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  “Help!” he managed, barely.

  Rushed to hospital with multiple breaks in his left leg, sprains to both wrists and burns to his right hand, he was unconscious when the ambulance pulled into the hospital and he was still unconscious when allocated a bed. When he did wake up, a doctor told him he was being taken to surgery to have an operation on his shattered leg. When he awoke the second time, he was in bed and it was day again and his leg was in traction. Plaster cast encased his leg from thigh to foot supported by balanced suspension using slings and both his wrists were bandaged. Mike Townsend was standing over him holding a card and a box of chocolates.

  “How many times do I have to tell you that humans don’t fly?” he said. “That’s why we use balloons.”

  Sutcliffe afforded a gentle smile. With a weak turn of the head, he watched Townsend draw up a chair. “How many times have I told you I don’t like chocolate?”

  Their smiles hardened into a look more serious.

  “Brad, I’m so sorry about what happened. I should’ve checked the tanks beforehand. I feel terrible.”

  “Don’t. It wasn’t your fault.”

  The National Transportation Safety Board later concluded that a leaky propane tank had exploded. The Board also stated that Sutcliffe had been extremely lucky that the other three canisters of propane hadn’t ignited.

  Sutcliffe spent a few months in hospital. It gave him plenty of time to reflect on his life, where it was all heading. The dreadful events of that day had given him astounding clarity and purpose. All he could think about was piloting a balloon into space. Those he shared the wacky idea with failed to take him seriously, blaming the crash for his dementia. He allowed them to ridicule him, even made jokes at his own expense. But his actions would be his words. He hadn’t achieved much in his life and now was an opportunity to change that.

  Using his laptop, he executed exhaustive research from his bed. He made enquiries by mobile phone and he decided to use the money from his compensation to fund the project. Soon, though, he realised he couldn’t manage the space flight alone. Not only did he need a crew, he needed investors. Costs were mounting, more than he’d first anticipated. But he would see it through, even if it killed him.

  Outside the Chandelier Ballroom, Sutcliffe saw a hot drinks machine and for a pound he got a strong coffee. It would help sharpen his mind and settle his nerves. Strangely enough, he felt more anxious about the imminent conference with the media than he did about the balloon flight into space. British journalists could be malignant at times, even when they were covering stories filled with superlatives. Essentially, the space flight would make him a celebrity with success or a gallant hero with failure.

  He took his coffee into the theatre-style conference room and stared at the stage in awe of the table arrangements, which met with his approval, before he headed backstage to get ready.

  Chapter 2

  The classic duck-egg blue campervan with patches of grey filler and Greenpeace and Save the Whale stickers glued all over the windows received admiration and reverence wherever it went because it symbolised the dying icon of hippy adventurers. Although long unpainted and suffering with arthritic joints, the van was very much alive and loyal to the Volkswagen bloodline.

  The aging machine was making some unusual clattering noises, but that wasn’t the reason Keith Burch pulled up onto the gravel embankment. He had lost his way to the Moorland Links Hotel in Plymouth. He didn’t have a map and his portable GPS system was broken. The day’s rain was only making things worse. Ignoring the sound of flints and pebbles careening up into the undercarriage, he stopped the van and popped it into neutral. Unable to figure out his bearings, he concluded that he would have to guess which way to go. The road seemed completely devoid of road signs and there didn’t seem to be a local about anywhere to give him directions. Judging by the duration of his travel, he thought he had to be close. Then again, he’d forgotten his watch, just another mistake he’d made that morning. And the clock in the van had stopped years ago.

  With a shaking hand, he pinched an anxiety pill from its sachet, dropped it into his mouth and chased it down with some water. He wanted a cigarette, desperately. The van reeked of tobacco smoke, courtesy of an over-flowing ashtray, which he shook. Buried among the cinders he found the leftovers of a half-smoked cigarette. He sparked the end and drew in a deep lungful, immediately feeling better, though he was still lost and every chance he was running late. Flustered and full of apprehension, it induced Burch into a melancholic state.

  “They’re gonna kill me,” he whined.

  In the rear-view mirror, he caught sight of his forty-year-old eyes, black with fatigue. He thought about the state of his life, but it left his mind as quickly as it had entered and he felt a sudden surge of determination. Punching the gear lever into first, he trundled along the road, foot heavy to the floor, the engine howling in protest. The hotel had to be around there somewhere. There had to be other cars going the same way. A full house, Brad Sutcliffe had mentioned on the phone. To the west, he saw a wooded area and decided that it could easily hide a large hotel complex. Instead, it hid a golf course. Sutcliffe had mentioned a golf course. Yelverton Golf Club, something like that, was near the Moorland Links Hotel. He turned off at the next left and there, right in front of him, was a sign for the Moorland Links Hotel, blurred by the rain on his wind-shield. As the van lurched into the grounds of the country-style hotel, he saw the car park bursting with several media vehicles – a full house.

  “Full house,” the prison warden gloated. “You get the last bed on the wing, Mr Burch.”

  At twenty-two years of age, Keith Burch had been caught for tax evasion and was given a three-month prison sentence. Felix Dunmore, his cellmate for the next twelve weeks, had tattoos all the way up to his neck with an intimidating one which rose out of his collar like small flames trailing to beneath his left ear. No sooner had Burch set his belongings down on the bottom bunk than Dunmore, who lay on the top bunk reading, said, “Man, your head’s big.”

  Burch had heard it all his life and shrugged off the remark. “You know what they say about people with big heads?” he replied.

  Dunmore frowned. “I’m listening.”

  “Big head, strong skull, head-butt like a bull.”

  Cringing as he slid onto his bed, he waited with unbearable dread for Dunmore to react. He’d been in the room not forty five seconds and he was about to be torn to shreds. He felt the top bunk rock and two black boots swung down from the mattress close to his head, followed by something quite unexpected. Dunmore threw his head back and laughed. It made Burch laugh too, though he wasn’t quite sure why he was laughing. Dunmore stopped, resuming in brief bursts, before hopping down off his bed, where he crouched down beside Burch. “Get up!”

  Burch stopped laughing. The fear returned. “Why?”

  “Get up!”

  “What if I say no?”

  “Get up, man, I wanna show you something.”

  Reluctantly, Burch got off his bed and saw Dunmore pointing at photographs on the wall above his pillows. “They’re me babies.”

  Burch expected to see photographs of children smiling for their imprisoned father with little messages scribbled on the back in the messy handwriting of infants. Instead, as he moved closer, he saw a dozen hot-air balloons in a variety of unique designs.

  “What d’ya think?”

  “They’re…balloons.”

  “No, they’re escape.”

  Burch frowned. “You’re going to break out of prison in a hot-air balloon?”

  Dunmore slapped the back of his head. “I ain’t gonna get far in a fucking balloon, am I? Nah, escape of the mind. On bad days, I imagine I’m on a balloon. It’s quiet, nobody around, jus’ me and nature. It helps.”

  Burch saw a sensitive side to his cellmate and that put him at ease. Dunmore looked like a bad character, but he had been proved wrong. Dunmore was a simple man with a simple obsession, which provided him with focus and
inspiration. It gave his life purpose and every man needed purpose. At that point, Burch had no real purpose, both on the inside and the outside. Ballooning. It sounded so exotic. And one thing Burch loved more than anything else was nature. He had turned to vegetarianism at a young age, had visited every wildlife park in Britain and had even taken part in a practical conservation project for CSV Action Earth as part of his community service after he’d been arrested for drink driving. He looked back at the pictures of balloons, his eye trained on one balloon in particular shaped as a Marlboro cigarette; a standard one-hundred-and-twenty -thousand cubic feet. The beige butt of the Marlboro sat at the top with the tip at the bottom. Large flames coming from the propane tanks created the impression the cigarette was being lit. Burch craved a smoke. He craved to be taken far away in a hot-air balloon out into the countryside.

  A few days before his release, Burch lay reading his book on his bunk when Dunmore returned to the room in a grump. No sooner had he climbed up onto his bed than he flew into a rage. “Where’s me fucking balloon?” he yelled, his voice so loud it made Burch jump. The bed rumbled and Dunmore climbed down. “What the fuck have you done with it big head?”

  Burch could not find the words to defend himself. “I…what? Sorry, I don’t…”

  Dunmore hauled Burch to his feet by the scruff of his collar and forced his head round to the clean rectangle patch of wall where a photograph had spent years collecting dust and a Marlboro balloon missing.

  “Where is it?” he yelled.

  Unable to get a word in, Burch realised he’d never been so frightened in all his life.

  Bruised and cut, two black eyes and a broken nose, Burch walked out of prison with stooped shoulders and his head held high. He never looked back. His mother had come to collect him. She needn’t have bothered. She lectured him all the way home about sorting his life out. He didn’t listen much, too absorbed with his souvenir – the photograph of a Marlboro balloon. All he could think about was his first packet of smokes and his first flight in a hot-air balloon, unable to wait for either.

  His first ballooning experience was one to remember but not one to cherish. After a turbulent liftoff in a ninety-thousand-cubic-foot balloon, they drifted into an invisible wind current and, under the duress of the strong breeze, were swept across the countryside of Great Britain. Despite the settling words of the pilot – she’d observed the frightened look on her passenger’s face – Burch couldn’t relax. It had nothing to do with the dreadful roar of the propane tanks or the fear of bad weather or the inability to control the balloon’s direction and speed or the idea of crashing. It had taken him forty years to realise that he had an unrestrained fear of heights.

  Instead, he started designing hot-air balloons, his inspiration coming from the Marlboro photograph, which he’d had enlarged and framed on the wall of his basement, which served as a studio for his work. He lived with his mother in the decaying neighbour-hood of Stanhope. In between working in his basement at night and sleeping at intervals during the day, he attended to his mother because she got ill all the time and demanded a lot of his time. It was one thing after another; hip replacement, pneumonia, bowel cancer op, flu. For years she had been onto him about finding a real job, complaining that his balloon doodles were a waste of time. Then she developed Alzheimer’s and forgot to remember to nag him. The news came as a shock to Burch. But it meant he could concentrate on his career without the party of a moaning mother.

  After his first success with a balloon called Agatha, a unique marrow-shaped balloon, he began to network as his reputation preceded him and he started to get in with the right people. Then, something magical happened. Never had he been headhunted for a special project before, not until a smartly dressed man came knocking at his door claiming to be in need of his skills. The man said he would pay handsomely and that Burch’s work would be marvelled over in the aviation world for decades to come. His name was Brad Sutcliffe. Burch needed the project. It would ignite his career. But he worried Sutcliffe would find out about his shady past and change his mind at the last minute. He had no idea that Sutcliffe was an articulate, prudent man and had already done his home-work. He had studied Burch’s resume a hundred times over before approaching him in person. Burch possessed the knowledge, the experience, the drive, though something about his brief time in prison left Sutcliffe suspicious. To be certain, he’d ordered a police reference check on Burch where he learnt about his time in prison. However, that had been a long time ago, enough time for a person to change their ways, Sutcliffe felt. Everyone did something illegal when they were young, he appreciated that. Burch was uneducated. He was unmarried. But he lived with his sick mother and took care of her single-handedly and that said a lot about a man.

  “Well, you think you’re up to the challenge?” asked Sutcliffe.

  “You want me to build the biggest ever zero-pressure helium balloon that is resistant to the extreme cold and can withstand the conditions of the stratosphere?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I have to say, that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in all my life.” Burch laughed, a nervous laugh, while he considered the offer. “On one condition,” he said.

  Sutcliffe was expecting the designer to ask for more money, to have the balloon named after him in his honour, to be present at interviews, something that would give him worldwide recognition for his involvement.

  “I want to fly with you, up there,” he said. “I want to be part of your crew. You agree to that and you’ve got yourself a balloon.”

  As soon as he said it, he wondered why. Heights frightened him and he hated ballooning. And Sutcliffe had explained that they would be flying into the stratosphere, some twenty five miles high. Then again, throughout his life Burch had always been a nobody. Flying a balloon into space would make him a somebody.

  ‘I will need to discuss it with Simon Matthews, my business partner. I’ll be in touch.’

  Sutcliffe called the next day and said that he and Matthews had agreed, but there would be extensive training and several seminars to attend, and his payment for designing the balloon would need to be scaled down, though he added that the financial repercussions of success would surpass that of his initial fees. Burch agreed and put his nose to the grind immediately, working tirelessly day and night. Designing a space balloon was no easy enterprise. It took him a few years to come up with a super-thin, one-of-its-kind helium balloon put together with a transparent polyethylene material, making it more manoeuvrable and less susceptible to bad weather.

  Outside the Moorland Links Hotel, Burch found an empty space in the far corner of the car park and filled it with his old van. Ignoring the rain, he darted between the parked media vehicles and ran across the lawn to the hotel entrance, fixing his necktie over a crumpled white shirt. A beautiful woman wearing a business suit with long, black hair and tanned skin caught his eye. She was wearing large sunglasses and was leaning against a pillar in a slight pose. He smiled at her. She didn’t see him. Never mind. He had no time for women anyway. He entered the hotel foyer and hurried straight to the Chandelier Ballroom.

  Chapter 3

  The swell of the English Channel was making Claris Faraday feel boat-sick. The Wight-Link ferry from Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, which crossed the Solent to Lymington on the mainland, was only a thirty-minute crossing, but she couldn’t take much more. The sea was ferociously alive, the rain coming down like sharp arrows and several people on the observation deck had fallen prey to the spiteful venom of seasickness. When the boat finally docked at the Ferry Terminal Marina in Lymington Harbour, Faraday was pale and lightheaded, though she had managed to prevent herself from throwing up by the pure force of will. Now she was on country road A358 heading towards the Moorland Links Hotel. Just ten miles to Plymouth, the sign stated.

  Tears were streaking down Faraday’s face like the heavy rain down her windshield, obscuring her vision, and she was driving at a dangerous sixty miles per hour. The roads were nar
row but luckily not busy. Body numb, she felt as though she was floating across the asphalt of the A358. Lime Regis, Exeter and Dartmoor had become a single stretch of blurry land and memories as she headed further west. Dead ahead, a sheep casually walked into the road having escaped from a meadow via a snapped chain-link fence. It stood innocently in the path of Faraday’s hurtling Aston Martin. Only at the last moment did she see it and instinctively turned the wheel in a last-ditch effort to save the animal’s life. The sports car flew into an aggressive spin, adding to her giddiness. She heard a thud against the frame of her sports car. Then she stopped. She opened the door and vomited in the passenger foot well.

  “Oh God!” she yelled, banging her fists on the steering wheel.

  Realising that the sports car had stopped sideways in the road blocking lanes in both directions, she restarted the engine and drove slowly up the embankment. As soon as she stopped, something on her windshield appeared; a trickle of dark red fluid diluting in the rain followed by a little black foot. Then the whole sheep rolled down the windshield, leaving a smear of wet blood as it slipped onto the bonnet and off the side.