She said, ‘Baden-Baden’ under her breath, not paying me any attention, a view of life that changed rapidly when I offered after all to look up for her the weather, past, present, and anywhere, and any time she wanted.
‘Do you mean it?’ she demanded, eyes, voice and mind all sharpening fast to an acute awareness quite at odds with her glittery hair.
‘I can’t do it until Monday,’ I said. ‘I can’t use the necessary computer until then.’
She objected, ‘Bell says you’re the head of home forecasting. I’d have thought you could do what you like as such.’ I said I was only the deputy head, and to myself added that I wasn’t going to use up any favours on results I thought of as highly speculative. I smiled my best apologetic excuse to Glenda and truthfully explained that the mainframe computer only ran on Sundays for strictly necessary reasons. Tracing errant husbands wasn’t classed as essential or necessary.
‘And why,’ I asked without pressure, ‘does he go to Baden-Baden and those other places?’
‘Girls, of course! I’ll give you the list.’ Glitzy Glenda wasn’t quite a fool. ‘All those places are racecourses,’ she said. ‘I suppose you don’t know.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘All in Germany?’
‘What a clever boy! Not all, but most.’
‘And does your husband have runners there?’
‘Haven’t I told you, he says so? He says the races are abandoned because of snow, but I’m telling you, it doesn’t snow when he says it does.’
‘I’ll look it up for you,’ I promised.
She gave me from her handbag a copy of the list she’d given to Bell, and I glanced at it briefly before stowing it in a pocket.
‘Baden-Baden,’ she said. ‘It’s rubbish.’
I was so close to her at that moment that I could smell alcohol on her breath and see little black beads on the ends of her rigid eyelashes. The shiny blonde hair had minuscule black roots.
‘I’ll divorce George,’ she said with sudden and vicious intent. ‘And it will serve him right.’
I suddenly couldn’t be bothered to try any more at that moment to unwind any of Newmarket’s twisted and destructive personalities. I spent the hour round the November Handicap simply watching the mechanics of the different, bewitching wider world of racing, and winning a tiny amount when Harvey’s runner, the second favourite, came in third.
I wasn’t sure whether or not Robin Darcy was actively avoiding me, but in the end the meeting certainly looked accidentaclass="underline" one of those times when two people turn together and find themselves face to face.
We must both have had hours to prepare. We said to each other everything appropriate. I bewailed the loss of his beautiful aircraft, he rejoiced in the survival of Kris and myself. He thanked me for the letter I’d sent him from Miami airport half an hour before I left to fly home. I hoped he’d had a good journey himself: he had arrived at Newmarket yesterday, he confided.
He was friendly. He shook hands. He invited me to visit with himself and Evelyn again any time. I wanted to say to him, ‘Where’s the folder? For whom will you fix the sale of the next bargaining chip, the next bit of bomb?’
In the brown eyes behind the big black frames there was the same sort of question and answer, ‘Did Perry Stuart read those lists in the folder? He can’t have done. He couldn’t have opened the safe. He certainly heard my password, Hereford, but it would have meant nothing.’
I wanted to say, ‘Whichever of you thought of the blindfold, thank you’; and I read, ‘You don’t know how close you came to a bullet.’
I wondered what he had said to Kris... wondered what he wanted Kris to do.
I wished Robin Darcy had been an ally, not an enemy. Born clever... Why should such a man trade in death?
Too many clever men chose to trade in death.
He gave me a nod and moved off to where, not far away, Caspar Harvey, able but not brilliant, received lukewarm plaudits for his horse’s third place in the November Handicap. Nothing but winning would have pleased his bullish attitude to racing, and I thought Oliver Quigley literally to be inviting trouble when in Caspar’s hearing he said that given his training methods and his instructions to the jockey, the horse would have won.
By the end of six races, when Kris and I went back to the airfield to fly home, the extra physical demands of the past ten days had drained my normally perceptive self to the equivalent of a worn-out battery. We spent long minutes on farewells to most of the Newmarket contingent in the car park nearest to the landing ground, and I was dozing even when Kris was taxiing down the field for take-off. He changed fuel tanks ostentatiously. I pretended not to notice.
On this Saturday, late in the year for daylight landings, Kris had arranged with his friend in the control tower at White Waltham to put car-battery-powered lamps down the runway to shine a path for his quiet approach and arrival at about five o’clock, half past toast and teatime.
We were in the air and a long way south of Doncaster when Kris shook me awake.
‘Sorry,’ I said, yawning and reaching for the map, ‘where are we?’ It was still just light enough to see the three Rs, roads, rivers and railways. ‘No problem with those,’ I said. He always flew a straight heading.
Kris, however, wasn’t worrying about being lost but about oil on the windscreen, he said.
‘What?’ I asked blankly.
‘Oil. On the windscreen. Perry, wake up.’
It was the urgency of those last three words that sharply reached my senses. I did wake up. My heart lurched.
There were dark gold thread-like lines on the windscreen, which as I watched were joined by more lines, which were running and spreading upwards over the glass.
Horrified, we both understood what was happening. The hot oil that should have been circulating inside the engine case, lubricating the four thundering pistons, was somehow coming out into the engine compartment itself, and from there it was sliding upwards and backwards in droplets through the engine cowling’s crack-like edges to hit the glass of the windscreen... and from there, gradually to spread and cover the whole windscreen with oil... and so, effectively, blind the pilot.
The oil itself wasn’t the dirty brown-black old stuff that had been cleansing inner engine surfaces for many hours of flight. Kris always looked after his pride and joy, and he had changed his oil regularly. The disaster on the windscreen had been clean for the Newmarket lunch.
‘God Almighty,’ Kris said, ‘what the hell do we do now?’
‘Keep straight on our course,’ I said automatically, ‘so we know where we are.’
‘That’s the easiest. What if all the oil comes out? The engine will go dry and seize up.’ Kris suddenly sounded comically unconcerned. ‘And how do we land, if we can’t see where we’re going?’
‘Can we break the windscreen?’ I suggested.
‘Get with it, Perry.’
He was both sarcastic and fatalistic. ‘The windscreen’s made of toughened glass to withstand birdstrike. And even if we could break it — and what with — we would have our faces cut to ribbons, and we’d need goggles as in the old Tiger Moth days, and even then we’d be going too fast. It would be like facing a Category 3 hurricane wind, it can’t be done.’
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Keep our course and height. We’ll have to find a large public commercial airport open late on Saturday afternoon.’
‘Oh great.’ He glanced across at me. ‘How do we find one of those?’
‘It’s a doddle.’ With immense thankfulness I took note that this time we were sensibly in contact by radio with the outside world, and we did have an aeronautical map giving the radio frequencies of airports. We didn’t have parachutes or ejector seats — couldn’t have everything.