Kelly Tropper

Who they are

A local: she pulls pints at The Downside Man in Upshott, keeps a sketchpad, and flies a Cessna from the strip beside the MoD range. She is River Cartwright’s lover for the three weeks he spends in the village as the novelist Jonathan Walker, and she is the one person in his Upshott who is not playing a part.

That is what makes her useful. She flies because it is “the most alive you can ever be”, and she makes no secret of wanting to be watched while she does it — a wanting that a man with a plan can aim. She takes a planeload of leaflets towards London taking it for a stunt, expecting to be escorted home, arrested and fined, looking forward to being read about. The leaflets provoke the alert that empties the City and empties the Needle, which is precisely what the operation required, and she is the one component of it that works perfectly.

What they want

To be at the centre of something, and to be seen being brave in it. Everything else — the pub, the aeroplane, River — is either the vehicle or the waiting.

Book 2 — Dead Lions

• C07 — Is three weeks into an affair with River and still will not take him up in the aircraft; her sketchpad’s last page is a tower struck by lightning.
• C09 — Teases him across the bar, stands at the centre of the flying club’s old group photograph, and is booked to fly the next day.
• C13 — Takes the Skyhawk up with Damien Butterfield and a cargo she takes for a stunt, and looks forward to being read about.
• C15 — Refuses the radio, remembering that Tommy Moult offered her a way of proving her bravery, and flies on towards the City.

Tells

The teasing register, applied to everything, including a man she has decided to like. The sketchpad. The refusal to carry passengers. And the habit of naming a fear and dismissing it in the same breath — the deeper engine note under the propeller, the future in which she is an object lesson, both heard and both put aside.

Open questions

Whether she knew the drop would empty the City, or only that it was a stunt. What Moult told her he was, and why she believed him. What happens to her after the intercept — the book moves on without saying.