But in my breast and in my brain,

dreadful disaster in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where a commuters' train had plunged through an opened span of the bridge into the waters of Newark Bay, drowning dozens of the passengers aboard, I already knew from the quick glance I had had at the cutting in the plane. But, as I had also gathered in the plane, this was a follow-up story and the reporter wasted little time on the appalling details: his interest lay in another direction entirely. It was 'reliably reported', he said, that the train had been carrying an army courier: that he was one of the forty who had died: and that he had been carrying a 'super-secret guided missile mechanism'. That was all the cutting said, but it was enough, and more than enough. It didn't say whether the mechanism had been lost or not, it most certainly never even suggested that there was any connection between the presence of the mechanism aboard the train and the reasons for the crash. It didn't have to, the cheek-by-jowl contiguity of the two items made the reader's own horrifying conclusions inevitable. From the silence that stretched out after I had read out the last words, I knew that the others were lost in the same staggering speculations as myself. It was Jackstraw who finally broke this silence, his voice abnormally matter-of-fact. "Well, we know now why you were knocked on the head." "Knocked on the head?" Zagero took him up. "What do you" "Night before last," I interrupted. "When I told you I'd walked into a lamp-post." I told them all about the finding of the cutting and its subsequent loss. "Would it have made all that difference even if you had read it?" Zagero asked. "I mean" "Of course it would!" My voice was harsh, savage almost, but the savagery was directed against myself, my own stupidity. "The fact of finding a cutting about a fatal crash which occurred in strange unexplained circumstances on the person of a man who had just died in a fatal crash in equally strange and unexplained circumstances would have made even me suspicious. When I heard from Hillcrest that something highly secret was being carried aboard the plane, the parallel would have been even more glaringly obvious, especially as the cutting was found on the manan army officerwho was almost certainly the courier, the carrier of this secret. Anything larger than a match-box in the luggage the passengers were carrying I'd have ripped open and examined, radio and tape-recorder included. reports on digital camera Smallwood knew it. He didn't know what was in the cutting, but heor Corazziniknew it was a cutting and they were taking no chances at all." "You weren't to know this," Levin said soothingly. "It's not your fault" "Of course it's my fault," I said wearily. "All my fault. I don't even know how to start apologising. You first, Zagero, I suppose, you and Solly Levin, for tying you" "Forget it." Zagero was curt but friendly. "We're just as bad -all of us. All the facts that mattered were as available to us as they were to youand we made no better use of them: less, if anything." In the tiny glow from the torch I could see him shaking his head. "Lordy, lordy, but ain't it easy to understand everything when it's too late. Easy enough to understand now why we crashed in the middle of nowherethe plane captain must have been in on it, he must have known that the mechanism was aboard and thought it important enough to put the passengers' lives second and crash-land in the middle of the ice-plateau, where Smallwood could never reach the coast." "Not knowing that I was there waiting to oblige Smallwood," I said bitterly. I shook my head in turn. "It's obvious now, all too obvious. How Corazzini damaged his hand in the shacknot by saving or trying to save the radio but by accelerating its fall after he'd pushed the hinges in. How and why he lost the toss and had to sleep on the floorto give him a chance to smother the second officer." "What you might call a good loser," Zagero said grimly. Then he gave a short laugh. "Remember when we buried the second officer? I wonder what Smallwood's burial service would have sounded like if we'd really been close enough to hear?" "I missed that," I nodded. "I missed the suggestion you made inside the plane that we should bury the murdered menif you had been guilty you'd never have dared make that suggestion for then the way these men died would almost certainly have been discovered." "You missed it," Zagero said feelingly. "How about me/said it, and I never even thought of it till now." He snorted. "Boy, am I disgusted with myself. As far as I can see the only thing I knew that you didn't was that Corazzini clouted our friend Smallwood back in the pass there simply in order to throw suspicion on me: but, then, I knew that even trying to tell you that would have been crazy." There was a long moment's silence, while we listened to the rise and fall of the Citroen's exhaust