Gaining height, its homely snout tilted, as if smelling out the route, the plane passed over Staines and Windsor, the castle set among clouds, the Thames like silver wire. On a clear day, at this point, Richardson could see his own village and, tracing the street to the church, pick out his house. Sometimes he thought he detected a farewell wink of sunlight from his rooftop observatory.
‘We’re now flying over Haslemere, having left Staines and Windsor on the right-hand side of the aircraft.’ The reassuring voice came over the address system. ‘Our route today will take us south-east across the channel. We pass over Belgium and then make our way down over Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia and to the Mediterranean …’
The everyday gazetteer, places ticked off one by one, far away and yet only hours distant, that not long ago had meant weeks of voyage. Now, leaving Windsor, Staines and Haslemere increasingly behind, the big and glittering plane set course for the lands of deserts.
Richardson settled back feeling the hours spaced out before him. He often needed to work on the plane, but today he postponed opening his briefcase. It could wait. Sometimes he felt ashamed of his relief at getting away, escaping from Adele and their life. He held the stem of his champagne glass and began to read Astronomy Now which he had bought at the airport. The constellation Lyra, the Harp, with its blue leading star Vega, was overhead that month with Cygnus the Swan, Aquila, Scorpius, Sagittarius and company performing their unending dance on the stage of the sky; a fandango of stars, comets, spheres, meteors, mobile specks of brightness, joined far below, he liked to think, by the moving lights of aeroplanes. In the Gulf the stars would appear different, brighter, some incandescent, eavesdropping close to the earth.
The heavy young man, snoring mildly in the window seat, was one of a generation of workers in what had once been an unimagined region; shuttled now to the Persian Gulf and back, journeys which still took less time than a train from the South West to the North of England. What had once been merely a map on a classroom wall they familiarly called ‘Saudi’ or ‘The Gulf’. They returned to Britain and their families only within the time allowance of their tax avoidance, then flew back to their monk-like lives of making money. Their fathers would scarcely have travelled beyond the next town, the next building site.
Club Class was ten short of full. Some favoured travellers had been up-graded from Economy. There were several women, one with a sleeping child, and businessmen, briefcases ajar grafting like scribes at their tablets. There was a group of taciturn Arabs and the inevitable industrious Japanese, like earnest schoolboys, their only sparkle coming from their spectacles, two tapping silently on laptop keyboards while two more squinted neatly at minute notebooks. Each of them in turn would smooth his black hair.
Immediately in front of the movie screen the seats were vacant and four men, whom Richardson guessed to be military, wearing uniform civilian suits, sat further back, the line of squared shoulders like a parade. The other seats were occupied by tourists going to Singapore on the second leg of the journey, or to Australia on the final stage. A whittled Australian, parrot nosed and cracked faced, sat across the aisle from Richardson crushing a worn brown hat in both hands, his bright eyes fixed ahead. His sharp little wife muttered: ‘We’re still up here, Ted. We’re still up.’
When Bramwell brought the lunch trays the man in the window seat stirred but decided he preferred to sleep. The meal was attentively laid out, no plastic in Club Class, and the menu read well, but despite the blandishments Richardson was aware that something happened to food the moment it left the ground.
The sense of anticipation was present; the improbable situation of lunching high above the clouds, the relaxed leaning back, the names of the wines, the French menu. Despite all this he could never recall eating his way through an airline meal. Now he picked at the shrimps and salad clotted with dressing, a dish which had visibly aged as it reached 35,000 feet, ate only half the Chicken Kiev and left the chocolate slice to glisten untouched. He drank two glasses of French white wine. They were trying a new importer. There was always a temptation to drink more in that elevated vacuum; the belief that, fastened into your seat, going far but going nowhere, a passenger could safely imbibe as much as he pleased. It was not true; flying hangovers were the worst, and Edward Richardson would never have allowed the staff to see him drinking more than two glasses of wine.
He refused coffee, slid the magazine into his case, and dozed, thinking of Mrs Kitchen and his observatory now far behind. An hour later something roused him sharply and he saw that the film was being shown in the darkened cabin. He concluded that the projected picture had woken him but then, with a lurch, he saw that a man was standing before the screen holding his hand up into the beam of the projector. Silhouetted against the face of a laughing Shirley MacLaine was the shape of a hand grenade. ‘Oh God,’ he muttered.
Barbara Poppins, the stewardess, walked briskly into the cabin from the forward galley. The man reached out with his free hand and caught her around the throat. Her eyes bulged in the dimness, she tried to scream but the clasp under her chin prevented her. Richardson, looking swiftly around, said loudly: ‘Remain in your seats please, everyone.’ The youth next to him awoke and was staring in disbelief at the posed figure. ‘Shit and corruption,’ he muttered.
The Australian wife was reassuring her husband: ‘It’s just a practice, Ted. It’s not real.’
‘Grenade,’ said the man in front of the screen, oddly like the demonstration of a safety routine. He held it high so that the silhouette could be recognised in the beam of the movie. Then, pulling the terrified Barbara in front of him, he slotted the little finger of the crooked hand that held her, into the clearly outlined circular pin of the bomb. Richardson saw the service director, Tarrant, and Bramwell appear at the port-side rear of the cabin and the steward Holloway from the opposite side.
‘Lights,’ ordered the man with the grenade. He had lowered the weapon so that it was next to Barbara’s ear. Her eyes were closed in a sort of calm terror, her lips clenched, her face drained and rigid. Tarrant nodded and Bramwell turned up the lights and stopped the film. One drama was enough.
The man was an Arab, narrow faced, hair cropped, with black, fierce and unblinking eyes. He was wearing a light brown woollen jerkin zipped to his thin throat. His mouth was as tight as that of the girl he held. He had a small butt of a moustache and a hooked nose.
Richardson felt no doubt that he would use the grenade. Desperately he visualised the rehearsed procedures for the situation. Tarrant was doing the same. But rehearsals were one thing, this was another. The passengers, including the military men, sat like wooden figures. People rarely panicked. The hijacker would make the moves. There would be accomplices, remaining concealed until they knew they were fully in control, revealing themselves only if they needed to. He prayed that the crew remembered the rules. He glanced at the quartet of Arabs. They sat as rigid as everyone else. To his relief he saw that the man had relaxed his armgrip on Barbara’s throat. She had opened her eyes and was staring, beyond belief, at the passengers in the seats before her.
‘I could deal with that bastard,’ offered the youth in the seat next to Richardson in a whisper.
‘You won’t,’ warned Richardson quietly. ‘You’ll not move, son. That girl’s life is at risk.’
‘If she goes, he goes,’ grunted the young man.
‘He doesn’t care.’
‘Mad,’ said the youth. ‘Fucking mad.’
‘Baghdad,’ said the hijacker to Tarrant like someone paying a busfare. ‘We go to Baghdad. Tell the captain now. You tell him.’
‘Just a moment, old fellow.’ The steward Holloway began to move forward, slowly, arms outstretched. ‘God loves you. Whoever is your God, he loves you.’ Richardson almost fainted.
‘Stop him,’ he wanted to say but the words would not come. Tarrant had already moved forward but now, all at once, there was something which prevented them stopping him. There was a quick, new expression in the
hijacker’s face. Could he be afraid? ‘I die, you die,’ he said, but his voice was shaking. Holloway moved on, irrevocably, down the aisle, step after step, arms before him. Everyone else was frozen. Barbara stared at Holloway, her mouth sagging. She clenched her eyes again, her face white with sweat.
‘None of us are going to die, you know that, old son,’ said Holloway softly. He was confronting the Arab now. My God, thought Richardson marvelling, he is going to do it. He is going to do it.
‘Give me that,’ said Holloway lightly but firmly. ‘Let me take that silly thing.’
Abruptly the Arab crumpled. His body arched forward, he released his hold on Barbara. Half rising in his seat, Richardson thrust out his trembling hand and pulled the girl towards him. Her clasp was wet. Calmly Holloway took the grenade from the man’s grip. The Arab began sobbing like a boy, leaning over the empty seat in front of him. Holloway put his arm around him and turned smiling to the dumbstruck passengers like a cabaret artist almost at his finale. But not quite. He leaned over to one of the seat trays and picked up a table knife. With this he cut into the grenade, slicing it halfway across and then upwards revealing a bright yellow interior.
‘Always been partial to a nice little pineapple,’ he announced with a radiant smile.
‘I told you it was only a practice, Ted,’ said the old Australian woman to her husband. ‘See, it was only a pineapple.’
Bramwell sat on the arm of a seat at the back of the cabin and buried his eyes in his hands.
‘A pineapple,’ he echoed faintly. He looked up at Holloway. ‘It takes one to know one.’
The captain of the flight had taken the decision to fly on to Bahrain. The weeping Arab had been taken off by the security authorities. The crew, Holloway apart, had been instructed to go to their hotel. ‘I wonder what it’s like in a mental hospital in the Gulf?’ said Bramwell thoughtfully. Barbara remained silent and pale.
Ninety per cent of the passengers had been unaware of the drama, although the rumour soon filtered back. The failed hijacker was at first confined in a forward lavatory where he had sat with his black hair wet with sweat, his thin fingers held like a mask over his face.
Holloway took him a cup of coffee. Then he was left there with Holloway, his keeper, outside the door and a sign ‘Toilet Out of Use’ hung on the doorhandle. They were only an hour from Bahrain. It was as near as any alternative. It was midnight before the security man brought Holloway to the hotel. The Boeing’s crew were all awaiting him among the debris of food and coffee.
He blushed. ‘God was with me,’ he told them simply. His finger pointed religiously up. ‘I received advance warning.’
‘From God?’ asked Tarrant. Richardson glanced quickly at him.
‘Of course. Who else?’ replied Holloway. ‘God doesn’t appear in a shining cloud, you know. He works in a mysterious way. You must know the hymn, Mr Tarrant. “His wonders to perform”.’
‘And this was a mysterious way,’ prompted Richardson.
‘Most mysterious.’ Holloway glanced around enjoying the moment. His smile spread blissfully. He sat down and minutely arranged the creases in his trousers. He savoured another pause, then said: ‘I spotted our would-be hijacker acting in a peculiar way at Heathrow this morning. I was in the departure lounge and he was coming out of the gents toilet. I recognised him because of his brown pullover, his hair and his mad expression. There was no mistaking it was the same chap. He charged out, looking wild, as I say, and I went in and there was the toilet attendant going berserk. He was an Indian lad and he was upset because this chap had left one of the cubicles in a right mess – boot blacking on the loo seat, toilet rolls all covered in boot blacking, and a bag full of fruit.’
‘Which he had brought through security,’ said Richardson thoughtfully.
‘No law against that, Mr Richardson,’ pointed out Holloway primly. ‘Nothing to stop anyone carrying a few apples and pears and a couple of baby pineapples through.’
‘I’ve known people bring their own sandwiches,’ nodded Bramwell.
‘Who can blame them?’ said Holloway seriously. ‘I’d bring mine.’
‘Go on, Holloway,’ prompted Richardson.
‘Well, in the plastic bag in the loo, a bag from a greengrocer’s in Notting Hill, were bits of fruit, including one baby pineapple, plus the tin of Cherry Blossom black boot polish and a kid’s penknife. On the floor there were shavings from another pineapple. He’d fashioned a grenade from the pineapple and blackened it with boot polish. I’ve seen some funny things left behind in lavs, believe me, but this is different.’
‘And the pin was just the ring-pull from a beer can,’ said Richardson.
He turned to Holloway. ‘Well, you were terrific,’ he said shaking his hand. ‘I’ve already told them at Heathrow.’ He looked around. ‘Naturally they want this kept quiet. It wasn’t real. It was more of a … hoax.’
‘A hoax? We could have ended up in Baghdad, Mr Richardson,’ pointed out Tarrant.
‘The company view is that it was a hoax,’ repeated Richardson solidly. ‘And must be treated as confidential.’ He looked around the faces. ‘That’s not me saying that – it’s the company.’
‘Poor chap,’ regretted Holloway. He looked hopefully at them. ‘Perhaps we should pray for him.’
Georgina Hayles drove from Heathrow into the morning rush-hour traffic on the Bath Road. Her car slotted between a red bus and a tanker towing a trailer. She felt grateful she did not need to go towards London for more than a mile before diverting through secondary roads stirring themselves for another suburban day.
She had worked on the flight from Los Angeles, ten hours over the Pole. Now she looked forward to sleeping. She was pleased she had answered Barbara Poppins’s advertisement in Skyport. The barge was quaint and quiet, it would be well suited for her purpose. Turning the car away from the interlocking streets, along one of the littered lanes that hemmed the airport area, she drove over a humped bridge above the canal, built in brick in Victorian times, and took a cinder track down to a half-field where there was a corrugated iron shed, some cannibalised cars and rusting farm machinery. The sheets of corrugated iron hung out like tongues, but as if some of the ancient agricultural vehicles lent a feeling to it, the place, for all its decay and rust, had a sweetish air of rural seclusion. Weeds, grown high all around, sprouted up the shed and curled around the wheels and frames of the old carts and cars. There were wild flowers and working bees, there were birds sounding and from somewhere came the comforting rasp of a cow.
‘Cow,’ repeated Georgina to herself. She grimaced at her self-criticism, but she had made a choice. After locking the car she walked around the shed, alarming a field mouse. In the hawthorn hedge was a sagging gate. There was a knack to opening it and she let herself out of the overgrown enclosure and onto the canal tow-path. The barge was lying with other elderly boats nudging the bank. There was a thick smell of water, elderberries and dandelions. In the flat sky above the random trees on the opposite bank she could see an airliner in the regular procession taking off from Heathrow. Had she turned a half-circle, she would have seen the spaced lights of flights coming in. She did not bother. It no longer struck her as a novelty that less than two hours before she had been suspended up there in the sky and now she was in this watery place, so quiet and so hidden.
There were two barges among the craft along the fringe of the disused canal. The water was so still the boats did not creak. The other barge had been long unoccupied and was gradually dropping to pieces. One day it would slide with a sigh below the thick surface. People arrived at weekends and sometimes on light evenings to work on their boats or to take them out for brief voyages through the overhanging suburbs, the streets and industrial estates by the airport and below the motorway bridge and the railway viaduct.
She was glad of the seclusion because, these days, she needed it. Barbara had ordered a new gangplank when Georgina had moved in and it looked solid and safe. She knew the trick now of hauli
ng it by its chain from the deck to the bank. She put down her stewardess’s bag and manoeuvred it into position, then walked aboard, opened the hatch door with the two keys Barbara had given her, and went into the long, low and homely main cabin of the barge. She put down her bag, closed the door and picked up the telephone. She dialled the Indian’s number.
‘Hello,’ she said carefully when he answered. ‘It’s Candy here. My messages?’
‘Ah yes, Miss Candy, you have many messages. I have made the times for you. I am looking forward to my next payment.’
‘End of the month,’ she said firmly. ‘Like I told you. Aren’t you satisfied?’
‘Oh, dear, most satisfied,’ he said. ‘Most satisfactory. The money is more than I make from the sale of newspapers. Maybe I will stop the selling of bloody newspapers.’
‘I wouldn’t. This could stop tomorrow.’
‘And I will not ever tell the police.’
She took a deep breath. She needed him because it worked so well. ‘Don’t you ever say that again,’ she threatened quietly. ‘The police would not be interested. There is nothing illegal, you understand that. Mention it again and I’ll get somebody else to take the messages.’
He sounded panicky. ‘I never will,’ he promised. ‘Never, ever. My wife Marika will not either.’
‘Your wife knows?’
‘She does not know. Only about the messages. Sometimes she has to answer the telephone. If I am not here. But she does not know why the messages are necessary, only that I get money for them. She likes money and she is obedient.’
Arrivals & Departures Page 10