I looked up, and watched trousers being pulled down, and then underpants, and then a pair of large pink cheeks descended towards me, with a hairy pair of balls and a long thin penis at the front. The whole lot dangled down inside the seat, blocking out almost all the tiny amount of light. I imagined the expression on the face of the owner of this apparatus. He had probably been holding his legs together since boarding the flight, and at the first opportunity, he had dashed in here, and was now seated with a gleam of blissful expectancy on his face. Had he known what lurked beneath him, I had a feeling the expression might have been somewhat different.

As I wondered, I took careful aim with my pistol: it was a Capchur gun, the type that zoo-keepers use for firing drugged darts into unapproachable animals. It works on compressed air, and the tiny pin-like darts dissolve in the skin they penetrate. With a ‘plunk’ that made a roar and an echo down here that sounded like a twenty-one-gun salute, a tiny dart filled with a large dose of Scoline embedded itself into the right cheek of the man’s buttocks. Even as he exclaimed in surprise, and began to stand up to find out why he had felt this sudden pin-prick pain, the drug had started to travel through his blood stream, turning him, fraction of second by fraction of second from being wide awake into being dog-tired; so dog-tired that by the time he got to his feet, he could not remember why it was that he had stood up, and by the time he had sat down again, he was fast asleep.

I unscrewed the four bolts, removed them, and then, using all my weight, and all the leverage I could get from the slippery floor, I pushed the bowl sideways, being careful not to send it and its occupant tumbling over with a crash that would bring a stewardess running in. He was a heavy customer, and it took a full minute of pushing to clear a gap for me to climb through. I had had to wait for someone to come into the lavatory in order that the door be locked – it was the only way I could emerge safely from my hiding place. The man whose luck it had been to come in first was a well-built man in his late forties; from his close-cropped hair and his poor quality clothes, I guessed he was almost certainly a Russian, but I wasn’t interested enough to start trying to make sure.