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  ‘Off.’

  ‘Engine anti-icing?’

  ‘Off.’

  ‘Extinguisher bottle?’

  Griffiths pulled the red tab. ‘Discharged one!’

  The orange glow died down as the cowling was filled with inert gas. Then, just as suddenly, up it flared again.

  ‘Hasn’t made the slightest difference, sir!’

  ‘What the hell’s up with the thing?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with the fire extinguishing system, Captain.’

  ‘Then why is there no effect?’

  ‘Dunno, sir.’

  Harker shouted, ‘Pull the other one!’

  ‘Transfer switch?’ Adams called.

  ‘Transfer.’

  ‘Extinguisher bottle?’

  ‘Discharged two!’ Griffiths pulled the other tab, and peered beyond Adams to look at the starboard wing. ‘That’s our last bottle gone!’

  They watched the fire quiver and momentarily darken.

  ‘Any better yet, Mr Griffiths?’

  The flames gave an eerie orange sunburn to the Engineer

  Officer’s face as he stared out into the night.

  ‘Worse, sir!’ Griffiths shouted back hoarsely. ‘Much worse! And it’s spreading over the wing …’

  PART TWO

  Tuesday, 20th July 1978 –

  Friday, 18th November 1979

  Chapter One

  ‘My wife doesn’t understand me, Belinda. Not these days. Not any more.’

  A wistful smile crinkling up his sunburned face, his grey eyes fixed on the smooth pink back of the girl lying naked on the big white bath towel at his feet, Paul Harker said the words slowly and sadly as husbands have said them for hundreds of years.

  The girl laughed, turning over on her back and throwing the teddy bear he had bought at Saks Fifth Avenue high in the air. ‘ I’ve heard that before.’

  ‘God’s truth.’

  Now that was a funny expression to use in the circumstances, he thought, listening to the hollow tone of his voice echoing round this overheated, fifty-first floor hotel room and dying away into the misty greyness of Central Park far below. That’s not me. That’s not a term I use. That’s more like old Archie Truscott mouthing his actor’s lines. Harriet would have laughed. ‘For a man who doesn’t believe in God …’ He could almost hear her voice as she bent over the Aga in their kitchen, three thousand miles away.

  The girl smiled. ‘ They all say that.’

  ‘All, he thought? Already I am classified with a vast concourse of elderly men who have an appetite for ‘beanshoots’, as Harriet had christened those delicious fresh-faced youngsters, jeans-clad and long-haired, who seemed to flower on the pavements of every big city in the world. An appetite in the same category of disorder as a passion for artichokes in pregnancy.

  ‘I’m not like that,’ he said stiffly, to himself rather than to Belinda.

  ‘I am not as other men,’ Harriet would have mimicked.

  But Belinda did not appear to notice his pomposity. She rolled back onto her stomach, turned her big, slightly protuberant blue eyes away from the teddy bear and began looking him over appraisingly.

  She saw a hefty man in his early fifties, wearing an open-necked white sports shirt and brown linen trousers, sitting straight-backed in his chair, his wistful expression giving way to the one of alert interest that she knew well in other men, as he conducted his own scrutiny of her.

  Her curly blonde hair was cut severely short, emphasising what Harriet would call a dish-shaped face, and a slender neck to which tiny moist tendrils clung in little dark blonde snails. From the neck, his eyes travelled to the narrow, sloping, very feminine shoulders, the thin schoolgirl arms, then a delicious back as gently curved as the support of a suspension bridge, with a runnel down the middle that up-tilted finally into a plump little peach of a bottom.

  ‘No,’ she said finally and solemnly, ‘ I don’t think you are, Captain Harker.’

  ‘What do you think I am then?’

  She drew a deep, sighing breath. ‘May I really tell you, Captain Harker?’

  She’s going to do a Harriet on me, after all, was his first reaction. She’s going to give me the unpalatable truth when I would prefer the palatable lie.

  But no – the eyes were mild and thoughtful, even admiring. She blinked them rapidly, and held her head on one side in an attitude that made him feel ten feet tall. Perhaps the situation was not as ludicrous as Harriet would undoubtedly have found it. Perhaps this young girl really did look up to him. Perhaps she really did feel protected by his skill and his strength. After all, Harriet, a radiographer when he met her, had often commented that nurses and lesser hospital beings looked up to the consultants as though they were little tin gods. And they didn’t depend for their lives, like a stewardess, on the chap up front.

  ‘I’ve told you not to call me that, Belinda.’

  ‘Oh, but I must. After all you are the …’ she dropped her voice almost to a whisper, ‘Captain. And I’m only a stewardess … one of sixteen other stewardesses, Captain Harker, the newest and greenest of them all. Chief Steward Bingley said to me, Miss Chafford, you are flying with the best and most experienced pilot in the company …’

  And the oldest, he thought. Once he had found Bingley going off the aircraft with six bottles of the company’s champagne and had given him a good talking to instead of reporting him. So naturally …

  ‘… but you must always call him Captain Harker. He is not the man to tolerate familiarity. Those were Mr Bingley’s words, Captain Harker.’ She nodded her head and blinked her eyes again but there lurked within their blue innocence, he thought, a gleam of guile.

  All the same, the situation was not unpleasing, with him sitting there like a slavemaster and Belinda now curling up in a tight little pink ball at his feet, all legs and arms and golden curls. He longed to touch her.

  ‘Then I shall call you Miss Chafford.’

  ‘You are entitled to call me what you want, Captain Harker.’

  ‘Belinda is perfectly acceptable. Belinda suits you. Pretty, jaunty, young. Belindas are always young.’

  ‘I shall stay young for ever if you order me to, Captain Harker.’

  ‘I do. Unless you have another name I might like better?’

  ‘Antoinette.’

  ‘Too guillotiney.’ He grimaced. ‘Not your pretty head in a basket. Too sad!’

  ‘I think my mother was too sad when she had me.’ Miss Chafford looked theatrically tearful. ‘She was an actress … well, sort of an actress. She worked the clubs. Having me cramped her style. My father didn’t want me either. He went off soon after I was born.’

  Genuinely moved, he put out his hand and patted the top of her head. The curls were unbelievably soft to the touch. He would have withdrawn his hand immediately, but she caught hold of it and pressed it to her cheek.

  ‘My dear child,’ he said heavily, ‘ that would be nothing whatsoever to do with you.’

  ‘What wouldn’t?’

  ‘Your father going off.’

  ‘You say that because you’re kind.’

  She released his hand, straightened out again and gazed up at him from the floor, chin propped up by her elbows.

  ‘When I first saw you at Heathrow Airport yesterday, coming up the steps, I knew you would be kind. But that wasn’t my first thought. I first thought you looked so … distinguished. And then when I said, ‘‘Good evening, Captain Harker’’, you gave me such a marvellous smile. And I thought … I could never have dreamed up a father like that. For I did used to dream, Captain Harker, of a handsome father, but never anyone as nice as you.’

  ‘How old are you, Belinda?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘And I’m fifty-three.’

  ‘Oh, I know. But you couldn’t tell. That you’re fifty-three, I mean. And when I asked the other girls about you … the girls who’d flown with you … they said you were super. You know that little striped tent we have at the back of the
Astrojet to rest in … we call it the sheik’s harem … well, we were in there gossiping coming over … oh, nothing but nice about you, Captain Harker. They said you were very proper … very married. Children, they thought.’ She stopped. ‘Have you any children?’

  ‘Two,’ he said.

  ‘Still at school?’

  He smiled and shook his head. ‘Colin is in the Navy. Jane—’

  He had no idea where Jane was. This then surely was it, the core of their problem, Harriet’s and his. The worm in the bud of their once happy marriage. Or was Jane’s departure the symptom not the cause? Were there other hidden worms in the marriage?

  Whatever it was, Jane had suddenly walked out of the house six months ago. Harriet had been devastated. Loving, over-protective, her ambitions contained within the twin impossible goals of being perfect mother and perfect wife, she had felt it more than he, who, when he came to think about it, hardly knew Jane at all. He had so often told Harriet she’d have made a better mother if she’d done less for the children and been ambitious for herself. Kept on her radiographer’s job full time instead of five hours a week. ‘But I want to be home when you come back,’ she had said. ‘When the children come home.’

  Trouble was she was home when they left home too. And for Jane to leave like that! Not even a row. Or at least not a proper row. Jane had been unforgivably sullen and rude for weeks before. Yelled at him that he never listened to what she had to say, never took any interest in anything but his bloody flying.

  Harriet had intervened, told her sharply her father’s flying had provided her with fees for her school, for her expensive Cordon Bleu course, her holidays, her horse, and if she couldn’t be polite then she’d better be quiet. And that had seemed the end of that – but it hadn’t been. When Jane had gone, they’d tried the police, of course. But Jane was twenty-one and they weren’t interested. They’d tried the Salvation Army Bureau and they’d advertised in all the national papers. He’d never thought those heartrending appeals in the personal column were for real, till Jane went.

  Eventually, two months ago Jane had had the grace to phone her mother. She was being stifled at home, Jane said. She needed to get away to think. Then she had begun, thank heaven, the habit of phoning her mother every Tuesday about nine. Once when she had phoned early, he had answered the telephone. He had not known what to say to her, nor she to him.

  ‘Jane is doing her own thing,’ he told Belinda to show he was in the swim. ‘You know how kids are these days.’

  ‘Is she good-looking, your daughter?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Like you?’

  ‘No, not at all. Like her mother.’

  ‘Is she sophisticated?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Country-tweedy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Horsey?’

  ‘She rides.’

  ‘Has she got her own horse?’

  ‘Yes. That we have to look after.’

  ‘I always wanted my own horse. It must be lovely to be your daughter, Captain Harker.’

  ‘Jane doesn’t think so.’

  ‘Why? Because you’re away so much?’

  He laughed. ‘No, my dear. Because I’m at home so much.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly. And because I have so many faults.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t believe that!’

  ‘It’s true. You should ask my wife.’

  Belinda opened her eyes wide in amazement. ‘Does she think you have faults?’

  ‘My wife,’ he said wryly, ‘ is unfailingly honest.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she giggled. Then she asked, ‘Does she tell you your faults?’

  ‘She does.’

  ‘Do you have rows?’

  Did they have rows? They used not to have rows. At least, only what he would have called ‘fun rows’. Arguments, postures, discussions, taken up for the fun of it, often ending in one or the other bursting into laughter. Those had been the discovering, growing-together years, the years when Harriet, not a little beanshoot of a stewardess, could make him feel ten feet tall.

  ‘You married me because I made you into a hero.’ Harriet often used to tease him then.

  Like so much Harriet said, it was founded on truth, though God knew what he loved her for was not his own image but her innermost self. Ex-serviceman hero, the local Cambridgeshire paper had called him. Visitor swims out to rescue local doctor’s daughter in capsized craft.

  That was how he had met her.

  Though the local paper in its summer doldrums had blown up the story out of all proportion with a panegyric to his swimming ability, his early career on a Short Service Commission in the RAF just after the war, together with descriptions of the notorious Severn currents, they had been unaware of the real story that until that moment he had been a very indifferent, laboured swimmer.

  It had been his fate and his good fortune to be walking along the river bank when the boat had turned over and he had instantly plunged in. He’d known he had to reach her, and somehow he had found the strength and skill.

  Just as he’d found so much he could do in the early years of their marriage. After the RAF, he had joined Atlanta as a First Officer and stooged in the right-hand seat for years. But Harriet made life fun. Harriet was a home-maker, a garden-maker. She had, he sometimes told her, green fingers for everything in life. She painted, she rode, she loved music. She saw all the small and beautiful minutiae of every day. She took him to concerts, she took him riding and exploring. They built a greenhouse, then a camellia house against the sitting room wall. Brought up as he had been in a narrow, unimaginative household, she opened his eyes and his ears. The children had taken her a little away from him but never enough to doubt that he was first to her in everything. For with the years they had developed a telepathic communication – waves, they called it – of moods, feelings, needs, transmitted without necessity for words.

  Until about a year ago, when for no reason he could think of, transmission ceased. Harriet’s green fingers seemed to wither. Her vitality diminished. She was tired and irritable. He even wondered in his perplexity if she had met some old fool of a doctor at the hospital and fancied she had fallen for him. But no. Harriet was transparently honest and devoted as ever. Was she run-down? Did she need a tonic? No, it was Jane’s departure that had made her so difficult of late, so prone to correct him as if she were noticing new failures and shortcomings in him all the time.

  Yesterday, for instance, driving the thirty miles for him to go on Service had been an example.

  Paul was, according to Harriet, ‘a typical Aries’ – head down into the thicket, there to get his horns enmeshed in brambles.

  Ten miles away from Heathrow Airport, a thunderstorm had burst over them. Rain sheeted down. Dipping down into Egham, the road ahead was inches deep in water.

  ‘Go up higher, love,’ she said in the quiet, rather flat tone she used these days.

  His car was a Citroën GS with hydraulic suspension and the whole body could be raised by the handle. Whether she should have spoken louder or expressed herself more clearly was a subject of argument afterwards. Full of the imperative necessity to get to the airport on time, he simply drove at full speed into the water.

  The car gurgled, hissed, steamed, slowed, then came to a full stop in the middle of the waterlogged stretch.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done!’ she had said. ‘Why didn’t you go up higher?’

  Years ago she would have made light of it, even thrown her arms round him and said hopefully, ‘ Now you can’t go.’ In surprise, he had turned all his fury on her, so frustrated he could have hit her.

  ‘A fat lot of good saying that now, damn you!’

  ‘I said it before.’

  ‘You most certainly did not.’

  ‘I did. I know I did.’ A high anxious note which he hated had crept into her voice. ‘Either you didn’t listen or you didn’t hear!’

  Didn’t listen or didn’t hear, her constant co
mplaint these days. Awareness going, or physical hearing, both for an airline Captain almost equally bad. Ageing, which always lurked in a distant dark corner, taking a step forward into the light.

  ‘You must have mumbled it, if you said it at all,’ he replied coldly, staring into her face with eyes that he knew she would recognise as hostile.

  There were lines between her brows that he had never noticed before and a grey pallor to her skin. She who had always looked so much younger than her fifty years, now looked infinitely older. The thought saddened and then unreasonably angered him, as if she had gone over to some mythical other side.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she had asked him, her own expression stiffening under his scrutiny. Her large grey eyes held his, their expression so anxious and disbelieving, that he began to doubt himself, his competence, his hearing, his alertness, everything.

  ‘I shall be late for Service.’ It was all he could think of.

  They sat there arguing miserably as the rain came down and the cars hissed by. Every now and again, he tried to start the engine, failed, swore at the car and told her she should have made herself clearer.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ she had shrieked finally, ‘ I’m not staying here a moment longer. At least try to do something. Find a telephone box. Get help!’

  She had pushed the car door open, preparatory to paddling, when she saw a yellow Land Rover in the distance. She began waving it down frantically. Watching in the driving mirror, he had said, ‘It won’t do anything.’

  ‘Of course it will.’ Her voice was lower, firm and clear again. ‘It’s the new people where I get my eggs.’ She turned back to wave and smile at their rescuers. Just for a fleeting moment, she had looked a pretty girl again.

  ‘Do we have rows, Belinda?’ he said eventually, looking down at

  her. ‘All married couples have them. They’re a safety valve.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For tensions. For frustrations.’

  ‘Do you get frustrated?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Do you get cross with your wife then, Captain Harker? Do you get angry?’

  ‘I get very irritable.’

  ‘Does she get irritable with you?’