BIGGLES – AIR ACE

by Captain W. E. Johns

(Page references are for the paperback first edition, followed by the hardback second).

X. SIMPLE ARITHMETIC (Pages 157 – 162/Pages 150 – 155)

This ‘Air Police’ story was originally published in “The Boy’s Own Paper” dated December 1955. It was overlooked when short stories were collected and only finally collected in a book when Norman Wright gathered the “uncollected stories” into ‘Biggles – Air Ace’ in May 1999. I suspect the reason it was never collected before was because the story is so short. In my opinion, this is the shortest of all the Biggles Air Police stories.

“You seem to be in a mess. What’s it all about?” Police pilot “Ginger” Hebbethwaite put the question to Biggles, whose desk was littered with papers. Biggles explains that he is “fiddling with mathematics wrapped around five empty petrol cans”. About three months ago, Inspector Gaskin was working on a case where a man named Norman Oliver Birch was thought to have gone down in the sea in an Auster Autocrat belonging to the Stanton Flying Club. He was a bank clerk and £20,000 in notes and travellers’ cheques had vanished at the same time. The numbers of the notes and cheques were known and when none of them turned up in circulation, it looked as if Birch had “gone down in the drink taking his loot with him to Davy Jones” (Davy Jones’s locker is a metaphor for the bottom of the sea). Marcel Brissac of the French Surete has recently been in touch to ask Biggles if he might know why five empty British two-gallon petrol cans might have been found in a ditch on a French farmer’s land. Biggles had remembered the case of Birch and called for the file. Birch spoke French fluently and his gardener remembered that there had been five two-gallon petrol cans in his Birch’s garage that had also disappeared when he did so. Biggles has been drawing circles on a map, showing the 440 miles that Birch could have flown without re-fueling and then marking where the cans were found. Drawing a straight line between the Stanton Flying Club airfield and the cans gives the line of flight. If he continued on the same line he would end up in “the sparsely populated area of France known as the Cevennes, sometimes called the Massif Centrale. The place is an enormous plateau of rock, three or four thousand feet high, split into sections by gorges with vertical sides, some fifteen hundred to two thousand feet deep”. The missing aircraft might be hidden in a gorge there. Biggles contacts Marcel to tell him where the plane that disposed of the petrol cans might be found. A week later, a ‘phone call from Marcel confirms that a plane crash can been seen at the bottom of a chasm in the suggested area. Biggles says they will go along straight away. The following afternoon, they arrive at the lip of a “terrifying chasm” where a party of men, police and civilians, are lowering a volunteer down. The volunteer returns white faced and says “He is there”. The pilot, Birch, is still dead in his seat. His passport and aircraft log-book have been recovered together with a rucksack containing packets of new £1 notes. Biggles says that Birch “boobed his landing in the dark and went over the edge”. “Can I leave you to clear up this mess, Marcel?” “Of course,” is the answer. Biggles says they will get home and he takes the rucksack with him.