No Highway

Read No Highway for Free Online Page B

Book: Read No Highway for Free Online
Authors: Nevil Shute
really think we ought to run a night shift on it, sir.”
    “I think we should, Scott. Can you provide the staff?”
    “I’ll take young Simmons away from Mallory and put him to work with Honey,” I said. “Simmons can watch the thing at night for the time being. He can have a camp bed in the office and an alarm clock. That’ll do for a week or so; I’ll have Dines to put on it when he comes back from leave.”
    “All right, Scott. You can tell Honey that I’ll see about the night shift in the morning.”
    I was greatly relieved to have got that settled: at any rate we were now doing all we could upon the technical side. “He’ll have plenty to do tomorrow, sir, getting all that cracking. I’d rather he was down here doing that than coming up with me to London.”
    It was nearly half-past six by the time I left the Director. I went back to my office and rang Honey’s office, but there was no reply: he had probably gone home. I asked the exchange to give me his home number, and they said he hadn’t got one. I packed up my work and went down to the balloon shed on my way out, to see if by any chance he was still there working late. But his office was locked and deserted. Outside, the great span of the tailplane stood upon its testing rig beneath the loading gantries, still and silent. It was not a happy thought that there were Reindeers in the air at that moment, putting up the hours towards the point when Mr. Honey said their tails would break.
    It was nearly half-past seven by the time that I got home. Shirley had had dinner waiting for me for half an hour, and she was not too pleased about it. “You might have rung me up,” she said.
    I told her I was sorry. “I’ve got to go out afterwards and dig up Honey,” I said. “There’s a bit of drama on.”
    “What’s the trouble?”
    “It’s that Reindeer tail,” I said.
    “The one that Mr. Honey says will come to bits in 1,440 hours?”
    I nodded. “Do you remember seeing in the paper that a Reindeer flew into a hill in Labrador a month or so ago? With the Russian Ambassador on board it?”
    “I remember the Russians kicking up a stink,” she said. “Was that a Reindeer?”
    “That was the prototype Reindeer,” I replied. “We heard this afternoon that it had done just on fourteen hundred hours when it came to grief.”
    She had not worked at Boscombe Down all those years for nothing, and she knew quite a bit about aeroplanes. “Oh, Dennis! Do you think it was the tail?”
    “I just don’t know,” I said unhappily. “If it was, I suppose the bloody Russians will say we knew that it was going to happen, and we did it on purpose.”
    She smiled. “They couldn’t say that, surely. Nobody suspected there was anything wrong with the tail when that one crashed.”
    “Mr. Honey did,” I said. There was no end to the trouble that might come out of this thing. But the first thing to do was to make darned sure that it could never happen again.
    We had dinner, and washed up; then I went out and got into the car again, and drove round to Mr. Honey’s little house in Copse Road. It was about a quarter-past eight when I got there; the door was locked. It was one of those suburban doors with a window in the top part; through this window I could see past the stairs down the narrow hall into the kitchen at the back. I pressed the bell; it rang, but there was no sign of life. Then as I waited there was a stir upstairs and footsteps coming down, and Honey appeared in the hall and opened the door for me.
    He said, “Oh, Dr. Scott—I didn’t expect to see you. Come in. I was just putting Elspeth to bed.”
    I went into the hall with him. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Honey,” I said. “But something came up about the Reindeertail this afternoon that I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve been with the Director this evening, and I’ve got to go to London in the morning. If you can spare a minute I’d like to have a talk about it now.”
    He led the way

Similar Books

Mathilda, SuperWitch

Kristen Ashley

The Lords of the North

Bernard Cornwell

Beautifully Unfinished

Beverley Hollowed

The Parasite Person

Celia Fremlin

No Magic Moment (Secrets of Stone Book 4)

Angel Payne, Victoria Blue

Escape Into the Night

Lois Walfrid Johnson

Thundering Luv

LM Preston