I didn’t say anything. Down the snakes and back to square one. I tried again without success to do a Houdini on Yardman’s chain job, and Rous-Wheeler sat down again and watched me with a mixture of anxiety and annoyance.
‘What branch of the Treasury?’ I said, giving it up.
‘Initial finance,’ he replied stiffly.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Grants.’
‘You mean, your department settles who gets grants of public money, and how much?’
‘That is so.’
‘Development, research, defence, and so on?’
‘Precisely.’
‘So that you personally would know what projects are in hand... or contemplated?’
‘Yes.’
They wouldn’t have bothered with him, I supposed, for any less.
After a pause, I said, ‘What about this ultrasonic transmitter?’
‘What about it? It isn’t a British project, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Did I get it right... that it will emit waves on the natural frequency of any mineral substance?’
‘I believe that’s what Yardman said,’ he agreed stiffly.
‘It would break things... like sound breaks glass?’
‘I am not a scientist. I’ve no idea.’ And from the tone of his voice he didn’t care.
I stared gloomily at the floor and wondered what made a man change his allegiance. Rous-Wheeler might have been self-important and disappointed and have refused to face his own limitations, but thousands of men were like that, and thousands of men didn’t give away a slice of their nation’s future in return for a flat, a car, and a pat on the back. There had to be more to it. Deep obsessive murky convoluted motives I couldn’t guess at, pushing him irresistibly over. But he would be the same man wherever he went: in five years or less, again disgruntled and passed over. A useless dispensable piece of flotsam.
He, it appeared, took as pessimistic a view of my future as I of his.
‘Do you think,’ he cleared his throat. ‘Do you think Billy will really kill you?’
‘Be your age,’ I said. ‘You saw what he did to the crew.’
‘He keeps putting it off,’ he said.
‘Saving the icing till last.’
‘How can you be so frivolous?’ he exclaimed. ‘Your position is very serious.’
‘So is yours,’ I said. ‘And I wouldn’t swop.’
He gave me a small pitying smile of contemptuous disbelief, but it was true enough. Everyone dies sometime, as Simon had once said, and one was probably as little eager at eighty as at twenty-six. And there really were, I reflected with a smile for Victorian melodramas, fates worse than death.
A heavy van or lorry of some sort pulled up with a squeak of brakes somewhere near the door and after a few moments its driver came into the hangar. He was like Giuseppe, young, hard, cold-eyed and quick. He looked at me without apparent surprise and spoke to Rous-Wheeler in rapid Italian, of which the only intelligible word as far as I was concerned was Brescia.
Rous-Wheeler held up a hand, palm towards the driver. ‘I don’t understand you, my good fellow. Wait until I fetch Yardman.’
This proved unnecessary as my ex-employer had already seen the lorry’s arrival. Followed by his entourage carrying ladders, paint pots, brushes and overalls, Yardman came forward into the hangar and exchanged some careful salutations with the driver.
‘Right,’ Yardman said in English to Billy. ‘There should be several small light cases and one large heavy one. It will be easiest to load the light cases up through the forward door and stow them in the luggage bay. Then we will open the back doors, haul the heavy case in on the block and tackle, and stand it in the peat tray of the last box, the one that’s now flattened. Clear?’
Billy nodded.
I opened my mouth to speak, and shut it again.
Yardman noticed. ‘What is it?’ he said sharply.
‘Nothing.’ I spoke listlessly.
He came over to me and looked down. Then he squatted on his haunches to peer on a level with my face.
‘Oh yes, my dear boy, there is something. Now what, what?’
He stared at me as if he could read my thoughts while the calculations ticked over in his own. ‘You were going to tell me something, and decided not to. And I feel I really should know what it is. I feel it must be to my disadvantage, something definitely to my disadvantage, as things stand between us.’
‘I’ll shoot it out of him,’ Billy offered.
‘It’ll be quicker if I guess it... Now, what is wrong with stowing the cases the way I suggested? Ah yes, my dear boy, you know all about loading aeroplanes, don’t you? You know what I said was wrong...’ He snapped his fingers and stood up. ‘The heavy case at the back is wrong. Billy, move the mares forward so that they occupy the two front boxes, and put the heavy case in the second to back box, and leave the rear one as it is.’
‘Move the mares?’ Billy complained.
‘Yes, certainly. The centre of gravity is all-important, isn’t that right, my dear boy?’ He was pleased with himself, smiling. Quick as lightning. If I gave him even a thousandth of a second of suspicion that Gabriella was still alive...
Billy came over and stood looking down at me with a revoltingly self-satisfied smile.
‘Not long now,’ he promised.
‘Load the plane first,’ Yardman said. ‘The van has to go back as soon as possible. You can... er... have your fun when I go to fetch the pilot. And be sure he’s dead by the time I get back.’
‘O.K.’ Billy agreed. He went away with Alf, Giuseppe and the driver, and the van ground away on the short stretch to the D.C.4.
‘What pilot?’ Rous-Wheeler asked.
‘My dear Rous-Wheeler,’ Yardman explained with a touch of weary contempt. ‘How do you think the plane is going on?’
‘Oh... Well, why did you kill the other one? He would have flown on to wherever you said.’
Yardman sighed. ‘He would have done no such thing without Billy at hand to shoot pieces off our young friend here. And frankly, my dear fellow, quite apart from the problem of Billy’s and my return journey, it would have been embarrassing for us to kill the crew in your new country. Much better here. Much more discreet, don’t you think?’
‘Where exactly... where are we?’ asked Rous-Wheeler. A good question if ever there was one.
‘A private landing field,’ Yardman said. ‘An elderly respected nobleman lets us use it from time to time.’
Elderly and respected: Yardman’s voice held some heavy irony.
‘The usual sort of blackmail?’ I asked. ‘Filmed in a bed he had no right in?’
Yardman said ‘No,’ unconvincingly.
‘What’s he talking about?’ Rous-Wheeler asked testily.
‘I’m talking about the methods employed by your new friends,’ I said. ‘If they can’t get help and information by bamboozling and subverting people like you, they do it by any form of blackmail or intimidation that comes to hand.’
Rous-Wheeler was offended. ‘I haven’t been bamboozled.’
‘Nuts,’ I said. ‘You’re a proper sucker.’
Yardman took three threatening steps towards me with the first anger he had shown. ‘That’s enough.’
‘Nothing’s enough,’ I said mildly. ‘What the hell do you think I have to lose?’
Yardman’s glasses flashed in the light, and Rous-Wheeler said self-righteously, ‘He tried to get me to free him, while you were painting the plane. He asked me to unlock him. I didn’t, of course.’
‘You nearly did,’ I said. ‘Anyone can reach you; your overgrown self-esteem makes you permanently gullible.’
Yardman looked from me to him with a taut mouth. ‘I have to go over to the plane, Mr Rous-Wheeler, and I think it would be best if you came with me.’