Flyaway. Desmond Bagley
had his hands on the table and seemed intent on studying the liver spots. He said, ‘There is one cloud in the sky for you gentlemen. I’m having trouble with Andrew McGovern.’
Charlie raised his eyebrows. ‘The Whensley Group?’
‘That’s it,’ said Brinton. ‘Sir Andrew McGovern—Chairman of the Whensley Group.’
The Whensley Group of companies was quite a big chunk of Brinton’s holdings. At that moment I couldn’t remember off-hand whether he held a controlling interest or not. I said, ‘What’s the trouble?’
‘Andrew McGovern reckons his security system is costing too much. He says he can do it cheaper himself.’
I smiled sourly at Charlie. ‘If he does it any cheaper it’ll be no bloody good. You can’t cut corners on that sort of thing, and it’s a job for experts who know what they’re doing. If he tries it himself he’ll fall flat on his face.’
‘I know all that,’ said Brinton, still looking down at his hands. ‘But I’m under some pressure.’
‘It’s five per cent of our business,’ said Charlie. ‘I wouldn’t want to lose it.’
Brinton looked up. ‘I don’t think you will lose it—permanently.’
‘You mean you’re going to let McGovern have his way?’ asked Charlie.
Brinton smiled but there was no humour in his face. ‘I’m going to let him have the rope he wants—but sooner than he expects it. He can have the responsibility for his own security from the end of the month.’
‘Hey!’ I said. ‘That’s only ten days’ time.’
‘Precisely.’ Brinton tapped his finger on the table. ‘We’ll see how good a job he does at short notice. And then, in a little while, I’ll jerk in the rope and see if he’s got his neck in the noose.’
I said, ‘If his security is to remain as good as it is now he’ll have to pay more. It’s a specialized field and good men are thin on the ground. If he can find them he’ll have to pay well. But he won’t find them—I’m running into that kind of trouble already in the expansion programme, and I know what I’m looking for and he doesn’t. So his security is going to suffer; there’ll be holes in it big enough to march a battalion of industrial spies through.’
‘Just so,’ said Brinton. ‘I know you test your security from time to time.’
‘It’s essential,’ I said. ‘We’re always doing dry runs to test the defences.’
‘I know.’ Brinton grinned maliciously. ‘In three months I’m going to have a security firm—not yours—run an operation against McGovern’s defences and we’ll see if his neck is stuck out far enough to be chopped at.’
Charlie said, ‘You mean you’re going to behead him as well as hanging him?’ He wasn’t smiling.
‘We might throw in the drawing and quartering bit, too. I’m getting a mite tired of Andrew McGovern. You’ll get your business back, and maybe a bit more.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Charlie. ‘The Whensley Group account is only five per cent of our gross but it’s a damned sight more than that of our profits. Our overheads won’t go down all that much, you know. It might put a crimp in our expansion plans.’
‘You’ll be all right,’ said Brinton. ‘I promise.’ And with that we had to be satisfied. If a client doesn’t want your business you can’t ram it down his throat.
Charlie made his excuses and left, but Brinton detained me for a moment. He took me by the arm and led me to the fireplace where he stood warming his hands. ‘How is Gloria?’
‘Fine,’ I said.
Maybe I had not bothered to put enough conviction into that because he snorted and gave me a sharp look. ‘I’m a successful man,’ he said. ‘And the reason is that when a deal goes sour I pull out and take any losses. You don’t mind that bit of advice from an old man?’
I smiled. ‘The best thing about advice is that you don’t have to follow it.’
So I left him and went down to the thronged street in his private lift and joined the hurrying crowds eager to get home after the day’s work. I wasn’t particularly eager because I didn’t have a home; just a few walls and a roof. So I went to my club instead.
I felt a shade better when I arrived at the office next morning. I had visited my fencing club after a long absence and two hours of heavy sabre work had relieved my frustrations and had also done something for the incipient thickening of the waist which comes from too much sitting behind a desk.
But the desk was still there so I sat behind it and looked for the information on Billson I had asked Joyce to look up. When I didn’t find it I called her in. ‘Didn’t you find anything on Billson?’
She blinked at me defensively. ‘It’s in your in-tray.’
I found it buried at the bottom—an envelope marked ‘Billson’—and grinned at her. ‘Nice try, Joyce; but I’ll work out my own priorities.’
When Brinton had injected funds into the firm it had grown with an almost explosive force and I had resolved to handle at least one case in the field every six months so as not to lose touch with the boys on the ground. Under the pressure of work that went the way of all good resolutions and I hadn’t been in the field for fifteen months. Maybe the Billson case was an opportunity to see if my cutting edge was still sharp.
I said abruptly, ‘I’ll be handing some of my work load to Mr Ellis.’
‘He’ll not like that,’ said Joyce.
‘He’d have to take the lot if I was knocked down by a car and broke a leg,’ I said. ‘It’ll do him good. Remind me to speak to him when he gets back from Manchester.’
Joyce went away and I opened the envelope and took out a four-page article, a potted history of the life and times of Peter Billson, Aviation Pioneer—Sunday Supplement instant knowledge without pain. It was headed: The Strange Case of Flyaway Peter, and was illustrated with what were originally black-and-white photographs which had been tinted curious shades of blue and yellow to enliven the pages of what, after all, was supposed to be a colour magazine.
It boiled down to this. Billson, a Canadian, was born appropriately in 1903, the year the first aeroplane took to the sky. Too young to see service in the First World War, he was nourished on tales of the air fighting on the Western Front which excited his imagination and he became air mad. He was an engineering apprentice and, by the time he was 21, he had actually built his own plane. It wasn’t a good one—it crashed.
He was unlucky. The Golden Age of Aviation was under way and he was missing out on all the plums. Pioneer flying took money or a sponsor with money and he had neither. In the late 1920s Alan Cobham was flying to the Far East, Australia and South Africa; in 1927 Lindbergh flew the Atlantic solo, and then Byrd brought off the North and South Pole double. Came the early’ thirties and Amy Johnson, Jim Mollison, Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post were breaking records wholesale and Billson hadn’t had a look-in.
But he made it in the next phase. Breaking records was all very well, but now the route-proving stage had arrived which had to precede phase three—the regular commercial flight. Newspapers were cashing in on the public interest and organizing long-distance races such as the England-Australia Air Race of 1934, won by Scott and Campbell-Black. Billson came second in a race from Vancouver to Hawaii, and first in a mail-carrying test—Vancouver to Montreal. He was in there at last—a real heroic and intrepid birdman. It is hard to believe the adulation awarded those early fliers. Not even our modern astronauts are accorded the same attention.
It