by Craig Thomas
"David as you see, you've just caught me off on a jolly. Another freebie Aubrey's last words to her were in her mind. There has been no crime because the reason for the crime no longer exists. Such matters are known by the soubriquet of business ethics. But they will be all the more determined to act against anyone who even threatens to remind them of the fact that there was a crime, that people died Be careful, I beg you. He had addressed Gant as earnestly as herself.
"David," she repeated with a great deal more self-confidence.
"How nice to see you and to see you have the time to spend cultivating business in our little banana republic!"
David was forced to chuckle. The minister, whose gravity was that of an undertaker rather than born of confidence or sincerity, scowled at her levity. As if in further rebuke, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, emerging from the official limousine, waved to David before brushing his tie straight across his ample stomach and flicking a cowlick of hair away from his forehead.
"Flavour of the month," she murmured.
"Ready, David?" the junior minister intruded.
Marian was relieved rather than irritated with the man's pompous assumption of superiority. David's unwavering gaze was a withering light beating on her nerves.
"What? Oh, yes… Marian, have a wonderful time in Brussels, I presume? You're all right? I mean, after that fire—?"
The question was dazzling in its innocence.
"Fine!" she replied with as much ingenuousness.
He leaned forward and pecked at her suddenly cold cheek. She held herself rigid so that she would not flinch away from his kiss. He was smiling as he drew back from her, then his attention immediately embraced the junior minister. At St. Stephen's Porch, the Chancellor still loitered, waiting for a word with Winterborne. There has been no crime, Aubrey had said. Damn you for being so right, Kenneth!
She felt bewildered until the elderly Member took her arm and began to guide her towards the minibus with its ridiculously grinning hostess.
She was unable to suppress the shiver of nerves, alarming the Opposition MP "All right, lass?" he asked in his broad Yorkshire accent.
"You're not sickening for sum mat are you?"
She smiled. His tone was as normal and reassuring as the traffic as it jerked from light to light along St. Margaret's Street; as familiar as Parliament at her back.
Marian shook her head.
"I'm fine, Henry fine. Wrong time of the month you know."
"Aye. And I've heard that excuse cover a multitude of sins in my time, too."
They had reached the bus and she patted the hand that still lay, gnarled and blue veined from coal, on her arm.
"I doubt it was ever used to resist your advances, Henry. Thanks."
Shaking her hair away from her face, she climbed aboard the minibus and plumped aggressively into a vacant seat. The male MPs seemed infected with the atmosphere of a holiday. What else was it? She kept her briefcase on her lap, opening it determinedly to remove Private Eye. She turned to its parliamentary gossip, "HP Sauce', and almost at once called out:
"I see you're in the Eye, Roger again!"
Roger appeared mortally offended, but knowledgeable.
"Everything there is already declared on the Register," he snapped.
"You hope!" someone else called. Another commented good-humouredly:
"I see Marian's up to mischief as usual."
And she was… She had left Aubrey's flat late in the afternoon, with Giles, having promised to be a good girl. Giles had taken her at her solemn, pretended word, but Kenneth had been suspiciously anxious on her behalf… And now she knew why.
She frowned as she scanned Private Eye's already widespread gossip. She even knew the source of most of it.
Gant had stayed behind with Aubrey for some kind of briefing; perhaps he had stayed overnight. He seemed contained, but like a pressure cooker filled with boiling water and steam. She understood his motives, even though his intent had a primitive, violent end in view.
Strickland had caused a chaos in his world, just as David Winterborne had done in hers. The minibus pulled out of Old Palace Yard into traffic, towards Waterloo and the train to Brussels… where Michael had been murdered.
Her briefcase was full of the morning papers, each of which celebrated, in its own particular manner, Aero UK's success, Tim Burton's expansion plans and the coming transatlantic price war. Boeing was already engaged in furious counter hype Air France was about to lease a dozen Skyliners, with a promise to buy at least six of them by the end of the year. Europe was vigorously thumbing its nose at the States and its plane makers She looked up as Ben Campbell sat himself next to her. His smile was engaging, self-regarding. His Times, as he unfolded it, observed in a headline Success for Skyliner at eleventh hour. It had been close, the line between success and failure, threadlike. David had merely tilted the balance a little, slightly moved the goalposts, so that he, Aero UK and Balzac-Stendhal were now standing on the other side of the narrow line. Success and failure all it had required was a few instructions given in a high office overlooking the City after receiving best advice and the consequence had been one murder in another country and two remote aircraft accidents. For those small and obscure events, the reward could be a difference of hundreds of millions, eventually billions. How could David not have taken the course he had?
"You all right?" Ben Campbell asked.
"You looked a bit off-colour out there." The Euro MP's enquiry was brightly, in curiously made.
"Fine," she replied, glancing up then quickly down again as she met the hot penetration of his stare, sensed the weighing, the judging that was occurring behind it.
"No, I'm fine, Ben," she repeated. Thanks for asking."
That fire business, I suppose?" he murmured.
"I suppose," she snapped ungraciously, then added: "Sorry it was a bit unsettling… You know."
"Yes, I'm sure."
Campbell, a Euro MP for the last three years, a Commission functionary before that, was their duenna for the junket to Brussels. It was a PR role he seemed formed by destiny to fulfill, his thick hair, white teeth, firm jawline offering the necessary assurances concerning the rectitude of everything European. Campbell's Eurosoup, many Members unkindly called him.
"We will be out to change your mind, Marian, I give you fair warning," he announced with an ingratiating smile. Throw off our ogre's clothes for something more attractive to you."
"I don't doubt it."
His eyes seemed filled with a piercing enquiry, but she could not be certain that it was not her own nerves that made his proximity and interest suspicious. There seemed to be another role, besides that of expert PR man. Of course, Ben Campbell had long been a lobbyist for Aero UK and Balzac-Stendhal… and an associate of Winterborne. With surprising ease, she could imagine herself and Campbell as prisoner and escort. She rubbed her arms involuntarily. Ben Campbell was a professional, fully employed smoothie… it was just his manner.
Wasn't it…?
"Did your mum make you up some sandwiches for the train?" she managed.
His smile was warm, reassuring: it disarmed. Yet his presence discomfited.
London slipped past the window of the minibus, but despite herself, she could not help feeling once more that she was under threat; even from Campbell.
The minibus crossed Westminster Bridge. She glanced back towards Parliament as if expecting David to be standing there, monstrously enlarged. The sunlight made the Palace of Westminster a gingerbread house, biscuit-coloured. The Thames was flecked with pleasure craft other junkets, corporate entertainments, business as usual. Had it been at some cocktail party or reception that David had first decided that Michael Lloyd must be silenced… that she should be burned alive?
She shivered and Campbell noticed the involuntary spasm. Waterloo loomed as darkly as some Victorian prison-house. Come on, come on, she told herself, but there seemed no defiance available.
His eyes moved from the map strapped
to his knee to the landscape four thousand feet below the Cessna. He was above Perigueux, Limoges behind him, Brive a smudge away to the east. The land ahead of the aircraft was beginning to crumple like a suddenly ageing face into the worn folds and creases of the Dordogne. Soon he would need to find somewhere quiet to land.
He had walked out to the plane Aubrey had hired for him, into a glad-to-be-alive summer morning through which he had had to pass as if it was no more than a stage set. Dew still on the grass. A young woman in the office had completed his paperwork and glanced casually at his pilot's licence. There had been no more to it than that before he had unlocked the Cessna, done his external checks, climbed in, started the engine. Even the name of the place, Biggin Hill, had impinged without any sense of its history. The hours he had spent with Aubrey, after the general and his daughter had left and before he had briefly slept in the old man's spare bedroom, had sapped like leeches. Until this flight over southern England, the Channel, then northern France had seemed no more than a getaway, some kind of temporary escape.
The woman had grasped at him like feverish hands, her determination greater than his, her sense of urgency more vivid.
His search for Strickland wasn't just a wild card to her, it was something like a solemn promise. He felt the weight of her indignation, her demand for the truth, press at his back. She was uncomfortable to be around, even to remember.
The Channel had been filled with shipping and white wakes, an impression of slow, inexorable purpose and of certainty and destination. His flight was more empty than that, the plane's unfamiliar slowness suggesting drift, aimlessness.
He checked the map again. The clock on the instrument panel showed ten-forty.
French air traffic control was on a go-slow, not answering his calls since he had first contacted Paris. An Air Algerie flight, picking up one of his calls, had offered to relay to Paris Control on his behalf, but that hadn't been what he wanted. There was an airfield at Perigueux, already behind him, another at Brive and a third at Sarlat about eighteen miles south of his position. Sarlat was ideal had he wanted to use an airfield. He didn't. Almost certain that he had left Aubrey's apartment without detection, and that his taxi hadn't been followed out of London, he still sensed that they would be waiting for him — French Intelligence, the people from Oslo at Bordeaux, which his flight plan claimed was his destination. Any diversion to another airfield was traceable and a matter of no more than an hour's drive from Bordeaux. He needed to disappear, temporarily, and to have a secure, undiscovered airplane to return to… with Strickland.
Strickland was at his farmhouse-Doubt was pointless. He cut it off and eased the throttles back and put the Cessna into a gentle, descending turn. His altitude was four thousand feet above sea level, the country was three thousand feet below him. He had seen narrow river valleys that were possible landing sites, but hedges and clumps of trees were scattered across their slopes like traps. Most of them were narrow gorges anyway too narrow for him to ensure a safe landing. It should only look like a forced landing, the airplane had to stay in one piece, its flimsy undercarriage usable for take-off.
He dropped lower still in a left-hand orbit. His right hand reached out to grasp the fuel mixture control. He made the mixture leaner, his fingers almost stroking the control, until the engine banged, popped, became fragile and insufficient to support the weight of the Cessna against the air. The wind noise intruded into the engine's coughing.
Nodding, he returned the mixture to normal running.
Someone would have heard the first failing notes of the engine. When he repeated it and seemed to drop more quickly out of the sky, eye-witnesses as they invariably did would embroider what they saw.
Smoke, maybe an engine fire, a wing coming off… People did that, trying to help the investigation. He smiled briefly.
The land was dotted with villages, some of them clamped like mussels on to rock outcrops, the roofs of the buildings biscuit-brown. Dark paint-spills of forest and cultivated orchards and groves. The threads of rivers like bright woollen strands accidentally plucked from a complex tapestry. He continued to toy with the mixture control, producing a rough-running engine note. Fifteen hundred feet below, a tractor, seemingly immobile, was tilted on a sloping field, earth crimped darkly behind its plough. The field looked free of fences, ditches, bushes. Dotted with old, broad trees, it sloped in such a way that it would provide sufficient approach and landing distance. He allowed the Cessna to sink leaflike towards the field, as if the plane was turned only by the wind. The engine continued to cough and bang convincingly. The man on the tractor seemed to be staring skywards, the vehicle unmoving on the slope of the field. A few sheep were grazing on part of it, but already seeking the shade of the trees against the heat of midmorning.
Eight hundred feet… A double bang, felt through the controls as much as heard.
He pushed the mixture to fully rich, alerted the pitch of the aircraft, as it seemed to wobble for an instant, as if about to tumble from a cliff-edge of air; levelled the wings. He checked the instruments furiously, unnerved. The controls responded normally. What in hell—?
There was a crimson and white stain on the starboard wing strut.
A bird strike. A bird had flown into the propeller. There were dark specks on the cockpit windscreen, a smear on the starboard wing. The engine coughed and choked now without his interference. The Cessna sank towards the trees and the sloping field. The man on the tractor watched him, posed in imperturbability. The wind direction was right.
He reduced power and lowered the undercarriage. A rabbit hole would be enough to fling the light aircraft violently tail over cockpit, send it tumbling to fragments down the slope of the field. He lowered the flaps a notch, his attention focused on a point perhaps two hundred yards beyond a small knot of trees and resting sheep. He closed the throttle.
He dropped the flaps fully and tensed himself against the first touch of the wheels now. The plane seemed to float for an instant, as if it had encountered water which buoyed it up. The wheels thumped, bounced, began to roll. He switched off the fuel. The engine's noise was replaced by the clatter of running over the rough pasture. He passed the tractor, glimpsing the driver's surprised expression. The plane slowed as if running through mud. Then it came to a gradual stop, the gradient of the field rising in front of the nose, the tractor in the mirrors abandoned by the farmer, who was stalking towards him.
The engine ticked as it cooled. He opened the cockpit door. The gyros whined down into silence. He heard birdsong and then the shouts of the farmer. The sheep had bolted from the shade out into the sunlight.
Gant waited for the Frenchman to reach the plane. Looking down at his reddened, perspiring features, his evident outrage, he shrugged and said:
"Sorry, fella. Engine trouble—" He climbed out beneath the wing, tugging at a rucksack, and dropped to the grass. The Frenchman was gesticulating angrily at the Cessna, at his field, at the already nibbling sheep even at the sky and the country around them.
"Sorry can't parlez Franqais, fella." A shrug of incomprehension as he continued: "Engine trouble." He spoke as if to an idiot child.
"I need a garage got to make some repairs… Understand?"
His relief had become amusement.
"Garage?" the Frenchman replied in heavily accented English. The aircraft your engine? I heard—" He pointed at the sky, at his ears.
Gant nodded.
That's right—" He looked at his watch, already possessed by a sense of the small scene as an interlude, something put in a Hitchcock movie, just before someone got killed or the audience, taken off-guard, was shocked in some other way.
Strickland's farmhouse was no more than a couple of miles from where he stood.
"I can leave the plane here While I go for spare parts?" He banged his hand on the engine cowling.
"Repairs? Can I leave the plane here?"
The farmer nodded furiously.
"Mais oui, m'sieur… You are OK?"
Thanks, fella I'm fine." He locked the door of the Cessna.
"Where's the nearest garage?"
"St. Amand-de-Coly, maybe." He shrugged.
"What do you need, m'sieur?"
"Just a couple of parts." He studied the map, pointing out the village the farmer had named. It lay in the same direction as Strickland's farmhouse, maybe a couple of miles farther southwest. He wouldn't create any suspicion by suddenly heading off in the wrong direction.
The farmer's blunt, earth-browned finger tapped the map in agreement.
St. Amand-de-Coly. I'll be maybe two hours, three—?"
"No one will steal your aircraft, m'sieur!" The farmer laughed. Gant slung the rucksack across his back, waved to the farmer, and began walking towards the gate of the field. Time began to hurry in his head. They would be waiting at Bordeaux airport, they would soon realise he wasn't going to show… There was more champagne, more canapes, then the sudden harsh lighting of the Channel Tunnel as the train sped into it like someone dashing for shelter from the rain clouds gathering in the blue Kent sky. Marian concentrated with a deliberate effort on the remnants of her constituency post bag the tickle of her claustrophobia raising her temperature, making her body wriggle uncomfortably in her seat. The table in front of her was littered with the ordinariness, the seductions of Parliament; submissions from researchers on half a dozen matters, her tape recorder and notepad. Roger and one or two others had already mocked her Goody-Twoshoes attention to Commons business as they wolfed the canapes, downed the champagne. Attentive stewards glided and poured and offered as brazenly as hoardings. Come to sunny Brussels for the Good Life… She rubbed her eyes, and looked up as Campbell slipped into the seat opposite her.
Ben Campbell again, as if to dispel the comfortable talismans she had drawn around her. The lights of the Tunnel flashed past the windows like some hypnotic and virtual reality.