A HUNDRED TWENTY MILES FROM EDINBURGH TO Inverness, and we fought the wind and rain every inch of the way. We followed the railway lines, which added miles but gave us sure guidance. As the clouds dropped ever lower, we did as well, until I feared we might meet an engine head-on. Javitz hunched over the controls, the juddering of the stick knocking through his body like a blow. Every so often, I saw him peer forward at the instruments, and I could tell when he braced his knees around the control stick to reach out and tap at the instruments.
The wind howled, the rain beat us sideways, the 'plane groaned and cracked, and even the wind clawing at the cover could not take away the stink of fear in my boxed-in space.
On a good day, we might have covered the distance in ninety minutes, but between the head-wind and being continually blown off course, it was twice that by the time we saw signs of a city below. The number of times Javitz leant forward to rap at the gauges did not make my stomach any easier around the stony eggs and sloshing coffee.
We came down ominously close to dusk, slowing, dropping, teetering on the gusts. Javitz chose what appeared to be a mowed hayfield, although as we descended I noticed a faded red length of cloth nailed to a high post at the far end, tugged back and forth, tautly horizontal to the ground. He slowed us further, rising into a half-stand so he could see past the nose. No aerodrome here: If his undercarriage repairs failed, we would be grounded.
Then again, if the repairs failed on landing, further transportation might be the least of our worries.
Clearly, the danger was foremost on the pilot's mind, as well. Javitz fought the machine for control, our low tanks and the 405 square feet of wing threatening to upend us before we touched down. When he did tap the wheels to the ground-gently, cautiously-the wind perversely refused to let us go, lifting and playing us on the razor's edge of flipping over all the way down the field.
We came to a halt, wings still quivering, ten feet from the hedgerow at the field's end.
Javitz peeled one hand off the control stick and cut the fuel.
Silence pounded at our eardrums. In a calm voice that sounded very far away, Javitz said, “I'm going to go get drunk now, if you don't mind. I'll meet you back here at dawn.”
“What-” I strangled on the word, cleared my throat and tried again. “What about the machine?”
“I'll make arrangements.”
The arrangements came from the nearby house to meet us, in the form of a grizzled farmer and his strapping young son, the latter of whom was clearly the enthusiast. The lad stared from the aeroplane to the pilot in open admiration, while his disapproving father moved to tie our eager machine down to earth. I half-fell down the ladder, accepted the valise that Javitz thrust into my arms, and watched him march away down the field with the young man trailing behind, pelting him with unanswered questions.
After a minute, I realized an older man was standing at my side, and had asked me something. “Terribly sorry,” I said. “I could rather use a Ladies', if you might direct me?”
I felt his hand on my elbow, propelling me in the direction of the building he'd come out of. He led me through a kitchen, showed me a door, and went away. I put down the valise, closed the door, and knelt to vomit into the tidy enamel lavatory.
When the spasm had passed, I stayed where I was for a time, shuddering with a combination of cold and reaction, emitting a noise that was part groan and part cry. Not unlike the noise the wind had made all afternoon around my head.
All right, I said after a minute. Enough. I got to my feet, washed my hands, splashed water on my face, and even went into my valise for a comb to restore my hair to order. When I came out, I felt approximately halfway to human.
Which was just as welclass="underline" The man standing in the farmer's kitchen was so out of place, he could only be Mycroft's Inverness contact, colleague to Mr MacDougall.
“Mungo Clarty, at your service,” he declared. His name and speech patterns were Scots, although the accent originated two hundred miles to the south. He marched across the room with his hand extended, pumping my arm as if trying to draw water. “I've been instructed to make you welcome and get whatever you might want. And if you're fretting over your pilot, I've sent a friend to look after him, in case he decides to get a bit the worse for wear. I've telephoned to a dear friend of mine, runs a lovely boarding-house in the town with more hot water than you could ask for, beds fit for a queen and a cellar second to none. Does that sound like what you'll be needing?”
Had he remained where he was, I might have draped myself around him in gratitude and wept on his shoulder, but he had let go of my hand and picked up my valise, and was already taking our leave from the farmer, leading me from the warm kitchen to his waiting motor, talking over his shoulder all the time.
“You haven't had any information from MacDougall?” I asked when he paused for breath. His motorcar was not as warm as the farmer's kitchen, but it was blessedly out of the wind, and the travelling rug he tucked over my knees was thick.
“He said to tell you the waiter had gone to see his mother, whatever that means, but that he's going after him.”
I took a breath, and pushed away temptation. “Good man. I need to visit all the hotels and restaurants in town.”
“All the-that'll take most of the night!”
“What, in a town this size?”
“ Inverness is the door to the north,” he said, sounding reproachful. “Anyone going to northern Scotland passes through here.”
“Superb,” I muttered. “Perhaps we should begin with any ticket agencies that may be open.”
It was, as Clarty had warned me, many hours before I took to that bed fit for a queen. Even when I did, so cold through that I gasped with relief at the hot-water bottle against my feet, the physical warmth had no chance against the turmoil of my thoughts.
We had found no trace of them. I had looked at my last pair of the photographs Holmes had left me, loath to let go of them, but in the end decided that, from here on, the places I would be asking were so remote, any three strangers would attract notice: descriptions would suffice. I left the photographs with Clarty, so he could repeat the circuit of ticket agents and hotels during the daylight hours.
Friday morning, at dawn, I returned to the air field to do it all again.
If Inverness was a tenth the size of Edinburgh, Thurso would have a tenth the population of Inverness, too small a setting for Mycroft to have any sort of an agent: From here on, I was on my own. I had asked for a car to pick me up well before dawn, not wanting to rob Clarty of his already short sleep, and I could hear its engine chuckling on the street outside when I walked down the stairs of the boarding-house, so ill-slept I felt hung over.
The owner was there, looking fresh as a terrier, and greeted me a good morning.
“I don't suppose you had any messages during the night, for me?” I asked her.
But she had not had a message to assure me that Holmes had resolved the issue on his own. Nothing to transform my Valkyrie ride through hell into a placid, unadventurous, puffing, ground-based train-ride back to the warm, dry, August-kissed South Downs. I would even process the honey from the other hives, I pledged, were it to absolve me from climbing back into that aeroplane.
But, no message, telegraphic, telephonic, or even telepathic.
I followed the obscenely cheerful driver out onto the rain-shined street, and he drove me to the hay-field.
Javitz was there before me, his young admirer lingering at a distance. My pilot looked no better than I felt. Still, his hands were steady as he poured me a cup from a thermal flask filled with scalding coffee.
He walked away and finished his check of our various levels by torch-light. I cradled the coffee to its dregs, and dropped the cup back onto the flask. When he came back, I handed it to him, and glanced up at the glass-wrapped passenger chamber with loathing.