It was magnificent, I had to admit. I could have hit her, but it was magnificent.

"Nothing, Miss Ross. Just nothing at all." By the time I had pulled on my parka, gloves, goggles and mask she was fully dressed, staring at me as I climbed up the steps and out through the hatch.

The snow was falling quite heavily now, gusting in swirling ghostly flumes through the pale beam of my torch: it seemed to vanish as it hit the ground, freezing as it touched, or scudding smoke-like over the frozen surface with a thin rustling sound. But the wind was at my back, the bamboo markers stretched out in a dead straight line ahead, never less than two of them in the beam of my torch, and I had reached the crashed plane in five or six minutes.

I jumped for the windscreen, hooked my fingers over the sill, hauled myself up with some difficulty and wriggled my way into the control cabin. A moment later I was in the stewardess's pantry, flashing my torch around.

On the after bulkhead was a big refrigerator, with a small hinged table in front of it, and at the far end, under the window, a hinged box covered over what might have been a heating unit or sink or both. I didn't bother investigating, I wasn't interested. What I was interested in was the for'ard bulkhead, and I examined it carefully. It was given up entirely to the small closed doors of little metal lockers let in flush to the wall—food containers, probably—and there wasn't a single metal projection in the entire wall, nothing that could possibly account for the wound in the stewardess's back. And if she had been here at the moment of impact, that was the wall she must have been flung against. The inference was inescapable—she must have been elsewhere at the time of the crash. I remembered now, with chagrin, that I hadn't even bothered to see whether or not she was conscious when we'd first found her lying on the floor.

Across the passage in the radio compartment I found what I was looking for almost immediately—I'd a pretty good idea where to look. The thin sheet metal at the top left-hand corner of the radio cabinet was bent almost half an inch out of true: and it didn't require any microscope to locate or forensic expert to guess at the significance of the small dark stain and the fibres of navy blue cloth clinging to the corner of the smashed set. I looked inside the set itself, and now that I had time to spare it more than a fleeting glance it was abundantly clear to me that the wrenching away of the face-plate didn't even begin to account for the damage that had been done to the set: it had been systematically and thoroughly wrecked.

If ever there was a time when my thoughts should have been racing it was then, but the plain truth is that they weren't. It was abominably cold inside the chilled metal of that dead plane, and my mind was sluggish, but even so I knew that this time I couldn't be wrong about what had happened. I could see now why the second officer had sent out no distress messages. I could see now why he had almost certainly been sending out his regular 'on route—on time' checks to base. Poor devil, he hadn't had much option -not with the stewardess sitting there with a gun on him. It must have been a gun. It was no consolation at all that the crash had caught her unprepared.

A gun! Gradually, ever so gradually, in infuriating slow-motion process, thoughts were beginning to click into place in my numbed mind. Whoever had landed that plane, landed it so skilfully into the blinding maelstrom of last night's blizzard, it hadn't been a dead man. I straightened, walked forward into the control cabin and shone my torch on the dead captain of the plane. As I'd noticed when I'd first seen him, he appeared to be completely unmarked, and I don't know whether it was some unconscious process of logical reasoning or some strange instinct that made me right away lift up the crackling ice-stiffened tunic j acket enough to see the black powder-ringed bullet hole in the middle of the spine. I had been expecting it, I had been uncannily certain that I would find such a hole, and find it just there: but my mouth was suddenly dry, dry as if I had drunk nothing for days, and my heart was thudding heavily in my chest.

I lowered the jacket, pulled it down into position, turned away and walked slowly towards the rear of the plane. The man the stewardess had called Colonel Harrison was still sitting as I had left him, propped up stiffly in a comer, as stiffly as he would remain there for heaven only knew how many frozen centuries to come.

The jacket was fastened by a central button. I undid it, saw nothing except a curious thin leather strap running across the chest, undid a shirt button, another, and there it was, the same deadly little hole, the same powder-ringed evidence of point-blank firing staining the whiteness of the singlet. But in this case the powder marks were concentrated on the upper part of the ring, showing that the pistol had been-directed in a slightly downward angle. On a hunch, but still like a man in a dream, I eased him forward, and there, less like a bullet hole in the jacket than an inconsequential rip one might easily overlook, was the point of exit, matched by an equally tiny tear in the padding of the upholstered seat behind. At the time, that carried no special significance for me. Heaven knows that I was in no mental frame of mind at the moment, anyway, to figure anything out. I was like an automaton, the movements of which were controlled by something outside me. I felt nothing at the time, not even horror at the hideous thought that the man's neck might well have been cold-bloodedly broken after death to conceal its true cause.

The leather strap across the man's chest led to a felt-covered holster under the arm. I took out the little dark snub-nosed automatic, pressed the release switch and shook the magazine out from the base of the grip. It was an eight shot clip, full. I replaced it and shoved the gun into the inside pocket of my parka.

There were two inside breast pockets in the jacket. The left-hand one held another clip of ammunition, in a thin leather case. This, too, I pocketed. The right-hand pocket held only passport and wallet. The picture on the passport matched the face, and it was made out in the name of Lieut.-Colonel Robert Harrison. The wallet contained little of interest—a couple of letters with an Oxford postmark, obviously from his wife, British and American currency notes and a long cutting that had been torn from the top half of a page of the New York Herald Tribune, with a mid-September date-mark, just over two months previously.

For a brief moment I studied this in the light of my torch. There was a small, indistinct picture of a railway smash of some kind, showing carriages on a bridge that ended abruptly over a stretch of water, with boats beneath, and I realised that it was some kind of follow-up story on the shocking train disaster of about that time when a loaded commuters' train at Elizabeth, New Jersey, had plunged out over an opened span of the bridge into the waters of Newark Bay. I was in no mood for reading it then, but I had the obscure, unreasonable idea that it might be in some way important.

I folded it carefully, lifted up my parka and thrust the paper into my inside pocket, along with the gun and the spare ammo clip. It was just at that moment that I heard the sharp metallic sound coming from the front of the dark and deserted plane.