But our escape did not go unrecognised by the men we left behind. The guards must have been near the air field even before the lights attracted their attention, because we’d only been airborne a few moments, and were about to bank around the high trees at the end of the runway, when the roar of noise within the machine changed in some indefinable way, and the air blew into our faces in a manner it had not before. I suddenly could see light from the runway, spilling in three clear circles punched through the floor.

“The fools—they’re shooting!” Holmes cried.

My body tried to crawl into itself, although there could be no escape, either from being hit directly, or from going down in a ball of flame. But Goodheart banked hard then, and the change in our outline, or the increased distance from their guns, or even their belated realisation that they might also be shooting at their prince, meant the end of it: No more holes appeared in the thin metal skin. When the plane’s wings had levelled out and we were aimed south, I uncurled to pat our waking prisoner from head to toe. It was a huge relief to find him unwounded: Explaining an abducted maharaja was going to be hard enough; a dead one might present real problems. The man himself appreciated neither concern. He glared at me over his gag, drugged and drunk still but angry; I checked his bindings and went back to Holmes.

“He’s all right. Where are we heading?”

“I don’t suppose you know if the British encampment has a parade grounds?”

“I should very much doubt it, in these mountains.”

“Then it’s Hijarkot.”

I sighed, foreseeing the hell that would break loose the minute we set down with our kidnapped maharaja and no authority, no legal stance, no Geoffrey Nesbit to explain.

I leant forward to yell into Holmes’ ear. “Mycroft is going to be absolutely mortified when he finds out that his sources misled him regarding Goodheart.”

“These amateurs,” Holmes bellowed back, wagging his head in mock disapproval. “They present a continuous obstacle to the smooth running of the world.”

Holmes shifted, intending to head forward and help Goodheart navigate his strange aeroplane across an impossible route between a place where men were shooting at us and a place where we would be unable to set down, over seventy miles of invisible and terrifying mountainside, by nothing but the fading moonlight. As he stood, I caught at his elbow and pulled him back so he could hear me.

“The next time Mycroft asks us to do something,” I shouted to my husband, “we really must tell him no.”

Chapter Thirty