‘I’m Melanie,’ she announced, and then exclaimed, ‘I say! Aren’t you Perry Stuart? Good heavens! Come this way.’
The office she led me into was small and its occupant, large. Four bare walls and a skylight housed a desk, two chairs of so-so comfort and a grey metal filing cabinet. The tall man who rose to a sketchy handshake and an introduction of himself as John Rupert could easily have filled the part of text-book publisher downstairs.
‘My colleague at the Health and Safety Executive,’ he said without preliminaries, ‘informs me you may have something to tell me about the Unified Trading Company — and while we are at this stage, do you find your appearance a hindrance on occasion?’
I said, ‘I couldn’t come to your office, for instance, without someone remarking that I’d been here.’
‘Melanie, for instance?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Mm.’ He thought briefly, so briefly that I was pretty certain he’d thought before my arrival. ‘If you were to publish a text book, Dr Stuart, what subject would you choose?’
I gave him not the instinctive answer of ‘Wind and Rain’, but the more oblique thought, ‘Depression’.
His eyes narrowed. He nodded briefly. He said, ‘I was told you might be a player.’ A contemplative silence lengthened. ‘There appears to exist,’ he said finally, ‘a small packet of extremely sensitive information. I myself think it’s very unlikely you’ve seen it, but I’m told that if you have, you may have understood what you were looking at.’ He left another extended pause. ‘Can you help us?’
Who, I wondered, was us? Us, I concluded, were ‘the authorities’ I’d come looking for. ‘Us’ had to be trusted... for now.
I asked, ‘Where would you look for your sensitive package?’
‘It could be anywhere in the world.’ John Rupert pinched the thin bridge of his nose. ‘We had a man in Mexico, near the northern border. He’d had a sight of a sensitive package, he’d reported its existence, he’d heard it was for sale and on its way to Miami. He asked us whether he should steal it if he could, or buy it,’ John Rupert grimaced. ‘He let the wrong people know that he had seen it, and he was found floating face down in the Florida Everglades with a bullet in his head and his legs half eaten away by alligators.’
I’d got myself into a right pickle, I thought, and telling anyone anything at all was asking for more trouble, if not a bullet. I didn’t know if what I’d learned was worth dying for, and yet I found I couldn’t, from some obscure instinct towards justice and order, simply walk away and forget it.
‘Suppose,’ I said at length, ‘as a result of too many cooks trying to keep a sensitive package safe, it gets too thoroughly hidden away on an island and has to be retrieved before it can be used. It’s no good to anyone if it’s not in use.’ I stopped.
‘Go on, go on,’ John Rupert urged.
‘To collect the package there’s a suitable light aeroplane available, but no suitable pilot to fly it, until along comes a meteorologist, a private pilot with a hankering to fly through the eye of a hurricane. The pilot agrees to make a detour flight to pick up the package, in return for his hurricane adventure.’
John Rupert, understanding, gave me a nod.
‘That simple errand fails,’ I said. ‘The hurricane crashes the aircraft into the sea. Collecting the package, still essential, now involves more certain measures, such as a calmer sky, and a much larger aircraft with a bigger crew equipped and ready to do actual battle if necessary.’
‘Battle for the package?’
‘More like battle for the repossession of the whole island, whose ownership is in dispute. The crew, I think, are the Unified Trading Company, who ruled the place before they frightened the residents away by growing exotic mushrooms in containers that gave off radioactivity...’ I stopped talking. His face was smoothing to disbelief.
‘Goodbye,’ I said briefly, standing up. ‘Children in school can make more or less anything appear to give off radioactive alpha particles. Just scatter a little powdered uranium ore around.’ I gave him a small card with my grandmother’s phone number on it. ‘Phone if you’re interested in any more.’
‘Stop,’ he said, his interest growing already.
‘People aren’t wrong to be frightened,’ I said from the doorway. ‘If you swallow a pea-sized alpha particle source, it will kill you, but you can carry it safely for a long time in a paper bag. I expect I’m telling you what you already know.’
‘Don’t go yet.’
‘I have to take the bad news from Aix to Ghent.’
John Rupert laughed.
Kris in the end was easy to find as he was back at the BBC Weather Centre in Wood Lane, preparing to share with me the bad-weather broadcast ahead for the run-up to Guy Fawkes Night.
He greeted me with a yelp and a crushing hug, and I suffered similar warm squeezing all round the office. Comment on thinness and gauntness could last only minutes when, to the relief of the forecaster standing by to give the kids the damp news for squibs, reliable old Stuart had returned from the dead and popped up on time.
Kris himself looked spectacularly tanned with sun-brightened hair and moustache, and his spirits rose at the sight of me from gloom to stratosphere as fast as any of his rocket lift-off poems.
‘I can’t believe it!’ His voice could probably be heard all down Wood Lane. ‘How come you’re here? We all thought your gran a bit touched yesterday, insisting you’d have got a message to her if you’d drowned!’
We walked along a quiet passage towards the room we all shared between appearances — all except the guru, who had a retreat to himself — and Kris, with small skips and jumps like a young boy, told me that he in the life raft had scudded with the wind across the western edge of Odin for several days until Robin’s hired helicopter operators had spotted him and winched him up. The description of his rescue poured out of him like an uncorked flood, as if to prevent any other subject surfacing, but in the end I put an anchoring hand on his arm and congratulated him on his engagement to Bell.
‘Don’t tell her father,’ he said in alarm. ‘Old Caspar wouldn’t exactly have wept if he’d had to get someone else to tell him it was hay-cutting time.’
There was too much truth in that to be funny. I let it go without contradiction and asked instead, ‘What did Robin Darcy say about losing his aeroplane?’
‘I haven’t talked to him since that morning we set off. If I phone his home in Sand Dollar Beach I just get Evelyn’s voice on an answering machine. But poor old Robin, what can he say? It was he who urged us to go.’
‘Well...’ I frowned. ‘What did he really want you to do on that island?’
‘Trox?’
‘Yes, of course, Trox.’
‘How should I know?’ Kris shrugged absentmindedly, then suddenly looked wary.
‘Perhaps,’ I mildly suggested, ‘because he himself told you.’
Kris slowed and stopped in two paces as if he had just remembered he’d given me two different answers already to that question.
‘I’m so glad,’ he said explosively, ‘I’m really so pleased you’re alive.’
‘So am I that you are.’ We beamed at each other, and whatever else was said, that was the truth.
We shouldered through a swinging door into a change-clothes and brush-hair environment, where shiny foreheads and noses were dusted to matte by a lady dragon of twenty-three who tended to follow one into camera range waving a powder puff. Kris fell into flirtatious chat with her, but kept glancing my way from under his eyelids as if half hoping that I would after all disappear.