"Here we go," he repeated quietly through clenched teeth.
He released the brakes and the plane leapt forward as if released from a chain.
There was no sense of its size behind him as it skimmed the runway, reaching eighty knots. Gant felt the rudder become effective. The airspeed indicator needles flicked upwards. A bird flashed across and beneath the nose of the 494.
The centre line wavered for a moment and Gant steered delicately on the rudder pedals, his right hand hovering over the throttles. If the engines failed now, he could close them down… Without reverse thrust, they'd plough into the desert at the end of the runway.
"V-One," he heard Vance call. Committed now. He moved his right hand to the control column as Vance assumed control of the engines.
One-fifty knots, one fifty-three, four, five eight.
"Rotate."
Gant pulled back on the column and the nose of the aircraft lifted towards the blinding, leached sky. Ten per cent, fifteen on the attitude indicator. He felt the undercarriage leave the runway.
"V-Two," he muttered to Vance.
"Gear up."
The undercarriage bay doors opened and he felt the slight increase in drag, then the bogies clunked home and the doors shut. He turned the aircraft into the wind.
Altitude five hundred feet, the mountains diminishing in bulk, becoming manageable, dismissible. Twelve hundred feet… He was sweating as Vance eased back the throttles to climb power. He dropped the nose to allow for the reduction. The miniature buildings of Vance Aircraft disappeared beneath the port wing and the mountains seemed to slip aside, leaving the emptiness of the air ahead and the architect's model that was Phoenix glittering on the desert floor, surrounded by reservoirs with mirror surfaces.
He was repeating the flight that had killed Hollis in every detail.
Vance's presence behind him made the hair on his neck itch. Farther behind him were the two huge engines that had failed, and for which failure there was no answer… The voice at the other end of the telephone, that of Michael Lloyd's only relative, an aunt in Crewkerne, seeped coldly into her ear like an ointment. Lloyd's untidy handwriting on the single sheet of A4 paper lay on her desk, reminding her of his undergraduate essays when she had been his tutor in modern history. She sensed that even those memories were an escape route, one unplanned but quickly taken.
"Yes," she murmured.
The aunt had fostered Lloyd as a difficult teenager, abandoned by a philandering father and a mother comatosed by her husband's desertion.
'… I never suspected, you see, Miss Pyott, that Michael was — that he took…" A gobbling, breathy silence. The intimacy of tragedy pressed against her, insinuating itself. It was as if the aunt were trying to catch her breath beneath a waterfall or facing a fierce, choking wind.
"Never once in my life…" Marian felt vile, like an eavesdropper.
An overdose of heroin at least, of heroin that had been badly cut, insufficiently diluted. She had guessed, at certain times, from the heightened, dizzy manner of some of his phone calls, that there was the likelihood that he indulged some occasional cocaine habit. But heroin?
'… such a loving boy, when you loved him," Marian heard.
"Yes, yes," she replied eagerly, desperate to offer the aunt some sense of a shared sorrow.
"It was late last night a friend of Michael's called at his flat, but couldn't get an answer, you see, and looked through the letter box… saw Michael just lying on the floor, not moving."
"Yes…"
The what do they call it? The the people he worked with, anyway… they're making the arrangements. For the body to be returned. I thought here…?"
"Yes." There was nowhere, no one else.
"Yes, I think that would be right. I please let me know if there's anything I can do and of course, the funeral. The date—" There's some delay, because of the way you know, the way…"
"Yes." She felt her temples pressed by a drying thong, the sense of her clothes wrapped tight as a straitjacket around her, the heat of her body. The unfolded sheet of paper, the letter beside it, the little tub of undeveloped film, all were bold accusations on her desk. She could not understand why… then, of course, she did, feeling nausea rise in her throat. She had obviously forged some causal link between what he had done those were the results lying there and what had happened to him. And at once felt icily cold, perspiration chilly on her forehead.
"Yes…" she breathed.
"I'm sorry to have brought you bad news, Miss Pyott. I thought you would wish to know." The aunt had moved on from sobs to the clarity of arrangements, of other calls, of the immediate future.
"Yes, thank you. I'll will ring, perhaps tomorrow. Just in case there's anything you feel I can do. Thank you for letting me know…
I'm so sorry—"
"Yes. Goodbye, Miss Pyott."
Marian put down the receiver with a clatter, then gripped the back of her chair, lowering herself into it with the awkwardness she sometimes saw in her father's movements. Her elbows hurt as they took the weight of her head. The desk's surface was very hard, resisting her, as accusing as the items that littered it. She rubbed a hand through her hair, pushing it back on her head. It flopped back at once, blinkering her view of the items on the desk. She did not brush it away from her face again.
Eventually, she sniffed loudly and sat upright, shaking her head, shaking away the numb mood. Michael's letter offered itself at once to her new composure. It was a hasty note, no more, filled with anxiety and a heightened amusement, a sense of boyish adventure. He had been followed back to the Commission and they had practised a deception to discover who he was. I think I may have exaggerated everything… security people are notoriously paranoid, aren't they? Whistling in the dark? She could not now decide. Except that she did not believe in the heroin addiction, not even in a clumsy and tragic early attempt at the drug. Michael had bought a new car recently, and moved to a bigger, more expensive apartment. He had no money worries, no drain on his resources… guilt nudged, constantly returning her thoughts to her father's oldest friend, one of her oldest friends… Kenneth Aubrey. The undeveloped tub of film, the names on the page. There was no real surprise the Euro MP whose constituency at Strasbourg included her own, the two EU Commissioners, the two plane makers It was obviously Skyliner, and the urgency of the meeting and its secrecy had been demanded by the collapse of the Aero UK helicopter bid. There were no names attached to the people who had frightened Michael and followed him and who… She excised the thought. Sunlight streamed across her hands as they lay resting on the desk. Her diary was open; her notes for the Commons' afternoon business and the details faxed to her in preparation for her Saturday-morning surgery lay near it.
She snatched up the telephone and dialled. Eventually, she heard Mrs.
Grey's carefully modulated, slightly pretentious tones.
"Mrs. Grey is Sir Kenneth free this morning? It's Marian Pyott here, I'd like his advice—"
"I'm sure Sir Kenneth will be delighted to see you, Miss Pyott. He is lunching at his club with your father and Sir Clive but he will be here until twelve-thirty.
What time shall I tell him you'd like to call?"
She glanced at her watch. Twelve. I can make it by twelve."
I'll tell him."
Marian continued to study the receiver after she had replaced it.
Somehow, having called Kenneth, invoking the spirit of his professional self, the names on Michael's sheet of paper seemed less innocent. Their contiguity troubled. Her own suspicions returned regarding the illegal diversion of EU funds for the development of the Skyliner project. The Transport Commissioner and the Urban Development chief… her attention underlined the title as Lloyd's pen had done.