“You read the signs. Okay, so there’s certain obvious things, like the fare’s carrying luggage. Then there’s the route he’s taking. That’s easy. But, you say, he may just be going to stay with friends in Hammersmith. All I can say is, the fare didn’t get into the cab in the manner of someone going to stay with friends in Hammersmith. So, what else do you look for? Well, here’s where you need to be a cabbie to know. Normal life for a cabbie is lots of little bits here and there. You don’t know from minute to minute what’s going to happen, what work you’re going to get, how the day’s going to go. You kind of prowl around in a restless kind of way. But if you get a fare to Heathrow, you’re away. Good solid journey, good solid fare, wait in line for an hour or so, get a good solid fare back to town. That’s your whole morning taken care of. You drive in a completely different way. You’re higher up on the road, you take better lines through corners. You’re on your way. You’re going somewhere. It’s called doing the Heathrow Hop. Any cabbie’ll spot it.”

“Hmm,” said Dirk. “That’s remarkable.”

“What you notice depends on who you are.”

“You couldn’t happen to tell which flight he’s catching, could you?” asked Dirk.

“Who do you think I am, mate,” retorted the cabbie, “a bloody private detective?” Dirk sat back in his seat and stared out of the window, thoughtfully.

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

THERE MUST BE some kind of disease that causes people to talk like that, and the name for it must be something like Airline Syllable Stress Syndrome. It’s the disease that seems to kick in at about ten thousand feet and becomes more and more pronounced, if that’s a good word to use in this context, with altitude until it levels out at a plateau of complete nonsense at about 35,000 feet. It makes otherwise rational people start saying things like “The captain has now turned off the seatbelt sign,” as if there were someone lurking around the cockpit attempting to deny that the captain has done any such thing, that he is indeed the captain and not an impostor, and that there aren’t a whole bunch of second-rate and inferior seatbelt signs that he mightn’t have been fiddling about with.

Another thing that Dirk reflected on as he settled back into his seat was the curious coincidence that not only does the outside of an aircraft look like the outside of a vacuum cleaner, but also that the inside of an aircraft smells like the inside of a vacuum cleaner.