Flyaway

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1978

Copyright © Brockhurst Publications 1978

Cover layout design Richard Augustus © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780008211318

Ebook Edition © JULY 2017 ISBN: 9780008211325 Version: 2017-06-22

Title Page

Copyright

Flyaway

Dedication

Map

Epigraph

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

To Lecia and Peter Foston of the Wolery

Two little dicky-birds,

Sitting on a wall;

One named Peter,

The other named Paul.

Fly away, Peter!

Fly away, Paul!

Come back, Peter!

Come back, Paul!

No man can live in the desert and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad.

Wilfred Thesiger

We live in the era of instancy. The clever chemists have invented instant coffee; demonstrating students cry in infantile voices, ‘We want the world, and we want it now!’ and the Staffords have contrived the instant flaming row, a violent quarrel without origin or cause.

Our marriage was breaking up and we both knew it. The heat engendered by friction was rapidly becoming unsupportable. On this particular Monday morning a mild enquiry into Gloria’s doings over the weekend was wantonly interpreted as meddlesome interference into her private affairs. One thing led to another and I arrived at the office rather frayed at the edges.

Joyce Godwin, my secretary, looked up as I walked in and said brightly, ‘Good morning, Mr Stafford.’

‘Morning,’ I said curtly, and slammed the door of my own office behind me. Once inside I felt a bit ashamed. It’s a bad boss who expends his temper on the staff and Joyce didn’t deserve it. I snapped down the intercom switch. ‘Will you come in, Joyce?’

She entered armed with the secretarial weapons—stenographic pad and sharpened pencil. I said, ‘Sorry about that; I’m not feeling too well this morning.’

Her lips twitched in a faint smile. ‘Hangover?’

‘Something like that,’ I agreed. The seven year hangover. ‘What’s on the boil this morning?’

‘Mr Malleson wants to see you about the board meeting this afternoon.’

I nodded. The AGM of Stafford Security Consultants Ltd was a legal formality; three men sitting in a City penthouse cutting up the profits between them. A financial joke. ‘Anything else?’

‘Mr Hoyland rang up. He wants to talk to you.’

‘Hoyland? Who’s he?’

‘Chief Security Officer at Franklin Engineering in Luton.’

There was once a time when I knew every employee by his given name; now I couldn’t even remember the surnames of the line staff. It was a bad situation and would have to be rectified when I had the time. ‘Why me?’

‘He wanted Mr Ellis, but he’s in Manchester until Wednesday; and Mr Daniels is still away with ‘flu.’

I grinned. ‘So he picked me as third choice. Was it anything important?’

The expression on Joyce’s face told me that she thought my hangover was getting the better of me. A Chief Security Officer was expected to handle his job and if he rang the boss it had better be about something bloody important. ‘He said he’d ring back,’ she said drily.

‘Anything else?’

Wordlessly she pointed to my overflowing in-tray. I looked at it distastefully. ‘You’re a slave-driver. If Hoyland rings I’ll be in Mr Malleson’s office.’

‘But Mr Fergus wants the Electronomics contract signed today,’ she wailed.

‘Mr Fergus is an old fuddy-duddy,’ I said. ‘I want to talk to Mr Malleson about it. It won’t hurt Electronomics to wait another half-hour.’ I picked up the Electronomics file and left, feeling Joyce’s disapproving eye boring into my back.

Charlie Malleson was evidently feeling more like work than I—his in-tray was almost half empty. I perched my rump on the edge of his desk and dropped the file in front of him. ‘I don’t like this one.’