Free Mysterious Aviator by Nevil Shute Page B

should be all right. D’you mean he’s off his head?”
    She nodded. “Mm.”
    I reached out and put my hand to the starter. “I’d better get along back to him.”
    She didn’t move from her position, leaning against the car. “He’s all right now,” she said. “He was sleeping quite nicely when I came out, and Mrs. Richards is in the sitting-room. But you shouldn’t have left him like that. You gave Mrs. Richards a great fright.”
    “I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I didn’t think he was going to be off his head. He gets this thing whenever he takes a bad chill. Malaria, or something. He picked it up out in Honduras.”
    She didn’t make any reply to that, so that there was silence for a bit. Then she looked up suddenly.
    “Is he an airman?” she inquired.
    I nodded. “He was in my squadron in the war. He became a professional pilot after that.”
    “And now,” she said casually, “he’s just come back from Russia.”
    I glanced down at the river. It runs pretty fast over pebbles beneath that bridge, and with a rippling sound. I have heard that there are grayling in it, and I remember wondering then if that were true. And presently I glanced at her again.
    “You’d better tell me about it,” I said quietly.
    She laughed. “There’s nothing much to tell. Only it’s so funny. Mrs. Richards sent a maid over to him in the middle of the morning with a grape-fruit and some barley water, because she thought he’d like it. And the girl came back and said she couldn’t make him understand anything, but he was talking to himself all the time. Mrs. Richards thought you’d got a looney over there, and went over herself. And then she came and fetched me.”
    “I see,” I muttered. “That’s how it was. Did you send for Armitage?” The local doctor.
    She shook her head. “I didn’t think it was necessary unless he got worse. You see, you’d told them that he’d got malaria, and that he’d have to lie up for a bit. You hadn’t told them that he was going to be off his head, though. No, we just took it in turns to sit with him.”
    “That was kind of you,” I said.
    “Not a bit. He’s a nice man.”
    I knew what she meant by that. There’s no better way to get to know a man’s character than to get him tight and see how he talks then. And I suppose delirium is much the same.
    She leaned both arms upon the hood of the car and looked straight at me. “He was saying such funny things,” she remarked.
    I nodded ruefully. “I expect he was. What did he say?”
    She considered for a minute. “It was all so mixed up,” she said. “He seemed to be talking most of the time about a long night flight that he had made in the dark. In the cold.” She glanced at me. “Do you know where that was?”
    I shook my head.
    “It was over snowy country, and it was very cold. He was frozen in his seat so stiff that he couldn’t move, and his head kept dropping forward with the sleepiness of it. And to keep himself awake he raised his goggles, and the cold bit his face and made his eyes water, and the tears froze on his cheeks. And he was most terribly frightened.”
    She paused. “That’s one of them. He gets a sort of cold fit every now and again, and whenever he gets that he comes back to talking about that cold flight. He shivers.”
    “Poor old soul,” I remarked. “What else did he say?”
    “He was talking a lot about his wife. But I don’t want to repeat that, and there wasn’t anything that really mattered. Except to them.”
    “All right. What else?”
    It was very quiet by the river. “He was talking about a man called Poddy Armstrong that he used to meet at the Royal Aero Club. It was rather horrid, that. Where’s the Royal Aero Club, Mr. Moran?”
    “It’s a London club,” I said. “In Clifford Street.” I glanced at her. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that Poddy Armstrong was chasing him in another machine, and trying to shoot him down in the dark.”
    She stared