Barbara Cleverly by The Palace Tiger Read Free Book Online

dangerous!’ Madeleine said with pride. ‘These Jennys - you can’t trust ’em! The engine cuts out sometimes when they’re upside down and then you’ve got trouble! They were never intended to be stunt planes but Stuart’s a fabulous mechanic as well as pilot and he’s worked on his planes until they do what he wants when he wants it. Now look at this!’
    The plane was spiralling upwards, gaining height. As he climbed, the pilot threw out a shower of shiny tinsel that fell, sparkling against the sun, drifting lazily down over the plain.
    ‘This is the Eastern bit of the welcome,’ said Madeleine.
    Edgar caught a piece of tinsel and looked at it closely. ‘Gold?’ he said.
    ‘Of course,’ said Madeleine.
    ‘Urn
    how high is he proposing to climb?’ asked Joe nervously as the pilot continued his upward spiral, releasing more tinsel as he went.
    ‘Oh, he’s barely started,’ said Madeleine comfortably. ‘Stuart tried for the altitude record a couple of years ago. Just kept on going until he ran out of gas then freewheeled back down. He made over twenty-five thousand feet but he was still a hundred feet off the record. He’ll do it one day.’
    They watched in silence, mouths open, increasingly tense.
    ‘Okay, Stu, that’s good enough
    We’ve got the picture,’ Joe heard Madeleine mutter.
    As though hearing her, the pilot stopped his ascent, levelled out and began an abrupt dive.
    ‘What’s he doing now?’ said Edgar uneasily.
    ‘He’s going into a loop,’ said Madeleine. ‘Never seen a loop before?’
    The plane’s nose pulled up and the frail fuselage fought its way upwards, the engine screaming a protest.
    It was her gasp that alerted him. At the moment of maximum effort, half-way into the loop, the plane had suddenly stopped rising. Its nose dropped and the plane flattened out. At the same moment, the engine appeared to stop.
    ‘Now why the hell would he do that?’ she said to herself. ‘That’s not in the script!’
    To Joe’s horror the plane began to drop out of the sky. This was no lazy, calculated, gliding descent.
    ‘He’s going to crash!’ he blurted out and wished he’d kept silent.
    Madeleine’s face was anxious but she replied confidently enough. ‘Not this plane. Not this pilot. This’ll be some new stunt he’s been working on for our benefit. He’s supposed to scare us! That’s what he does! Oh, come on, Stu! Pull out now!’
    ‘But the engine’s cut out,’ said Edgar. ‘How can he pull out? Idiot’s leaving it too late!’
    Madeleine rounded on him. ‘Well, you sure know a lot about planes! These crates can have the whole engine drop off and you can still land them. Done it myself!’
    But Joe noticed that she was climbing out of the car and beginning to run towards her brother’s plane. In a few strides he had caught up with her and grasped her by the shoulders. ‘It won’t help to have us cluttering up his landing space!’ he shouted. ‘Come on, Maddy, let’s get back!’ But they stayed, frozen together, unable to run in any direction as, inexorably, the plane continued its uncontrolled descent. Joe thought he saw the pilot struggling with the controls a second or two before it crashed on to its belly in the dust about fifty yards ahead of them.
    The fuselage fell apart, the wings crumpled in on themselves, the tail section broke off and dropped away, trailing steel cables. The machine Joe had admired dancing like a dragonfly only minutes before was a pile of matchwood.
    Edgar lumbered past them. ‘God’s sake, Joe! Shift your arse, man! He may be alive still! Madeleine - stay back!’
    They set off to sprint the short distance to the plane, one thought in both their minds. ‘Fuel tank! Can we get him out before it blows?’
    Joe reached the plane first. He went straight for the pilot, who was slumped sideways in the open cockpit, blood pouring from him and down the side of the fuselage. Joe grasped him under the armpits and pulled. He was aware that manhandling of this kind was likely to do further damage to a