It had the desired effect. As the eighth second elapsed, the door opened, and an inquisitive engineer poked his head out into what he expected would be the normal, pressurized air of the cabin, but was in fact a cloud of the same sleeping gas Horace Whalley had enjoyed, squirting hard out of the nozzle of the device that was now clamped under my right arm and looked not unlike an early-model Sten gun, but which was in fact a very recent model gas-gun. By the time the ninth second had elapsed, he was fast asleep, and after the tenth second had passed, so were his chums – the pilot, co-pilot, navigator and radio operator. I turned the nozzle down towards the aisle of the aircraft and squeezed the trigger much harder. Within seconds, the entire cabin was filled with the gas.

I pulled the flight crew out into the aisle, then went back into the cockpit and pulled the door firmly shut behind me. I looked at my watch: one minute and twenty seconds had elapsed. From the dose I had given, it would be some minutes yet before the people back in the cabin would begin to come round, although I couldn’t be sure. I hoped for their sakes it wouldn’t be much more.

It was five minutes to eleven. The sky was clear blue without a cloud to be seen, and Margate was twenty-three thousand feet below our port wing, as the plane continued its course on auto-pilot.

Didier Garner looked at his watch and grimaced. It was five to ten, Paris time; one hour and twenty minutes of his ten-hour working day had so far elapsed without his lighting up a single Winston. Normally he would be lighting his fourth about now, but today he was finished with smoking; he had quit, and he was going to stay quit. The last hour and twenty minutes had been hell, but he had got through them, and he would get through the rest of the day – somehow. He looked out of his window into Place Vendôme, out across the square towards the Ritz. It was a bright sunny November morning, and everything looked good for the director of Heli-Transport France. It was about time. For six weeks the company’s three Aérospatiale Puma helicopters, the backbone of his fleet, had been grounded by the authorities after a piece of engine cowling had sheared off one and plummeted through the roof of a parked car. The problem had been traced to a mechanic carrying out faulty maintenance work, but the grounding had cost the company a fortune. From today, the grounding had been lifted, and there was a full schedule for the helicopters for several weeks ahead, which would quickly resolve the company’s financial crisis.