The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [152]
“Actually,” I told Lofte, “I have a few things I must do. How about if I meet you down the road a piece? In, say, twenty minutes?”
“I don't mind wait—”
“No no, it's a lovely day out there.” I plucked his shiny new Panama hat from the side-table and thrust it back into his hands. “Where are we headed?”
“Albemarle Street,” he answered.
“The Burlington Arcade, then. Twenty minutes. See you there.”
Obedient, if uncomprehending, he stepped out of Mycroft's front door. Three minutes later, I stepped through Mycroft's private back exit.
What happened next is no-one's fault but my own. Leaving the dim tunnel near Angel Court with my mind on aeroplanes, I came face to face with a man I had last seen in the corridors of Scotland Yard. Worse, his reactions were quick.
Leaving behind the light cardigan I wore seemed preferable to assaulting one of Lestrade's men, but it was training, not speed, that wrenched my arm free from his hard fingers. Speed did make it possible to draw away from him on the street, as I led him on a circuit of St James's Palace and up to the mid-afternoon crowds along Piccadilly.
He was persistent, give him that. I didn't shake him off until I dodged in and out of the Dorchester, and even then, I took care to work my way back through the by-ways of Mayfair. All in all, it was a full half hour before I spotted Lofte, browsing a display of silk kerchiefs in the Burlington Arcade.
“Good,” I said nonchalantly, my eyes everywhere but on him. “Shall we go?”
He took in my breathless condition and proved his worth by whipping the hat from his head and popping it on mine, then did the same with his jacket, which fit my arms rather less completely than it had his. He smoothed his hair with both hands and followed me back up the Arcade, removing his neck-tie and rolling up his sleeves to make for a more complete change of image. From a distance, the two men who left the Arcade, one of them regrettably en dishabille, bore little resemblance to the young woman who had sprinted away from an officer of the law.
Lofte's “Society” was, it transpired, the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain. And Mr Lofte himself, I found as we strolled up Old Bond Street with watchful eyes, had been Captain Lofte of the RAF, beginning in the early days of the War when, if memory served me, the average life span of an active fighter pilot had been three weeks. Even after several years in the Far East, he still knew half the world's airmen, and those he didn't, had at least heard of him. It explained how he had been able to thumb rides across two continents at the drop of a hat.
The Aeronautical Society wore the face of science over the heart of madcap undergraduates. We walked past a dignified sign and through a polished front door into a minor riot that would not have been tolerated at that bastion of Bohemian excess, the Café Royal. Five boisterous young men were racing—literally—down a long staircase while a sixth flung his legs over the banister and leapt to the floor below, staggering into a scramble as he hit the carpet ahead of the pack that rounded the newel and circled towards whatever rooms lay behind. Voices raised from the depths of the building indicated disputed results and an accusation of cheating; the dignified Swiss man at my side looked only marginally discomfited.
“We shall wait for them in here,” he suggested, leading me to a sitting room too tidy to be used for anything but the occasional entertainment of guests and ladies. He pressed into my hand an unasked-for glass of sherry, and slipped out. I set the glass on the table, and looked around me.
The quiet room was decorated primarily with photographs: Blériot after crossing the Channel in 1909; the Wrights' first flyer, wings drooping alarmingly but its wheels clear of the ground; an aerial dogfight over English fields; Alcock and Brown standing next to the biplane they crossed the Atlantic in. I lingered