As I stood up he reached out, grasped my jacket by the collar, and pulled it backwards and downwards. Two more jerks and it was off.
‘I regret this, I do indeed,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid we must ask you to put your hands together behind your back.’
I thought that if I did that I was as good as dead. I didn’t move. Billy squeezed round into the small space between me and the washbasin and put the silencer against my neck.
Yardman’s unhurried voice floated into my ear. ‘I really must warn you, my dear boy, that your life hangs by the merest thread. If Billy hadn’t clumsily missed you in the street, you would be in the Milan morgue by now. If you do not do as we ask, he will be pleased to rectify his mistake immediately.’
I put my hands behind my back.
‘That’s right,’ Yardman said approvingly. He tied them together with a rough piece of rope.
‘Now, my dear boy,’ he went on. ‘You are going to help us. We have a little job for you.’
Billy’s searchlight eyes were wide and bright, and I didn’t like his smile.
‘You don’t ask what it is,’ Yardman said. ‘So I will tell you. You are going to persuade your friend the pilot to alter course.’
Alter course. Simple words. Premonition shook me to the roots. Patrick wasn’t strong enough.
I said nothing. After a moment Yardman continued conversationally, ‘We were going to use the engineer originally, but as I find you and the pilot are good friends I am sure he will do as you ask.’
I still said nothing.
‘He doesn’t understand,’ Billy sneered.
I understood all right. Patrick would do what they told him. Yardman opened the washroom door. ‘Turn round,’ he said.
I turned. Yardman’s eyes fell immediately to the dried bloodstains on my shirt. He reached out a long arm, pulled the once white poplin out of my trousers and saw the bandage underneath.
‘You grazed him,’ he said to Billy, still critical.
‘Considering he was running and falling at the same time that isn’t bad, not with a silencer.’
‘Inefficient.’ Yardman wasn’t letting him off the hook.
‘I’ll make up for it,’ Billy said viciously.
‘Yes, you do that.’
Yardman turned his head back to me. ‘Outside, dear boy.’
I followed him out of the washroom into the cabin, and stopped. It looked utterly normal. The four mares stood peacefully in the two middle boxes, installed, I presumed, by Yardman and Alf. The foremost and aft boxes were strapped down flat. There were the normal bales of hay dotted about. The noise was the normal noise, the air neither hotter nor colder than usual. All familiar. Normal. As normal as a coffin.
Yardman walked on.
‘This way,’ he said. He crossed the small area at the back of the plane, stepped up on to the shallow platform formed by the flattened rear box, walked across it, and finished down again on the plane’s floor, against the nearest box containing mares. Billy prodded his gun into my back. I joined Yardman.
‘So wise, my dear boy,’ nodded my employer. ‘Stand with your back to the box.’
I turned round to face the tail of the aircraft. Yardman took some time fastening my tied hands to the centre banding bar round the mare’s box. Billy stood up on the flattened box and amused himself by pointing his gun at various parts of my anatomy. He wasn’t going to fire it. I took no notice of his antics but looked beyond him, to the pair of seats at the back. There was a man sitting there, relaxed and interested. The man who had flown out with us, whose name was John. Milan hadn’t been the end of his journey, I thought. Yardman wanted to land him somewhere else.
He stood up slowly, his pompous manner a complete contradiction to his grubby ill-fitting clothes.
‘Is this sort of thing really necessary?’ he asked, but with curiosity, not distress. His voice was loud against the beat of the engine.
‘Yes,’ said Yardman shortly. I turned my head to look at him. He was staring gravely at my face, the bones of his skull sharp under the stretched skin. ‘We know our business.’
Billy got tired of waving his gun about to an unappreciative audience. He stepped off the low platform and began dragging a bale of hay into the narrow alleyway between the standing box and the flattened one, settling it firmly longways between the two. On top of that bale he put another, and on top of that another and another. Four bales high. Jammed against these, on top of the flattened box, he raised three more, using all the bales on the plane. Together, they formed a solid wall three feet away on my left. Yardman, John and I watched him in silence.
‘Right,’ Yardman said when he’d finished it. He checked the time and looked out of the window. ‘Ready?’
Billy and John said they were. I refrained from saying that I wasn’t, and never would be.
All three of them went away up the plane, crouching under the luggage racks and stumbling over the guy chains. I at once discovered by tugging that Yardman knew his stuff with a rope. I couldn’t budge my hands. Jerking them in vain, I suddenly discovered Alf watching me. He had come back from somewhere up front, and was standing on my right with his customary look of missing intelligence.
‘Alf,’ I shouted. ‘Untie me.’
He didn’t hear. He simply stood and looked at me without surprise. Without feeling. Then he slowly turned and went away. Genuinely deaf; but it paid him to be blind too, I thought bitterly. Whatever he saw he didn’t tell. He had told me nothing about Simon.
I thought achingly of Gabriella hanging on to life in Milan. She must still be alive, I thought. She must. Difficulties, the doctor had said. There might be difficulties. Like infection. Like pneumonia. Nothing would matter if she died... but she wouldn’t... she couldn’t. Anxiety for her went so deep that it pretty well blotted out the hovering knowledge that I should spare some for myself. The odds on her survival were about even: I wouldn’t have taken a hundred to one on my own.
After ten eternal minutes Yardman and Billy came back, with Patrick between them. Patrick stared at me, his face tight and stiff with disbelief. I knew exactly how he felt. Billy pushed him to the back with his gun, and Yardman pointed to the pair of seats at the back. He and Patrick sat down on them, side by side, fifteen feet away. A captive audience, I reflected sourly. Front row of the stalls.
Billy put his mouth close to my ear. ‘He doesn’t fancy a detour, your pilot friend. Ask him to change his mind.’
I didn’t look at Billy, but at Patrick. Yardman was talking to him unhurriedly, but against the engine noise I couldn’t hear what he said. Patrick’s amber eyes looked dark in the gauntness of his face, and he shook his head slightly, staring at me beseechingly. Beseech all you like, I thought, but don’t give in. I knew it was no good. He wasn’t tough enough.
‘Ask him,’ Billy said.
‘Patrick,’ I shouted.
He could hear me. His head tilted to listen. It was difficult to get urgency and conviction across when one had to shout to be heard at all, but I did my best. ‘Please... fly back to Milan.’
Nothing happened for three seconds. Then Patrick tried to stand up and Yardman pulled him back, saying something which killed the beginning of resolution in his shattered face. Patrick, for God’s sake, I thought, have some sense. Get up and go.
Billy unscrewed the silencer from his gun and put it in his pocket. He carefully unbuttoned my shirt, pulled the collar back over my shoulders, and tucked the fronts round into the back of my trousers. I felt very naked and rather silly. Patrick’s face grew, if anything, whiter.
Billy firmly clutched the dressing over the bullet mark and with one wrench pulled the whole thing off.
‘Hey,’ he shouted to Yardman. ‘I don’t call that a miss.’
Yardman’s reply got lost on the way back.