Gavin Lyall - Flight From Honour

“Pretty well, I’d say. He doesn’t take chances . . . or rather, he does, but he knows what the chances are. I’d back him against the steeple-chasing young sprigs of nobility you seem to get in that world.”

“Yes. Andrew’s pretty sharp about those guys. He thinks the way they break their airplanes – and necks – gives aviation a bad name.” She smiled thoughtfully around a mouthful of prawn. “I bet you never thought he’d wind up learning to fly when you rescued him from a life of crime in Irish back alleys.”

“He didn’t tell you that.”

“He’s kind of hinted at it.”

“Well, he’ll tell you the full story if he feels like it. But he wasn’t any run-of-the-mill criminal. He might have deserved being in cells, but managing to dodge it, from our . . . from one point of view, that’s a recommendation. And I don’t think he was from any back alleys, either: he can read and write, for one thing, and knows how an Irish gentleman behaves. Anyway, the Army doesn’t recruit from the slums, too many of them are wrecked before they’re twenty by rickets and tuberculosis and God knows what – that’s what those slums do for you. London’s, too. We prefer country boys who don’t panic at the smell of fresh air.”

He refilled their glasses. “My guess is that he was born in the country – he can ride and he’s been a servant in one of the Big Houses – and then his family moved to a town. Maybe his father took a job in one of the shipyards. I think O’Gilroy did, after the Army. Certainly some work with machines and metal.”

“You say you’re guessing: he doesn’t confide in even you?”

“Why should he?”

She smiled and shook her head at the same time. Men. “But that doesn’t explain how he got to . . . here.”

Ranklin looked serious. “Perhaps we’re starting at the wrong end. If you take an Irish country boy and reckon his chances at ending up as . . . in a job like this, of course it’s a million to one against. But start with one in this job and look back, and all you can say is that he must have been exceptional. And he is. Lucky, if you like, as well. But you must meet exceptional people every day in your world. Perhaps they all had luck, too – at least not to get bogged down in routines of work and family and knowing their place . . . ” He went on reflectively. “That’s really what had happened to me, until a year ago. My life’s been far more conventional, given my family and so on, than O’Gilroy’s ever was.”

She frowned at him. “Oh now . . .”

“No, I mean it. Joining the Army was pure convention for a younger son – I happened to choose the Guns, but I’d never have got into a fashionable regiment anyway, and then I drifted along, vaguely hoping for a war – not a big one – and a chance to make my name, but when I got a war, in South Africa, all I did was get locked up in a siege.”

“Where you met Conall? He’s talked about that, all right, the way you adopted him and taught him about artillery.”

“I needed another gun number, that’s all.”

“Oh come on. I bet you were a better officer than you make out, saying you were only interested in guns and tactics.” It exasperated her the way he dodged compliments. She knew the English well enough to recognise most self-deprecation as inverted boasting. But with Ranklin it seemed genuine. It suited the job, of course; he could hardly go around saying: “Really, I’m only a minor spy, quite unimportant” – but it went deeper than that.

But probably, she reminded herself, when he talks about his past he’s remembering a man he once knew in a bygone world. Not his fault, except for that damned British gallantry which made him acknowledge the signature his elder brother had forged before his financial ruin and suicide. And financial ruin was terrible – but in her world, it was a familiar dragon. You knew you were fooling with it and if it bit you, then maybe, scarred but wiser, you recovered. But it had eaten Ranklin’s world in one gulp. Almost overnight, he had gone from a predictable Army career to a mercenary soldier to a spy. Such things must change a man.

And from her point of view, very much for the better. If she had met that comfortable, doubtless worthy, Gunner officer, she wouldn’t have given him a second glance.

She gazed around the walls, with the lowering wallpaper that pressed in on them like some Edgar Allan Poe story, at the inevitable picture of a dead hare nestling into a bunch of dewy fruit. Not, she thought coolly, very romantic.

“This isn’t the . . . shop itself?”

“No, that’s upstairs.”

“And empty?”

“Yes,” Ranklin said incautiously. “They put telephone calls through to here at night and weekends.”

A slow grin spread across Corinna’s face. “I suppose you wouldn’t let me have a little peek?”

“No.”

“You’d be with me. You could be Very Close to me, to make sure I didn’t do anything I shouldn’t.”

Ranklin suddenly realised what she was proposing. “You are a bad, disgraceful, shocking little girl. Absolutely No.”

“Oh please. Just once. In the headquarters of the British Secret Service . . .!”

“When you first join the . . . the shop, they tell you about shameless wicked women who try to uncover secrets by . . .”

“Tell me what the shameless wicked women do,” she purred, stretching so that her blouse pulled taut over the swell of her breasts.

O’Gilroy flopped into bed alone but feeling as close to Heaven as he was ever likely to get in England, and content that there was no way he could have done or learned more in a single day. The Brooklands aviation village, he had found, had a cosmopolitan population with a class system of its own. If you were rich and well-born the flying schools would take your money as they would anybody’s: in advance rather than argue with the executors of your will. But you were respected only for flying ability and knowledge, and if anybody asked politely about O’Gilroy’s background, they forgot his answers immediately. That was part of Heaven, too.

But one where he was a very minor cherub. At first he had assumed he would have an advantage both because no other student could have studied aeronautical magazines as avidly as he, and because he was young and thus a quick learner. Instead, he had learnt quickly that everybody had read more than he, and that thirty was very old for a cherub. The one advantage his age gave him – if he survived to exploit it – was that he expected things to go wrong. He loved machinery, but knew it was mortal and that he could only prolong that life by gentleness and mistrust. Mid-air was no place for thinking “I can always buy another one”.

And he had two other advantages: that he had nothing else to do – no tailors or girlfriends in London needing his attention – and Andrew Sherring. When nothing was happening at the flying school, O’Gilroy haunted Andrew’s shed or the Blue Bird, asking and listening. He saved his own opinions to impress Ranklin.

On Monday, Ranklin handed Dagner a brief report on Saturday’s events and, ten minutes later, was called in to discuss it. For the first time, Dagner wore plain clothes, a dark grey lounge suit that was brand new. So probably he had worn uniform last week simply because, after years in India, he was waiting for his tailor to run him up some London clothes. Ranklin should have thought of that, and felt ashamed of his glib hints that Dagner abandon uniform.

“D’you think Mr Sherring’s aeroplane fits Senator Falcone’s needs?”

“He appeared to be talking seriously about it.”

“Then let’s hope . . . Now, about the Senator being followed. You obviously did the right thing in moving him to a hotel in the country-”