The Lost Testament

102

Breakfast was exactly what they needed — a choice of strong coffee or hot chocolate, croissants and a couple of small pains au raisin, fruit and yoghurt — and they cleared the lot. Bronson paid the bill in cash, and they were back on the road by just before eight in the morning.

After travelling slowly for four hours on minor roads, weaving through village after village, they stopped for lunch: another selection of sandwiches purchased in a cafeteria attached to a small service area, washed down by moderately suspect coffee.

‘God knows what this service station food is doing to my complexion,’ Angela muttered as she swallowed the last of her chicken sandwich. ‘I’d kill for a nice crisp salad. I’ll be really glad to get home, I can tell you that. How are we going to get across the Channel?’

‘Probably a ferry. The danger with the Tunnel is that it’s an entirely closed environment. If we’re spotted when we drive onto the train, or even when we’re waiting to embark in the car park, there’s nowhere for us to go. At least on a ferry I’ll have room to manoeuvre. The problem is that the Channel is a choke point, just like the Pyrenees, but even more restricted. And we have to cross it and get back to Britain, somehow.’

‘I did have one idea that I thought might work,’ Angela said.

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘As I see it, the trick really is to convince anybody who’s following us that we’ll be in one particular place at a certain time, while we’re actually somewhere else.’

She glanced at Bronson, who nodded slowly, lifting an eyebrow.

‘So here’s an idea. Later on today, when we’re north of Rouen, say, why don’t you ring up the ferry company on your mobile and use one of your credit cards to book a particular crossing for this evening. If you’re right and these people are able to track our credit card transactions, that will tell them precisely when we’ll be arriving at Calais, and so that’s where they’ll turn up to intercept us. In the meantime, suppose we don’t go to Calais or Dunkirk or any other port, but instead head for Le Touquet.’

‘And what’s there?’

‘An airfield,’ she continued, ‘and it’s a popular destination for private flyers taking day trips from Kent. A friend of a friend of mine — his accountant, actually — quite often flies down there for lunch in his own aircraft. If we turn up there this afternoon with some sob story about needing to get back to Britain as quickly as possible, I think we might find somebody with a couple of spare seats in his Cessna or whatever. And if we can’t talk our way onto a private aircraft, there’s a regular daily service to Le Touquet, operated from Lydd Airport in Britain, so we could buy seats on one of those aircraft as our last resort. Anyway, that’s what I thought.’

Bronson was silent for a moment, looking for flaws in her proposal. Then he glanced across at her.

‘That’s a bloody good idea,’ he said.

By five o’clock that afternoon they were on a back road near Abbeville, and the satnav was steadily counting off the kilometres to go to the Côte d’Opale Airport at Le Touquet.

Bronson hadn’t been quite sure what to expect. Some small airfields he’d visited in the past had been little more than rights of way in a ploughed field, but Le Touquet had a proper tarmac runway, taxiways, hard-standings and even a control tower. And there were a lot of light aircraft parked on those hard-standings, most with registration numbers beginning with ‘F’ — meaning they were of French registry — but quite a lot with a ‘G’ for Great Britain. The terminal building wasn’t all that big, but it was certainly busy, and Bronson and Angela heard a mix of accents and languages as they moved around inside.

Bronson had suggested that Angela waited in the car outside while he tried to thumb a lift from some home-going Brit, but she’d pointed out very sweetly that most private pilots were men and she was far more likely to be able to persuade one of them to accept a couple of passengers than he was, as a bulky, menacing and hairy-arsed middle-aged man — a description he wasn’t entirely happy with — so they had both gone inside the building, Bronson weighed down with their bags. Angela quickly homed in on a couple of likely men, standing talking together on one side of the lounge. They were unmistakably English, casually but expensively dressed and probably in their late thirties.

‘I’ll try them first,’ she said. ‘Try not to get into any trouble while I’m away.’

‘Trouble? Me?’

Bronson watched as Angela made her way over to the two men and held a brief conversation with them. After a minute or so, she turned and walked back to him.

‘They can’t help,’ she said, ‘because they only arrived a short while ago and they’re staying in the area overnight. But they did suggest that another friend might be able to do something. He should be landing any time now with a couple of passengers who are also overnighting in Le Touquet, and they’re pretty certain he’ll be going back empty. They gave me the registration number of his aircraft — I think they said it was a four-seat Piper PA28 Cherokee — and his name, Gary Burnside.’

‘That sounds ideal,’ Bronson said. ‘I’ll get you a drink while we wait. Non-alcoholic, just in case.’

‘Just in case what?’ Angela’s normally cheerful disposition was almost restored, probably because nobody had shot at her so far that day.