‘And after that he began to study maps. To plan his route, you think.’
‘Yes. From then on it was in the forefront of his mind instead of being something that you drop with your working clothes. He even began to come in late as a habit. As if he went out of his way to look for an easier route.’ He paused a moment, and then added in a quick warning tone: ‘Please understand, Mr Grant, I’m not saying Bill has lost his nerve.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Lost nerves don’t take you that way at all, believe me. You get quite the opposite. You don’t want to think of flying at all. You get short in the temper, and you drink too much and too early in the day, and you try to wangle short hops, and you go sick when there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s no mystery about lost nerve, Mr Grant. It announces itself like a name on a marquee. There was nothing like that about Bill—and I don’t think there ever will be. It was just that he couldn’t leave the thing behind.’
‘It became an obsession with him.’
‘That’s about it, I suppose.’
‘Did he have other interests?’
‘He read books,’ Mr Cullen said, in an apologetic way; as one confessing a peculiarity in a friend. ‘Even in that, it showed.’
‘How: showed?’
‘I mean, instead of the books being the usual story affairs they’d as likely as not be about Arabia.’