Patrick’s being alive made a lot of difference to everything. I was now thankful without reservation that I had taken the D.C.4 however stupid my motive at the time, for if I’d left it, and Yardman had found him alive, they would simply have pumped another bullet into him, or even buried him as he was. The tiring mental merry-go-round of whether I should have taken the Cessna troubled me no more.
I yawned. Not good. Of all things I couldn’t afford to go to sleep. I shouldn’t have taken those pills, I thought: there was nothing like the odd spot of agony for keeping you awake. I rubbed my hand over my face and it felt as if it belonged to someone else.
I murdered Billy, I thought.
I could have shot him in the leg and left him to Yardman, and I’d chosen to kill him myself. Choice and those cold-blooded seconds of revenge... they made it murder. An interesting technical point, where self-defence went over the edge into something else. Well... no one would ever find out; and my conscience didn’t stir.
I yawned again more deeply, and thought about eating one of Patrick’s bananas. A depleted bunch of them lay on the edge by the windscreen, with four blackening stalks showing where he had fended off starvation on the morning trip. But I imagined the sweet pappiness of them in my mouth, and left them alone. I wasn’t hungry enough. The last thing I’d eaten had been the lasagne with Gabriella.
Gabriella...
After a while I got up and went through the plane to look at Patrick. He lay relaxed and unmoving, but his eyes were open again. I knelt beside him and felt his pulse. Unchanged.
‘Patrick,’ I said. ‘Can you hear?’
There was no response of any sort.
I stood up slowly and looked at Rous-Wheeler sitting on the bale of hay. He seemed to have shrunk slightly as if the gas had leaked out, and there was a defeated sag to his whole body which showed that he realised his future was unlikely to be rosy. I left him without speaking and went back to the cockpit.
Four o’clock. France had never seemed so large. I checked the fuel gauges for the hundredth time and saw that the needles on the auxiliary tanks were knocking uncomfortably near zero. The plane’s four engines used a hundred and fifty gallons an hour at normal speed and even with the power reduced they seemed to be drinking the stuff. Fuel didn’t flow automatically from the main tanks when the auxiliaries were empty: one had to switch over by hand. And I simply couldn’t afford to use every drop in the auxiliaries, because the engines would stop without warning the second the juice dried up. My fingers hovered on the switch until I hadn’t the nerve to wait any longer, and then flipped it over to the mains.
Time passed, and the sleeping country slipped by underneath. When I got to the coast, I thought wearily, I was going to have the same old problem. I wouldn’t know within two hundred miles where I was, and the sky was ruthless to the lost. One couldn’t stop to ask the way. One couldn’t stop at all. A hundred and fifty an hour might be slow in terms of jetliners, but it was much too fast in the wrong direction.
In Patrick’s briefcase there would be not only a thick book of radio charts but also some topographical ground maps: they weren’t needed for ordinary aerial navigation, but they had to be carried in case of radio failure. The briefcase was almost certainly somewhere under or behind the four packing cases in the luggage bay. I went to have a look, but I already knew. The heavy cases were jammed in tight, and even if there had been room to pull them all out into the small area behind the cockpit I hadn’t enough strength to do it.
At about half past four I went back for another check on Patrick, and found things very different. He had thrown off the blanket covering him and was plucking with lax uncoordinated hands at the bandage on his head. His eyes were open but unfocused still, and his breath came out in short regular groans.
‘He’s dying,’ Rous-Wheeler shouted unhelpfully.
Far from dying, he was up close to the threshold of consciousness, and his head was letting him know it. Without answering Rous-Wheeler I went back along the alley and fetched the morphine from the first aid kit.
There were six glass ampoules in a flat box, each with its own built-in hypodermic needle enclosed in a glass cap. I read the instruction leaflet carefully and Rous-Wheeler shouted his unasked opinion that I had no right to give an injection, I wasn’t a doctor, I should leave it for someone who knew how.
‘Do you?’ I said.
‘Er, no.’
‘Then shut up.’
He couldn’t. ‘Ask the pilot, then.’
I glanced at him. ‘I’m the pilot.’
That did shut him up. His jaw dropped to allow a clear view of his tonsils and he didn’t say another word.
While I was rolling up his sleeve Patrick stopped groaning. I looked quickly at his face and his eyes moved slowly round to meet mine.
‘Henry,’ he said. His voice didn’t reach me, but the lip movement was clear.
I bent down and said, ‘Yes, Patrick. You’re O.K. Just relax.’
His mouth moved. I put my ear to his lips, and he said ‘My bloody head hurts.’
I nodded, smiling. ‘Not for long.’
He watched me snap the glass to uncover the needle and didn’t stir when I pushed it into his arm, though I’d never been on the delivering end of an injection before and I must have been clumsy. When I’d finished he was talking again. I put my head down to hear.
‘Where... are... we?’
‘On your way to a doctor. Go to sleep.’
He lay looking vaguely at the roof for a few minutes and then gradually shut his eyes. His pulse was stronger and not so slow. I put the blanket over him again and tucked it under his legs and arms and with barely a glance for Rous-Wheeler went back to the cockpit.
A quarter to five. Time to go down. I checked all the gauges, found I was still carrying the box of ampoules, and put it up on the ledge beside the bananas and the cup of water. I switched out the cockpit lights so that I could see better outside, leaving the round dial faces illuminated only by rims of red, and finally unlocked the automatic pilot.
It was when I’d put the nose down and felt again the great weight of the plane that I really doubted that I could ever land it, even if I found an airfield. I wasn’t a mile off exhaustion and my muscles were packing up, and not far beyond this point I knew the brain started missing on a cylinder or two, and haze took the place of thought. If I couldn’t think in crystalline terms and at reflex speed I was going to make an irretrievable mistake, and for Patrick’s sake, quite apart from my own, I couldn’t afford it.
Four thousand feet. I levelled out and flew on, looking down through the moonlit blackness, searching for the sea. Tiredness was insidious and crept up like a tide, I thought, until it drowned you. I shouldn’t have taken that codeine, it was probably making me sleepy... though I’d had some at other times after racing injuries, and never noticed it. But that was on the ground, with nothing to do but recover.
There. There was the sea. A charcoal change from black, the moonlight just reflecting enough to make it certain. I flew out a little way, banked the plane to the right and began to follow the shore. Compass heading, east-south-east. This seemed extraordinary, but it certainly had to be the north-east coast of France somewhere, and I wasn’t going to lose myself again. There were lighthouses, flashing their signals. No charts to interpret them. The biggest port along that coast, I thought, was Le Havre. I couldn’t miss that. There would be a lot of lights even at five in the morning. If I turned roughly north from there I couldn’t help but reach England. Roughly was just the trouble. The map in my head couldn’t be trusted. Roughly north could find me barging straight into the London Control Zone, which would be even worse than Paris.
It wouldn’t be light until six at the earliest. Sunrise had been about a quarter to seven, the day before.