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the Accidents Branch; I had had a good bit to do with him at Boscombe Down on various occasions that had not been great fun.
    I said, “You remember that Reindeer that flew into the hill in Labrador? Tell me, sir—could you let me know how many hours it had done before the crash?”
    He said he’d look into the matter and let me know.
    He came back on the telephone twenty minutes later. “That figure that you asked about,” he remarked. “The aircraft had done thirteen hundred and eighty-three hours, twenty minutes, up to the time of the take-off from Heath Row.”
    I said quietly, “Add about nine hours for the Atlantic crossing?”
    “About that, I should think.”
    “And say another hour from Goose on to the scene of the accident?”
    “I should think so.”
    “Making 1,393 hours in all?”
    “That’s about right.”
    I put down the telephone, feeling rather sick. It was my job to stop that sort of thing from happening.

2
    THAT AFTERNOON THE Director was in a conference; I was not able to get in to see him until six o’clock in the evening. He was tidying up his papers to go home, and I don’t think he was very glad to see me at that time. “Well, Scott, what is it?” he inquired.
    “It’s that Reindeer tail,” I said. “Rather a disconcerting fact came to light this afternoon.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You remember the prototype, the one that flew into the hill in Labrador or somewhere?” He nodded. “Well, it had done
1,393
hours up to the moment of the crash.”
    “Oh.… Mr. Honey’s figure for tail failure was 1,440 hours, wasn’t it?”
    “That’s right, sir.” I hesitated. “The figures seem so close I thought you ought to know at once.”
    “Quite right,” he said. “But, Scott, in fact that machine
did
come to grief by flying into a hill, didn’t it?”
    I hesitated again. “Well—that’s what we’re told, sir, and that’s what everybody seems to have accepted. The story as I’ve heard it is that it hit the top of a mountain and fell down into a forest. Nobody saw it happen and everyone in it was killed. So there’s no direct evidence about what happened to it.”
    “Marks on the ground, to show where it hit first,” he said.
    “Oh yes,” I said. “I’ve no doubt that there was that sort of evidence. But if the tail came off at twenty thousand feet it would have to fall somewhere.”
    “Is that what you think?”
    I was silent for a moment. “I don’t know,” I said at last. “I only know that this figure of 1,393 hours, the time that this machine did till it crashed—that figure’s within three per cent of Mr. Honey’s estimate of the time to failure of the tail. I can’t check that estimate and Sir Phillip Dolbear won’t.” I paused in bitter thought, and then I said, “And that three per cent is on the wrong side. It would be.”
    “It certainly is a coincidence,” he said. “Rather a disturbing one.” We stood in silence for a minute. “Well,” he said,“clearly the best thing is to establish what actually did happen to that aircraft. If it was a tailplane failure, then there must be some evidence of it in the wreckage. I should make a careful check of that upon the basis of Honey’s theory. After all, a fatigue fracture is quite easily recognisable.”
    I nodded. “I was thinking on those lines, sir. I think the first thing is to get hold of the accident report and talk to the people who prepared it. If you agree I’d like to go to London in the morning and see Ferguson, and go with him to see Group-Captain Fisher in the Accidents Branch.”
    “Will you take Honey with you?”
    “Not unless you want me to particularly,” I replied. “He isn’t very good in conference, and I’d really rather that he stayed down here and got on with the job of verifying his theory. What I’d like to do would be to see him this evening and tell him that you’ve authorised the trial upon the Reindeer tail to go ahead by day and night from now on. I