have been squawking 7000.

  ‘So what happened?’ I asked again.

  ‘Seven thousand’s off the plot.’

  ‘When? When did it happen?’

  ‘Exactly?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Hang on. I wrote it down.’

  The builder had given up with the tea. He was back beside the big window in the extension, his shirt tail flapping in the wind. I watched him slopping primer on the frame, my mind a complete blank. Adam couldn’t have just disappeared. Not the way this man was saying. He was far too clever, far too wily. My old fox. My young cub.

  ‘Eleven twelve.’

  I felt my stomach lurch. Eleven twelve was more than four hours ago.

  ‘Maybe there was some problem with the transponder,’ I said quickly. ‘Maybe he turned back. Have you tried the French?’

  I had a sudden picture, extraordinarily vivid, of Adam in a little café on the edge of some French airfield tucking into steak and frites, but even before the answer came, I knew I was fantasising. Had Adam really turned back, he’d have been on the radio in seconds, and even if the radio had gone U/S as well, he’d have made contact again after landing. He was far too good a pilot to have left the situation unresolved.

  I clung to the telephone. According to the policeman, checks on airfields on the other side of the Channel were still awaiting the arrival of someone who spoke French. Now, he was talking about a search-and-rescue operation.

  ‘Lee-on-the-Solent have put up a helicopter. They’re in touch with a freighter fifteen miles to the east of the impact point, and the Bembridge lifeboat’s on standby.’

  Impact point? My grip tightened on the phone. I couldn’t get the bloody wall display out of my head.

  ‘But the trace,’ I insisted, ‘the squawk, seven thousand. Tell me exactly what happened.’

  ‘Ah…’ He paused for a second or two, apologetic, regretful. ‘I’m afraid I can’t, Mrs Bruce. I’m simply relaying the facts. They say he’s gone, disappeared. I’m afraid we may have to assume the worst.’

  ‘But there wasn’t a radio message?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Nothing?

  ‘No.’

  ‘So where was he? Whereabouts did it happen?’ Another silence. Then the policeman was back again. ‘He was just crossing the fifty-degree north line. Does that make any sense?’

  I nodded. The fifty-degree north line was almost exactly mid-Channel. If this nightmare conversation was real, if Adam had indeed ditched, then he’d be out there now, a tiny dot in the ocean. At the height of summer, with no injuries, he could have paddled round for hours but in early February, even with his luck, I knew the prospects were bleak.

  The policeman was asking me to stay by the phone. He might have more news within the hour. Before he rang off he was nice enough to ask me if there was anyone close who could stay with me. Lying, I assured him there was.

  I remember very clearly the morning when I first met Adam. I was still living down in the Falklands on the sheep settlement where I’d grown up, a rather solitary, introspective nineteen-year-old, much given to moody, day-long excursions on one or other of the farm’s horses.

  My favourite was a sturdy chestnut called Smoko. Like me, she had a passion for striking out across the trackless peat and the endless acres of tussock, riding for miles and miles until we were satisfactorily lost. Somehow, we always managed to return in one piece but the magic of the Falklands was the chance to be so overwhelmingly alone, and it was into that solitude that Adam, quite literally, dropped.

  It was July 1982. Smoko and I had been reined in by the Argie occupation, and by the war that followed, and this was the first time since April that my father had judged it safe for us to venture out. Even so, we had to stick to areas declared mine-free by the army people and I was deep in one of the maps we’d been issued when I first heard the helicopter.

  It was flying very low, following the contour of the hills from the direction of San Carlos Water. I remember shielding my eyes against the low winter sun, watching the little black insect grow quickly bigger. Despite the events of the past few months, Smoko had never quite got used to the clatter of the helicopters and I had to gentle her as the chopper circled us a couple of times before settling on to a nearby stretch of track. It was one of the big Royal Navy helicopters, squat, heavy, the dark-grey bulk of the cabin streaked with salt and oil. They called them Sea Kings and they were forever flying low over the settlement, frightening the sheep.

  Even when the rotor had stopped turning and it was quiet again, Smoko was still nervous. We watched the pilot studying us from the cockpit. At length he unstrapped himself and appeared at the rear door. He stepped down on to the track and stamped some of the stiffness out of his legs. He was tall, well over six feet, and when he lifted an arm to wave I felt Smoko twitch beneath me. He walked over towards us. He’d taken off his helmet by now and his hair was flattened against his skull the way you look when you come out of the shower. He had a nice grin - spontaneous, unforced - and when he got close and took off his aviator sunglasses, I remember the colour of his eyes. They were the lightest blue, a shade my mother always referred to as ‘mischievous’.

  He introduced himself, keeping his distance from the horse. Like most of the service people we’d seen, he looked exhausted, his pale face darkened with stubble.

  He wanted to know which settlement I came from. When I told him, he grinned again.

  ‘Gander Creek?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘The Tranters?’

  I have two sisters, one older, one younger. We’ve all been fortunate in our physical inheritance, absorbing a mixture of my mother’s long-legged Scandinavian good looks and my father’s wind-buffed Yorkshire sturdiness. I don’t think any of us thought of ourselves as beautiful - I’d much rather have had blue eyes than brown, and my smile is decidedly lop-sided - but we were all still single in ‘82 and it was plain that navy intelligence had spread the word.

  Adam was gesturing back towards the Sea King. In a couple of days’ time, it was his winchman’s birthday. He said he owed the old bugger a decent night out and he wondered whether he and his crew and one or two others might drop over for a party. He’d seen the settlement from the air and he knew we had a community hall. He and his boys could muster plenty of Scotch, oodles of vodka, and the winchman had a sackful of disco tapes. They’d been fighting the war for longer than he cared to think about, and now the Argies had jacked it in, there was the bloody weather to contend with.

  His mention of the weather made me laugh. Living in the islands all my life, I’d got used to the incessant wind and sudden curtains of squally rain. The thought that a Falklands winter might offer some kind of ordeal was wonderfully novel.

  ‘We’ve got a date, then?’

  Rather cautiously, I told him it might be possible, but when he said he’d prefer Sunday to Saturday I realised that for him, at least, the party was as good as fixed. He gave me another grin, then extended a gloved hand close enough for me to reach down and shake it.

  ‘Nice horse,’ I remember him saying, ‘I’ll try not to frighten it next time.’

  It was dark before the police phoned back. I’d been forcing myself around the house, coupling one job to another, fighting the temptation to think too hard about Adam
’s wretched Cessna. There had to be some way the West Drayton people had got it wrong. Either that, or Adam had already been picked up. Some fishing boat or other. Some passing mermaid. Anyone, as long as he was still intact.

  ‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  For the first time, I was close to tears. Tears are what happens when you can no longer find the words to keep the lid on all the stuff bubbling up inside. When the policeman came back with another of his sensible questions, I sank into the nearest chair, choked with emotion.

  ‘Was he carrying marker dyes?’ he asked for the second time. Dyes stain seawater red. Or green. Or yellow. Damn all use if it happens to be dark. ‘Mrs Bruce?’

  Tm sorry.’ I reached for a tea towel, the kitchen a blur. ‘Give me a moment.’

  He faltered, then told me that the coastguard would be in touch if there was anything to report. The search was resuming at first light but realistically, unless something exceptional had happened, they were looking at an MPD. Official jargon always gives me the shivers, how cold it can be, how brutally efficient. MPD means Missing Presumed Dead.

  I was trying hard to focus on the Aga. Adam used to stand there, I thought. It was his favourite spot, the place he chose to warm his bottom, and unzip his flying suit, and talk me through his latest sortie in the Mustang, or the Harvard, or even my little Moth. Our whole life had been built around these moments, sharing our respective days, comparing notes, swopping stories, sharing a glass or two of scrumpy from the farm down the lane before I busied around with the oven gloves and dished up supper. All that laughter. All that warmth. Gone.