Free 3 of a Kind by Rohan Gavin Page B

about the murder.’ The mention of her mother’s death brought a ghostly pall over Tilly’s face. ‘Nothing relevant. They’ll ping me when the drive is readable.’
    ‘If you want my assistance, I’m all ears.’
    ‘I’ll let you know when I’m ready to share,’ she said, toying with her sunglasses. ‘You know, your dad’s all right. Weird … but all right.’
    The aircraft nudged back from the terminal gate and taxied across the byways towards its designated runway.
    Knightley Senior shifted anxiously in his seat as the jet engines droned to life. He leaned across the aisle to the others. ‘I understand neither of you have travelled to the States before, so when we disembark in Los Angeles, meaning “City of Angels” – also known as LA for short – I’ll ask you, for once in your lives, to follow my lead. The thing about America is, everything’s bigger. The cars, the characters … especially the sandwiches. And I can’t promise they’ll be triangles and notsquares. But we’ll survive. And we will find Bogna, mark my words.’
    ‘The trail will be cold,’ replied Darkus. ‘How are we supposed to navigate a foreign city?’
    ‘Every investigation is like a foreign city, Doc. We simply read the clues and make our deductions, just as we do on home soil … Trust me.’
    The bulbous engines on either side of the fuselage reached a deafening whine as the massive aircraft accelerated to full tilt, pinning the trio in their seats.
    Knightley slipped the chain of the Saint Christopher medal around his neck, then gripped the seat with both hands as the g-forces took effect.
    The ground fell away, the motorways and buildings were reduced to toddler toys, and the plane passed through the cloud layer and into the flat blue sky, approaching cruising altitude.
    Darkus turned to his father, whose eyes were clamped shut, his nostrils flared and his nose whistling with every inhale and exhale.
    ‘Dad?’ Darkus whispered. ‘Dad …?’
    His father appeared to be unconscious.
    Tilly turned her attention away from the window. ‘Is he …? Has he …?”
    ‘I thought this might happen,’ Darkus sighed, reaching over to check his father’s pulse, which confirmed thathis dad was experiencing one of his ‘episodes’: a narcoleptic trance, brought on by stress. ‘Mum said he never was a good flyer.’

    In what had become a regular occurrence, Darkus found himself without a supervising adult. He felt the familiar sick feeling in his stomach and hoped his father’s lapse would be shorter than previous ones. He explained the unusual condition to the flight crew who set aside his father’s meals in case he woke from his trance at some point during the twelve-hour flight. Tilly busied herself with coding on her smartphone while Darkus set his wristwatch to show Los Angeles local time, which was eight hours behind British Summer Time. Then he tried to set his body clock by settling down for some sleep. Whether his dad was a working partner or not, Darkus would require all his mental powers for this case.
    As the plane followed its course, the sky appeared to bend, following the curvature of the Earth. Darkus drifted in and out of consciousness, first finding Tilly on her smartphone, then halfway through a Hollywood action movie, then curled up under a blanket, dead to the world. Knightley Senior continued to breathe heavily, oblivious to changing continents and timezones, wrapped in a duvet by a flight attendant, unconscious but still sitting bolt upright.
    Darkus stretched his legs a few times, knowing from his research that it was the best defence against deep vein thrombosis, or blood clots: a common problem among long-haul flyers. He also flexed his father’s legs for him, as he’d seen the nurses do so many times during Knightley’s four-year coma state. For comfort, the flight attendant had replaced his dad’s brogues with a pair of red slippers.
    What Darkus didn’t notice was a teenage boy sitting a