Flyaway

Very curious indeed! I said, 'Now, it's a fact that you kept your enhanced pay a secret from your sister. Why did you do that?'

'Oh, hell!' Billson suddenly grabbed a handful of sand. 'I've just told you — Alix is smart. If she knew she'd ask me why — and I couldn't tell her. Then she'd dig into it and perhaps find out.' He wagged his head. 'I didn't want to know.' He was afraid that Alix would shake all the leaves off the money tree. Billson might be a stupid man in many ways but he had cunning. Before he started work for Franklin Engineering he had already lived for many years at low pay and was quite content to continue to do while he amassed a small fortune. But to what end?

'You've acted the bastard towards Alix, haven't you, Paul?' I said. 'You must have known she was in financial difficulties and had to borrow money from the bank. And it was to help you, damn it!'

He said nothing. All he did was to pour fine sand from one hand to the other. I suppose a psychologist would call that a displacement activity.

'But the psychiatrist didn't help much, did he? You had a sudden brainstorm.'

'What the hell do you know about it?' he said petulantly. 'You don't know why I'm here. No one does.'

'Do you think I'm a damned fool?' I demanded. 'You've come out here to find your father's aeroplane.'

His jaw dropped. 'How do you know that? You couldn't… no one could.'

'Jesus, Paul; you're as transparent as a window-pane. You read that article by Michael English in the Sunday supplement and it sent you off your rocker. I talked to English and he told me what happened in the editor's office.'

'You've seen English?' He dropped the sand and dusted off his hands. 'Why have you been following me? Why come out here?'

It was a good question. My original idea had just been to ask a few questions in Algiers and let it go at that. I certainly hadn't expected to be on my way to Niger in the company of one Targui, one pseudo-Targui and one man who was. half-way round the bend. It had been a chain of circumstances, each link not very important in itself, excepting perhaps when we found Billson half dead.

I said wearily, 'Let's say it's for Alix and leave it at that, shall we?' It was the truth, perhaps, but only a fraction of it 'She worries about you, and I'm damned if you deserve it.'

'If I hadn't been shot I'd have found it,' he said. The plane, I mean. I was within a few miles of it.' He drove his fist into the sand. 'And now I'm going in the opposite direction,' he said exasperatedly.

'You're wrong,' I said flatly. That crashed aircraft in Koudia is French. Byrne knows all about it. Ask him. You went at that in the way you go about everything — at half-cock. Will you, for once in your life, for God's sake, stop and think before you take action? You've been nothing but a packet of trouble ever since you left Franklin.'

I didn't wait for an answer but got up and left him and, for once, I didn't confide my findings to Byrne. This bit really had nothing to do with him; he knew nothing of England or of London and could contribute nothing.

I walked out of camp a couple of hundred yards and sat down to think about it. I believed Billson — that was the devil of it. I had told him that he was as transparent as glass, and it was true. Which brought me to McGovern.

I thought about that pillar of British industry for a long time and got precisely nowhere.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

And so we travelled south.

At the Algerian border post Mokhtar guided Billson on foot around it while Byrne and I went through. There were more fiches to fill in — in triplicate, but we didn't get the full treatment we had had at the police post outside Tammanrasset. We went on and waited for Billson in the no-man's-land between the Algerian post and Fort Flatters in Niger, then it was my turn to walk, and Mokhtar took me on a long and circuitous route around the fort. If the two border posts compared notes, which Byrne doubted they would, then two men would have gone through both.

When Mokhtar and I rejoined the truck beyond Fort Flatters Byrne seemed considerably more cheerful. I was footsore and leg-stretched and was glad to ease myself down creakily into the seat next to him. As he let out the clutch he said gaily, 'Nice to be home.'

We were eighty miles into Niger when we camped that night and the country hadn't changed enough to justify Byrne's cheeriness, but thereafter it became better. There was more vegetation — thorn trees, it's true — but there was also more grass as we penetrated the mountains, and I saw my first running water, a brook about a foot across. According to Byrne, we had left the desert but, as I have said, these things are relative and this was still a wilderness to the untutored eye.

The Air is an intrusion of the Sahel into the desert,' said Byrne.

'You've lost me,' I said. 'What's the Sahel?' 'The savannah land between the desert and the forest in the south. It's a geographer's word. Once they called it the Sudan but when the British pulled out they left a state called the Sudan so the geographers had to find another word because they didn't want to mix geography and politics. They came up with Sahel.'

'Doesn't look much different from desert.'

'It's different,' said Byrne positively. These uplands get as much as six inches of rain a year.'

That's a lot?'

'A hell of a lot more than Tarn,' he said. There've been periods of up to ten years when it hasn't rained there at all'

We stopped at a small village called Iferouane which must have been important in the Air because it had an airstrip. Although the people here were Tuareg there was a more settled look about them. 'Still nomadic,' said Byrne. 'But there's more feed around here, so they don't have to move as far or as often.'

There were more animals to be seen, herds of camels, sheep and goats, with a few hump-backed cattle. The Tuareg seemed to be less formal here than in the north and some of the faces I saw were decidedly Negroid. I mentioned that to Byrne, and he shook his head. 'Those people are either Haratin or slaves.'

'Slaves!'

'Sure. The Tuareg used to go raiding across the Niger Bend to bring back slaves.'

'Is there still slavery?'

'Theoretically — no. But I wouldn't bet on it. A few years ago a British novelist bought a slave in Timbouctou just to prove that it could be done. Then he set the man free which was a damnfool thing to do.' He saw my frown. 'He had no land, so he couldn't grow anything; he had no money so he couldn't buy anything — so what was the poor bastard to do? He went back to his old master.'

'But slavery!'

'Don't get the wrong idea,' said Byrne. 'It's not what you think and they don't do too badly.' He smiled. 'No whips, or anything like that. Here, in the Air, they grow millet and cultivate the date palms on a share-cropping basis. Theoretically they get a fifth of the crop but a smart guy can get as much as half.'

Byrne seemed well-known and popular in Iferouane. He talked gravely with the village elders, chaffed the young women, and distributed sweets and other largess among the children. We stayed there a day, then pushed on south over rougher country until we arrived at Timia and Byrne's home.

Ever since we had left Fort Flatters Billson had avoided me. He couldn't help being close in the truck but he didn't talk and, out of the truck, he kept away from me. I suppose I had not hidden my contempt of him and, naturally enough, he didn't like it. I had penetrated his thick skin and wounded whatever amour propre he had, so he resented me. I noticed that he talked a lot with Byrne during this time and that Byrne appeared to show interest in what he was saying. But Byrne said nothing to me at the time.

Byrne was unTuareg enough to have built himself a small house on the slopes of what passed for a pleasantly-wooded valley in the Air. The Tuareg in the area lived, not in leather tents as they did in the desert to the north, but in reed huts, cleverly made with dismountable panels so that they could be collapsed for loading on the back of a pack camel. But Byrne had built a house — a minimal house, it is true, with not much in the way of walls — but a house with rooms. A permanent dwelling and, as such, foreign to the Tuareg.