The flames crept into the hall and up to the workbench. Grass seed spilled from a bag being consumed by the fire, the smoke from her smouldering furniture made her retch… Someone, someone — rough material, the smell of tobacco as when her mother pressed her against a blouse or cardigan she was wearing. Big hands clutching her up and out of the spiders' webs. The low mutter of constant cursing. The smell of soap pressed into her nose from the cheek against which her face was thrust, the sensation of bristles. Then the jolting passage through the flames and smoke, the squeezing of the hands and arms that did not allow her to breathe as she seemed buried in rough khaki cloth. Then the sunlight, the blue sky, and the scent of dry grass mingling with the smouldering smell of her clothes as she was pummelled. A big hand struck her burnt arm and she screamed again and then lost consciousness. To wake up still on the grass, with big adult faces pressing chokingly close to her and among them, Daddy-woke up. The carpet in the hallway of the flat was smouldering, the living room was an inferno the flame seen through boiling grey smoke. Woke up.
She squeezed herself upright against the wall and grabbed the door handle, tugging at it until she remembered, with great, precise clarity, that it was jammed. By someone… She shook her head, the past nightmare slipping from her.
She blundered through the door of the spare bedroom at the rear of the flat, quite certain of her movements, her direction. Moonlight was coming through the window. The cathedral loomed across the Close. She thrust up the window and peeling paint flew off like white sparks. The glass reflected the fire inside.
Lance Corporal Davies had rescued her from that childhood fire… Just as he had rescued her every time the nightmare had come back, every time she had been terrified by fire. She climbed over the windowsill on to the fire escape… Corporal Davies, looking down at her, his face as white as Daddy's… Her feet touched the rung of the fire escape and she stumbled down it to the lawn behind the flats, coughing hard enough to make her want to retch. She slipped and fell on the dewy grass. Rolling on to her stomach, then rising to her knees, she looked back at the flat. The fire was visible at every window. She could hear the burglar alarm, and the noise of an approaching siren.
Its noise gradually drowned the alarm. Her arm hurt.
It was almost two in the morning. Olssen's patience was gauze-thin, Jorgensen's indifferent contempt undisguised. His own tiredness was hard to conceal. The tape recorder remained amid the litter of the desk as if part of it and of no immediate concern to any of them.
Olssen's team of service engineers had long abandoned the hangar and the Boeing to the security guard. Gant had examined the service schedule with Olssen, out of routine rather than anticipation. Unless one of his people had screwed up, the answer didn't lie in the documents or their computer-stored duplicates. But he'd known that anyway.
All that he had was the vague description of a tall, well-built man with an American accent would two Norwegians know whether it was genuine or assumed? who claimed his name was Massey and that he worked for Vance Aircraft. He had been wearing a check shirt, denims, a leather jacket, heeled boots.
His hair was greying, he had a moustache, and maybe he was around forty.
It wasn't enough… not nearly enough.
"Can I go now?" Jorgensen asked Olssen, deliberately ignoring Gant but speaking in English so that he would understand his exasperation.
Olssen looked obsequiously, and with some impatience, at Gant.
"Sure. You're no help anyway, buddy," Gant sneered.
"Maybe you'll do more good at home." He smiled without meaning, other than a frustration of his own.
"You want to get some sleep, too, Mr. Olssen? You want to leave me here—?"
He wanted to rid himself of them now. They could be of no more assistance to him. Only these two had taken any notice, held any conversation with the saboteur, and neither of them could give him enough to recognise the man, or to be able to trace him. A stranger had walked in off the street, committed the crime, walked out of their lives.
"Look, I can hand over any keys, papers to the security guy. I may be some time yet."
Olssen seemed relieved of caution and authority equally. Standing up, he said:
Very well, Mr. Gant I will leave you the office keys, and you can lock up behind you. Hand them to Halvesson when you have finished. Come on, Jorgensen oh, you know how to work the coffee machine?" Gant nodded. Then, good night, Mr. Gant. I'm sorry we had to meet under—"
"Yeah. Me, too. Thank you for your help."
"Do you think you will be able to identify this man? To think that it was a sabotage—" Jorgensen was already out of the door and had begun whistling as he walked away.
"I don't think we have any evidence for saying that right now, Mr.
Olssen. Let's just keep that between us, OK?"
"OK. I well, I wish you the best of luck. And thank you for understanding that there was no way that I could—"
"Sure. You couldn't have known. The guy had what looked like authority. I don't think anyone's blaming you." He shook the man's hand quickly and sat down again, at once picking up a sheaf of papers. Keys rattled on to the desk, and he heard himself wished good night once more."
"Night," he murmured. The door closed behind Olssen and Gant breathed deeply with relief, dismissing the last hours… But the disappointment leaked into the vacuum he created.
He was angry at the distractions of obligations, people, debts. Barbara had played on that. He had made easy promises as a consequence. Worse than that was the sense he had of being so easily reduced to impotence almost the moment he had begun something on his own initiative. He banged his fist on to the littered desk. The photograph frame jumped and the tape recorder moved; switched itself on. The button must have struck against something hard. He listened, as if transfixed, to the description of Massey with a fierce, renewed concentration.
But there was no sense of anyone he recognised. Presumably the man calling himself Massey was an American. Height, weight, features, dress… He switched off the recorder because it angered him like the buzzing of a wasp; it threatened his ego. Involuntarily, he got up from the chair and walked out of the office into the hangar. The Boeing sat like a promise on the oil-stained concrete. There weren't many men who could cause a plane like that to fall out of the sky without using a bomb. It was evident that the second 494 should have fallen into the sea and been lost, so the calculations were precise, the technology advanced. It was exactly the same pattern as the one he had encountered, instability succeeded by fuel starvation to the engines… He didn't know who, and he didn't know who had enough to gain. None of the big airplane manufacturers in the States would have sanctioned sabotage. The idea was crazy. So, who? The why had to be rivalry between manufacturers, not carriers. The 494 was flying only with Artemis and a half-assed company in New Mexico. But Artemis was small, too small to worry the big carriers except with insect-stings.
Irritation, not ruin. Vance was small, he couldn't have rivalled a big
US plane maker Was it an ex-employee gone crazy, seeking revenge? Someone Vance had teed off even more than himself? He rubbed his hands through his hair angrily, lifting his face to the gantries, struts, metal beams of the hangar's roof. Was it just his intelligence experience that sought a strategy, a carefully organised operation in this, rather than a human motive?
Something at the edge of eyesight, high up among the metal bones of the hangar… Then the voice of the security guard distracted him.