He didn’t finish. But judging by his blood-streaked face, it would involve punching something until it turned to jelly.
“What’s going on?”
And here was the officer, in an officer’s uniform, a detail he seemed to think outweighed his being on civilian turf.
River said to Yates, “You tell him,” and headed for the side door.
“You! Stop right there!”
But River was already outside, on the east wall of the hangar, with a view of the mesh fence bordering the MoD range; of the range itself, which was a bland expanse of overlapping greens; of a brim-full wheelie-bin chained to one of the fenceposts; and of a stack of bags of fertiliser, the topmost of which was split down one side. A gentle trickle had spilled onto the ground. River kicked the stack, but it remained solid and real.
And then he had company.
“You attacked my men,” he was told. “And they say you claim you’re with the secret service. Exactly what’s going on?”
“I need a phone,” River said.
Up in the skies and miles to the east, over London’s outer settlements—massed clusters of red and grey rooftops, connected by winding stripes of tree-bordered tarmac and interspersed with golf courses—Kelly Tropper could feel excitement building. This was no ordinary flight. It would have a different ending.
As if to underline this, the radio was babbling. They should identify themselves immediately. If they were experiencing difficulties, they should state them now; failing which they should return to their filed route now, or face severe consequences.
“What do you think that means? Severe consequences?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Damien Butterfield said, “I thought we’d be closer before they noticed us.”
“It’s okay. Tommy said this would happen.”
“But he’s not here, is he?”
This wasn’t worth replying to.
Like the other flying club members, she and Damien had grown up together; the children of incomers, whose parents had moved from bigger, brasher places to pretty, vacant Upshott. An unfathomable decision, the children had agreed, and yet they too had all remained rooted there. For Kelly, it was the only way she could have access to the aeroplane, owned by Ray Hadley, but for which she and the others paid maintenance and rental fees. Sometimes she had wondered if there weren’t more to it than that; if it weren’t cowardice that had anchored her in her childhood village; a fear of failing in the big world. Though Tommy had told her—
It was funny about Tommy; everyone thought he just sold apples from his bike, but he knew everyone in Upshott, and everything that happened there, as if he received reports from everyone—as if he were the centre of a web. You could always talk to Tommy, and he always knew what was going on in your life. This was true for her; true for her friends; true for her parents too. Her father never failed to chat with Tommy on the mornings he was outside the shop, or doing his rounds of the village, picking up the odd jobs that sustained him, though he disappeared mid-week, and nobody had ever found out where. Perhaps he had another village somewhere, where he lived a similar existence with a different cast, but Kelly had never discussed the idea with anyone, because you never did discuss Tommy Moult—he was everybody’s secret. So yes, it was funny about Tommy, but a kind of funny she’d long ceased to question; he was simply part of life in Upshott, and that was that.
What Tommy had told her was, there were ways of proving your bravery to yourself, and making your mark on the big world. Many ways.
It was hard, now, to remember whose idea this had been; her own, or Tommy Moult’s.
Beside her, Damien Butterfield said, “Are we nearly there yet?” and laughed at his own joke.
The radio squawked again, and Kelly Tropper laughed too, and turned it off.
Somewhere to the north west two more planes took to the air: sleek, dark, dangerous and on the hunt.
The taxi driver had kept up a relentless stream of invective about bloody marchers, who were achieving nothing except mucking hard-working cabbies about, and if anyone
He threw a note at the driver, and jumped out into the path of Shirley Dander.
“Sh-sh-i-i-i-it,” she managed, in a kind of elongated hiccup. Ho was pleased to observe she looked like crap.
They were right by the forecourt of the Needle, through whose huge glass walls Ho could see a living breathing forest—but before he could comment on this, a barrage of sirens erupted, as if every car alarm in the City had been triggered at once.
“What?”
