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 Jim, 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 Jim, 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?"

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 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?"

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.

"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?"

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, 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. 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.

"You then Thomas, you want him dead?" The Guv switching his focus between them, like flicking on and off switches, jumping the ideas. 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.

"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.

"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.

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.

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

"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.

"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."

He paused, before delivering his punch-line.

They sat stunned, not knowing whether to crap or get of the pot. 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.