Night Over Water

all he had.

She said: “What’ll you do there, anyway?”

“Are you worried about me thieving?”

“It always ends up the same way, thieving. I never heard of a tea leaf that wasn’t collared sooner or later.”

A tea leaf was a thief, in rhyming slang. Harry said: “I’d like to join the air force and learn to fly.”

“Would you be allowed?”

“Over there, they don’t care if you’re working class, so long as you’ve got the brains.”

She looked more cheerful then. She sat down and sipped her tea while Harry ate his bacon sandwich. When he had finished he took out his money and counted out fifty pounds.

“What’s that for?” she said. It was as much money as she earned in two years of cleaning offices.

“It’ll come in handy,” he said. “Take it, Ma. I want you to have it.”

She took the money. “You’re really going, then.”

“I’m going to borrow Sid Brennan’s motorbike and drive to Southampton today and get a ship.”

She reached across the little table and took his hand. “Good luck to you, son.”

He squeezed her hand gently. “I’ll send you more money, from America.”

“No need, unless you’ve got it to spare. I’d rather you send me a letter now and again, so I know how you’re going on.”

“Yeah. I’ll write.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Come back and see your old ma one day, won’t you?”

He squeezed her hand. “’Course. I will, Ma. I’ll be back.”

Harry looked at himself in the barber’s mirror. The blue suit, which had cost him thirteen pounds in Savile Row, fitted beautifully and went well with his blue eyes. The soft collar of his new shirt looked American. The barber brushed the padded shoulders of the double-breasted jacket, and Harry tipped him and left.

He went up the marble staircase from the basement and emerged in the ornate lobby of the South-Western Hotel. It was thronged with people. This was the departure point for most transatlantic crossings, and thousands of people were trying to leave England.

Harry had discovered how many when he tried to get a berth on a liner. All the ships were booked up for weeks ahead. Some of the shipping lines had closed their offices rather than waste staff time turning people away. For a while it had looked impossible. He had been ready to give up, and start thinking of another plan, when a travel agent had mentioned the Pan American Clipper.

He had read about the Clipper in the newspapers. The service had started in the summer. You could fly to New York in less than thirty hours, instead of four or five days on a ship. But a one-way ticket cost ninety pounds. Ninety pounds! You could almost buy a new car for that.

Harry had spent the money. It was mad, but now that he had made up his mind to go, he would pay any price to get out of the country. And the plane was seductively luxurious: it would be champagne all the way to New York. This was the kind of insane extravagance that Harry loved.

He was no longer jumping every time he saw a copper: there was no way the Southampton police could know about him. However, he had never flown before, and now he was feeling nervous about that.

He checked his wristwatch, a Patek Philippe stolen from a Royal Equerry. He had time for a quick cup of coffee to settle his stomach. He went into the lounge.

While he was sipping his coffee, a stunningly beautiful woman walked in. She was a perfect blonde, and she wore a wasp-waisted dress of cream silk with orange-red polka dots. She was in her early thirties, about ten years older than Harry, but that did not stop him smiling when he caught her eye.

She sat at the next table, sideways to Harry, and he studied the way the dotted silk clung to her bosom and draped her knees. She had on cream shoes and a straw hat, and she put a small handbag on the table.

After a moment she was joined by a man in a blazer. Hearing them speak, Harry discovered that she was English but he was American. Harry listened carefully, brushing up on his accent. Her name was Diana; the man was Mark. He saw the man touch her arm. She leaned closer. They were in love, and saw no one but each other: the room might have been empty.

Harry felt a pang of envy.

He looked away. He still felt queasy. He was about to fly all the way across the Atlantic. It seemed an awfully long way to go with no land beneath. He had never understood the principle of air travel, anyway: the propellers went round and round, so how come the plane went up?

While he listened to Mark and Diana, he practiced looking nonchalant. He did not want the other passengers on the Clipper to know he was nervous. I’m Harry Vandenpost, he thought, a well-off young American returning home because of the war in Europe. Pronounced Yurrup. I don’t have a job just now, but I suppose I’ll have to settle down to something soon. My father has investments. My mother, God rest her soul, was English, and I went to school over there. I didn’t go to university—never did like swotting. (Did Americans say swotting? He was not sure.) I’ve spent so much time in England that I’ve picked up some of the local lingo. I’ve flown a few times, sure, but this is my first flight across the Atlantic Ocean, you bet. I’m really looking forward to it!

By the time he finished his coffee, he was hardly scared at all.

Eddie Deakin hung up. He looked around the hall: it was empty. No one had overheard. He stared at the phone, which had plunged him into horror, hating it, as if he might end the nightmare by smashing the instrument. Then he slowly turned away.

Who were they? Where had they taken Carol-Ann? Why had they kidnapped her? What could they possibly want from him? The questions buzzed in his head like flies in a jar. He tried to think. He forced himself to concentrate on one question at a time.

Who were they? Could they be simple lunatics? No. They were too well organized: crazy people might manage a kidnapping, but it had taken careful planning to find out where Eddie would be immediately after the snatch and get him on the phone with Carol-Ann at the right moment. They were rational people, then, but they were prepared to break the law. They might be anarchists of some kind, but most likely he was dealing with gangsters.

Where had they taken Carol-Ann? She had said she was in a house. It might belong to one of the kidnappers, but more likely they had taken over or rented an empty house in a lonely spot. Carol had said it had happened a couple of hours ago, so the house could not be more than sixty or seventy miles from Bangor.

Why had they kidnapped her? They wanted something from him, something he would not give voluntarily, something he would not do for money—something, he guessed, that he would want to refuse them. But what? He had no money, he knew no secrets and no one was in his power.

It had to be something to do with the Clipper.

He would get his instructions on the plane, they had said, from a man called Tom Luther. Might Luther be working for someone who wanted details of the construction and operation of the plane? Another airline, perhaps, or a foreign country? It was possible. The Germans or the Japanese might be hoping to build a copy to use as a bomber. But there had to be easier ways for them to get blueprints. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, could supply such information: Pan American employees, Boeing employees, even the Imperial Airways mechanics who serviced the engines here at Hythe. Kidnapping was not necessary. Hell, enough technical details had been published in the magazines.

Might someone want to steal the plane? It was hard to imagine.

The likeliest explanation was that they wanted Eddie to cooperate in smuggling something, or somebody, into the United States.

Well, that was as much as he knew or could guess. What was he going to do?

He was a law-abiding citizen and the victim of a crime, and he wanted with all his heart to call the police.