Chapter Fifteen

I owed my life to Billy’s greed. He was still hungry, still unsatisfied, and he shook his head to Yardman’s request. Seeing the way Yardman delicately deferred to Billy’s wishes it struck me that Rous-Wheeler’s simile of a tiger on a leash might not be too far off the mark. In any case for the first time I was definitely glad of Billy’s lust to spill my blue blood ounce by ounce, as I really was most averse to being shot down on the spot; and I acknowledged that I already had him to thank that I was still breathing at all. If I’d been anyone but who I was I would have died with the crew.

We walked back up the runway, I in front, the other four behind. I could hear Rous-Wheeler puffing, the only one not physically fit. Fit. It was only yesterday, I thought incredulously, that I rode in the Gold Cup.

The plane was a faintly lit shape to the left of the end of the runway. A hundred yards short of it Yardman said, ‘Turn left, dear boy. That’s it. Walk straight on. You will see a building. Go in.’

There was, in fact, a building. A large one. It resembled an outsize prefabricated garage, made of asbestos sheets on a metal frame. The door was ajar and rimmed by light. I pushed it open, and with Billy’s gun touching my back, walked in.

The right hand two-thirds of the concrete floor space was occupied by a small four-seater single-engined aeroplane, a new-looking high-winged Cessna with an Italian registration. On its left stood a dusty black Citroën, its bonnet towards me. Behind the car and the plane the whole far wall consisted of sliding doors. No windows anywhere. Three metal girders rose from floor to ceiling on the left of the car, supporting the flat roof and dividing the left hand part of the hangar into a kind of bay. In that section stood Alf.

‘Right,’ said Yardman briskly. ‘Well done, Alf, turn them off now.’ His voice echoed hollowly in space.

Alf stared at him without hearing.

Yardman went up to him and shouted in his ear. ‘Turn the runway lights off.’

Alf nodded, walked up to the wall on the left of the door I had come in by, and pushed up a heavy switch beside a black fuse box. A second similar box worked, I suppose, the fluorescent strips across the ceilings and the low-powered radiant heaters mounted high on both side walls. Beside the switches stood a mechanic’s bench with various tools and a vice, and further along two sturdy brackets held up a rack of gardening implements; spades, fork, rake, hoe and shears. Filling all the back of the bay was a giant motor mower with a seat for the driver, and dotted about there were some five gallon petrol cans, funnels, tins of paint, an assortment of overalls and several greasy looking metal chairs.

That Cessna, I thought briefly; I could fly it like riding a bicycle. And the car… if only I had known they were there.

Yardman searched among the clutter on the bench and produced a length of chain and two padlocks, one large, one small. Billy had shut the door and was standing with his back to it, the gun pointing steadily in my direction. Alf, Rous-Wheeler and Giuseppe had prudently removed themselves from his line of fire.

Yardman said, ‘Go over to that first girder, my dear boy, and sit down on the floor.’

To say I was reluctant to be tied again is to put it mildly. It wasn’t only that it was the end of any hope of escape, but I had a strong physical repugnance to being attached to things, the result of having been roped to a fir in a Scottish forest one late afternoon in a childhood game by some cousins I was staying with: they had run away to frighten me and got lost themselves, and it had been morning before the subsequent search had found me.

When I didn’t obey at once, Yardman, Giuseppe and Billy all took a step forward as if moved by the same mind. There was no percentage in having them jump on me: I was sore enough already. I walked over to the girder and sat down facing them, leaning back idly against the flat metal surface.

‘That’s better,’ Yardman said. He came round and knelt down on the ground at my back. ‘Hands behind, my dear boy.’

He twined the chain round my wrists and clicked on both padlocks. Tossing the keys on his palm he stood up and came round in front of me. All five of them stared down with varying degrees of ill-feeling and I stared glassily back.

‘Right,’ said Yardman after a pause. ‘We’d better get out and finish the painting. But this time we must leave someone with him, just in case’. He reviewed his available troops, and alighted on Rous-Wheeler. ‘You sit here,’ he said to him, picking up a chair and taking it over beside the switches, ‘and if he does anything you aren’t sure about, switch on the runway lights and we’ll come at once. Clear?’

Rous-Wheeler was delighted to avoid any more painting and accepted his new task with enthusiasm.

‘Good.’ Yardman looked at his watch. ‘Go on then, Billy.’ Billy, Alf and Giuseppe filed out and Yardman stopped as he followed them to say to Rous-Wheeler, ‘The cargo will be arriving soon. Don’t be alarmed.’

‘Cargo?’ said Rous-Wheeler in surprise.

‘That’s right,’ Yardman said. ‘Cargo. The reason for this… um… operation.’

‘But I thought…’ began Rous-Wheeler.

‘My dear Rous-Wheeler, no,’ said Yardman. ‘Had it been just you, I could have sent you down the usual discreet pipeline from Milan. Your journey would have been just as secret as it is now. No, we needed the plane for a rather special cargo, and as you know, my dear boy,’ he swung round to speak directly to me with a small ironic smile, ‘I do hate wasting space on flights. I always try to make up a full load, so as not to neglect an opportunity.’

‘What is this cargo, then?’ asked Rous-Wheeler with a damaged sense of self-importance.

‘Mm?’ said Yardman, putting the padlock keys down on the bench. ‘Well now, it’s the brain child of a brilliant little research establishment near Brescia. A sort of machine. An interesting little development, one might say. Broadly speaking, it’s a device for emitting ultrasonic rays on the natural frequency of any chosen mineral substance.’

‘Ultrasonics have been extensively researched,’ Rous-Wheeler said testily.

Yardman smiled tightly. ‘Take it from me, dear fellow, this particular development has great possibilities. Our friends have been trying to arrange photographs of the drawings and specifications, but these have been too well-guarded. It proved easier in the end to… er… remove some vital parts of the device itself. But that of course presented a transport problem, a difficult transport problem, requiring my own personal supervision.’ He was talking for my benefit as much as Rous-Wheeler’s: letting me know how expert he was at his job. ‘Once we were committed to the plane, of course it was the easiest way to take you too.’

No opportunity wasted. But he hadn’t originally intended to take me as well: to give him his due.

Yardman went out of the hangar. Rous-Wheeler sat on his hard chair and I on the hard concrete and again my presence and/or predicament embarrassed him. ‘Played any good wall games lately?’ I said at length.

A hit, a palpable hit. He hadn’t expected any needling school chums on his little trip. He looked offended.

‘Have you been to… er… wherever you’re going. before?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said shortly. He wouldn’t look at me.

‘And do you speak the language?’

He said stifly, ‘I am learning.’ ‘What are they offering you?’

Some heavy smugness crept into his manner. ‘I am to have a flat and a car, and a better salary. I will of course be in an important advisory position.’

‘Of course,’ I said dryly.

He flicked me his first glance. Disapproving.

‘I am to be a consultant interpreter of the British way of life. I pride myself that in my own small way I shall be promoting better understanding between two great peoples and making a positive contribution to the establishment of fruitful relations.’

He spoke as if he really meant it; and if he were as self-satisfied as that, he wouldn’t consider turning round and going back. But Yardman had left the padlock keys on the bench.

‘Your actions may be misunderstood, back home,’ I said…

‘At first. That has been explained to me. But in time…’

‘You’re wrong,’ I said roughly. ‘They’ll call you a traitor. A plain stinking common or garden traitor.’

‘No,’ he said uneasily.

‘What you need is someone to put your views forward, to explain what you are doing, so that your former colleagues admire you, and wish they had made more use of your undoubted abilities while they had the chance.’

I thought Id’ laid it on too thick, but not so. He was looking seriously pensive.

‘You mean… you? You would represent me?’ He pursed his lips.

‘I don’t always look so dirty,’ I said earnestly. ‘I could pull a certain amount of weight with my father’s friends, and… er… I have an uncle who more or less lives in the Reform Club.’

He was nodding, taking it all in.

‘A word in the right ear,’ he said judiciously.

‘Recognition,’ I put in gently.

He looked modest. ‘That’s too much to hope for.’

‘In time,’ I insinuated.

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Well, of course…’ I paused. ‘I would be happy to clear up any… er… bad feelings which your… move… may have left.’

‘Uncommonly kind of you,’ he said pompously.

‘At the moment, however, I don’t look like being able to.’

He looked disappointed. ‘I suppose not.’ He frowned. ‘You could have done me an excellent… as I see it now, an essential… service.’

I said casually, ‘A great pity, yes. Of course… the keys are just beside you… if you felt like it.’

He looked at the keys and at me. He stood up. He took the keys into his hand. I could feel my heart thudding as I tried to look unconcerned. He took a step in my direction. Then, looking uneasily round, his glance fell on the runway lights switch. He stared at it, transfixed.

‘Yardman said to put the lights on, if you tried anything.’ There was consternation in his voice. He turned and put the keys back on the bench as if they were suddenly hot. ‘Yardman considers it essential for you to remain here. It would not be an auspicious start for me with my new friends if the first thing I did was so exactly contrary to their wishes.’

‘Yardman’s wishes.’

He used a modicum of brain. ‘If I let you go back to England, Yardman wouldn’t be able to. His invaluable transport service would have come to an end…’ He looked horrified at the abyss he had almost stepped into. ‘I would have been most unpopular.’

I didn’t say anything. Down the snakes and back to square one. I tried again without success to do a Houdini on Yardman’s chain job, and Rous-Wheeler sat down again and watched me with a mixture of anxiety and annoyance.

‘What branch of the Treasury?’ I said, giving it up.

‘Initial finance,’ he replied stifly.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Grants.’

‘You mean, your department settles who gets grants of public money, and how much?’

‘That is so.’

‘Development, research, defence, and so on?’

‘Precisely.’

‘So that you personally would know what projects are in hand… or contemplated?’

‘Yes.’

They wouldn’t have bothered with him, I supposed, for any less. After a pause, I said, ‘What about this ultrasonic transmitter?’

‘What about it? It isn’t a British project, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Did I get it right… that it will emit waves on the natural frequency of any mineral substance?’

‘I believe that’s what Yardman said,’ he agreed stifly.

‘It would break things… like sound breaks glass?’

‘I am not a scientist. I’ve no idea.’ And from the tone of his voice he didn’t care.

I stared gloomily at the floor and wondered what made a man change his allegiance. Rous-Wheeler might have been self-important and disappointed and have refused to face his own limitations, but thousands of men were like that, and thousands of men didn’t give away a slice of their nation’s future in return for a flat, a car, and a pat on the back. There had to be more to it. Deep obsessive murky convoluted motives I couldn’t guess at, pushing him irresistibly over. But he would be the same man wherever he went: in five years or less, again disgruntled and passed over. A useless dispensable piece of flotsam.

He, it appeared, took as pessimistic a view of my future as I of his.

‘Do you think,’ he cleared his throat. ‘Do you think Billy will really kill you?’

‘Be your age’, I said. ‘You saw what he did to the crew’. ‘He keeps putting it off,’ he said.

‘Saving the icing till last.’

‘How can you be so frivolous?’ he exclaimed. ‘Your position is very serious.’

‘So is yours’, I said. A‘nd I wouldn’t swop.’

He gave me a small pitying smile of contemptuous disbelief, but it was true enough. Everyone dies sometime, as Simon had once said, and one was probably as little eager at eighty as at twenty-six. And there really were, I reflected with a smile for Victorian melodramas, fates worse than death.

A heavy van or lorry of some sort pulled up with a squeak of brakes somewhere near the door and after a few moments its driver came into the hangar. He was like Giuseppe, young, hard, cold-eyed and quick. He looked at me without apparent surprise and spoke to Rous-Wheeler in rapid Italian, of which the only intelligible word as far as I was concerned was Brescia.

Rous-Wheeler held up a hand, palm towards the driver. ‘I don’t understand you, my good fellow. Wait until I fetch Yardman.’

This proved unnecessary as my ex-employer had already seen the lorry’s arrival. Followed by his entourage carrying ladders, paint pots, brushes and overalls, Yardman came forward into the hangar and exchanged some careful salutations with the driver.

‘Right,’ Yardman said in English to Billy. ‘There should be several small light cases and one large heavy one. It will be easiest to load the light cases up through the forward door and stow them in the luggage bay. Then we will open the back doors, haul the heavy case in on the block and tackle, and stand it in the peat tray of the last box, the one that’s now flattened. Clear?’

Billy nodded.

I opened my mouth to speak, and shut it again.

Yardman noticed.

‘What is it?’ he said sharply.

‘Nothing.’ I spoke listlessly.

He came over to me and looked down. Then he squatted on his haunches to peer on a level with my face.

‘Oh yes, my dear boy, there is something. Now what, what?’

He stared at me as if he could read my thoughts while the calculations ticked over in his own. ‘You were going to tell me something, and decided not to. And I feel I really should know what it is. I feel it must be to my disadvantage, something definitely to my disadvantage, as things stand between us.’

‘I’ll shoot it out of him,’ Billy offered.

‘It’ll be quicker if I guess it… Now, what is wrong with stowing the cases the way I suggested? Ah yes, my dear boy, you know all about loading aeroplanes, don’t you?

You know what I said was wrong.’ He snapped his fingers and stood up. ‘The heavy case at the back is wrong. Billy, move the mares forward so that they occupy the two front boxes, and put the heavy case in the second to back box, and leave the rear one as it is.’

‘Move the mares?’ Billy complained.

‘Yes, certainly. The centre of gravity is all-important, isn’t that right, my dear boy?’ He was pleased with himself, smiling. Quick as lightning. If I gave him even a thousandth of a second of suspicion that Gabriella was still alive…

Billy came over and stood looking down at me with a revoltingly self-satisfied smile.

‘Not long now,’ he promised.

‘Load the plane first,’ Yardman said. ‘The van has to go back as soon as possible. You can… er… have your fun when I go to fetch the pilot. And be sure he’s dead by the time I get back.’

‘O.K.’ Billy agreed. He went away with Alf, Giuseppe and the driver, and the van ground away on the short stretch to the D.C.4.

‘What pilot?’ Rous-Wheeler asked.

‘My dear Rous-Wheeler,’ Yardman explained with a touch of weary contempt. ‘How do you think the plane is going on?’

‘Oh. Well, why did you kill the other one? He would have flown on to wherever you said.’

Yardman sighed. ‘He would have done no such thing without Billy at hand to shoot pieces off our young friend here. And frankly, my dear fellow, quite apart from the problem of Billy’s and my return journey, it would have been embarrassing for us to kill the crew in your new country. Much better here. Much more discreet, don’t you think?’

‘Where exactly… where are we?’ asked Rous-Wheeler. A good question if ever there was one.

‘A private landing field,’ Yardman said. ‘An elderly respected nobleman lets us use it from time to time.’

Elderly and respected: Yardman’s voice held some heavy irony.

‘The usual sort of blackmail?’ I asked. ‘Filmed in a bed he had no right in?’

Yardman said ‘No,’ unconvincingly.

‘What’s he talking about?’ Rous-Wheeler asked testily. ‘I’m talking about the methods employed by your new friends,’ I said. ‘If they can’t get help and information by bamboozling and subverting people like you, they do it by any form of blackmail or intimidation that comes to hand.’

Rous-Wheeler was offended. ‘I haven’t been bamboozled.’

‘Nuts,’ I said. ‘You’re a proper sucker.’

Yardman took three threatening steps towards me with the first anger he had shown. ‘That’s enough.’

‘Nothing’s enough,’ I said mildly. ‘What the hell do you think I have to lose?’

Yardman’s glasses flashed in the light, and Rous-Wheeler said self-righteously, ‘He tried to get me to free him, while you were painting the plane. He asked me to unlock him. I didn’t, of course.’

‘You nearly did,’ I said. ‘Anyone can reach you; your overgrown self-esteem makes you permanently gullible’.

Yardman looked from me to him with a taut mouth. ‘I have to go over to the plane, Mr Rous-Wheeler, and I think it would be best if you came with me.’

‘But I wouldn’t let him go,’ he said, like a scolded schoolboy.

‘All the same.’ Yardman came behind me and bent down to check that his chains were still effective, which unfortunately they were. ‘You look so gentle, dear boy,’ he said into my ear, ‘so misleading, isn’t it?’

They went away and left me alone. I had another go at the chains, tantalised by the Cessna standing so close behind me: but this time Yardman had been more careful. The girder was rooted in concrete, the chain wouldn’t fray like rope, and try as I might I couldn’t slide my hands out.

Little time to go, I thought. And no questions left. There wasn’t much profit in knowing the answers, since in a very short while I would know nothing at all. I thought about that too. I didn’t believe in any form of after life. To die was to finish. I’d been knocked out several times in racing falls, and death was just a knockout from which one didn’t awake. I couldn’t honestly say that I much feared it. I never had. Undoubtedly on my part a defect of the imagination, a lack of sensitivity. All I felt was a strong reluctance to leave the party so soon when there was so much I would have liked to do. But there was the messy business of Billy to be got through first… and I admitted gloomily to myself that I would have avoided that if I could have dredged up the smallest excuse.

Alf shufled into the hangar, went across to the rack of gardening tools and took down a spade. I shouted to him, but he showed no sign of having heard, and disappeared as purposefully as he’d come.

More minutes passed. I spent them thinking about Gabriella. Gabriella alive and loving, her solemnity a crust over depths of warmth and strength. A girl for always. For what was left of always.

The lorry came back, halted briefly outside, and rumbled away into the distance. Yardman and all his crew except Alf trooped into the hangar. Giuseppe walked past me across to the sliding doors at the back and opened a space behind the Citroën. A cool draught blew in and sent the dust round in little squirls on the concrete floor, and outside the sky was an intense velvety black.

Yardman said, ‘Right Billy. If the new crew are on time, we’ll be back with them in a little over an hour. I want you ready to go then, immediately the plane has taken off. All jobs done. Understand?’

‘O.K.’ Billy nodded. ‘Relax.’

Yardman walked over and paused in front of me, looking down with a mixture of regret and satisfaction.

‘Good-bye, my dear boy.’

‘Good-bye,’ I answered politely.

His taut mouth twisted. He looked across at Billy. ‘Take no chances, Billy, do you understand? You underestimate this man. He’s not one of your fancy nitwits, however much you may want him to be. You ought to know that by now. And Billy, I’m warning you, I’m warning you my dear Billy, that if you should let him escape at this stage, knowing everything that he does, you may as well put one of your little bullets through your own brain, because otherwise, rest assured, my dear Billy, I will do it for you’.

Even Billy was slightly impressed by the cold menace in Yardman’s usually uninflected voice. ‘Yeah,’ he said uneasily. ‘Well he won’t bloody escape, not a chance.’

‘Make sure of it.’ Yardman nodded, turned, and went and sat in the front passenger seat of the Citroën. Giuseppe beside him started the engine, reversed the car out of the hangar, and drove smoothly away, Yardman facing forwards and not looking back. Billy slid the door shut again behind them and came slowly across the concrete, putting his feet down carefully and silently like a stalker. He stopped four paces away, and the silence slowly thickened.

Rous-Wheeler cleared his throat nervously, and it sounded loud.

Billy flicked him a glance. ‘Go for a walk,’ he said.

‘A… walk?’

‘Yeah, a walk. One foot in front of the other.’ He was offensive. ‘Down the runway and back should just about do it.’

Rous-Wheeler understood. He wouldn’t meet my eyes and he hadn’t even enough humanity to plead for me. He turned his back on the situation and made for the exit. So much for the old school tie.

‘Now,’ said Billy. ‘Just the two of us.’