I had to clear my throat before I could say mildly, “They're hardly dependable.”
“Imperial Airways has been in existence since March,” he pointed out. “Not all that many flights, to be sure, but air travel is the way of the future.”
“You're not saying that there is commercial aeroplane travel from London to Orkney?” I demanded.
“No,” he admitted. “I should have to arrange something more private.”
I had a brief vision of Lofte's bedraggled condition on Saturday night, but told myself that had been the result of six thousand miles; this would be a mere tenth the bedragglement.
As if following my thoughts, Mycroft said, “If I can find you a 'plane, you could be there in a day, Thursday at the latest.”
“You needn't make this sound like some treat you're offering a child, Mycroft.”
“What is this you're offering Russell, Mycroft?” Holmes had come into the room at the last phrase, to fetch the stack of photographs showing the Adlers and Reverend “Hayden.”
“Aeroplane travel,” I said bluntly. “And do leave us some of those.”
He concentrated on setting aside a few of each photograph, but emotions played over his face: surprise giving way to a queasy apprehension, then serious consideration, finally settling into wonderment.
“One forgets,” he reflected, “that in half a year's absence, technological advances will have been made.”
“It's been an entire year since Kelly and Macready crossed America without stopping,” Mycroft said, stretching out an arm for the telephone. “And the American Army round-the-world team has reached Iceland with two of its original three machines.”
“Yes, and the Boston wrecked off Orkney, didn't it?”
“Is that your answer, Mary?”
“No, I suppose I could think-”
But Mycroft's hand was already on the instrument. “Sherlock, if you are looking for the folded maps, I've moved them to the escritoire. Hello, is that Carver? Can you find Lofte and send him to me?”
Holmes pawed through the maps and removed several, then noticed me. “Need you stand there gawping, Russell? Don't you have things to do? I recommend you begin with locating a pilot who has taken a pledge.”
“Thank you, Holmes, for offering me up to the gods of technology.” It appeared that I was to become a barnstormer.
Holmes' driver rang the bell a few minutes later, and the two men left through the hidden doorway. Ten minutes later, the bell rang again, this time for me.
Mr Lofte's appearance had improved out of all recognition in the three days since I had seen him. His face was shaved, his suit so new it still bore traces of tailor's chalk, and the only odour about him was the faint aura of shaving soap.
Mycroft greeted him by saying, “My brother's wife needs to be in Orkney immediately. I wish you to assist her.”
The unflappable modern-day Phileas Fogg merely asked, “Will you need both the 'plane and the pilot?”
“I can requisition the machine, if need be.”
“When you say ‘immediately,’ do you wish to undertake a night landing?” I hastened to assure him that my need for speed was merely desperate, not suicidal. He nodded.
“In that case, let me see what I can scare up at the Society.”
“I'll come with you, if I may,” I said, thinking: my life, my choice of pilots. Then Mycroft gently cleared his throat. I looked over. He was simply reading the paper, but after a moment, I saw the source of his objection.
“Actually,” I told Lofte, “I have a few things I must do. How about if I meet you down the road a piece? In, say, twenty minutes?”
“I don't mind wait-”
“No no, it's a lovely day out there.” I plucked his shiny new Panama hat from the side-table and thrust it back into his hands. “Where are we headed?”
“ Albemarle Street,” he answered.
“The Burlington Arcade, then. Twenty minutes. See you there.”
Obedient, if uncomprehending, he stepped out of Mycroft's front door. Three minutes later, I stepped through Mycroft's private back exit.
What happened next is no-one's fault but my own. Leaving the dim tunnel near Angel Court with my mind on aeroplanes, I came face to face with a man I had last seen in the corridors of Scotland Yard. Worse, his reactions were quick.
Leaving behind the light cardigan I wore seemed preferable to assaulting one of Lestrade's men, but it was training, not speed, that wrenched my arm free from his hard fingers. Speed did make it possible to draw away from him on the street, as I led him on a circuit of St James's Palace and up to the mid-afternoon crowds along Piccadilly.
He was persistent, give him that. I didn't shake him off until I dodged in and out of the Dorchester, and even then, I took care to work my way back through the by-ways of Mayfair. All in all, it was a full half hour before I spotted Lofte, browsing a display of silk kerchiefs in the Burlington Arcade.
“Good,” I said nonchalantly, my eyes everywhere but on him. “Shall we go?”
He took in my breathless condition and proved his worth by whipping the hat from his head and popping it on mine, then did the same with his jacket, which fit my arms rather less completely than it had his. He smoothed his hair with both hands and followed me back up the Arcade, removing his neck-tie and rolling up his sleeves to make for a more complete change of image. From a distance, the two men who left the Arcade, one of them regrettably en dishabille, bore little resemblance to the young woman who had sprinted away from an officer of the law.
Lofte's “Society” was, it transpired, the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain. And Mr Lofte himself, I found as we strolled up Old Bond Street with watchful eyes, had been Captain Lofte of the RAF, beginning in the early days of the War when, if memory served me, the average life span of an active fighter pilot had been three weeks. Even after several years in the Far East, he still knew half the world's airmen, and those he didn't, had at least heard of him. It explained how he had been able to thumb rides across two continents at the drop of a hat.
The Aeronautical Society wore the face of science over the heart of madcap undergraduates. We walked past a dignified sign and through a polished front door into a minor riot that would not have been tolerated at that bastion of Bohemian excess, the Café Royal. Five boisterous young men were racing-literally-down a long staircase while a sixth flung his legs over the banister and leapt to the floor below, staggering into a scramble as he hit the carpet ahead of the pack that rounded the newel and circled towards whatever rooms lay behind. Voices raised from the depths of the building indicated disputed results and an accusation of cheating; the dignified Swiss man at my side looked only marginally discomfited.
“We shall wait for them in here,” he suggested, leading me to a sitting room too tidy to be used for anything but the occasional entertainment of guests and ladies. He pressed into my hand an unasked-for glass of sherry, and slipped out. I set the glass on the table, and looked around me.
The quiet room was decorated primarily with photographs: Blériot after crossing the Channel in 1909; the Wrights' first flyer, wings drooping alarmingly but its wheels clear of the ground; an aerial dogfight over English fields; Alcock and Brown standing next to the biplane they crossed the Atlantic in. I lingered over this last-surely immeasurably harder than a jaunt to Scotland, and that was five whole years ago. I puzzled over the next photograph, of a curious looking aeroplane with an enormous set of propellers misplaced to its roof. It resembled some unlikely insect.
“That's an autogiro,” said an American voice from behind me.
I had not known there was anyone else in the room, but the man had been sitting in a high-backed chair in a dim corner. I smiled vaguely in his direction, and returned to the photo. “It looks like the result of two aeroplanes flying into each other,” I commented. Then, realising that a jest about mid-air collisions might not be in the best of taste here, I amended it to, “-or a piece of very Modernist sculpture. Does it actually function?”