Chapter Eighteen

Hed’ been out cold for six hours and he was still unconscious. Nothing moved in his eyes, and after a few seconds they fell slowly shut again.

My fingers were clumsy on his wrist and for anxious moments I could feel nothing; but his pulse was there. Slow and faint, but regular. He was on his way up from the depths. I was so glad that he wasn’t dead that had Rous-Wheeler not been there I would undoubtedly have wept. As it was, I fought against the flooding back of the grief I’d suppressed when Billy shot him. Odd that I should be tumbled into such intense emotion only because the reason for it was gone.

Rous-Wheeler stuttered, ‘What… what is it?’ with a face the colour and texture of putty, and I glanced at him with dislike.

‘He’s alive,’ I said tersely.

‘He can’t be.’

‘Shut up.’

Billy’s bullet had hit Patrick high, above the hairline and at a rising angle, and instead of penetrating his skull had slid along outside it. The long, swollen and clotted wound looked dreadful, but was altogether beautiful in comparison with a neat round hole. I stood up and spread the blanket over him again, to keep him warm. Then, disregarding Rous-Wheeler’s protest, I went away up the plane.

In the cockpit nothing had changed. The plane roared steadily on its three ten heading and all the instruments were like rocks. I touched the back of the co-pilot, awake again to his presence. The silence in him was eternal: he wouldn’t feel my sympathy, but he had it.

Turning back a pace or two, I knelt down beside Mike. He too had been shot in the head, and about him too there was no question. The agile eyebrow was finished. I straightened him out from his crumpled position and laid him flat on his back. It wouldn’t help any, but it seemed to give him more dignity. That was all you could give the dead, it seemed; and all you could take away.

The four packing cases in the luggage bay were heavy and had been thrust in with more force than finesse, pushing aside and crushing most of the things already there. Shifting the first case a few inches I stretched a long arm past it and tugged out a blanket, which I laid over Mike. Armed with a second one I went back into the galley. Sometime in the past I’d seen the first-aid box in one of the cupboards under the counter, and to my relief it was still in the same place.

Lying on top of it was a gay parcel wrapped in the striped paper of Malpensa Airport. The doll for Mike’s daughter. I felt the jolt physically. Nothing could soften the facts. I was taking her a dead father for her birthday.

And Gabriella… anxiety for her still hovered in my mind like a low cloud ceiling, thick, threatening and unchanged. I picked up the parcel she had wrapped and put it on the counter beside the plastic cups and the bag of sugar. People often did recover from bullets in the lungs: I knew they did. But the precise Italian doctor had only offered hope, and hope had tearing claws. I was flying home to nothing if she didn’t live.

Taking the blanket and the first-aid kit I went back to Patrick. In the lavatory compartment I washed my filthy hands and afterwards soaked a chunk of cotton wool with clean water to wipe his blood-streaked face. Dabbing dry with more cotton wool I found a large hard lump on his forehead where it had hit the floor: two heavy concussing shocks within seconds, his brain had received. His eyelids hadn’t flickered while I cleaned him, and with a new burst of worry I reached for his pulse: but it was still there, faint but persevering.

Sighing with relief I broke open the wrapping of a large sterile wound dressing, laid it gently over the deep gash in his scalp, and tied it on with the tape. Under his head I slid the second blanket, folded flat, to shield him a little from the vibration in the aircraft ’s metal skin. I loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt and also the waistband of his trousers: and beyond that there was no help I could give him. I stood up slowly with the first-aid kit and turned to go.

With anxiety bordering on hysteria Rous-Wheeler shouted, ‘You aren’t going to leave me like this again, are you?’

I looked back at him. He was half sitting, half kneeling, with his hands still fastened to the floor in front of him. He’d been there for nearly three hours, and his flabby muscles must have been cracking. It was probably too cruel to leave him like that for the rest of the trip. I put the first-aid kit down on the flattened box, pulled a bale of hay along on the starboard side and lodged it against the untrasonic packing case. Then with Alf’s cutter I clipped through the wire round his wrists and pointed to the bale.

‘Sit there.’

He got up slowly and stifly, crying out. Shufling, half-falling, he sat where I said. I picked up another piece of wire and in spite of his protests bound his wrists together again and fastened them to one of the chains anchoring the crate. I didn’t want him bumbling all over the plane and breathing down my neck.

‘Where are we going?’ he said, the pomposity reawakening now that he’d got something from me.

I didn’t answer.

‘And who is flying the plane?’

‘George,’ I said, finishing his wrists with a twirl he’d never undo. ‘Naturally.’

‘George who?’

‘A good question,’ I said, nodding casually.

He was beautifully disconcerted. I left him to stew in it, picked up the first-aid kit, checked again that Patrick’s pulse was plodding quietly along, and made my way back to the galley.

There were a number of dressings in the first-aid box, including several especially for burns, and I wasn’t keen on my shirt sticking and tearing away again. Gingerly I pulled my jersey up under my arms and tucked the side of the shirt away under it. No one except Billy would have found the view entertaining, and the air at once started everything going again at full blast. I opened one of the largest of the burn dressings and laid it in place with that exquisite kind of gentleness you only give to yourself. Even so, it was quite enough. After a moment I fastened it on and pulled my shirt and jersey down on top. It felt so bad for a bit that I really wished I hadn’t bothered.

I drank another cup of water, which failed to put out the fire. The first-aid kit, on further inspection, offered a three-way choice in pain-killers: a bottle each of aspirin and codeine tablets, and six ampoules of morphine. I shook out two of the codeines, and swallowed these. Then I packed everything back into the box, shut the lid, and left it on the counter.

Slowly I went up to the cockpit and stood looking at the instruments. All working fine. I fetched a third blanket from the luggage bay and tucked it over and round the body of Bob. He became immediately less of a harsh reality, and I wondered if that was why people always covered the faces of the dead.

I checked the time. An hour from Marseilles. Only a hundred and fifty miles, and a daunting way still to go. I leaned against the metal wall and shut my eyes. It was no good feeling the way I did with so much still to do. Parts of Air Ministry regulations drifted ironically into my mind… ‘Many flying accidents have occurred as a result of pilots flying while medically unfit… and the more exacting the flying task the more likely are minor indispositions to be serious… so don’t go up at all if you are ill enough to need drugs… and if coffee isn’t enough to keep you awake you are not fit to fly.’

Good old Air Ministry I thought: they’d hit the nail on the head. Where they would have me be was down on the solid earth, and I wholeheartedly agreed.

The radio, I thought inconsequentially. Out of order. I opened my eyes, pushed myself off the wall, and set about finding out why. I hadn’t far to look. Yardman had removed all the circuit breakers, and the result was like an electric light system with no fuses in the fuse box. Every plane carried spares, however. I located the place where the spares should have been, and there weren’t any. The whole lot in Yardman’s pockets, no doubt.

Fetching a fresh cup of water, I climbed again into Patrick’s seat and put on the headset to reduce the noise. I leaned back in the comfortable leather upholstery and rested my elbows on the stubby arms, and after a while the codeine and the bandage turned in a reasonable job.

Outside the sky was still black and dotted with brilliant stars, and the revolving anti-collision beacon still skimmed pinkly over the great wide span of the wings, but there was also a new misty greyish quality in the light. Not dawn. The moon coming up. Very helpful of it, I thought appreciatively. Although it was well on the wane I would probably be able to see what I was doing the next time I flew out over the coastline. I began to work out what time I would get there. More guesses. North-west across France coast to coast had to be all of five hundred miles. It had been one-forty when I left Marseilles; was three-ten now. E.T.A. English Channel, somewhere about five.

Patrick’s being alive made a lot of difference to everything. I was now thankful without reservation that I had taken the D.C.4 however stupid my motive at the time, for if I’d left it, and Yardman had found him alive, they would simply have pumped another bullet into him, or even buried him as he was. The tiring mental merry-go-round of whether I should have taken the Cessna troubled me no more.

I yawned. Not good. Of all things I couldn’t afford to go to sleep. I shouldn’t have taken those pills, I thought: there was nothing like the odd spot of agony for keeping you awake. I rubbed my hand over my face and it felt as if it belonged to someone else.

I murdered Billy, I thought.

I could have shot him in the leg and left him to Yardman, and I’d chosen to kill him myself. Choice and those cold-blooded seconds of revenge… they made it murder. An interesting technical point, where self-defence went over the edge into something else. Well… no one would ever find out; and my conscience didn’t stir.

I yawned again more deeply, and thought about eating one of Patrick’s bananas. A depleted bunch of them lay on the edge by the windscreen, with four blackening stalks showing where he had fended off starvation on the morning trip. But I imagined the sweet pappiness of them in my mouth, and left them alone. I wasn’t hungry enough. The last thing I’d eaten had been the lasagne with Gabriella.

Gabriella.

After a while I got up and went through the plane to look at Patrick. He lay relaxed and unmoving, but his eyes were open again. I knelt beside him and felt his pulse. Unchanged.

‘Patrick,’ I said. ‘Can you hear?’ There was no response of any sort.

I stood up slowly and looked at Rous-Wheeler sitting on the bale of hay. He seemed to have shrunk slightly as if the gas had leaked out, and there was a defeated sag to his whole body which showed that he realised his future was unlikely to be rosy. I left him without speaking and went back to the cockpit.

Four o’clock. France had never seemed so large. I checked the fuel gauges for the hundredth time and saw that the needles on the auxiliary tanks were knocking uncomfortably near zero. The plane’s four engines used a hundred and fifty gallons an hour at normal speed and even with the power reduced they seemed to be drinking the stuff. Fuel didn’t flow automatically from the main tanks when the auxiliaries were empty: one had to switch over by hand. And I simply couldn’t afford to use every drop in the auxiliaries, because the engines would stop without warning the second the juice dried up. My fingers hovered on the switch until I hadn’t the nerve to wait any longer, and then flipped it over to the mains.

Time passed, and the sleeping country slipped by underneath. When I got to the coast, I thought wearily, I was going to have the same old problem. I wouldn’t know within two hundred miles where I was, and the sky was ruthless to the lost. One couldn’t stop to ask the way. One couldn’t stop at all. A hundred and fifty an hour might be slow in terms of jetliners, but it was much too fast in the wrong direction.

In Patrick’s briefcase there would be not only a thick book of radio charts but also some topographical ground maps: they weren’t needed for ordinary aerial navigation, but they had to be carried in case of radio failure. The briefcase was almost certainly somewhere under or behind the four packing cases in the luggage bay. I went to have a look, but I already knew. The heavy cases were jammed in tight, and even if there had been room to pull them all out into the small area behind the cockpit I hadn’t enough strength to do it.

At about half past four I went back for another check on Patrick, and found things very different. He had thrown off the blanket covering him and was plucking with lax uncoordinated hands at the bandage on his head. His eyes were open but unfocused still, and his breath came out in short regular groans.

‘He’s dying,’ Rous-Wheeler shouted unhelpfully.

Far from dying, he was up close to the threshold of consciousness, and his head was letting him know it. Without answering Rous-Wheeler I went back along the alley and fetched the morphine from the first-aid kit.

There were six glass ampoules in a flat box, each with its own built-in hypodermic needle enclosed in a glass cap. I read the instruction leaflet carefully and Rous-Wheeler shouted his unasked opinion that I had no right to give an injection, I wasn’t a doctor, I should leave it for someone who knew how.

‘Do you?’ I said.

‘Er, no.’

‘Then shut up.’

He couldn’t. ‘Ask the pilot, then.’

I glanced at him. ‘I’m the pilot.’

That did shut him up. His jaw dropped to allow a clear view of his tonsils and he didn’t say another word.

While I was rolling up his sleeve Patrick stopped groaning. I looked quickly at his face and his eyes moved slowly round to meet mine.

‘Henry,’ he said. His voice didn’t reach me, but the lip movement was clear.

I bent down and said, ‘Yes, Patrick. You’re O.K. Just relax.’

His mouth moved. I put my ear to his lips, and he said ‘My bloody head hurts.’

I nodded, smiling. ‘Not for long.’

He watched me snap the glass to uncover the needle and didn’t stir when I pushed it into his arm, though I’d never been on the delivering end of an injection before and I must have been clumsy. When I’d finished he was talking again. I put my head down to hear.

‘Where… are… we?’

‘On your way to a doctor. Go to sleep.’

He lay looking vaguely at the roof for a few minutes and then gradually shut his eyes. His pulse was stronger and not so slow. I put the blanket over him again and tucked it under his legs and arms and with barely a glance for Rous-Wheeler went back to the cockpit.

A quarter to five. Time to go down. I checked all the gauges, found I was still carrying the box of ampoules, and put it up on the ledge beside the bananas and the cup of water. I switched out the cockpit lights so that I could see better outside, leaving the round dial faces illuminated only by rims of red, and finally unlocked the automatic pilot.

It was when I’d put the nose down and felt again the great weight of the plane that I really doubted that I could ever land it, even if I found an airfield. I wasn’t a mile off exhaustion and my muscles were packing up, and not far beyond this point I knew the brain started missing on a cylinder or two, and haze took the place of thought. If I couldn’t think in crystalline terms and at reflex speed I was going to make an irretrievable mistake, and for Patrick’s sake, quite apart from my own, I couldn’t afford it.

Four thousand feet. I levelled out and flew on, looking down through the moonlit blackness, searching for the sea. Tiredness was insidious and crept up like a tide, I thought, until it drowned you. I shouldn’t have taken that codeine, it was probably making me sleepy… though I’d had some at other times after racing injuries, and never noticed it. But that was on the ground, with nothing to do but recover.

There. There was the sea. A charcoal change from black, the moonlight just reflecting enough to make it certain. I flew out a little way, banked the plane to the right and began to follow the shore. Compass heading, eastsouth-east. This seemed extraordinary, but it certainly had to be the north-east coast of France somewhere, and I wasn’t going to lose myself again. There were lighthouses, flashing their signals. No charts to interpret them. The biggest port along that coast, I thought, was Le Havre. I couldn’t miss that. There would be a lot of lights even at five in the morning. If I turned roughly north from there I couldn’t help but reach England. Roughly was just the trouble. The map in my head couldn’t be trusted. Roughly north could find me barging straight into the London Control Zone, which would be even worse than Paris.

It wouldn’t be light until six at the earliest. Sunrise had been about a quarter to seven, the day before.

The lights of Le Havre were ahead and then below me before I’d decided a thing. Too slow, I thought numbly, I was already too slow. I’d never get down.

The coast swung northwards, and I followed. Five-twenty a.m. The fuel gauges looked reasonable with dawn not far ahead. But I’d got to decide where I was going. I’d got to.

If I simply went on for a bit I’d reach Calais. It still wouldn’t be light. Somewhere over in Kent were Lympne, Lydd and Manston airports. Somewhere. My mind felt paralysed.

I went on and on along the French coast like an automaton until at last I knew I’d gone too far. I hadn’t watched the compass heading closely enough and it had crept round from north to nearly east. That light I’d passed a while back, I thought vaguely, the light flashing at five second intervals, that must have been Gris Nez. I’d gone past Calais. I was nearly round to Belgium. I’d simply got to decide.

The sky was definitely lighter. With surprise I realised that for several minutes the coastline had been easier to see, the water beneath lightening to a flat dark grey. Soon I could look for an airport: but not in Belgium. The explanations would be too complicated. Back to Kent, perhaps.

In a way, the solution when it came was simple. I would go to the place I knew best. To Fenland. In daylight I could find my way unerringly there from any direction, which meant no anxious circling around, and familiarity would cancel out a good deal of the tiredness. The flying club used grass runways which were nothing like long enough for a D.C.4, but its buildings had once been part of an old Air Force base, and the concrete runways the bombers had used were still there. Grass grew through the cracks in them and they weren’t maintained, but they were marked at the ends with a white cross over a white bar, air traffic signal for a safe enough landing in an emergency.

My mental fog lifted. I banked left and set off North Seawards, and only after five decisive minutes remembered the fuel.

The burns were hurting again and my spirits fell to zero. Would I never get it right? I was an amateur, I thought despairingly. Still an amateur. The jockey business all over again. I had never achieved anything worthwhile and I certainly hadn’t built the solid life I wanted. Simon had been quite right, I couldn’t have gone on carting racehorses all my life; and now that Yardman Transport no longer existed I wouldn’t look for the same job again.

It was a measure of my exhausted state that having once decided to go to Fenland I hadn’t the will to plunge back into uncertainty. The fuel margin was far too small for it to be prudent to go so far. Prudence in the air was what kept one alive. If I went to Fenland I’d be landing on a thimbleful, and if the engines stopped five miles away it would be too late to wish I hadn’t.

Streaks of faint red crept into the sky and the sea turned to grey pearl. The sky wasn’t so clear any more: there were layers of hazy cloud on the horizon, shading from dark grey-blue to a wisp of silver. The moment before dawn had always seemed to me as restoring as sleep, but that time when I really needed it, it had no effect. My eyes felt gritty and my limbs trembled under every strain. And the codeine had worn off.

The coast of East Anglia lay like a great grey blur ahead on my left. I would follow it round, I thought, and go in over the Wash.

A swift dark shape flashed across in front of the D.C.4 and my heart jumped at least two beats. A fighter, I thought incredulously. It had been a jet fighter. Another came over the top of me ridiculously close and screamed away ahead leaving me bumping horribly in the turbulence he left in his wake. They both turned a long way ahead and roared back towards me, flying level together with their wing tips almost touching. Expert formation pilots: and unfriendly. They closed at something like the speed of sound and swept over the D.C.4 with less than a hundred feet between. To them I must have seemed to be standing still. To me, the trail they left me was very nearly the clincher.

Yardman couldn’t have found me, I thought desperately. Not after the wavering roundabout route I’d taken. They couldn’t have followed me and wouldn’t have guessed I’d go up the North Sea… it couldn’t be Yardman’s doing. So who?

I looked out at East Anglia away on my left, and didn’t know whether to laugh or die of fear. Americans. East Anglia was stiff with American air bases. They would have picked me up on their radar, an unidentified plane flying in at dawn and not answering to radio. Superb watchdogs, they would send someone to investigate… and they’d found a plane without registration numbers or markings of any sort. A plane like that couldn’t be up to any good… had to be hostile. One could almost hear them think it.

They wouldn’t start shooting, not without making sure… not yet. If I just went straight on and could deal with the buffeting, what would they do? I wouldn’t let them force me down. I had only to plod straight on… They swept past on each side and threw the D. C.4 about like a cockleshell.

I couldn’t do it, I thought, not this on top of everything else. My hands were slipping on the wheel with sweat. If the fighters went on much longer the sturdy old plane would shake to bits. They came past twice more and proved me wrong. They also reduced me to a dripping wreck. But after that they vanished somewhere above me, and when I looked up I saw them still circling overhead like angry bees. They were welcome to accompany me home, I thought weakly, if that was only where they’d stay.

I could see the lightship off Cromer still flashing its group of four every fifteen seconds. The first real sign of home. Only sixty miles to go. Fifteen minutes to the lightship in the Wash, and the sun rose as I went over it. I turned the plane on to the last leg to Fenland, and up above the escorts came with me.

The fuel gauges looked horrible. I drove what was left of my mind into doing some vital checks. Pitch fully fine, brakes off, mixture rich, fuel pumps on. There must have been a list somewhere, but heaven knew where. I had no business to be flying the plane at all, I didn’t know its drill. The Air Ministry could take away my licence altogether and I was liable for a prison sentence as well. Except, I thought suddenly with a flicker of amusement, that Patrick was qualified to fly it, and he might be said to be technically in charge. Resident, anyway.

I throttled back and began to go down. If I managed it, I thought, I would be a professional. The decision was suddenly standing there full-blown like a certainty that had been a long time growing. This time it wasn’t too late. I would take Tom Well’s job and make him stick to it when he inevitably found out my name. I would fly his car firm executives around and earn the sort of life I wanted, and if it meant giving up racing… I’d do that too.

The airspeed indicator stood at a hundred and thirty knots on the slow descent, and I could see the airfield ahead. The fighters were there already, circling high. The place would be crawling with investigators before my wheels stopped rolling. Questions, when I could do with sleep.

The distant orange wind sock blew out lazily, still from the south-west. There wasn’t enough fuel for frills like circuits, the gauges registered empty. Id’ have to go straight in, and get down first time… get down. If I could.

I was close now. The club building developed windows, and there was Tom’s bungalow…

A wide banking turn to line up with the old concrete runway. It looked so narrow, but the bombers had used it. Six hundred feet. My arms were shaking. I pushed down the lever of the undercarriage and the light went green as it locked. Five hundred. I put on full flap, maximum drag… retrimmed. felt the plane get slower and heavier, soft on the controls. I could stall and fall out of the sky… a shade more power… still some fuel left… the end of the runway ahead with its white cross coming up to meet me, rushing up… two hundred feet. I was doing a hundred and twenty. I’d never landed a plane with a cockpit so high off the ground… allow for that. One hundred… lower… I seemed to be holding the whole plane up. I closed the throttles completely and levelled out as the white cross and the bar slid underneath, and waited an agonised few seconds while the air speed fell down and down until there was too little lift to the wings and the whole mass began to sink.

The wheels touched and bounced, touched and stayed down, squeaking and screeching on the rough surface. With muscles like jelly, with only tendons, I fought to keep her straight. I couldn’t crash now. I wouldn’t. The big plane rocketted along the bumpy concrete. I’d never handled anything so powerful. I’d misjudged the speed and landed too fast and she’d never stop.

A touch of brake… agonising to be gentle with them and fatal if I wasn’t. They gripped and tugged and the plane stayed straight… more brake, heavier… it was making an impression… she wouldn’t flip over on to her back, she had a tricycle undercarriage with a nose wheel. I’d have to risk it. I pulled the brakes on hard and the plane shuddered with the strain, but the tyres didn’t burst and I hadn’t dipped and smashed a wing or bent the propellers and there wasn’t going to be a scratch on the blessed old bus… She slowed to taxi-ing speed with a hundred yards to spare before the runway tapered off into barbed wire and gorse bushes. Anything would have been enough. A hundred yards was a whole future.

Trembling, feeling sick, I wheeled round in a circle and rolled slowly back up the runway to where it ran closest to the airport buildings. There I put the brakes full on and stretched out a hand which no longer seemed part of me, and stopped the engines. The roar died to a whisper, and to nothing. I slowly pulled off the headset and listened to the cracking noises of the hot metal cooling.

It was done. And so was I. I couldn’t move from my seat. I felt disembodied. Burnt out. Yet in a sort of exhausted peace I found myself believing that as against all probability I had survived the night, so had Gabriella… that away back in Milan she would be breathing safely through her damaged lung. I had to believe it. Nothing else would do.

Through the window I saw Tom Wells come out of his bungalow, staring first up at the circling fighters and then down at the D.C.4. He shrugged his arms into his old sheepskin jacket and began to run towards me over the grass.