Flying finish / Бурный финиш. Книга для чтения на английском языке

My fingers were clumsy on his wrist and for anxious moments I could feel nothing; but his pulse was there. Slow and faint, but regular. He was on his way up from the depths. I was so glad that he wasn’t dead that had Rous-Wheeler not been there I would undoubtedly have wept. As it was, I fought against the flooding back of the grief I’d suppressed when Billy shot him. Odd that I should be tumbled into such intense emotion only because the reason for it was gone.

Rous-Wheeler stuttered, ‘What… what is it?’ with a face the colour and texture of putty, and I glanced at him with dislike.

‘He’s alive,’ I said tersely.

‘He can’t be.’

‘Shut up.’

Billy’s bullet had hit Patrick high, above the hairline and at a rising angle, and instead of penetrating his skull had slid along outside it. The long, swollen and clotted wound looked dreadful, but was altogether beautiful in comparison with a neat round hole. I stood up and spread the blanket over him again, to keep him warm. Then, disregarding Rous-Wheeler’s protest, I went away up the plane.

In the cockpit nothing had changed. The plane roared steadily on its three ten heading[523] and all the instruments were like rocks. I touched the back of the co-pilot, awake again to his presence. The silence in him was eternal: he wouldn’t feel my sympathy, but he had it.

Turning back a pace or two, I knelt down beside Mike. He too had been shot in the head, and about him too there was no question. The agile eyebrow was finished. I straightened him out from his crumpled position and laid him flat on his back. It wouldn’t help any, but it seemed to give him more dignity. That was all you could give the dead, it seemed; and all you could take away.

The four packing cases in the luggage bay were heavy and had been thrust in with more force than finesse, pushing aside and crushing most of the things already there. Shifting the first case a few inches I stretched a long arm past it and tugged out a blanket, which I laid over Mike. Armed with a second one I went back into the galley. Sometime in the past I’d seen the first-aid box in one of the cupboards under the counter, and to my relief it was still in the same place.

Lying on top of it was a gay parcel wrapped in the striped paper of Malpensa Airport. The doll for Mike’s daughter. I felt the jolt physically. Nothing could soften the facts. I was taking her a dead father for her birthday.

And Gabriella… anxiety for her still hovered in my mind like a low cloud ceiling, thick, threatening and unchanged. I picked up the parcel she had wrapped and put it on the counter beside the plastic cups and the bag of sugar. People often did recover from bullets in the lungs: I knew they did. But the precise Italian doctor had only offered hope, and hope had tearing claws. I was flying home to nothing if she didn’t live.

Taking the blanket and the first-aid kit I went back to Patrick. In the lavatory compartment I washed my filthy hands and afterwards soaked a chunk of cotton wool with clean water to wipe his blood-streaked face. Dabbing dry with more cotton wool I found a large hard lump on his forehead where it had hit the floor: two heavy concussing shocks within seconds, his brain had received. His eyelids hadn’t flickered while I cleaned him, and with a new burst of worry I reached for his pulse: but it was still there, faint but persevering[524].

Sighing with relief I broke open the wrapping of a large sterile wound dressing, laid it gently over the deep gash in his scalp, and tied it on with the tape. Under his head I slid the second blanket, folded flat, to shield him a little from the vibration in the aircraft ’s metal skin. I loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt and also the waistband of his trousers: and beyond that there was no help I could give him. I stood up slowly with the first-aid kit and turned to go.

With anxiety bordering on hysteria Rous-Wheeler shouted, ‘You aren’t going to leave me like this again, are you?’

I looked back at him. He was half sitting, half kneeling, with his hands still fastened to the floor in front of him. He’d been there for nearly three hours, and his flabby muscles must have been cracking. It was probably too cruel to leave him like that for the rest of the trip. I put the first-aid kit down on the flattened box, pulled a bale of hay along on the starboard side and lodged it against the untrasonic packing case. Then with Alf’s cutter I clipped through the wire round his wrists and pointed to the bale.

‘Sit there.’

He got up slowly and stifly, crying out. Shufling, half-falling, he sat where I said. I picked up another piece of wire and in spite of his protests bound his wrists together again and fastened them to one of the chains anchoring the crate. I didn’t want him bumbling all over the plane[525] and breathing down my neck.

‘Where are we going?’ he said, the pomposity reawakening now that he’d got something from me.

I didn’t answer.

‘And who is flying the plane?’