I’m all right here, he thought. I’m safe here with my family.
CHAPTER TEN
A day of waiting and worrying in the international building at Heathrow Airport had left Leila Mostyn feeling more tired than she would have thought possible.
There was a superabundance of passengers bound for the United States, many of them youngsters who gave the impression of having decided to go on the spur of the moment, and the trade in stand-by tickets had been brisk. She had failed to get a seat on a morning plane to Chicago, and had turned down some indirect possibilities in favour of an extra 747 flight which had been laid on to depart at noon. The difference in time zones meant that it would have got her into Chicago’s O’Hare field at around three in the afternoon, local time, leaving her with a reasonable four hours in which to reach Gilpinston. It would have been better to have a greater margin, especially as she knew that getting through the U.S. immigration checks could be a time-consuming process, but at that stage she still felt she could cope with the situation. There was, she had felt, enough time.
Then things had begun to awry.
First had come the announcement that a fault in the traffic control radar at Frankfurt was going to delay the arrival of her aircraft at Heathrow by two hours. Leila had been dismayed to find her reserves of time cut in half at a stroke, but by then it had become too late even to consider an indirect flight, and she had settled down with a taut, fluttery feeling in her stomach to adapt her thinking to a new and much more pressing schedule. She had eaten a light meal in the snack bar and was trying to relax afterwards with a glass of vermouth when a delay of a further hour was announced, wringing an ironic cheer from some of her fellow passengers.
It had been almost three o’clock before they had been able to board the aircraft, and by that time she had entered a state of sick, nerve-thrumming anxiety. A bespectacled man in the next seat had tried to strike up a conversation with her, but on receiving her tight-lipped, abstracted replies had turned his attention to a magazine. A few minutes later the captain of the 747 had come on the address system and, with evident embarrassment, had explained that the late arrival at Heathrow had caused problems with the fuelling service and that there would be a wait of forty-five minutes before the aircraft would be tanked up and ready to go. The news had roused a further cheer and, through some kind of reverse psychology, had strengthened the holiday spirit among the younger passengers, some of whom left their seats and stood in the aisles loudly swapping witticisms with their friends.
Leila had withdrawn into a bubble of loneliness, separating herself from an environment which was rapidly beginning to seem meaningless and hostile, a daunting melange of shouts and bellowing laughs, unfamiliar sights and smells, pneumatic hisses and hydraulic whines. It was a world of normal people doing normal things, and she was no part of it. She had been afraid to think too much about what she was doing, and right up to the moment when the heavy doors had been pulled into place, sealing the fuselage, she had been plagued by urges to leave her seat and quit the aircraft. Only when the engines had been started, sending expectant tremors through the floor and the arms of her seat, did she allow the mental floodgates to burst apart.
What have you done to me, John? The things 1 took to be evidence last night, when I was thrown completely off balance, aren’t evidence at all. A scrap of newspaper with the wrong date, a couple of odd coincidences…
My God, what am I doing to myself? Putting myself in jail, that’s all! I’m planning to go to the United States and burn down a house with Molotov cocktails. They’ll lock me up and throw away the key!
Leila was staring straight ahead at two male members of the cabin staff who were struggling to fit a large aluminium container for hot meals into its closet-like storage compartment. So great was the turmoil in her mind that perhaps ten minutes had gone by without any progress being made before she realized that the saga of hitches and delays for that particular flight had not yet ended. The alloy meal container was still blocking an aisle and the aircraft had not yet moved away from the embarkation bay. A stewardess tried to give the two men some advice and was sent away, pink-cheeked and angry. The men renewed their efforts to stow the container, now making a considerable noise as they hit it with fists and shoulders, and a minute later were joined by a senior steward and a member of the flight crew. A whispered argument developed, during which Leila’s sensitively attuned ears picked up the words “engineer” and “unseal”. Her heart began a slow, steady pounding.
The captain’s eventual announcement that there was to be yet another delay brought a round of derisory applause which Leila ’ scarcely heard. She undid her seat belt, stood up and took her coat and bag from the overhead locker, and was walking up the aisle within seconds of the mid-fuselage door being opened. A tall steward in a half-sleeved white shirt stepped in front of her as she tried to squeeze out past a mechanic who was entering with a box of tools.
“Sorry, miss,” the steward said. “You can’t go through there. Is there something wrong?”
“I’ve changed my mind about flying today.” She made her voice firm and self-possessed. “I want to leave the aircraft, and I believe I’m entitled to do so.”
The steward shook his head. “Passengers aren’t permitted to disembark after the luggage has been put on board. It’s a security regulation, miss.”
“I don’t care about your regulations.”
“If you would care to return to your seat I’m sure we can…”
“I don’t care to return to my seat because this aircraft was supposed to take off more than four hours ago, and I’ve missed an important appointment because of the delay, and now there’s no point in my going to the States—so I’m not going.” Leila increased the level of her voice, attracting the attention of passengers in the nearer part of the cabin. “If you try to keep me on board against my will, while your so-called engineers try to load the sandwich box, I promise you I’ll kick up the loudest, longest and nastiest fuss you’ve ever heard.”
“You don’t understand, miss,” the steward said unhappily.
“If you were to leave now we’d have to unload all the luggage and…”
“You are the one who doesn’t understand,” Leila countered. “If I’m obstructed from leaving at once I’ll go to the newspapers at the very first opportunity and I’ll tell them there was a four-hour delay over the packed lunches on this flight. I’ll make sure that everybody in the country hears about the kind of service this airline offers.”
The steward spread his hands. “Please wait here—I’ll let you speak to Captain Sinclair.”
The ensuing thirty minutes were among the most difficult and embarrassing of Leila’s entire life, especially as her abrupt change of mind about flying had aroused the suspicions of the customs, immigration and security staffs, but she weathered the period with an icy composure which did not crack until she had driven out of the airport grounds and was travelling north in the vicinity of Uxbridge. She pulled in to the side of the road as tears blurred out her vision, and sat with her forehead resting on the upper rim of the steering wheel.