Flyaway / Windfall. Desmond Bagley
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Group and knighted for his services to industry. Sir Andrew McGovern, who ran like a thread through Billson’s life and who wanted to run his own security operation as soon as Billson disappeared.
I said, ‘What was in the letter?’
‘McGovern offered me a post at £2000 a year.’ Billson looked up. ‘I grabbed it.’
He would! £2000 wasn’t a bad salary back in 1963 when the average pay was considerably less than £1000. ‘Didn’t you wonder why McGovern was offering that?’
‘Of course I did.’ Billson stared at me. ‘But what did you expect me to say? I wasn’t going to turn it down because it was too much.’
I had to smile at that. Billson might be stupid, but not stupid enough to say, ‘But, Mr McGovern; I’m not worth half that.’ I said, ‘So you just took the money and kept your mouth shut.’
‘That’s right. I thought it was all right at first – that I’d have to earn it. It worried me because I didn’t know if I could hold down that sort of job. But then I found the job was simple.’
‘And not worth £2000 then or £8000 now,’ I commented. ‘Now tell me; why was McGovern grossly overpaying you?’
‘I don’t know.’ Billson shrugged and said again, almost angrily, ‘I tell you – I don’t know. I’ve thought about it for years and come to no answer.’ He glowered at me. ‘But I wasn’t going to ask McGovern.’
No, he wouldn’t; he’d be frightened of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. I laid that aspect aside and turned to something else. ‘How did Alix come to work for Franklin Engineering?’
‘There was a vacancy in the typing pool,’ said Billson. ‘I told her about it and she applied. She got the job but she wasn’t in the typing pool long. She became McGovern’s secretary and he took her with him when he moved to London. Alix is a clever girl – she has brains.’
‘Did McGovern know she’s your half-sister?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t tell him.’ He gave a deep sigh. ‘Look, it was like this. I hardly saw McGovern. I wasn’t in the kind of job where you hob-nob with the managing director. During the first six years I don’t think I saw McGovern as many times, and I haven’t seen him at all since. That’s when he moved to London.’
Very curious indeed! I said, ‘Now, it’s a fact that you kept your enhanced pay a secret from your sister. Why did you do that?’
‘Oh, hell!’ Billson suddenly grabbed a handful of sand. ‘I’ve just told you – Alix is smart. If she knew she’d ask me why – and I couldn’t tell her. Then she’d dig into it and perhaps find out.’ He wagged his head. ‘I didn’t want to know.’
He was afraid that Alix would shake all the leaves off the money tree. Billson might be a stupid man in many ways but he had cunning. Before he started work for Franklin Engineering he had already lived for many years at low pay and was quite content to continue to do while he amassed a small fortune. But to what end?
‘You’ve acted the bastard towards Alix, haven’t you, Paul?’ I said. ‘You must have known she was in financial difficulties and had to borrow money from the bank. And it was to help you, damn it!’
He said nothing. All he did was to pour fine sand from one hand to the other. I suppose a psychologist would call that a displacement activity.
‘But the psychiatrist didn’t help much, did he? You had a sudden brainstorm.’
‘What the hell do you know about it?’ he said petulantly. ‘You don’t know why I’m here. No one does.’
‘Do you think I’m a damned fool?’ I demanded. ‘You’ve come out here to find your father’s aeroplane.’
His jaw dropped. ‘How do you know that? You couldn’t … no one could.’
‘Jesus, Paul; you’re as transparent as a window-pane. You read that article by Michael English in the Sunday supplement and it sent you off your rocker. I talked to English and he told me what happened in the editor’s office.’
‘You’ve seen English?’ He dropped the sand and dusted off his hands. ‘Why have you been following me? Why come out here?’
It was a good question. My original idea had just been to ask a few questions in Algiers and let it go at that. I certainly hadn’t expected to be on my way to Niger in the company of one Targui, one pseudo-Targui and one man who was half way round the bend. It had been a chain of circumstances, each link not very important in itself, excepting perhaps when we found Billson half dead.
I said wearily, ‘Let’s say it’s for Alix and leave it at that, shall we?’ It was the truth, perhaps, but only a fraction of it. ‘She worries about you, and I’m damned if you deserve it.’
‘If I hadn’t been shot I’d have found it,’ he said. ‘The plane, I mean. I was within a few miles of it.’ He drove his fist into the sand. ‘And now I’m going in the opposite direction,’ he said exasperatedly.
‘You’re wrong,’ I said flatly. ‘That crashed aircraft in Koudia is French. Byrne knows all about it. Ask him. You went at that in the way you go about everything – at half-cock. Will you, for once in your life, for God’s sake, stop and think before you take action? You’ve been nothing but a packet of trouble ever since you left Franklin.’
I didn’t wait for an answer but got up and left him and, for once, I didn’t confide my findings to Byrne. This bit really had nothing to do with him; he knew nothing of England or of London and could contribute nothing.
I walked out of camp a couple of hundred yards and sat down to think about it. I believed Billson – that was the devil of it. I had told him that he was as transparent as glass, and it was true. Which brought me to McGovern.
I thought about that pillar of British industry for a long time and got precisely nowhere.
And so we travelled south.
At the Algerian border post Mokhtar guided Billson on foot around it while Byrne and I went through. There were more fiches to fill in – in triplicate, but we didn’t get the full treatment we had had at the police post outside Tammanrasset. We went on and waited for Billson in the no-man’s-land between the Algerian post and Fort Flatters in Niger, then it was my turn to walk, and Mokhtar took me on a long and circuitous route around the fort. If the two border posts compared notes, which Byrne doubted they would, then two men would have gone through both.
When Mokhtar and I rejoined the truck beyond Fort Flatters Byrne seemed considerably more cheerful. I was footsore and leg-stretched and was glad to ease myself down creakily into the seat next to him. As he let out the clutch he said gaily, ‘Nice to be home.’
We were eighty miles into Niger when we camped that night and the country hadn’t changed enough to justify Byrne’s cheeriness, but thereafter it became better. There was more vegetation – thorn trees, it’s true – but there was also more grass as we penetrated the mountains, and I saw my first running water, a brook about a foot across. According to Byrne, we had left the desert but, as I have said, these things are relative and this was still a wilderness to the untutored eye.
‘The Aïr is an intrusion of the Sahel into the desert,’ said Byrne.
‘You’ve lost me,’ I said. ‘What’s the Sahel?’
‘The savannah land between the desert and the forest in the south. It’s a geographer’s word. Once they called it the Sudan but when the British pulled out they left a state called the Sudan so the geographers had to find another word because they didn’t want to mix geography and politics. They came up with Sahel.’
‘Doesn’t