“Lets have the first one in then,” the boss ordered.

So I brought him in. A long streak of dog-piss this one. Lanky, probably about 150 pounds spread over six foot. Ginger hair, starting to thin a bit, bits of grey at the ears, small diamond stud earring. Still wearing his ludicrous “flying suit,” his sponsor’s wares promoted all over him. Mid-forty’s probably, but he still thinks he’s in his teens.

“Name for the tape please,” asks the boss, almost, but not quite, failing to hide the sneer in his voice.

“Mark Nicol.”

“Full name please, if you wouldn’t mind Mr Nicol.”

“Mark Valentine Nicol.”

He gave us a cheesy grin, as if to excuse his parents lack of taste. Bloody hippies probably, if not hippies then “beatnicks” or the like, as me Mum would have called them.

“So Mr Nicol, or would you mind if I call you Mark…”

He interrupts, “as long as you don’t call me valentine, I really don’t mind.” A smug grin followed that, obviously a line he’s used before.

“Ok, then, Mark it is.Tell us your part in the events then Mark, you’re the one who was… how can I put this delicately… “seeing” his girlfriend behind his back were you not?”

That got a reaction, a reddening of his already sun and freckle reddened face, the freckles not hiding the… the what? Guilt? Embarrassment? Anger? Any or all would do. Get him uncomfortable, keep him uncomfortable, a good rule of thumb for any interview.

Silence. You could watch him pulling himself together, calming himself; “Ok, where would you like me to start?”

“At the beginning of course.”

“Sure. It was the last day of the comp, I’d been flying well and was in with a chance for the first place. Mind you there were four or five of us that could have pulled first place off theoretically. We’d been out the night before, all got a bit pissed up in fact, as we tend to when we get the rare chance to drink together.”

 

 

“How many of you?”

“Just about all of us in the comp, all the girlfriends, most of the organisers, some sponsors and a couple of hangers on. About forty of us maybe, all told.”

“Was he with you?”

“Yeah, that was odd. Howard rarely drank before a comp, and almost never when the comp was on. He normally had a few after though, it was almost guaranteed that he would if he won. You know he was a diabetic don’t you? Yeah. But he was chugging them down with the best of us. He’d started on his usual Perrier water, but by the end of the night, he’d had a beer or two, and I think I saw Jackie get him a vodka in at some point. He was well pissed, but I remember catching him in the bar bogs, giving himself a jab of insulin. Amazing that isn’t it, he’s ratted, but still able to do his bloods and jab?”

“The next day we were all as rough as a bear’s balls, Howard included. But a comp is a comp, and we’ve got sponsors to keep happy, and the day was building up to be a good one, possibly the best yet.”

“The window opened at about 8.30, we jostled into the lines for the gate, as it happened we were all in the first gaggle to take off.”

“You what, Mark? Care to translate that into English for us poor dim coppers?”

 

“So yeah, like I said, I had a humdinger of a hangover, still pissed probably, but we were jockeying for a front position at the window, trying to get off at the first gaggle, the day was going to be a boomer. Sorry, what that means is…”

“Ok, Chaz, your friend already clued us in on the jargon, keep talking and we’ll stop you if we’re not getting the gist.”

The Guv really does know how to work the edges on this. Never one for the full frontal attack, more the type to keep the peripheral stuff going, you never know what’ll slip out that way, it’s a lesson to watch him. “Keep them unsettled, keep them one down, occasionally let them think they’ve got one over on you, then bitch slap them down,” he once told me. Do it nicely of course.

Geezer by the name of Charles “Chaz” Kingman this one. Short, stocky, well built, looks like he could handle himself in a fight. Nasty scar over one eye, a fresh scar of the sort my kids would give their eye-teeth for, a real gem of a “Harry Potter” job. A crimson slash from his hairline to the top of his left eye, not deep, but impressive. Claims he got it in a fight a week or so back, and he knows we know who he was fighting.

Another top boy in this flight lark, another one of the front-runners, another top gun, or top parachute, or top dog. Uniform tell us that him and the deceased, (Howard Lackey; sorry I hadn’t mentioned his name before had I?) had recently got into a fight over a stupid trick he had played on Howard.

We had got wind of it off the central computer when we run the names though it. A couple of calls to the local cop shop in that area, and we heard it first hand off the uniform that had attended the incident.

The two of them had been trying to impress some sponsors at a competition, and Chaz had stuck a rival sponsor’s logo on the seat of Howard’s paraglider back-pack thing, so the first thing the sponsors saw when he was flying over them was their rivals logo. Even though Howard had got the sponsorship out of them, he hadn’t seen the funny side of it, and had confronted Chas later at the campsite bar. Howard had been drinking most of the evening by then. Words led to threats, pushing and shoving, then Howard had slapped him in the head with a plastic beer mug, which had broken and given him that scar. Chaz had smacked seven shades out of him after that, and a local plod who was in the vicinity of the bar had taken names and duly given warnings.

They weren’t the best of friends afterwards, as you could imagine.

“Can I take you back a bit Chaz? Before you took off, any problems, you notice anything unusual?”

“Nothing really.” He sat forward, hands crossed in front of his mouth, looking like a thought was occurring, a memory surfacing, or a lie brewing.

“Don’t know if it matters, but as I said, most of us were a bit under the weather, Howard as much as any of us. He staggered at one point when he was throwing his harness on.”

“Ok, we’ve been told that by a couple of people.”

“Yeah, but he was facing me and he looked, I don’t know, a bit rough, a bit unfocussed, more than just hung-over, bemused even, and for all his faults he was always one majorly focussed sod when in a comp. But when Jackie came over, and gave him the box of stuff he carries, his glucose sweets, his main insulin hypo, and the other stuff….”

“You knew about that then did you?”

“We all did, he’d had a bit of a nasty one a few years back. Crashed his kite, just when he was getting into the league ratings, no one could ever find out if he’d gone hypo before or after crashing, he wouldn’t tell. That’s when he’d met Jackie, she was one of the nurses in the hospital, she’d cracked onto him there and then. But I was surprised when she clipped his main hypo box onto him, he’d not normally have forgotten something that important, he’d not have left it to her to look after.”

 

“Where was I? Oh aye, well he’d had to come clean about the diabetes after the crash, there was no choice. There had been half a dozen of us who had been there and looked out for him while we were waiting for the ambulance, and one of the paramedics had shouted out “Diabetic: bad case of hypo, give me a shot of..” something technical…Well after that we all knew about his diabetes, so he was going to have to deal with it.

 

He stopped, rolled up and lit a fag; waved it around to illustrate what he was talking about, like he was conducting his thoughts with it before airing them. Affected little sod.

“The clever sod even turned that to his advantage though. Our national flying magazine did a story on him, how well he’d coped, how he was a model for other diabetics. I’d even gone to the training day he’d organised as part of his “charity work” for the diabetics society, we’d all got clued into what to do if he or anyone else went hypo again. Interesting stuff. He’d had to take out big insurance to keep flying of course, especially at our level, but with his old man’s money behind him he could afford it of course “

“You sneered when you said; “charity work”

“Yeah, “self-promotion work” would be closer to the mark. He could have given them more than he raised just by dipping into his petty cash fund, if he’d have wanted to.”

“Rich was he?”

“Stinking. His old man dropped dead last year, diabetes got him too, left Howard a small fortune. He was one of the only ones flying the circuit for fun, that’s why I got really pissed off when he beat me to that sponsorship deal, I needed it, he didn’t.”

“I can see how that would be annoying.”

“Unnecessary really.”

We took a coffee break and came back.

“So yeah, there were about ten of us got away in the first push, another twenty or so followed. The flying was hard, physical stuff, fighting with small punchy thermals, running downwind at the risk of losing everything, pinning hopes on whatever we could find to keep us up. There were just four of us well out in front after a couple of hours.”

 

“That’s right, just four of us left, Me, Howard, Chaz and Mark. We’d either blown off, or out flown everyone, pretty much as we’d predicted. And even though we were competing, when you’re out over mountains like that, you still keep an eye on each other. We were mates after all.”

 

Thomas this one, not Tom or Thommo, but Thomas. A bit over-educated for my liking, arty-farty type, well-to-do but slumming it with the plebs. The sort that gives you the look the doctor will give you when he knows that you’ve picked up a dose of something nasty; and your wife is going to get rather annoyed about it. A bit on the snooty side. Big built, good looking to those that like the type I suppose, long haired, easy to imagine him hoping he’ll get mistaken for Robert Plant, or whoever today’s rock heart throb is. A bit over six four, looks like he would play rugger rather than rugby, doesn’t look like one of these flyboys at all. More like a college professor on steroids.

“You were looking out for him, even though you’d had that big bust up at the last Comp?” asks the boss.

“I was wondering when you’d bring that up, and the answer is still yes, we all looked out for each other.”

The Guv leans back in his chair, says nothing. Waits. Gets bored with waiting; “tell us about it.”

“Nothing much to tell, we’d been out on the night of the last flying day of the comp. He’d won it, just, always a bad thing. We had all had a few too many, but he’d also been a right pain in the butt all evening. He’d been bragging himself up. That’s par for the course for him, so we just let it go. But then he started giving his girlfriend a real hard time, calling her a names, telling her how without him she’d be skint and back to washing bedpans, how she was leeching off him. She got upset at that, but staying with him is her choice, and after all, he paid for her to learn to fly, and he pays her way in the world.

But then he laid his hand on her, hard, dragged her over and kissed her roughly, told her he was only kidding, and that she was all he had. The idiot was almost legless on a few pints.

The boss treated this preamble as if he couldn’t care less, but I knew he was analysing hard here. “So?”

“So I waited till he went to the loo, and followed him and warned him off doing it again.”

“Hit him?”

“No need to. You see, although he’s good in the air, or rather, was good in the air, on the ground he’s a lightweight, scared of his own shadow. I remember his regular “freak out’s” were a great source of amusement to me when we were at college together back in the 90’s, before he became so hardened.

“So you’ve known him some time?,” the boss doesn’t hide his interest in this news.

“Not really, we were at the same college back in 95, both mature students, or at least I was mature, he was just older. We lived across the hall from each other for a year. I didn’t see him at all after I left there in 97, not until we ended up competing against each other two years back. I’d read his name in the flying mag, but never made the connection.”

“Ok, carry on,” the Guv had mined that seam well, but I thing he should have pushed harder.

Well Howard he talks big, sorry, talked big, and with the cash he’d got behind him he got away with it. But man-to-man he’s a coward, a real chicken-shit. So I just told him not to do that again in my presence, or there would be consequences.”

“Such as?”

“I left that to his imagination, it works wonders.”

“It must have done, it wasn’t long after that that he got into the fight with your other friend.”

“Yes, I see that now. He’d drunk more heavily after I talked to him, Dutch courage I suppose.”

“Nothing to add?”

“Nothing.”

“Coffee break.”

We let him sweat for a while, let him think about what he’d just told us; consequences eh?

Back into the room, tape on.

“So there you were looking out for each other up in the sky above the mountains, what, five k from here?”

Nice switch by the Guv, unbalance him.

“Yes, about that.”

“What happened?”

“I told the other officer, the uniform one.”

“For us please, for the tape.”

He sighs, looking, or trying to look, as if it pains him to remember, trying to look shocked, trying to look like he was the one to suffer loss. I held my judgment on how real the feelings were.

‘We were all fighting hard at this point, so it was difficult to tell how everyone was going, we’re pretty much all as good as each other. But I’d noticed Howard had been coping less well over the past few K, I was thinking he would soon be needing to top up his food, or take a jab, or whatever, and wondering how the hell he managed it up here. Truth be told I had a bit of grudging respect for him just then.”

“Go on.”

He runs his hands through his hair, rubs his face, sits back, rolls up, lights up. Same baccy and papers brand as Chaz, not important, but details, always the details. The devil in the details.

“So I was in a turn, gaining good hight, but it’s rough and I’m fighting for everything, playing the controls and shifting my balance hard. I looked over, Howard was outside of the thermal, easier air. Then he did it.”

“Did what?”

He looked like a slapped puppy at this point, looked at the Guv, then me, as if silently pleading we wouldn’t ask him to tell us. We stayed silent. He looked down, then back at the Guv. Then it came out in one rush, as if it tasted bad in his mouth, words tripping over each other to get out.

“Then he killed himself. He took armfuls of his risers and hauled his weight up on them. He gathered handfuls of lines and hauled them in. He was flying the latest high tech kite, you can’t play silly buggers with them, and it folded like a cheap tent. The whole thing wrapped, he dropped like a stone. We were about five hundred feet above the tops of the peaks at that point, and he hit about two hundred down from there, a hell of a fall. I saw him hit the rock face on the way down and bounce out again. He must have hit just the once before stopping on the scree. We flew straight down, Chaz radioed for help. But he was a gonner, his head had taken the worse of it.”

We led him out into the schoolhouse we were using as an incident HQ.

I had a fag and the Guv joined me.

“Not much more to do then Guv, suicide.”

“Let’s not be hasty, something’s not jelling here, something’s giving me an uneasy feeling, it’s all too clear to be clear. I can’t help but think that what we have here is a “locked room case”.

“You what Guv?”

“Don’t study the classics do you Sam? Lets sleep on it and I’ll see you early tomorrow morning”

Well, he’s the Guv.

 The next morning I caught up with the Guv back at the schoolhouse. He led me into the headmasters office, the one he had commandeered for his own use. Seeing as school was out for the holidays it made sense. We used that for his office, I had one, well me and the rest of the guys, plus the few uniform we’d managed to grab for leg work, had one next door. We used the various classrooms for interviews, and had an incident room in the hall.

But when we got into his office, there was another guy already in there. Strange?

 The Guv didn’t speak to him, just nodded in his direction. So I took my cue from him and did the same. Another fly-boy by the look of him, taller than me, about six two, looks like a surf bum. Blonde dyed hair in dreads, scruffy flying suit, smoking a dog end in the office, something I’d not risk for fear of the Guv ripping my bits off. He was sprawled out over a comfy chair like a gangly teenager, a look of bemusement on his face.

“Ok, I’ve been thinking Sam,” says the Guv, still ignoring the other guy, “we’ve got three guys here as main suspects, all telling the same tale, and with the background detail confirmed, or a least not questioned, by half a dozen other witnesses. We’ve got one tale to work with, and it’s not one I like. We need someone with an analytical eye to take a look at the incident scene.”

“But we’ve had the forensics and uniform go over the ground with a fine toothcomb Guv. We’ve got everything down in forensics being catalogued and analysed. Dr Death has the body, and he’s given up a weekends drinking to look at it, it’s the test match this weekend too, and he’d normally have spent that down the cricket club drinking them out of port.”

” I wasn’t talking about where he landed, Sam, I was talking about up there in the air.”

I didn’t like the way this was going.

“So what Guv, you planning to bring a chopper in, to get some aerial photo’s and the like? That would raise the man hours and cost through the roof.”

“Nope, we need someone with a coppers eyes, ears and brain to get up there and see what it tastes like, get a coppers instincts up there, get some immediate perspective. I want a copper to see things as they were that day.”

I liked this even less, and I could see that tosser over in the chair quietly smirking away to himself, as if in on the joke.

“What’s the plan then Guv?”

“Sorry, I’m being rather rude here,” the Guv changes tack. “Sam, you haven’t been introduced to your new best friend; Innes.” Innes, half raises a hand, palm out, as if to say “how” like a Red Indian.

“Innes runs the local paragliding school”

I was wondering if it was to late to call in sick, obviously it was. Could I just throw up, feign something terminal and go off home, or should I just shoot myself now and get it over with?

“But Guv, it would take weeks to train a guy to fly, and we’ve not got anyone amongst the uniform who do it, not that I know of anyway, and the conditions around here are for experts only, that Thommo geezer said so. So it’s not possible is it?”

“Ever ‘eard of a tandem?” Innes speaks for the first time, some sort of Pommy accent, not posh like in the old films, but more your sort of “rural rustic” local dialect.

“Yes, they’re a bike for two peo….”

 

The reality hits home, my jaw hits the deck, my gonads try crawling back up where they came from. He’s not serious? One last-ditch attempt at saving my underwear; “You going flying then Guv?”

It sounded as weak as a kittens fart even as I said it.

“Me? No, I’ve been on the phone all morning, I had a hunch last night and I wanted to check a few things out, it’s proving fruitful too, so you get the fun trip, while I do all the leg work down here.”

But Guv, honestly I…”

“No time to talk now. Innes’ll fit you out and get you there. He reckons there’ll be a window of opportunity at about 10.00 am, so there’s no chance for you to go and change, get straight to it.” It sounded like we were going dancing.

“You get there, and keep that brain of yours alert.” With what he’s proposing I’m bloody sure my brain would be alert.

“Sam, you’re a good copper and this could be the making of you.” Yeah, or the death of me.

“I’ll be down here doing the boring leg work, think of it as a freebee on the works account.” He slaps my shoulder so hard it hurts.

How could I confess to the boss I was scared of heights, how could I ever hope for promotion if they knew that looking out of a second story window had me sweating like a pig, the thought of climbing a ladder had my underwear wet? And now he wants me to take a flight over mountains on a glorified parachute, with a grinning hippy for a pilot. I all but collapsed at the thought of it.

 

 

 

 

Innes caught me from staggering and making an arse of myself, or more of an arse of myself. He slung his arm around me and ushered me outside.

“Bricking it eh?” I’d not heard it called that before, but yes, I admitted to myself that if I wasn’t careful I would be filling my pants…

“No point in denying it, I suppose. Can you fall and hurt yourself?”

“Not with me as your pilot,’” he said.

“I was asking if you could fall, like in as a favour, in the next ten minutes preferably.”

His grin grew wider, “I’ll remember tha’ one” he chuckled.

 

He led me over to his truck, a ten year old Landrover. I was wondering if I could book him for illegal tyres, or something like that, and get uniform to tow it away with all his kit in it. He jumps in and clears a load of crap off the passenger seat. Gives me a tatty form on a clipboard to sign; “Just sign at the bottom, you can read it if you like, you’re probably better at all that legal jargon than I am.”

I read it, basically it told me that by signing this form I gave up any right to sue Innes, his partners, friends, family and/or pets for any damage that happened to me while I was in the same country as he was, even if he had blindfolded, tortured and gagged me, and thrown me off a cliff. “Pretty standard disclaimer then,” I said more jokingly than I would have believed possible.

After about half an hour of uphill driving, mostly through forest, with frightening views of how high we were getting appearing through the trees at unnervingly more frequent intervals, we rounded a bend in the track and pulled up onto to a large grassy flat area at the top of a ridge. Several windsocks hung limply, not stirring too much, a few pilots sat around doing nothing, smoking, sharing jokes.

I blurted; “Not enough wind by the look of it, shame that, but never mind, I don’t think the Guv had his ideas worked out proper like. You’ll give me a lift back down then? Thanks old son.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Innes turned and looked at me, a rather sad expression on his face; “M-a-a-n, this is goin t’be the best day of yer life, perfect conditions, and the best tandem pilot in the country to fly you. And you’re going to let your imagination, all your kiddy fears, your own self created bogey man, scare you out of the experience? Your going to create a fear, let it grow, take root, flourish like a weed, and cripple a big guy like you? It’s time to face yourself man, it’s not the hight, or the drop, or the chances of failure you’ve got to square up to, it’s the part of you you’ve allowed to grow out of control and dominate you. Time to piss or get off the pot big guy.”

He looked me square in the eye, daring me to punch him out for being right. I nearly cried. I felt like I had when I was a kid of about ten, and all my mates were jumping off the quay wall into the lake, and I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t the swimming part; I just couldn’t picture the falling through the air, and the slap of the water on impact. I’d gone to the edge several times, but each time just made the whole idea more terrifying. I’d had to crawl on my belly to the edge in the end, and everyone had laughed at me. I had run home crying, only to get a belt off my dad when he found out what had happened.

I shrugged, “Well after a psychoanalysis like that, how could I refuse to go? You a shrink in your spare time?” “Nope, but I trained as a clinical psychologist before I got into this lark, but I won’t charge your Guv any extra for that service.”

I suppose my surprise showed on my face, he just smiled back. “He’s a good bloke that Guv of yours, and he thinks you’ve got the makings of a decent detective too. But joost maybe he thinks there a right soft spot in you that needs working on, or some weakness that needs tacklin’.”

A statement rather than a question.

 

We hauled a huge rucksack out of the Landrover, far too big for just one man to carry. A couple of the other pilots came over and offered to help. Innes introduced me as Sam, “a copper, but an ok guy”, and didn’t let on why I was here, or why I looked like I was about to lose my lunch. I suppose they knew it was something to do with the death of the pilot, as I don’t suppose too many people turn up for a fun flight wearing a suit and tie, but they didn’t let on, and they included me in the banter.

A fun bunch, I suppose I came across as a bit square, and bit fuddy-duddy, a bit of an old fart, even though most of them were my own age. Innes gave me an old flying suit to wear, and I struggled into it. I just kept concentrating on what I was doing at the time. “Now I’m doing the zip up, now I’m putting my boots on, now I’m tying my laces, now I’m wondering why everyone is looking at me oddly?”

Innes came over; “you do know that talking to yourself is the first sign you’re going doolally, don’t you?”

Christ, I hadn’t even realised.

Innes took me to the front of the hill, to where it dropped away steeply, and pointed out over to the other side of the valley, to where the mountains proper started. “That’s where it all happened. Funnily enough I was up on here tha’ day, teaching a bunch of beginners. I couldn’t see owt of course, far too far away, but I’ve got the co-ordinates in my GPS, so I should find the spot.”

I had registered most of what he had said, but didn’t feel like contradicting his idea that this was a fit place to bring beginners. Beginners for christs sake? I could see houses down at the bottom of the hill, bloody miles down, I could just about see cattle in the paddocks, from up here they were just black and white dots on the brown pasture. On the road we had turned off to get on the track up here, there was a child’s toy lorry chugging along, too far away to even be heard.

We strolled back up the hill, the wind had strengthened a little, which was very noticeable to me at that point, but only slightly. Innes got the glider out, and a couple of the guys came over and spread it flat with him. So many strings on the bloody thing! I was sure they’d be a right mess, and take a day or four to sort out, but bloody Innes took hold of one end, shook the lot and they all lined up neatly. I’ve seen conjurors with less impressive acts than that.

“Ok, here’s a quick run through of what you need to know, I’d normally give someone a couple of hours tuition first as a minimum, but as you’re getting…” He smiled, then laughed, so I beat him to the punch-line, “…a crash course. Oh bloody ha, ha, ha, Innes.” I didn’t have the energy to be angry with him, it was all being used by my stomach which had decided to learn how to turn somersaults.

“Ok, Jeff, can you get Sam here into the harness, and flight check him for me, give him a tight set for the off, while I get set up?”

Jeff strolls over calmly, and why shouldn’t he be calm? Jeff’s a big guy, quiet type, doesn’t say much, but he’s got forearms like a tyre fitter on him, and you wouldn’t cross him with a team of Sherpas. God, I’m supposed to be a bloody copper! I’ve been in tight spots, faced down a gunman once, been in more bash-ups than I care to remember; yet I’m like a rag doll being manhandled about here, and what’s worse is I’m too scared to object, let alone resist. Even when he sticks his hands down between my legs and pulls up a strap I do nothing, under any other circumstances that would have earned him a week in hospital, eating through a tube. His silence is even more threatening to me in my heightened state, god what a mess.

A worse bit comes when Innes suddenly appears at my shoulder. And the clips to the paraglider are snapped into my harness.

Just for something to say at that point, I asked “Innes, how come your accent changes so bloody frequently? Half the time your sound, then you’re all bloody Scottish or whatever.”

“Dales Yorkshire if you must know,” he replied, “and if you knew the bloody heartache I went through trying to make myself understood when I first moved here, specially with the school relying on me as chief instructor, and what wi you bloody lot talking down yer nostrils half the time…”

I noticed the more uptight he got, the stronger his accent became, I decided not to find out how strong it was at full throttle.

“Right sunshine, move forward to the front off the hill, over to where we were just stood. Jeff, can you give us an anchor here mate?”

Jef caught hold of my harness straps none too gently, and walks backwards, pulling me down to the front of the hill. His face had gone from its normal impassivity to a broad grin, then he spoke for the first and only time; “I got bust for dope the other day, one measly joint, I got a fine too. I’m going to enjoy this.”

May god have mercy…

So we’re walking forward to the front of the hill, Jeff pulling at the straps and grinning, he’s enjoying this; he’s like a kid at a fairground. At the bit of the hill where it drops away more steeply, we stop. I catch my breath and try to think of any last minute things I have to say, but all that comes to mind at this point is how much I hate my Guvnor, and “I wonder if my will is up to date?”

I thought we were going to take a break but, just as I’m relaxing and trying not to show how relieved I am, there’s massive “whoomph!” from behind me. I try to turn to see what it is, but as I do the paraglider itself shoots overhead and Jeff pulls hard on my chest straps. (I’m not sure, but I’m pretty convinced that Innes kicked me in the arse at that point too) I stumble forward, staggering under Jeff’s pulling, and trying to keep to my feet, or at least keep my feet on the ground. Three or four steps and the battle is lost, my feet are no longer on the ground. Looking back at it, if I’ve have been thinking straight, I could have kicked Jeff in the head as we flew over him, an opportunity missed.

We’re twenty, thirty, forty, feet in the air before I see sense and shut my eyes. It’s a much more smooth ride than I would have felt possible, but I’m still in danger of losing my breakfast. Then Innes pipes up from behind; “Ok Sam, pop yersel’ back into the seat lad, may as well get comfortable, we’ve got a ride ahead.”

I wonder what the hell he means, but remembering how the other guys had flown, sat back in the harnesses, I realise what he wants. How though? I see the straps hanging above me and reach up to pull myself back on them, but Innes shouts; “Not that way Sam, not unless you want a very quick trip back to earth.” I stop. “Just lean back a little, take some weight on the seat with your hands if you need it, and you’ll slip in.” So I do, and he’s right, I just fall back into the harness. It’s comfortable here, and following instructions from Innes, I adjust the strapping a little so I’m snug. The great thing about being in this position is that I don’t have to look down.

So we’re flying around, and I’m just about getting used to it, and I must admit Innes’ calm voice, and his talking me through what he’s doing, is making the whole experience, if not enjoyable, then at least bearable. So I chip in: “How do we get from here to the ridge where it happened Innes, we’re a long way off and still a bit low?”

“I’m looking for a thermal mate, a big soft bubble of warm air, we’ll ride up in that then scoot over to the ridge. That lot were flying in very punchy thermals when it all went down, so I’ll be expecting some of that when we get over there.”

“Riding up in a bubble of hot air? Pull the other one Innes, I may be at your mercy up here, but I haven’t lost all me marbles!”

Me and my big mouth…

The next thing you know is Innes has heeled us over hard left, and we’re flying in a circle, and bugger me we’re getting higher. This is getting scary again. We’re circling, sometimes pulling figures-of-eight, and all the time, or at least each time I’m forced to look, the ground’s getting further away and the clouds are getting closer. I want down at this point, I want down on the ground, to go home, to write my resignation letter, and then to go to the office and punch the Governor on the nose.

“Good one,” comes Innes voice from behind me, “we made good gains there, let’s find the next one.” I don’t even have the heart to object any more. So we’re flying out, not gaining in hight, but the valley floor is dropping away under us. Then after about ten minutes we’re back into the circles and figure-of-eight again, and going up once more. Innes is whooping with joy behind me; “best day of the week so far!” he shouts.

“Not for me,” I think to myself, “not by a bloody long shot.”

So after a while we’re as high as we’ve been before, if not higher, and by now we’re way out past the middle of the valley, and the mountains are closer. I’m sure I can feel the air getting colder, or maybe I just wasn’t shaking with fear so much.

I’m also almost used to the constant turns and the rising up in the air. I’m close to, if not enjoying then at least accepting, the ride, when Innes goes and spoils it all over again; “We’re getting near to the mountains now. The thermals will get a bit more punch over here, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Thanks Innes.

And he’s true to his word. We’re flying about, heading towards the mountains, which we should arrive at, (I didn’t dare say “hit,”) about three quarters up, when all of a sudden we’re thrown backwards and up. It felt like god had decided to use the glider as a football and given us a good punting. My stomach hit the back of my throat, and all the good thoughts I’d been having went out of my head in one big scream.

“Hey hey, good one,” Innes shouts above my scream, “couple more like that and we’ll be doing well.” Obviously a use for the term “doing well” that I hadn’t considered before.

This continued for at least half an hour, and every time the shock of getting kicked back, or sometimes sinking like a stone, got less frightening, another thermal would come through which seemed to be trying to outdo all the others. Of course Innes behind me was whooping and yelling like the kid who’s been given a fifty-dollar bill in a lolly shop.

I was barely hanging onto my sanity, when he said; “that would be it, just down there, you can see all of the markers and stuff that your boys left down there where he hit.”

Even he seemed sobered up by the thought.

I risked a look down. I could see the markers, the tape, the detritus of the crime scene stretched out on the rocks below me. “He was a bit higher when it all happened,” vouches Innes. I look down, scree, rocks, dirt, police tape, a few bits of police stuff, desolation. Mountains stretch off away from us, nothing special here, nothing to cause great angst. Nothing, a dead nowhere.

 

So why at this place, of all points on the compass? I didn’t have a clue. What had that tosser Thomas said? ““Then he killed himself. He took armfuls of his risers and hauled his weight up on them. He gathered handfuls of lines and hauled them in.”

Ok, so if he was going to top himself, here’s a place to do it, but why here, and why that way? It didn’t make sense, there would have been easier and less painful ways out, and why bother going along with the competition flying to this extent? If he’d have wanted to make a point with his suicide, he could have killed himself at the take off, and got a better crowd.

I leaned back in the harness; “Hey Innes, could he have done it by accident? Is there anyway he could have made a balls up, trying to do something else say?”

“Nah mate, not a chance. Your boss told me what Thomas had said, and there’s not a pilot worth his ticket who would do any of that, accidentally or not. It’s a guaranteed one way ticket.”

“What would it have resulted in?”

“Well, seeing as you’re asking.”

My brain had just managed to register the complete stupidity of what I had just asked, when the world went into freefall. I may have screamed. I certainly damn near filled my pants.

After what seemed like an hour, but was probably only a few seconds, there was a crack above us, and the glider dived forward until it was almost level with me, then backwards, then resumed flying as if nothing had happened.

“And that was a minor, controlled, stall. If what your boss says is true, he would have had a catastrophic failure of his glider. Oh, and he never even threw his reserve either. Not that that would have made much difference.”

 

“An explanation would have been sufficient,” I wanted to say, but I’d bit my tongue, not through choice, and couldn’t speak at that point.

So Innes flew us back. We didn’t get right back to the hill, but Jeff and some of the others met us in the valley, and drove us back to the school.

Innes walked with me into the school house. “Your boss says that he’ll pay my going rate for your flight, so there’s no time like the present.”

“Do I give you my dry cleaning bill, or him?” I asked.

Innes grinned, “You’re alright mate, you’ll do a treat. You’re not afraid to be honest about your fears. That’s the only way of safely beating them.”

“Thanks a bunch Professor Freud,” I replied as I shook his hand, more as a thanks for not killing us both, rather than out of any pleasure at the flight, I may add.

I found the governor sat at his desk. “Well,” he asks, “any gems of insight? Some of us have been doing real police work while you’ve been out enjoying yourself.”

So I told him, I told him that this all boils down to fear, that this whole sorry business was built around fear, once we found the cause of the fear, we had the perpetrator.

“Funny you should say that,” he said, smiling to himself, as if we’d shared a joke, “that just about tallies with all I’ve found out.

The next morning we met bright and early at the school house. A uniform brought in the three guys. Innes, was sat at the back of the room, smoking a dog end, and looking for all the world like he’d been invited to the party. Which I’m assuming he must have, seeing as the Guv didn’t chuck him out.

“Right” says the Guv, “I hope you all slept well, clear conscious and all that?”

“Lets get started. I wanted you all here to make sure we had everything straight from the off. No mix ups, no back stabbing.”

He turned, sharply, “Mark, you were screwing his girlfriend, yes? I’ll take that sullen nod as affirmation then. So you had a reason to get rid of him, didn’t you? Good lay was she?”

The guv lets the silence stretch on, and on, and on, until I’m almost ready to answer for Mark, just to break it. “No, not that good actually”, he answers at last, “truth be told, I was getting a bit fed up with her, she was full of mad schemes, and hair brained ideas. All ups and downs, a bit demanding sexually too.”

The Guv lets that last remark go without even a hint of a snipe at Mark’s sexual ability, must be going for the kill.

“Charlie, he took the sponsorship money from you, and rubbed your nose in it. He even messed up your pretty good looks,” he said this with a smile. “So was that enough to want him out of the way? I mean to say, he even took the mick out of you by getting you to earn sponsorship money for diabetes research, then skins you out of your living money. And there’s you swatting up on diabetes and emergency treatment and all that to help out, and he’s kicking you in the teeth for it. Did you want him dead Chaz?”

“No, not me,” Chas blurts out, unable to control the fear in his voice. “I disliked him, I thought he was a typical spoiled bastard. But the way I looked at it, I only had to put up with him at comps, he had to live with himself 24/7. He’d have got what he deserved eventually.”

He looked up, as if shocked at what he had just said. “But I didn’t have anything to do with it!,” almost shouting that out this time.

“You then Thomas, you want him dead?”

The Guv switching his focus between them, like flicking on and off a light, jumping the ideas, playing them off. All of them could hear what he had to say, and what he said to one was firing ideas in the others, and raising fears too I hope.

“Nope.” Nothing more. Nope full stop.

“Come on Thomas, you must have more to say than that, after all it was you that threatened him? It was you he was scared of,” the Guv gives me a nod, just a slight one, so I chip in.

“It was you that clued us into his character after all, it was you that told us about “his little freak outs” at college.”

“And?,” he looks at me, his mouth hanging open now, not believing that we were going to use that little slip of the tongue.

“And indeed,” I say, “you were the one who knew about his, what do they call them? Come on mate, you’re the educated one, you knew all about them, what’s the proper term?”

Unexpectedly, Mark chips in this time; “Panic attacks, profound panic attacks, normally caused for him by his extreme case of arachnephobia.”

“What the hell has that to do with anything?,” asks Thomas. Then the three of them start banging their fists on the desk, standing up, and shouting questions all at once. Two of the uniform lot rush into the room, but the Guv waves them out.

“If you three will shut up a second, allow me to paint you a picture,” he settles back in his chair.

“Here we have a man, a bloody unpleasant man. He lives off money he hasn’t earned, and flaunts it. He has no mercy in his chosen sport, and will even take his mates sponsorship money, take away their livelihood in effect, on a whim. He has a girlfriend, one who was working in the care field, but who he has now made reliant on him for her lifestyle. He is rough with her, more rough than we initially knew, in fact he has on occasion hit her, and to use the psycho-babble term, is emotionally aggressive, violent even, towards her. She in turn turns to someone who is more caring, or at least caring enough to give her one without any strings attached.”

He has them in the palm of his hands now, their attention is riveted to the storyteller in the chair.

“So we have a very unlikeable man, one who’s tread on enough toes for any number of people to wish him ill. Then what do we find? One day he’s out flying in a competition, suddenly he does something, something so totally out of character, so unbelievably dangerous, that we can only think it must have been suicide….

…But”

He leaves the word hanging in the air, hanging like a sentenced man.

“But what do we find when we get our friends at forensic involved? Well we find that he was dehydrated. Nothing unusual in that, but we also find his drinks bottle had been tampered with, the fluid adulterated from “sports drink” to include just a little something to keep up the dehydration from the beers the night before. And we all know that dehydration isn’t good for diabetics, is it? We find that his medical kit contains a syringe of insulin as expected, but that the insulin trace we found in it was watered down to a third of it’s normal strength. So here we have a man, still suffering a hangover from the previous night, who has been running on watered down fuel, a recipe for diaster, if you’ll excuse my mixed metaphor.”

“Simile, it’s a simile not a metaphor.” Thomas chips in, obviously wanting to exert some degree of influence on the way this was going.

“I bow to your superior erudition, “ replied the boss, the sarcasm dripping like rancid butter.

“But, and here’s the clever bit, what is the icing on the cake? Well now, as Mark so eloquently put it earlier, “panic attacks caused by his extreme case of arachnephobia” but how could you set one of those off? Well now, what if Howard needed a second needle, seeing as how his first jab somehow strangely failed to do the full job, and as he was feeling so rough he thought it best to take another dose?”

“He kept a second set of works in his instrument pack, in a pocket that rested on his lap.” Chaz this time, yet again speaking before thinking.

 

“Oh yes,” says the Guv, “the second set of “works”, needles and syringes and what not. Funnily enough we checked that pocket, after we got some information. It seems he’d been using it to house several species of spider, several large, hairy, nasty looking blighters. The lab found evidence of at least six of them, and one dead one too. Rather a strange thing to keep there for a man with such a pronounced fear of spiders.”

“So here we have a man, flying at the edge of his abilities, running out of sugar, running low on fluids, not in the best of states to be flying full stop, and when he goes for his emergency supply of insulin what does he find? The one thing he fears most.”

“It was virtually guaranteed he’d panic, and virtually guaranteed he’d end up dead. But who murdered him, who wanted him dead? Who was jealous of his money? Who wanted to end the relationship he was in? Who knew enough about his diabetes, and the effects of diabetes on the brain? Who knew his fears? Only one person could bring all those factors together gentlemen, only one person had the motive and the means to pull this off.”

He paused, before delivering his punch-line.

“His girlfriend Jackie Conyers fitted all the motives, means, and reasons, and a few more that we wont share with you out of confidentiality. We arrested her last evening, you’re free to go. Please leave your contact details for the coming weeks with the constable at the door, and don’t go too far without letting us know. We may need more information off you.”

They sat stunned, not knowing whether to cry, or laugh, or sue. Then all of them rose and turned to leave. Thomas turned back and shook the Guv by the hand, then left without saying anything.

A slow hand clap came from the back of the room, and Innes walked forward; “Fair do’s mate, you played them like tha’ were tickling trout, ever thought of acting?” The Guv grinned, and shoo’d him away. But Innes stopped where he was; “Right then, I’ll do you two a deal on lessons, I’m cutting my own throat here, but I’ll do you both my “full ticket” course for the price of one person, what you say?”

“Get stuffed Innes,” for the first time ever, me and the Guv spoke in unison.