Biggles by John Pearson

Author:John Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

7

The Great Race

The dining room of the Blazers’ Club has seen Prime Ministers and potentates, press lords and Presidents, yet by a firm tradition of the Club all visitors, however eminent, are treated just like any ordinary guests. So there was no reason why James Bigglesworth should have realised on meeting Lord Elberton who on earth he was, not that it would have made much difference if he had. Biggles paid little heed to rank. He had a simple way of judging anyone he met — either the fellow was all right, or he wasn’t. Lord Elberton seemed distinctly in the second category.

It was an evening late in 1934 and Colonel Raymond had taken Biggles off to dinner at his Club as something of a consolation prize for several very boring jobs he had recently performed for the British Secret Service. They sounded glamorous enough — a flight to Budapest to fetch Karminsky, the Hungarian cypher king, three weeks in Italy trying to discover the performance figures of the new Savoia-Marchetti long-range seaplane, a visit to a factory outside Paris where Duval, the great explosives expert, was rumoured to be manufacturing an aerial torpedo that had their Lordships at the Admiralty distinctly worried.

It suited Colonel Raymond to employ a freelance operator he could trust implicitly, yet disown if anything went wrong. And, thanks to no fault of Biggles’, go wrong they had. Karminsky had changed his mind at the last minute and refused to come, the Italian seaplane sank on its trials on Lake Garda, and the great Duval had blown up his factory and himself. As a perfectionist, Biggles found it difficult to cope with failure and these three setbacks in a row had depressed him terribly. Algy had done his best to cheer him up — as Algy always did — but Biggles remained firmly in the dumps, and it was the faithful Algy who had finally rung Colonel Raymond to suggest he have a word with him — hence the invitation out to dinner in the hallowed precincts of the Blazers’ Club.

The dinner had been excellent as ever — the best smoked salmon this side of the Firth of Forth, a partridge slaughtered at Balmoral, claret from the cellars of a former President of France — and as the meal progressed, Biggles’ spirits had undoubtedly improved.

‘The trouble is, sir,’ he confessed to Colonel Raymond, ‘I really feel I’m getting soft.’

‘Never heard such nonsense in my life,’ replied the Colonel, jabbing at the Stilton with an eighteenth-century silver scoop, ‘you and Lacey are the toughest pair of fliers it has been my privilege to meet.’

‘That’s very kind of you, sir. But the fact is that it’s been years since the ending of the war. We’ve flown a lot, we’ve been around the world, and been delighted to perform the occasional odd job for you, but I feel that we require a challenge.’

Colonel Raymond gave an icy laugh.

‘I’d have thought you’d had enough of them to last a lifetime, Bigglesworth my boy.

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