Tony Richards - The Astonishing Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the Twenty-First Century

He was already quite uncomfortably aware that the slang term for the mode of travel that he was about to undertake was ‘cattle class’. Several hundred human bodies, packed together so tightly they might as well be cutlery inside a pantry drawer. He would describe himself as many things, but never ‘cattle’, and it pained him slightly.

Except that Lizzie Bradman noticed his unease immediately. With an amazingly light, deft touch, she took hold of one of his elbows with her fingertips, squeezing it in such a fashion as to simultaneously comfort him and draw him slightly nearer.

“Don’t you worry on it, not an instant, Sherlock … may I call you that?” Her tastefully red-painted lips edged up a little closer to his ear. “As soon as they allow us to get up and move around, why, I’ll come heading back to see you, and I’ll bring some champagne with me.”

“That would be quite excellent,” was the detective’s immediate response.

He really did enjoy Lizzie’s company a remarkable amount. They had never met before, and only known each other for the briefest while, and yet it felt as if they knew each other well. Such were the vagaries of human nature, Holmes decided. Likings and dislikes had no genuine logic to them, but were based upon subconscious instincts. And Mr Sigmund Freud and his ilk had tried to make a science out of analysing those, but had not really succeeded much to Holmes’ way of thinking.

All he really knew was that he felt a strong pang of regret when Lizzie walked away from him, retreating down the corridor. It was rare for him to feel such a powerful affinity with someone he had only very recently encountered. But maybe this was what a term like ‘friendship’ really meant. You decided that you liked each other in the moment that you met.

He only had to wait a bare couple of minutes before his seat number was called out with the rest. And then he found himself shuffling along the walkway to the plane with all the other cheaper passengers.

There were small, square Perspex windows ranged to either side of them as they approached the airplane’s door. Through them, he could make out that the sky had grown a great deal darker, phasing through to almost black. And lightning bolts were surging down as though some ancient deity were digging at the planet with bright silver dinner forks. The walkway was shuddering to repeated bursts of thunder. And his fellow passengers around him were wide-eyed, their movements unsteady and their faces taut.

It was like being on the treadmill to an abattoir, in other words. Yes, ‘cattle class’ indeed.

The liner started being buffeted as soon as it was off the ground. Its port wing tilted over sharply upon take-off, and for one horrid moment Holmes was certain it would strike against the tarmac of the runway and so send them plunging to their doom. Such accidents were rare, but they had happened in the past. But then the pilot pulled the aircraft’s nose up hard, and the soil of Japan was lost beneath them in another second.

Several of the passengers around him were emitting high-pitched shrieks, regardless. But Holmes simply tightened his seatbelt another notch, then settled back.

He had flown for most of his extensive life. He had been across the world and back on more occasions than he could recount. He had not only been numerous times in planes like these, but in far smaller ones, in helicopters, and even in hot air balloons. During the course of World War II, he had flown several times in military aircraft and then parachuted from them into Occupied Europe, on some or other mission. And so flying held no terrors for him in the least.

On the headrest of the seat in front of him was the usual electronic screen. He switched it on, and it described the movies and the TV shows it had to play, the games that were available, but he ignored all that. He selected, instead, a crude animation of this airplane with a row of figures by its side that told you what the craft was doing. In the next few minutes, it had climbed to some thirty-five thousand feet, which was the usual altitude for journeys of this kind. But then it kept on going.

It became immediately obvious what the pilot was doing. He was trying to climb above the storm and find some calmer air to sail through. Holmes watched as their height went up through thirty-eight to forty thousand feet, and then reached forty-two.

Still, the darkened clouds around them refused to subside. Still, the lightning flashed. Apart from that, it was as black as a coalmine round the plane, and the whole fuselage continued to shudder like the neck of a rat in the grip of some deranged terrier.

Holmes was at the window, and found himself staring down. Occasionally, a gap would appear in the mass of cloud below, and he would catch a glimpse of land. They were over mountain peaks by this time, and so, travelling westwards, they had reached the centre of Japan.

Their altitude reached almost fifty thousand feet, which was quite near to the limit at which these planes flew. And still the great storm had them in its grip. The darkness and the lightning showed no signs of abating. Great, blinding flashes of the latter would erupt almost directly outside Holmes’ window. They dazzled him and made him squint. And the plane was being shaken around harder and more savagely with every passing minute.

“This is your captain,” came a voice over the PA system, the first thing he or any of the rest had heard from the individual in charge. “As you can tell, we’re still encountering severe weather conditions. I would ask you to remain seated, since the seatbelt lights are still switched on.”

Holmes was already aware of that. They had been airborne for a whole half hour by this time, and not a single member of the cabin staff had got up to their feet and walked around. So much for the glass of champagne he’d been promised. He’d be lucky if he managed to get himself a paper cup of water.

He tried to close his eyes. He tried to doze, which is the wisest thing that you can do when you are trapped on board a plane. But the bursts of lightning were so intense, the turbulence so vicious, he could manage neither. It was as though the liner were an ocean one, and being hammered at by massive waves.

Many of the children on this flight were crying by this juncture, wailing piteously or letting out profound and solemn moans. And some of the adults round him looked on the verge of descending to the self-same febrile state. The elderly man next to him had his eyelids squeezed tightly shut, and every time that the plane jolted then his head, loose on his neck, would do the same. He kept emitting startled grunting sounds. The woman next to him looked close to fainting.

Which was absurd. What would that achieve? There were simply some aspects of life that had to be endured. Victorian travellers had always known that, and Holmes knew it too. He toyed idly with the buttons that controlled the screen in front of him, running at last through the movie and the TV channels. Almost all of it was comedy and fluff, and held out no attraction to him. And so he summoned up a computerised game of backgammon, beat the computer in three minutes flat, sighed boredly and switched the machine off and let his head drop back.

Holmes hadn’t eaten a bite at Narita and was now regretting it. As soon as he started thinking about food, his gut vibrated with a gentle growl. The air inside this cabin was becoming stale extremely quickly. And so he was finally forced to admit the truth of this whole matter: this was, without the faintest shadow of a doubt, the most unpleasant journey he had ever been on. How much more would he and the rest be forced to take before they put this storm behind them?

It really was a remarkably large one, even by the standards of the turbulent Far East. When he got another glance down through a small break in the clouds, he could make out a grey patch of ocean. Which had to mean that they were now crossing the Sea of Japan, on their way to the far eastern tip of Russia and then mainland China. Was the storm actually following them? And if not, how far did it go?