Payback by Graham Lancaster Read Free Book Online Page A

to me is the word “bluebottles”.’
    The doctor laughed. ‘That’s it. When he and I were young, “bluebottle” was the nickname for a policeman. He thinks they’re still after him.’
    Lydia stared down again at the husk of the man. How easy it was to fall from grace. A success one day; on the streets, shouting, the next. Perhaps this was one reason she helped out here. There but for the Grace of God and all that. After the doctor had gone into his surgery with one of the other patients, Lydia took out her purse and slipped a twenty-pound note in old Charlie’s pocket. ‘Good luck, “Sir” Charles,’ she said gently to the haunted, frightened face.
    Then, after a glance at her accusingly expensive watch, it was time to go and see another ‘Sir’, her father. To discover just how secure his grip would prove to be on the seemingly fickle Grace of God...
    *
    Chancey was worried. They were ten minutes off landing and Banto had started to wake up, moving his head back and forth and moaning. Despite his skill as a pilot, Chancey did not relish the thought of putting down with a violent passenger flailing beside him.
    He radioed Bolitho. ‘What to do, man? He’s kam bek awake! I’m mebbe ten minute to down.’
    ‘ He’s strapped in good?’
    ‘ Sure.’
    ‘ Hit him if you have to. But not too hard. You hear?’
    ‘ Sure,’ Chancey replied, uncertainly, feeling down for the wrench by his right side.
    Banto was now fully conscious and had opened his eyes to the most frightening experience of his life. More terrifying than facing up to a wild boar. Or than the time he startled a cassowary, the fiercesome five foot tall, 130-pound flightless bird, PNG’s biggest animal. More harrowing even than battle, and the taking of his first trophy head. There below him was green. His mind had no framework to recognise it as his beloved forests. He was like a person looking for the first time at a 3D image, unable to assimilate the patterns into anything recognisable. One thing he could comprehend, however, was the sky. And this now seemed to be above and below him! Then, directly ahead, they were approaching a place where the green ended, and a great empty space of blue-green began. A wilderness of nothingness all the way to the horizon: his first sight of an ocean. Worse than even all this was the noise. Angry, deafening and alien to his senses, creating harmonics in his head he had never before experienced. His first instinct was to flee, and he tried to get up and run. But the harness kept him pinned to the seat, and after a brief struggle, terror washed over him and he bent double with fear, staring at his feet, shaking uncontrollably and chanting. Chancey observed all this, and finally put the wrench down, greatly relieved: not because he no longer had to beat him senseless—violence was his stock-in-trade—but because he could avoid the risk of damaging him and facing the anger of Bolitho.
    The private, unlicensed runway was 400 yards long. Tight, but a breeze after the 250-yard forest clearing. After all the drama he had expected, the landing was an anti-climax for Chancey, with Banto stiff beside him, still shaking, his teeth chattering.
    Bolitho ran over to the Otter and yanked open the door to inspect the native. ‘He OK?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘Did you hit him?’
    Chancey killed the engines and freed his seat-harness. ‘He’s fine, kiap . No need to quiet him, he’s planti afraid.’
    Bolitho —in his late fifties, a shaven bullet-head crowning a once-fit body—was a 1960s Vietnam war veteran who had never been able to adjust back to the soft, domestic world he had left in Ohio. A life since as a mercenary, cargo pilot, drugs runner and general muscle-for-hire had finally washed him up in PNG, dying of cirrhosis. It was a question of months, maybe a year. That was if he, or one of his many enemies, did not blow his brains out first. ‘Great work, kauboi ,’ he said. ‘You done