Second Wind

Chapter 3

Robin, as generous with his telephone as with his rum, listened with barely confined enthusiasm to my report on the weather brewing in the circle of sea named after the frightening Caribs, North American Indians, who invaded the islands and coastal lands, and ruled by torture there before Columbus and other European colonists drove them out in their turn.

There were still pirates, modern dress variety, Robin said, infesting the warm blue waters as murderous predators, stealing yachts and killing the owners, though maybe they weren’t quite as bloodsucking as in the past. He smiled, mentioning that the word carib had the same linguistic root as cannibal.

I talked to the Hurricane Center in Miami where a longtime telephone pal gave me an as-of-five minutes-ago state of the upper winds.

‘Odin is coming along nicely,’ he said. ‘There were signs of organisation during the night. I wouldn’t now say you’ve crossed the pond for nothing. Call me tomorrow, we might have more. This storm’s mighty slow, forward movement only 6 miles an hour, if that. There are 35 miles an hour sustained winds on the surface, but no eye yet.’

To Robin I said, ‘It’s a toss-up.’

‘Heads it’s a hurricane?’

‘Do you want it to be a hurricane?’ I asked curiously.

It seemed to me that in fact he did, but he shook his bespectacled head and said, ‘No, I definitely don’t. I’ve lived here in Florida for forty years, and I’ve gone inland from the coast every time evacuation’s been advised. We’ve been lucky with water surge too. There’s a reef parallel with the coast here about half a mile out and in some way it lowers the storm surge and inhibits the formation of large waves. Where there’s no reef, it’s the water, not the wind, that kills most people.’

One couldn’t live so long in a hurricane alley, I supposed, without learning a few deadly statistics, and on my second (glorious) evening in his house, Robin switched on the national weather channel for us all to see how Odin was coming along.

Dramatically well, was the answer.

The pressure in the circling centre of the tropical depression Odin, a happy television voice announced, had dropped 20 millibars in the past two hours. Almost unheard of! Now officially designated a vigorous tropical storm, Odin, generating winds around 65 mph, lay more than 200 miles south of Jamaica and was travelling due north at 7 miles an hour.

Robin absorbed the information thoughtfully and announced that on the next day we would all take a flight to Grand Cayman Island for a few days in the sun.

As we had spent the whole of that day swimming in the Darcy pool, drinking Darcy revivers and lying in the Florida sun, Robin had only one possible intention; to move, if not directly into the eye of Odin, at least to where it could see us.

Kris stalked with huge elastic strides around the sunny pool and the half-shaded terrace above. Odin, tracked by radar and satellites, was too small for his taste, too slow, and too far from land. Robin said dryly that he was sorry not to have been able to fix a better display.

Evelyn thought hurricane-chasing a dangerous and juvenile sport and said she wasn’t going to Grand Cayman, she was staying comfortably at home: and Robin reminded her that if Odin intensified, and if Odin changed course, as hurricanes were liable to do from one minute to the next, it might be she who found the monster roaring on her doorstep, not us.

‘What is more,’ she continued firmly, ignoring the threat, ‘tonight for dinner we’re having stone crabs, Florida’s pride, and after that Kris can repeat to us the poem he’s been muttering to himself all day, and after that you can watch hours of the weather channel if you like, but don’t wake me in the morning, I’m not catching any flight to anywhere.’

‘What poem?’ Robin asked.

‘There’s no poem. I’m going for a swim,’ Kris said immediately, and was still in the pool at sunset.

‘He did recite a poem,’ Evelyn complained. ‘Why does he pretend he didn’t?’

I said from experience, ‘Give him time.’

In time, he would either repeat his verses or tear them up. It would depend on how he felt.

The stone crabs for dinner, with mustard sauce and green salad, beat fish pie with parsley sauce out of sight, and over coffee out on the terrace in soft silhouetting light, Kris said, without preliminaries, ‘I went to Cape Canaveral, you know.’

We nodded.

‘I’ll fly through a hurricane, but those first astronauts sat on countless tons of rocket fuel and lit a match. So... well... I wrote for them. I wrote about Cape Canaveral, about the past... about the future.’

He stood up abruptly and carried his coffee cup to the end of the terrace. His voice came matter-of-factly out of the dark.

No one spoke.

Kris said,

More silence.

With a sigh, Kris said,

Kris walked over and put his coffee cup on the table. ‘So you see,’ he said, a near-laugh lightening his concept, ‘I’m no John Keats.’

Robin said judiciously, ‘An interesting aperçu, all the same.’

Kris left Robin explaining an aperçu to Evelyn and walked me to the edge of the terrace to look at the moon reflected in the pool.

‘Robin’s arranged a Piper in Cayman,’ he said. ‘I’ve checked that I can fly it. Are you on?’

‘I can’t afford much.’

‘Don’t fuss about the money. Are you spiritually on?’

‘Yes.’

‘Great.’ My unqualified agreement excited him. ‘I was sure that’s why you came.’

‘Why is Robin so keen on us going to Odin?’

Kris wrinkled his tall pale forehead. ‘Understanding why people do things, that’s your sort of work, not mine.’

‘I liked your poem.’

He grimaced. ‘You should go to the Cape. You’d never believe that the moon walks were spawned from those concrete slabs.’

There were times, there were days, when the extremes of Kris’s see-saw nature fell into balance, not just as always for his solo two-minute on-screen weather forecasts, but also for a lasting peace. It was as if the careful pilot took over even after the wheels had landed. On the evening of the Cape Canaveral verses he sounded more level-headed than I’d ever known him out of an aeroplane.

‘Did you see Bell?’ he asked.

‘I talked to her on the telephone.’

‘Will she marry me, do you think?’

I blew a breath of exasperation down my nose. ‘First,’ I said, ‘you’d better ask her.’

‘And next?’

‘Both of you practise keeping your temper. Count ten before you yell.’

He thought it over and nodded. ‘You tell her, and I’ll do it.’

I nodded. I doubted that either would manage it, but an attempt was an advance.

In a typical non sequitur he conversationally asked, ‘What do you know of Trox Island?’

‘Er.’ I thought without result. ‘Does Bell like it, or something?’

‘Bell? It’s nothing to do with Bell. It’s to do with Robin and Evelyn.’

I said ‘Oh?’ vaguely. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘It seems that most people have never heard of it,’ Kris said, ‘but suppose Robin wants you and me to fly to Trox Island, never mind through Odin’s eye.’

I said, puzzled, ‘Why ever should he?’

‘I think it’s something to do with mushrooms.’

‘Oh no, Kris,’ I protested. ‘I’m not risking my life for mushrooms.’

‘You won’t be risking your life. In the past, dozens of planes have flown through hurricanes to gather essential and helpful information, and almost none has been lost.’

Almost none, I thought, wasn’t enormously reassuring.

‘So why mushrooms?’ I asked.

‘Robin was talking on the phone soon after I came,’ Kris explained, ‘and I accidentally overheard him, and it was something about me and possibly my friend, that’s you, and Odin and mushrooms on Trox Island.’

‘And you haven’t asked him about it?’

‘Well... not yet. I mean... I don’t want to upset him. He says he’s paying for us to go to Cayman, and he’s paying the cost of the aircraft...’

‘I’ll ask him,’ I said, and later, peacefully, night-cap glass of cognac to hand, I mentioned Bell’s account of the Darcy mushroom and sod farm business and wondered where he found fungus and grass to grow best.

‘Florida,’ he promptly said. ‘I grow my grass in swampland up near Lake Okeechobee. Best wet agricultural conditions for sod in the States.’

‘And someone mentioned Trox Island, too. Where’s that?’ I put no force into an ultra-calm enquiry, but even so I sensed a tightening, and then a deliberate loosening in my host.

‘Trox?’ He took his time answering. He opened a heavy gleaming wood thermidor and fiddled lengthily with cutting and lighting a cigar. Internal debate came out in punctuating puffs of smoke. I sat placidly, looking out from the terrace to the vast untroubled sea.

‘Trox,’ Robin said pleasantly at length, sure he had the whole tobacco tip redly glowing, ‘is one of the many little islands sticking up in the Caribbean Sea. I believe Trox is chiefly constructed of guano — that’s bird droppings, of course.’

‘Fertiliser,’ I agreed.

He nodded. ‘So I understand, but I’ve never been there myself.’ He inhaled smoke and blew it out, and said how much Evelyn and he were enjoying having Kris and myself as houseguests, and how interesting he had found Kris’s view of the future of space travel, and how much he looked forward to Kris’s reports on shaking hands with Odin. He had dropped Trox Island as if of no interest. I tried again to mention it and he cut me off immediately, saying flatly, ‘Think about Odin. Forget Trox Island. Let me fill your glass.’

Evelyn drew me away, wanting me to identify the stars, turning aside as boring our engrossment with shifting winds.

At the end of the evening Kris and I each returned to our colourful basic tropical bedrooms: brilliant fabrics, wicker furniture, white-tiled floor, ceiling fan circling, bright bathroom adjacent, all an ultimate comfort. I fell asleep as easily as on the previous evening, but half-woke hours later in the dark wondering why the London street lights weren’t throwing familiar shadows on the ceiling.

Miami... I drifted to full consciousness... I was in Sand Dollar Beach, named for the flat round decorative shells sometimes found on the shoreline. They were a sort of sea urchins of the order Clypeasteroida... I’d looked them up.

I switched on the bedside light, felt restless, got up, padded in and out of the bathroom, and finally, with a towel and in swimming shorts made my way through the dark house, across the terrace and down into the soothing pool.

Robin Darcy, friendly but secretive, generous beyond normal, had given us too much and told us too little. So what the devil were Kris and I set on? And could it be a one-way trip?

Mrs Mevagissey relied on my earnings, as I for twenty past years had lived on hers. I had no right to risk the money that paid the nurses. They alone made her existence bearable. My priority was to fly through a hurricane and to return home safely. Kris’s plans came second, Robin’s third.

Odin, my own knowledge and forward-looking perception told me, could grow quite quickly from Category 3 to Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which meant that the speeds of its winds would destroy every instrument put out to measure them. Category 5 meant Odin would deliver catastrophic damage in storm surge wherever it touched on shore; it could sustain incredible winds of around 180 miles an hour in its eye-wall... and little islands, with or without mushrooms, could be flooded and disappear.

I relaxed in the semi-cool water and swam lengths with economic strokes, covering distance without concentrating. All my life, swimming had been the one competitive sport my grandmother and I had been comfortably able to afford for me, though from sixteen onwards I’d deserted municipal pools and Olympic-type racing for longer endurance trials and surfing. By the time Kris and I went to Florida I was growing out of the urge to race at all, but I still had the shoulders and movements of long practice.

Thinking only of Hurricane Odin and Trox Island, I slid out of the pool in a while and stood, towelling, with my back to the house.

A voice behind me said with goose-bumpy menace, ‘Stand still and raise your hands.’

I nearly swung round thoughtlessly and would doubtless have been shot, but after a moment of reconsideration I dropped the towel and did as I’d been told.

‘Now turn round slowly.’

I turned round, realising that I, near the pool, was in unlit shadow to anyone up on the terrace.

Robin stood up there, lit from behind by a glow in the house. Round cosy Robin held a hand gun pointing motionlessly where it could do me terminal damage.

‘It’s me — Perry,’ I said. ‘I was swimming.’

‘Come forward where I can see you. And come slowly, or I’ll shoot.’

If he hadn’t so obviously been speaking the simple truth, I might have joked; instead I slowly stepped forward until the house lights shone into my eyes.

‘What are you doing out here?’ Robin asked blankly, lowering the gun to point at my feet.

‘I couldn’t sleep. Can I put my hands down now?’

He shook himself slightly as if waking up, opening his mouth and nodding, but in the second before life returned to normal the pool area was suddenly full of blinding lights, blue uniforms, shouting voices and horribly purposeful black guns. The wish — the willingness to kill — reached me like shock waves. I felt battered by noise. I was told to kneel and did so, and was held down by a ruthless hand on my neck.

Robin was ineffectually speaking. The blue-uniformed police, not listening, continued with their rough mission, which was if not to put a bullet in him, at least to immobilise the intruder and shout garbled words into his befuddled ear, words Robin later identified as my ‘rights’.

For what seemed ages I went on kneeling ignominiously at the edge of the pool, feeling stupid in my swimming shorts, gripped by unfriendly hands, with wrists clicked into handcuffs behind my back (always behind one’s back in Florida, Robin said, and in most other American states). My protests got nowhere against their loud voiced and fulfilling abuse until Robin finally reached the chief uniform’s attention. The intruder, he apologised, was a houseguest.

A houseguest swimming at three-thirty in the morning?

Very sorry, Robin said. Very sorry.

Unwillingly deprived of their prey, the blue uniforms with surliness holstered their guns and rested their light bulbs. They reported back by radio to their home base, produced forms for Robin to sign, treated both of us with continuing suspicion, retrieved their handcuffs and finally disappeared as fast as they had come.

I stood up stiffly, picked up the towel, crossed the terrace and followed Robin into the house.

He wasn’t pleased with me, nor inclined to realise that he hadn’t warned me about any alarms.

‘I had no idea,’ he said crossly, ‘that you would swim in the middle of the night. There are burglar alarms round the terrace which alert a security firm to the presence of an intruder. There’s a direct line to the police and a warning buzzer in my bedroom. I suppose you’d better have a drink.’

‘No... I’m sorry for the trouble.’

I wound and tied the towel round my hips like a loin cloth and Robin assessed me with thoughtfulness, crossing his wrists below his stomach to hold his gun.

‘I must say,’ he said judiciously, ‘that you behaved very coolly under fire.’

I hadn’t felt cool. My heart-rate had been of Cape Canaveral speed.

I asked, ‘How far off were they from actually shooting?’

‘The distance of a trigger’s travel,’ Robin said. He put his hand gun into a pocket in his robe. ‘Go back to bed. I hope you sleep.’

Before I could move, however, the telephone rang, and without surprise at this early morning summons, Robin answered.

‘Yes,’ he said into the receiver. ‘A false alarm. My houseguest... midnight swim... yes, everything’s fine... yes... yes... it’s Hereford... yes, that’s right, Hereford. No, the police weren’t happy, but I assure you all is well.’ He put down the receiver and briefly explained to me that the security firm had been checking. ‘They always do, after the police radio in that it’s a false alarm.’

Robin accompanied me to my bedroom door, recovering his milder manner on the way.

‘I should have told you about the alarm,’ he murmured. ‘But never mind, no harm done.’

‘No.’ I smiled goodnight, and he with a laugh said he hoped I would be as unruffled when I met Odin.

Leaving Evelyn at home, Robin, Kris and I flew on Cayman Airways from Miami to Grand Cayman in the morning, Robin with still good humour telling Kris about our adventures in the night. Kris, on the far side of the house, had slept soundly through the din.

It was after we’d cleared immigration that trickles of decent information slowly reached me, but without flowing together to make a stream.

Robin and Kris, collected by car outside the airport, were driven away, telling me transport was there for me as well but otherwise leaving me standing in unexpectedly hot air temperature wondering what to do next.

‘Next’ turned out to be a thin woman in bleached often-washed cotton trousers and a white sleeveless top who walked straight up to me and said, ‘Dr Stuart, I presume.’

Her voice was crisply grand-house-in-the-country English. She’d seen a lot of BBC weather forecasts and she knew me by sight, she said. She told me to get into the front cab of her orange pickup truck, standing not far ahead. She sounded accustomed to being in charge.

‘Robin Darcy... Kris...’ I began.

She interrupted, ‘Kris Ironside has gone for familiarisation flights in the aircraft he’ll be flying. Get in the pickup, do.’

I sat in the cab and roasted in the heat, which allowed no respite, even with the windows open. It was the second half of October south of the Tropic of Cancer. I took off my too conventional tie and thought of a tepid shower.

‘I’m Amy Ford,’ the woman said, identifying herself as she drove out of the airport. ‘How do you do?’

‘Could I ask where are we going?’

‘I have an errand to run in George Town. Then to my house.’

She drove a short distance into a compact and prosperous looking small town, its streets lined with shade trees and alive with camera-clicking tourists.

‘This is the island’s capital, George Town,’ Amy said, and added, ‘It’s the only real town, actually.’

‘All these people...’

‘They come off the cruise ships,’ Amy said, and pointed, as we rounded a corner, to the broad open sea where three huge passenger ships rode at anchor, and imitation pirate galleons popped off imitation cannon balls, and container ships edged into the quay-side bringing food and bulldozers.

Amy parked within running distance of the Public Library to return a book, then, after passing important-looking bank buildings, she drove back along the harbour front where friendly drivers amazingly gave way with smiles.

‘Nice place,’ I said, meaning it.

Amy took the comment as natural. ‘My house next,’ she said. ‘Not far.’

Her house, not far, as she’d said, must have covered eight thousand square feet of the ocean front paradise it was set in; a clone of Robin Darcy’s easy opulence but magnified by two.

She led the way into a sitting-room, small by the house’s overall standard, but blessedly cool with air conditioning and a rotating ceiling fan. There was a view through heavy sliding glass doors of intensely blue sea, there were chairs and china figures in tropically exuberant colours, and there was a man in white shorts who said ‘Michael Ford’ and shook my hand.

‘You look bigger than on the screen.’ His comment was without offence and said in roughly the same accent as his wife, though I would have placed him a shade lower in the social hierarchy, however bulging the coffers.

In between my basic weather work (and, frankly, to earn more in order to pay Jett van Els and her sisters) I lectured freelance and after-dinner talked and, from a natural aptitude for mimicry, I’d learned to recognise the origins of many accents. Not nearly in such incredible detail as Shaw’s Professor Higgins, of course, but enough in the right places to amuse.

I would have put Michael Ford’s vocal roots, like my own, as somewhere in western rural Berkshire, but in his case the basic material had been polished by studied layers of gloss.

Scarcely taller than Robin Darcy, Michael Ford, with his tanned bare broad-shouldered torso and his strong shoe-and-sockless slightly bowed brown legs, looked like the useful muscle that the rounded Robin lacked.

Amy Ford said ‘Cold drink?’ to me and poured orange juice lavishly onto ice cubes, and it wasn’t until I tasted it that I realised there was a good deal of something like Bacardi in its kick.

I said, ‘Would you mind awfully telling me who you are and why I’m here?’ And I heard Amy’s tones in my own; slightly shocking.

Amy however, appearing not to notice, did in part explain.

‘I sold Robin my aeroplane. As I understand it, your friend is going to fly it through this hurricane Odin, and you are here to navigate.’

I thought blankly, why ever would Robin buy a doubtless expensive aeroplane for Kris — someone he’d casually met at a lunch party — to fly through a violent storm?

‘Robin bought my aeroplane for Nicky, actually,’ Amy said, seeing nothing odd in it, ‘but of course Nicky went away.’

‘Hurricane Nicky?’ I asked.

‘Naturally. Of course. But this new storm was brewing more or less on Nicky’s heels, one might say, and Robin said he’d met Kris who apparently was a good pilot, and Kris wanted to fly through a hurricane, so... well... here you are.’

As an explanation it raised more questions than it answered.

I said over my strongly laced juice, ‘Where is Odin this morning, do you know?’

As of two hours earlier, Odin, according to my helpful pal at the National Hurricane Tracking Center, had been intensifying south of Jamaica and causing the population of that island to contemplate safety in the hills.

‘If you’re going towards Odin,’ my pal warned, ‘remember that on Grand Cayman there aren’t any hills to go to.’

‘Is Odin likely to hit Cayman?’

‘Look, Perry, you know damned well that not even Odin knows where it’s going. But the report just coming in puts Odin high in Category 3, that’s a fierce hurricane, Perry, you get out of there. Disregard what I said before, and go.’

‘What about Trox Island?’ I asked.

He said ‘Where?’ and after a pause added, ‘If that’s one of that scatter of little islands in the western Caribbean, then don’t go there, Perry, don’t. If Odin goes on developing it could hit any of those islands head on and wipe them out.’

‘Wind or storm surge?’

‘Both.’ He hesitated. ‘We can easily be wrong, so it’s better not to guess. At the moment I’d put my money on Odin veering north-west to miss Jamaica, and as Grand Cayman,’ he finally assured me, ‘would then be straight ahead of Odin... it’s a place to leave, not play around in, if you have any sense.’

I suppose I had no sense.

I asked, ‘Where exactly is Trox Island?’

‘Is it important? I’ll look it up.’ There was a rustling of paper. ‘Here we are. Islands in the West Caribbean... Roncador Cay... Swan... Thunder Knoll. Here it is... Trox. Number of inhabitants, anything from zero to twenty, mostly fishermen. Size, one mile long, half a mile wide. Highest point above sea level, two hundred feet. Volcanic? No. Constructed of bird droppings, guano, coral and limestone rock. Map co-ordinates, 17.50 degrees North, 81.44 West.’ Another rustle of paper. ‘There you are, then, it’s just a peak of guano-covered rock sticking up from undersea mountains.’

‘Any farming? Any mushrooms?’

‘Why ever mushrooms? No, if anything, you might find coconuts. It says here there are palm trees.’

‘Who does Trox belong to?’

‘It doesn’t say in this list. All it says is “Ownership Disputed”.’

‘And is that the absolute lot?’

‘Yes, except that it says there’s a landing for boats and an old grass strip for aircraft, but no fuel and no maintenance. Nothing. Forget it.’

He was busy at work and could talk no longer. His final advice was ‘Go home’: and he meant by home, England.

Michael Ford looked at the heavy gold watch weighing down his left wrist and pushed buttons on a vast television set until he reached a noisy channel giving alarmist details of the development of Odin.

Odin had become organised into a full-grown hurricane with a central area where the winds were circling ever faster, leaving a calm small round quiet centre like a hub. Odin, with this well-developed ‘eye’, was now circling with winds of 120 miles an hour or more, but was still going forwards slowly at 7 mph. The low-pressure centre of winds aloft had weakened and allowed a stronger circling in the central dense overcast, resulting in the distinct formation of the eye.

Kris, at least, would be pleased to hear the development was official.

Odin was 750 miles south of where Evelyn peacefully sunned herself by the Sand Dollar pool, and even from where I stood on Grand Cayman, the view through the windows of sand and palm trees 200 miles from a major storm, was calm, sunny and without a breeze. It seemed impossible that any speed of wind could blow away a town as thoroughly as Hurricane Andrew had, or that any ocean surge could drown 300,000 people as in Bangladesh. I knew pretty thoroughly the paths of the winds of the world and had studied most of the devilments of nature, but like many a volcanologist I’d warmed my hands from afar without walking round an erupting rim.

As a committed fly-through prospect, the satellite picture of Odin was soul-shrink daunting. Did I really intend to fly with Kris into the centre of that?

I had brought with me by habit my small accurate camera, but even given the best lens in the world, I was not going to see any satellite’s-eye view. The circling top of a great hurricane, where the winds were coldest, rose to maybe fifty or sixty thousand feet; Kris and I, without oxygen, couldn’t go much higher than ten thousand. We would fly into the quiet central hub, read and note the air pressure there, ditto the wind speeds in the eye-wall, and fly out on the other side to make our way back to the home field. For most of the way, might we not be buffeted about in rain cloud? But we would be travelling faster than the wind.

How the hell, I thought privately, did one find the eye? How was I supposed to navigate? I’d had no rehearsals. Who would give me a quick course in hurricane dead reckoning? Who would distract me from the word ‘dead’?

Why did I, all the same, want to do that flight more than anything else?

The Weather Channel went on chattering in civilised tones about the downward march of millibars, those useful measurements of lowering air pressure and forthcoming disaster.

The television screen in the Ford house looked out from a clearly expensive wall fitment, and Amy, Michael and I sat around in lush armchairs glancing occasionally at the image of the wide white swirling mass while they told me that historically Grand Cayman had suffered few major direct hits, but that of course there was always a first time. Their blithe voices, though, said they didn’t believe it.

I’d heard jockeys describe the atmosphere in the changing-room before they’d gone out to partner half a ton of horse in the Grand National over the biggest, most demanding jumps in the sport. They were going into break-neck paraplegic country, and they did it for love. I’d wondered why they felt compelled; and in the Fords’ clean bright wealthy sitting-room, I found I knew.

During the several idle hours before Robin and Kris reappeared, I learned among other things that in the United States Amy had owned, managed and sold a string of video rental stores, while Michael equipped gymnasiums and collected membership money.

They were both proud of their achievements, also proud of each other, and in those areas talked freely.

I learned that neither Amy nor Michael were themselves licensed pilots, though Amy had been taking instruction before she sold her aircraft to Robin.

‘Why did you sell it to Robin?’ I asked Amy without pressure, more as time-filling chit chat than as a purposeful enquiry.

Michael made a damping movement of his hand as if urging caution, but Amy answered limpidly, ‘He wanted it. He made a good offer, so I agreed.’ She finished her tall glass of orange mixture. ‘If you want to know why he bought it, you’ll have to ask him.’

Robin and Kris came back at that moment in good spirits, so I did ask him straight out, lightly, there and then, as if it were merely again a conversational opening without purpose.

Robin blinked, paused, smiled, and in the same misleading way answered, ‘Amy wouldn’t want me to tell you that she could buy a diamond necklace if she sold me her airplane.’

‘And more besides,’ Michael heartily said, relieved.

I smiled warmly. They were all capable liars. Amy gave Kris a tall glass tinkling with ice and I told him neutrally, ‘Mine has rum in it.’

He was halfway up to a manic high, but non-alcoholic, as usual. He looked piercingly at the almost full glass standing beside me on a small table, then he tasted his own, set it down, and with sizzling enthusiasm told me the news.

‘It’s a terrific plane. Two engines. I had an instructor put me through its paces. Passed with OK. OK, Robin’s happy. Everyone’s happy. Mind you, most people think amateurs should stay strictly away from storms, but they’ll take account of what we’ll measure, even if we don’t have a fully equipped flying laboratory...’

‘When are we going?’ I asked.

Everyone looked at the Weather Channel’s update. Odin by that moment had dropped another couple of frightening millibars and had moved one minute north-west. A bright-mannered elderly studio visitor with — I guessed — a pay-off from the tourist trade — rejoiced that Odin was circling over water and doing no harm to holiday makers or people vacationing ashore. Kris looked at me cynically and shrugged since, in circling over a warm sea, Odin was strengthening all the time.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ Kris said, ‘0800. Eight o’clock. Before it gets too hot.’

Michael and Amy had insisted on having Robin, Kris and me all stay overnight in their house. They gave us unending drinks, more rather than less alcoholic, to Kris’s embarrassment, and Michael grilled steaks on a brick-built barbecue with a flourish of proprietorial strength inside a shiny vinyl apron.

Kris and I were given small tasks to do, like folding napkins and filling a tub with ice cubes; small tasks that kept us close to Amy’s side. It became somehow understood that neither of us should wander away, and with Robin’s alarm system in mind, I stayed where my hosts wanted. It felt to me a shade like luxurious imprisonment, but I had little money and no good excuse for insisting on a hotel instead.

Michael, besides, though on the surface all friendly, a genial cook, had also, I slowly realised, an agility with all those muscles that spoke of combat rather than the exercise machines he had dealt in.

Odin on the television moved slowly, dangerously, north-west.

Amy, pleasantly, with my help, laying plates at a dining table in an insect-screened porch near the barbecue, exclaimed suddenly to the rest of us ‘How good looking Kris is! And you too, of course, Perry. Does the BBC choose the forecasters for their ultra attractive faces?’

Kris grinned. ‘All the time.’

I was used to the way Kris looked, but it was true, I knew, that at one time he’d clung onto his job in the aftermath of one of his more outrageous statements only because of the swoon factor in women viewers. Rarely, though, for such a handsome person, he was equally liked by men, and that, I thought, lay somewhere in his manic-depressive spectrum, from which he offered a friendship that could be wildly scatty but had no sex in it. His reliance on me was in the nature of an expedition leader being certain that whatever the catastrophe, he could absolutely rely on base camp being there for him.

He brought zany lightheartedness to that strange evening in Cayman, but he refused Robin’s request for a repeat recital of the Cape Canaveral verses; asked why not, he replied that the genesis of the verses had lain in depression and should stay there.

I watched Robin thoughtfully contemplate Kris. Robin had got himself more than a good amateur pilot, he’d got a British national celebrity, and I wondered if in his so far unexplained planning, this celebrity factor had been intentional or unforeseen.

By six-thirty the next morning, Odin had been firmly declared a Category 4 hurricane, travelling north-west at less than 7 miles an hour.

Straight ahead, if it continued on that path, it would in a day or two smash into the house of Michael and Amy, blowing away its opulence, sweeping through the bright little room with a hundred tons of sand-heavy water.

Kris came to stand beside me, watching the deadly drama on the screen and being pleased at the sharp definition of the eye.

‘Come on then,’ he said, ‘we might as well go.’ His eyes shone like a child’s ready for a party. ‘We’re not the only people flying,’ he added, ‘and I’d better file a flight plan.’

We went back to the airfield in the orange pickup truck, with directions from Amy, and among a surprising number of light aircraft standing in a separated area designated ‘general aviation’, Kris singled out and patted approvingly the twin-engine propeller-driven Piper that Robin had bought.

‘Why don’t you sit in this little beauty while I go and file the flight plan?’ Kris suggested. ‘I won’t be long.’

‘How about a map?’ I asked.

He fiddled about unlocking the door with his back to me and after a while turned and said, ‘What we really need is a direction to Odin’s eye, not a regular map.’

‘Can they give you that direction from here?’

‘They sure can.’

He more or less trotted off eagerly, leaving me behind.

He and I, I thought, had been friends for years and I’d seen him through enough suicidally bad times to know when he was avoiding telling me the truth. That morning in Cayman’s airport, he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

He came back from the offices waving a sheet of paper which he thrust into my hands for me to read while he went through his external checks. Those checks, for that aircraft, only semi-familiar to Kris, were in stapled sections of instructions, a small heap of them lying on the captain’s seat. Kris checked the exterior of the aeroplane with the appropriate section of instructions in hand to refer to, and I read the flight information sheet he’d filed with the Air Traffic Service.

Most of it was to me double Dutch. When he’d finished the external checks, I asked him what was meant by the addresses given for instance as MWCRZTZX and MKJKZOZYX.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.

‘I’m not going unless you tell me.’

He stared, astonished, at my mild mutiny. ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘the first lot of letters is the address of Grand Cayman Tower, in this airport, and the second is Kingston Airspace, Jamaica, where we’ll find Odin, probably. Satisfied?’

He pointed lower down the form to our ‘destination aerodrome’ which was listed as ZZZZ, because we weren’t sure where we were going. ‘Odin,’ he said.

‘And how about a map?’ I asked. ‘I’m really not going with you without a map.’

In England he would never have flown anywhere without a map. To set off into the wide Caribbean without one was madness.

‘I know where I’m going,’ he said mulishly.

‘Then you don’t need a navigator.’

‘Perry!’

‘A radio map,’ I said. ‘One with Trox Island on it.’

His half-awakened sense of shock came fully alive.

He frowned. He said, ‘Robin will be livid.’

‘Robin’s using us,’ I answered him.

‘How?’ He didn’t want to believe it. ‘He’s been the tops for us. He’s paying everything for us, don’t forget. He even bought this aeroplane from Amy.’

I said, ‘What if he bought himself an aircraft so that he could do what he liked with it? What if he got himself a good amateur pilot, little known in this area, and one, what’s more, who’s an expert meteorologist, who can deal with and understand cyclonic winds?’

‘But he’s just an enthusiast,’ Kris protested.

I said, ‘I’ll bet he’s got you to include the island in our flight... and perhaps it’s ZZZZ on the flight plan... and I’ll bet he persuaded you not to tell me where we’re going.’

‘Perry...’ He looked shattered, but denied nothing.

‘So did he tell you why?’ I asked. ‘Did he tell you what to do on Trox Island if we got there? Did he say why he wasn’t going himself? And, chief of the difficult questions, what is so odd about the destination or the purpose for going there, that it has to be camouflaged in a hurricane?’