The Chinese Assassin (23 page)

Stil
l
man turned
his back suddenly
on
his audience
and
stood staring pointlessly at
the
brightness of
the
blank screen. He took
an
audible deep
breath
in the
darkness and
this brought on a sudden fit of coughing. When he
had
recovered he spoke more quietly than before,
still
without
turning
round.
‘To
cut a long
story short
gentlemen, I
was
subjected to a considerable degree of physical coercion
and taken
forcibly to the scene of the crash. I arrived there on the fourth
day
after it happened, September seventeenth.’

He swung round suddenly and paced with new resolution to the end of the dais where
Scholefield
was
seated. He snapped his
fingers and
a new slide appeared on the screen showing a sheet of photographic paper covered
with
a graph grid. Four parallel lines were
traced
evenly across
it. Stillman
turned to face his audience again
and
cleared his throat.
‘This,
gentlemen,’ be
said
softly, ‘is
the read-out
from the Trident’s black b
o
x.’

The Group members
stared
in uncomprehending silence at the
screen.

‘It’s great,
just
great, Doctor Stil
l
man.’ Harvey Ketterman’s voice
carried
cheerfully from the back of the room. ‘The trouble is that all of us here may well be staring at the most
vital
piece of evidence since they took Cain’s fingerprints off that asses’ jaw-bone
east
of Eden—but
it
might
just
as well be an
extract
from my granny’s pearl
and
plain
knitting book
for all I can tell.’

The American’s lightness broke the tension and there
was a rattle
of relieved laughter from around
the
darkened
room. Stillman
picked up a long pointer
and
moved
briskly
to the side of the screen.
‘These
four lines are
traces
from the four channels of the flight recorder.’ He pointed quickly to each
line in turn.
‘The first records
the
aircraft’s heading, whether it’s flying north, south, east or west. The second shows
its altitude, the third
shows when the machine
was
yawing or pitching—that’s backwards and forwards
and
from side to side,
like
this.’ He stuck out his arms stif
f
ly
to make aeroplane wings
and
swung
hi
s body to illustrate the movements.
‘And
the fourth records negative G. That shows if
the
plane suddenly drops or
goes
up in
turbulence.’

He turned and looked round over his shoulder at his audience. ‘The,
t
im
e
scale is along
the
bottom
and
the
box
operates, remember, all the while the
aircraft
is flying. If
these
lines all
run
smoothly you can
say with certainty
the plane,
was
travelling in a
normal
way. If it
starts
to do
anything
strange
these lines will tell
you exactly what it
was and
help you work out afterwards why it happened.’

‘These four lines of yours all look pretty steady to me, Doctor
Stil
lm
an,’ said
Ketterman slowly from the back of the
room,
‘for an aircraft that’s
supposed
to have come to a violent end.’

‘Precisely.’
Stil
l
man
turned back to the
screen and raised his pointer again. ‘You can see that the
top
line
is the only one
that gives us variable information. It indicates that there was a steady
1800
change of heading from north-west to south-east not long before the lines cease. That proves conclusively the pilot turned and was flying back the way he’d come. But other lines show the altitude didn’t change, there was no rising or falling from turbulence and no pitching or yawing.’ Stillman slid his pointer back and forth across the screen, illustrating his points by tracing each line in turn. ‘All four lines stop dead here abruptly—with the plane in a normal posture.’ He pointed to the ends of the lines again. ‘There’s just these little tick—like kicks.’

He remained silent and continued to hold the pointer against the screen for several seconds, as though anticipating that somebody would prompt him with an obvious question. When nobody spoke he laid the pointer aside and turned round slowly like a schoolmaster exasperated by dull pupils. ‘If the Trident, as Chou En-lai claimed, had come in to land relatively successfully, at least as far as getting onto the ground was concerned, we would have expected, wouldn’t we, gentlemen, to have found that altitude line descending gradually ,to zero? And the other lines would have gone on recording the changing postures of the aircraft during the descent, until the very moment
it
broke up on the ground. Wouldn’t they?’

When nobody offered a response, he stopped and signalled for the light to be switched on. He blinked in the sudden glare from the neon tubes and looked round the room. ‘Does nobody know then what these straight lines prove?’
He
brushed perfunctorily at the grey ash that had gathered on the front of his jacket. Still nobody responded. He looked up slowly and stared out above their heads again. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. It proves that the black box stopped operating suddenly and unexpectedly when the Trident was flying perfectly level at four hundred feet. That means all its electrics were destroyed in a single instant during normal f
l
ight.’ He paused and spoke very slowly for effect. ‘Only one thing is capable of causing that.’

He turned and walked across the dais to where the discoloured lump of foamed plastic was lying in front of Yang. He picked
it
up and held
it
out at arm’s length. ‘And that’s where this fellow comes in. This shapeless and r
a
ther ugly modem artifact, gentlemen, contains conclusive pro
of
of the crime.’ Still holding
it
he walked
back to his chair
and bent down and opened the battered
leather briefcase that
lay
on the
floor.
When he stood up he was holding a
thick bunch
of long
steel knitting needles
in his other
fist.

‘Though I
say this myself gentlemen,
not
everybody
would have appreciated the
significance
of
this innocent-looking
object. But our “friends” in the KGB’—he stopped
and
waved the
needles in
the air
stressing
the word
heavily—’our
“friends” were luckier than they knew when they chose to
take
me on
their special
Mongolian package tour. In my youth I
developed a special
knowledge of
cushions
in my work at the forensic
l
aboratories
of the Royal Armament
Research and
Development
Establishment.
Some of you probably know
that’s a section
of the Ministry of Defence that provides certain
special services
to other government
departments.
I
became a specialist there,
gentlemen, in the study of ordinary house
cushions
that certain citizens were in
the
habit of wrapping round
safes
before
ope
ni
ng
them violently
and
illegally without keys..’ He lifted his head
and
his discoloured teeth appeared suddenly in another brief smile towards
the
ceiling. ‘Li
fe
is
full
of strange coincidences, isn’t it? Out there on the steppes of Mongolia I
nipped
over this object
and saw
the same
kind
of marks I’d
first
seen
forty
years
ago in cushions taken from a broken bank
vault in the Mile End
Road.’

He placed
the
slab of foamed plastic on the lectern in front of
him and
began inserting the long steel
knitting needles
one by one into holes in
its
surface. ‘This
was a back-rest cushion in
the Trident. I picked it up a
good half mile
from the site of the
main
wreckage. It wasn’t burned
like
everything
else.’
He bent closer
peering
shortsightedly at the plastic to
find
the entry points for the needles. ‘The
first thing
I noticed were these
holes.
The human
hairs
I
mentioned earlier showed
up in another
cushion
from a facing seat whe
n
I got all the
stuff back
to
the laboratory
they’d set up for me in
the
Academy of
Sciences in
Moscow.’

The
two dozen
or so
steel
needles jutting out from the surface bad
begun
to form a funnel-shaped cluster
tapering
to a point
like
the bare poles of an Indian wigwam. ‘But as
soon as I stuck
these ordinary Russian
knitting needles into
the holes, I knew.’ He picked up the
cushion, turned
it over
and
held it
out towards
his audience
in
both hands. The cluster of needles now hung down from its underside, converging towards a common point beneath the cushion. ‘The seat-back you see was reclined to its maximum. These holes were clearly made by tiny objects passing upwards through the cushion. You only have to trace their trajectories to see that all the little objects, whatever they were, radiated from a common source underneath the seat-back.’ He paused and peered triumphantly round the room. ‘Are you beginning to get a glimmer, gentlemen, of what that common source might have been?’

He was still holding the cushion and its hanging cone of needles in front of him, when there was a quiet knock on the door. Because Stillman’s demonstration had engaged the rapt attention of everybody in the room, nobody moved at first. The knock was repeated and Nina, after a questioning glance towards Scholefie
ld
, got up and opened
it.

The aged porter from the Institute’s front reception desk upstairs stood in the doorway holding an expensive—looking brown leather document case. He peered round the room until his eyes lighted on Scholefield. ‘Pardon me, Sir, but a Chinese gentlemen asked me to deliver this immediately to a Mr. Yang. Some reports for distribution to the meeting, apparently.’