The D.C.4 stood there on the tarmac less than a hundred yards away, still waiting to take four mares back to England. Vittorio stopped the taxi fifty yards from the loading area. ‘Now,’ said Billy to me, enjoying himself again. ‘You listen and do as you are told, otherwise I’ll put a hole in you. And it’ll be in the breadbasket, not the heart. That’s a promise.’ I didn’t doubt him. ‘Walk down the road, straight across to the plane, up the ramp and into the toilet. Get it? I’ll be two steps behind you, all the way.’
I was puzzled, but greatly relieved. I had hardly expected such a mild end to the ride. Without a word I opened the door and climbed out. Billy wriggled agilely across and stood up beside me, the triumphant sneer reasserting itself on his babyish mouth.
‘Go on,’ he said.
There was no one about at that side of the airfield. Four hundred yards ahead there were people moving round the main building, but four hundred yards across open tarmac looked a very long way. Behind lay scrubland and the taxi. Mentally shrugging, I followed Billy’s instructions: walked down the short stretch of road, across to the plane, and up the ramp. Billy stalked a steady two paces behind me, too far to touch, too near to miss.
At the top of the ramp stood Yardman. He was frowning heavily, though his eyes were as usual inscrutable behind the glasses, and he was tapping his watch.
‘You’ve cut it very fine,’ he said in annoyance. ‘Another quarter of an hour and we’d have been in trouble.’
My chief feeling was still of astonishment and unreality. Billy broke the bubble, speaking over my shoulder.
‘Yeah, he was dead late coming out of the hospital. Another five minutes, and we’d have had to go in for him.’
My skin rose in goose pimples. The ride had after all led straight to the heart of things. The pit yawned before me.
‘Get in then,’ Yardman said. ‘I’ll go and tell the pilot our wandering boy has at last returned from lunch and we can start back for England.’ He went past us and down the ramp, hurrying.
Billy sniggered. ‘Move, your effing Lordship,’ he said. ‘Open the toilet door and go in. The one on the left.’ The pistol jabbed against the bottom of my spine. ‘Do as you’re told.’
I walked the three necessary steps, opened the left hand door, and went in.
‘Put your hands on the wall,’ said Billy. ‘Right there in front of you, so that I can see them.’
I did as he said. He swung the door shut behind him and leaned against it. We waited in silence. He sniggered complacently from time to time, and I considered my blind stupidity.
Yardman. Yardman transports men. Simon had fought through to a conclusion, where I had only gone halfway. Billy’s smoke screen had filled my eyes. I hadn’t seen beyond it to Yardman. And instead of grasping from Simon’s message and my own memory that it had to be Yardman too, I had kissed Gabriella and lost the thread of it. And five minutes later she had been bleeding on the pavement...
I shut my eyes and rested my forehead momentarily against the wall. Whatever the future held it meant nothing to me if Gabriella didn’t live.
After a while Yardman returned. He rapped on the door and Billy moved over to give him room to come in.
‘They’re all coming across, now,’ he said. ‘We’ll be away shortly. But before we go... how about the girl?’
‘Croaked,’ said Billy laconically.
‘Good,’ Yardman said. ‘One less job for Vittorio.’
My head jerked.
‘My dear boy,’ said Yardman. ‘Such a pity. Such a nice girl too.’ In quite a different voice he said to Billy, ‘Your shooting was feeble. You are expected to do better than that.’
‘Hey,’ there was a suspicion of a whine in Billy’s reply. ‘They started running.’
‘You should have been closer.’
‘I was close. Close enough. Ten yards at the most. I was waiting in a doorway, ready to pump it into them just after they’d passed me. And then they just suddenly started running. I got the girl all right, though, didn’t I? I mean, I got her, even if she lingered a bit, like. As for him, well, granted I did miss him, but she sort of swung round and knocked him over just as I pulled the trigger.’
‘If Vittorio hadn’t been with you,’ Yardman began coldly.
‘Well, he was with me, then, wasn’t he?’ Billy defended himself. ‘After all, it was me that told him to worm into that crowd round the girl and keep his ears flapping. Granted it was Vittorio who heard the police telling this creep to go and see them straight from the hospital, but it was me that thought of ringing up the hospital and winkling him out. And anyway, when I rang you up the second time, didn’t you say it was just as well, you could do with him back here alive as you’d got a use for him?’
‘All right,’ said Yardman. ‘It’s worked out all right, but it was still very poor shooting.’
He opened the door, letting in a brief murmur of people moving the ramp away, and closed it behind him. Billy sullenly delivered a long string of obscenity, exclusively concerned with the lower part of the body. Not one to take criticism sweetly.
The aircraft trembled as the engines started one after the other. I glanced at my watch, on a level with my eyes. If it had been much later, Patrick would have refused to take off that day. As it was, there was little enough margin for him to get back to Gatwick within fifteen hours of going on duty that morning. It was the total time which mattered, not just flying hours, with enquiries and fines to face for the merest minutes over.
‘Kneel down.’ Billy said, jabbing me in the spine. ‘Keep your hands on the wall. And don’t try lurching into me accidental like when we take off. It wouldn’t do you an effing bit of good.’
I didn’t move.
‘You’ll do as you’re ruddy well told, matey,’ said Billy, viciously kicking the back of one of my knees. ‘Get down.’
I knelt down on the floor. Billy said ‘There’s a good little earl,’ with a pleased sneer in his voice, and rubbed the snout of his pistol up and down the back of my neck.
The plane began to taxi, stopped at the perimeter for power checks, rolled forward on to the runway, and gathered speed. Inside the windowless lavatory compartment it was impossible to tell the exact moment of unstick, but the subsequent climb held me close anyway against the wall, as I faced the tail, and Billy stopped himself from overbalancing on to me by putting his gun between my shoulder blades and leaning on it. I hoped remotely that Patrick wouldn’t strike an air pocket.
Up in the cockpit, as far away in the plane as one could get and no doubt furious with me for coming back so late, he would be drinking his first coffee, and peeling his first banana, a mile from imagining I could need his help. He completed a long climbing turn and after a while levelled off and reduced power. We were well on the first leg south to the Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean. A tremor as nasty as the one I’d had on finding Yardman at the heart of things fluttered through my chest. The D.C.4 was unpressurised. The cabin doors could be opened in flight. Perhaps Billy had simply opened the door and pushed Simon out.
The traceless exit. Ten thousand feet down to the jewel blue sea.
Chapter Thirteen
Yardman came back, edging round the door.
‘It’s time,’ he said.
Billy sniggered. ‘Can’t be too soon.’
‘Stand up, stand up, my dear boy,’ Yardman said. ‘You look most undignified down there. Face the wall all the time.’