Flying Finish

Chapter Thirteen

Yardman came back, edging round the door.

‘It’s time,’ he said.

Billy sniggered. ‘Can’t be too soon.’

‘Stand up, stand up, my dear boy,’ Yardman said. ‘You look most undignified down there. Face the wall all the time.’

As I stood up he reached out, grasped my jacket by the collar, and pulled it backwards and downwards. Two more jerks and it was off.

‘I regret this, I do indeed,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid we must ask you to put your hands together behind your back.’

I thought that if I did that I was as good as dead. I didn’t move. Billy squeezed round into the small space between me and the washbasin and put the silencer against my neck.

Yardman’s unhurried voice floated into my ear. ‘I really must warn you, my dear boy, that your life hangs by the merest thread. If Billy hadn’t clumsily missed you in the street, you would be in the Milan morgue by now. If you do not do as we ask, he will be pleased to rectify his mistake immediately.’

I put my hands behind my back.

‘That’s right,’ Yardman said approvingly. He tied them together with a rough piece of rope.

‘Now, my dear boy,’ he went on. ‘You are going to help us. We have a little job for you.’

Billy’s searchlight eyes were wide and bright, and I didn’t like his smile.

‘You don’t ask what it is,’ Yardman said. ‘So I will tell you. You are going to persuade your friend the pilot to alter course.’

Alter course. Simple words. Premonition shook me to the roots. Patrick wasn’t strong enough.

I said nothing. After a moment Yardman continued conversationally, ‘We were going to use the engineer originally, but as I find you and the pilot are good friends I am sure he will do as you ask.’

I still said nothing.

‘He doesn’t understand,’ Billy sneered.

I understood all right. Patrick would do what they told him. Yardman opened the washroom door. ‘Turn round,’ he said.

I turned. Yardman’s eyes fell immediately to the dried bloodstains on my shirt. He reached out a long arm, pulled the once white poplin out of my trousers and saw the bandage underneath.

‘You grazed him,’ he said to Billy, still critical.

‘Considering he was running and falling at the same time that isn’t bad, not with a silencer.’

‘Inefficient.’ Yardman wasn’t letting him off the hook.

‘I’ll make up for it,’ Billy said viciously.

‘Yes, you do that.’

Yardman turned his head back to me. ‘Outside, dear boy.’

I followed him out of the washroom into the cabin, and stopped. It looked utterly normal. The four mares stood peacefully in the two middle boxes, installed, I presumed, by Yardman and Alf. The foremost and aft boxes were strapped down flat. There were the normal bales of hay dotted about. The noise was the normal noise, the air neither hotter nor colder than usual. All familiar. Normal. As normal as a coffin.

Yardman walked on.

‘This way,’ he said. He crossed the small area at the back of the plane, stepped up on to the shallow platform formed by the flattened rear box, walked across it, and finished down again on the plane’s floor, against the nearest box containing mares. Billy prodded his gun into my back. I joined Yardman.

‘So wise, my dear boy,’ nodded my employer. ‘Stand with your back to the box.’

I turned round to face the tail of the aircraft. Yardman took some time fastening my tied hands to the centre banding bar round the mare’s box. Billy stood up on the flattened box and amused himself by pointing his gun at various parts of my anatomy. He wasn’t going to fire it. I took no notice of his antics but looked beyond him, to the pair of seats at the back. There was a man sitting there, relaxed and interested. The man who had flown out with us, whose name was John. Milan hadn’t been the end of his journey, I thought. Yardman wanted to land him somewhere else.

He stood up slowly, his pompous manner a complete contradiction to his grubby ill-fitting clothes.

‘Is this sort of thing really necessary?’ he asked, but with curiosity, not distress. His voice was loud against the beat of the engine.

‘Yes,’ said Yardman shortly. I turned my head to look at him. He was staring gravely at my face, the bones of his skull sharp under the stretched skin. ‘We know our business.’

Billy got tired of waving his gun about to an unappreciative audience. He stepped off the low platform and began dragging a bale of hay into the narrow alleyway between the standing box and the flattened one, settling it firmly longways between the two. On top of that bale he put another, and on top of that another and another. Four bales high. Jammed against these, on top of the flattened box, he raised three more, using all the bales on the plane. Together, they formed a solid wall three feet away on my left. Yardman, John and I watched him in silence.

‘Right,’ Yardman said when he’d finished it. He checked the time and looked out of the window. ‘Ready?’

Billy and John said they were. I refrained from saying that I wasn’t, and never would be.

All three of them went away up the plane, crouching under the luggage racks and stumbling over the guy chains. I at once discovered by tugging that Yardman knew his stuff with a rope. I couldn’t budge my hands. Jerking them in vain, I suddenly discovered Alf watching me. He had come back from somewhere up front, and was standing on my right with his customary look of missing intelligence.

‘Alf,’ I shouted. ‘Untie me.’

He didn’t hear. He simply stood and looked at me without surprise. Without feeling. Then he slowly turned and went away. Genuinely deaf; but it paid him to be blind too, I thought bitterly. Whatever he saw he didn’t tell. He had told me nothing about Simon.

I thought achingly of Gabriella hanging on to life in Milan. She must still be alive, I thought. She must. Difficulties, the doctor had said. There might be difficulties. Like infection. Like pneumonia. Nothing would matter if she died... but she wouldn’t... she couldn’t. Anxiety for her went so deep that it pretty well blotted out the hovering knowledge that I should spare some for myself. The odds on her survival were about even: I wouldn’t have taken a hundred to one on my own.

After ten eternal minutes Yardman and Billy came back, with Patrick between them. Patrick stared at me, his face tight and stiff with disbelief. I knew exactly how he felt. Billy pushed him to the back with his gun, and Yardman pointed to the pair of seats at the back. He and Patrick sat down on them, side by side, fifteen feet away. A captive audience, I reflected sourly. Front row of the stalls.

Billy put his mouth close to my ear. ‘He doesn’t fancy a detour, your pilot friend. Ask him to change his mind.’

I didn’t look at Billy, but at Patrick. Yardman was talking to him unhurriedly, but against the engine noise I couldn’t hear what he said. Patrick’s amber eyes looked dark in the gauntness of his face, and he shook his head slightly, staring at me beseechingly. Beseech all you like, I thought, but don’t give in. I knew it was no good. He wasn’t tough enough.

‘Ask him,’ Billy said.

‘Patrick,’ I shouted.

He could hear me. His head tilted to listen. It was difficult to get urgency and conviction across when one had to shout to be heard at all, but I did my best. ‘Please... fly back to Milan.’

Nothing happened for three seconds. Then Patrick tried to stand up and Yardman pulled him back, saying something which killed the beginning of resolution in his shattered face. Patrick, for God’s sake, I thought, have some sense. Get up and go.

Billy unscrewed the silencer from his gun and put it in his pocket. He carefully unbuttoned my shirt, pulled the collar back over my shoulders, and tucked the fronts round into the back of my trousers. I felt very naked and rather silly. Patrick’s face grew, if anything, whiter.

Billy firmly clutched the dressing over the bullet mark and with one wrench pulled the whole thing off.

‘Hey,’ he shouted to Yardman. ‘I don’t call that a miss.’

Yardman’s reply got lost on the way back.

‘Want to know something?’ Billy said, thrusting his sneering face close to mine. ‘I’m enjoying this.’

I saved my breath.

He put the barrel of his revolver very carefully against my skin, laying it flat along a rib just above the existing cut. Then he pushed me round until I was half facing the wall he had made of the hay bales. ‘Keep still,’ he said. He drew the revolver four inches backwards with the barrel still touching me and pulled the trigger. At such close quarters, without the silencer, the shot was a crashing explosion. The bullet sliced through the skin over my ribs and embedded itself in the wall of hay. The spit of flame from the barrel scorched in its wake. In the box behind me, the startled mares began making a fuss. It would create a handy diversion, I thought, if they were frightened into dropping their foals.

Patrick was on his feet, aghast and swaying. I heard him shouting something unintelligible to Billy, and Billy shouting back, ‘Only you can stop it, mate.’

‘Patrick,’ I yelled. ‘Go to Milan.’

‘That’s bloody enough,’ Billy said. He put his gun back on my side, as before. ‘Keep still.’

Yardman couldn’t afford me dead until Patrick had flown where they wanted. I was all for staying alive as long as possible, and jerking around in the circumstances could cut me off short. I did as Billy said, and kept still. He pulled the trigger.

The flash, the crash, the burn, as before.

I looked down at myself, but I couldn’t see clearly because of the angle. There were three long furrows now, parallel and fiery. The top two were beginning to bleed.

Patrick sat down heavily as if his knees had given way and put his hands over his eyes. Yardman was talking to him, clearly urging him to save me any more. Billy wasn’t for waiting. He put his gun in position, told me to keep still, and shot.

Whether he intended it or not, that one went deeper, closer to the bone. The force of it spun me round hard against the mares’ box and wrenched my arms, and my feet stumbled as I tried to keep my balance. The mares whinnied and skittered around, but on the whole they were getting less agitated, not more. A pity.

I had shut my eyes, that time. I opened them slowly to see Patrick and Yardman much nearer, only eight feet away on the far side of the flattened box. Patrick was staring with unreassuring horror at Billy’s straight lines. Too soft-hearted, I thought despairingly. The only chance we had was for him to leave Billy to get on with it and go and turn back to Milan. We weren’t much more than half an hour out. In half an hour we could be back. Half an hour of this...

I swallowed and ran my tongue round my dry lips.

‘If you go where they say,’ I said urgently to Patrick, ‘they will kill us all.’

He didn’t believe it. It wasn’t in his nature to believe it. He listened to Yardman instead.

‘Don’t be silly, my dear boy. Of course we won’t kill you. You will land, we will disembark, and you can all fly off again, perfectly free.’

‘Patrick,’ I said desperately. ‘Go to Milan.’

Billy put his gun along my ribs.

‘How long do you think he can keep still?’ he asked, as if with genuine interest. ‘What’ll you bet?’

I tried to say, ‘They shot Gabriella,’ but Billy was waiting for that. I got the first two words out but he pulled the trigger as I started her name, and the rest of it got lost in the explosion and my own gasping breath.

When I opened my eyes that time, Patrick and Yardman had gone.

For a little while I clung to a distant hope that Patrick would turn back, but Billy merely blew across the top of his hot revolver and laughed at me, and when the plane banked it was to the left, and not a one eighty degree turn. After he had straightened out I looked at the acute angle of the late afternoon sun as it sliced forwards in narrow slivers of brilliance through the row of oval windows on my right.

No surprise, I thought drearily.

We were going east.

Billy had a pocket full of bullets. He sat on the flattened box, feeding his gun. The revolving cylinder broke out sideways with its axis still in line with the barrel, and an ejector rod, pushed back towards the butt, had lifted the spent cartridges out into his hand. The empty cases now lay beside him in a cluster, rolling slightly on their rims. When all the chambers were full again he snapped the gun shut and fondled it. His eyes suddenly switched up to me, the wide stare full of malice.

‘Stinking earl,’ he said.

A la lanterne, I thought tiredly. And all that jazz.

He stood up suddenly and spoke fiercely, with some sort of inner rage.

‘I’ll make you,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Ask.’

‘Ask what?’

‘Something... anything. I’ll make you bloody well ask me for something.’

I said nothing.

‘Ask,’ he said savagely.

I stared past him as if he wasn’t there. Fights, I thought with some chill, weren’t always physical.

‘All right,’ he said abruptly. ‘All right. You’ll ask in the end. You bloody sodding well will.’

I didn’t feel sure enough to say I bloody sodding well wouldn’t. The taunting sneer reappeared on his face, without the same infallible confidence perhaps, but none the less dangerous for that. He nodded sharply, and went off along the alleyway towards the nose, where I hoped he’d stay.

I watched the chips of sunshine grow smaller and tried to concentrate on working out our course, more for distraction than from any hope of needing the information for a return journey. The bullets had hurt enough when Billy fired them, but the burns, as burns do, had hotted up afterwards. The force generated inside the barrel of a pistol was, if I remembered correctly, somewhere in the region of five tons. A bullet left a revolver at a rate of approximately seven hundred feet per second and if not stopped carried about five hundred yards. The explosion which drove the bullet spinning on its way also shot out flames, smoke, hot propulsive gases and burning particles of gunpowder, and at close quarters they made a very dirty mess. Knowing these charming facts was of no comfort at all. The whole ruddy area simply burnt and went on burning, as if someone had stood an electric iron on it and had forgotten to switch off.

After Billy went away it was about an hour before I saw anyone again, and then it was Alf. He shuffled into my sight round the corner of the box I was tied to, and stood looking at me with one of the disposable mugs in his hand. His lined old face was, as usual, without expression.

‘Alf,’ I shouted. ‘Untie me.’

There wasn’t anywhere to run to. I just wanted to sit down. But Alf either couldn’t hear, or wouldn’t. He looked unhurriedly at my ribs, a sight which as far as I could see produced no reaction in him at all. But something must have stirred somewhere, because he took a slow step forward, and being careful not to touch me, lifted his mug. It had ‘Alf’ in red where Mike had written it that morning, in that distant sane and safe lost world of normality.

‘Want some?’ he said.

I nodded, half afraid he’d pour it out on the floor, as Billy would have done; but he held it up to my mouth, and let me finish it all. Lukewarm, oversweet neo-coffee. The best drink I ever had.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

He nodded, produced the nearest he could do to a smile, and shuffled away again. Not an ally. A non-combatant, rather.

More time passed. I couldn’t see my watch or trust my judgment, but I would have guessed it was getting on for two hours since we had turned. I had lost all sense of direction. The sun had gone, and we were travelling into dusk. Inside the cabin the air grew colder. I would have liked to have had my shirt on properly, not to mention a jersey, but the mares behind my back provided enough warmth to keep me from shivering. On a full load in that cramped plane eight horses generated a summer’s day even with icing conditions outside, and we seldom needed the cabin heaters. It was far too much to hope in the circumstances that Patrick would think of switching them on.

Two hours flying. We must, I thought, have been down near Albenga when we turned, which meant that since then, if we were still going east and the winds were the same as in the morning, we could have been crossing Italy somewhere north of Florence. Ahead lay the Adriatic, beyond that, Yugoslavia, and beyond that, Roumania.

It didn’t matter a damn where we went, the end would be the same.

I shifted wearily, trying to find some ease, and worried for the thousandth time whether Gabriella was winning, back in Milan. The police there, I supposed, wrenching my mind away from her, would be furious I hadn’t turned up. They still had my passport. There might at least be a decent investigation if I never went back for it, and Gabriella knew enough to explain what I’d inadvertently got caught up in. If she lived. If she lived...

The plane banked sharply in a steep turn to the left. I leant against the roll and tried to gauge its extent. Ninety degrees turn, I thought. No; more. It didn’t seem to make much sense. But if... if... we had reached the Adriatic I supposed it was possible we were now going up it, north west, back towards Venice... and Trieste. I admitted gloomily to myself that it was utter guesswork; that I was lost, and in more than one sense.

Ten minutes later the engine note changed and the volume of noise decreased. We had started going down. My heart sank with the plane. Not much time left. Oncoming night and a slow descent, the stuff of death.

There were two rows of what looked like car headlights marking each end of a runway. We circled once so steeply that I caught a glimpse of them through the tipped window, and then we levelled out for the approach and lost speed, and the plane bumped down on to a rough surface. Grass, not tarmac. The plane taxied round a bit, and then stopped. One by one the four engines died. The plane was quiet and dark, and for three long deceptive minutes at my end of it there was peace.

The cabin lights flashed on, bright overhead. The mares behind me kicked the box. Further along, the other pair whinnied restlessly. There was a clatter in the galley, and the noise of people coming back through the plane, stumbling over the chains.

Patrick came first, with Billy after. Billy had screwed the silencer back on his gun.

Patrick went past the flattened box into the small area in front of the two washroom doors. He moved stiffly, as if he couldn’t feel his feet on the floor, as if he were sleep walking.

Billy had stopped near me, on my right.

‘Turn round, pilot,’ he said.

Patrick turned, his body first and his legs untwisting after. He staggered slightly, and stood swaying. If his face had been white before, it was leaden grey now. His eyes were stretched and glazed with shock, and his good-natured mouth trembled.

He stared at me with terrible intensity.

‘He... shot... them,’ he said. ‘Bob... and Mike. Bob and Mike.’ His voice broke on the horror of it.

Billy sniggered quietly.

‘You said... they would kill us all.’ A tremor shook him. ‘I didn’t... believe it.’

His eyes went down to my side. ‘I couldn’t...’ he said. ‘They said they’d go on and on...’

‘Where are we?’ I said sharply.

His eyes came back in a snap, as if I’d kicked his brain.

‘Italy,’ he began automatically. ‘South west of...’

Billy raised his gun, aiming high for the skull.

‘No.’ I yelled at him in rage and horror at the top of my voice. ‘No.’

He jumped slightly, but he didn’t even pause. The gun coughed through the silencer and the bullet hit its target. Patrick got both his hands half-way to his head before the blackness took him. He spun on his collapsing legs and crashed headlong, face down, his long body still and silent, the auburn hair brushing against the washroom door. The soles of his feet were turned mutely up, and one of his shoes needed mending.