Читать книгу Destination Unknown - Агата Кристи, Agatha Christie, Detection Club The - Страница 8

‘Flight 108 to Paris. Air France. This way please.’

The persons in the lounge at Heathrow Airport rose to their feet. Hilary Craven picked up her small, lizard-skin travelling case and moved in the wake of the others, out on to the tarmac. The wind blew sharply cold after the heated air of the lounge.

Hilary shivered and drew her furs a little closer round her. She followed the other passengers across to where the aircraft was waiting. This was it! She was off, escaping! Out of the greyness, the coldness, the dead numb misery. Escaping to sunshine and blue skies and a new life. She would leave all this weight behind, this dead weight of misery and frustration. She went up the gangway of her plane, bending her head as she passed inside and was shown by the steward to her seat. For the first time in months she savoured relief from a pain that had been so sharply acute as almost to be physical. ‘I shall get away,’ she said to herself, hopefully. ‘I shall get away.’

The roaring and the revolutions of the plane excited her. There seemed a kind of elemental savagery in it. Civilized misery, she thought, is the worst misery. Grey and hopeless. ‘But now,’ she thought, ‘I shall escape.’

The plane taxied gently along the runway. The air hostess said:

‘Fasten your belts, please.’

The plane made a half-turn and stood waiting its signal to depart. Hilary thought, ‘Perhaps the plane will crash … Perhaps it will never rise off the ground. Then that will be the end, that will be the solution to everything.’ They seemed to wait for ages out on the airfield. Waiting for the signal to start off to freedom, Hilary thought, absurdly: ‘I shall never get away, never. I shall be kept here—a prisoner …’

Ah, at last.

A final roar of engines, then the plane started forward. Quicker, quicker, racing along. Hilary thought: ‘It won’t rise. It can’t … this is the end.’ Ah, they were above the ground now, it seemed. Not so much that the plane rose as that the earth was falling away, dropping down, thrusting its problems and its disappointments and its frustrations beneath the soaring creature rising up so proudly into the clouds. Up they went, circling round, the aerodrome looking like a ridiculous child’s toy beneath. Funny little roads, strange little railways with toy trains on them. A ridiculous childish world where people loved and hated and broke their hearts. None of it mattered because they were all so ridiculous and so prettily small and unimportant. Now there were clouds below them, a dense, greyish-white mass. They must be over the Channel now. Hilary leaned back, closing her eyes. Escape. Escape. She had left England, left Nigel, left the sad little mound that was Brenda’s grave. All left behind. She opened her eyes, closed them again with a long sigh. She slept …

When Hilary awoke, the plane was coming down. ‘Paris,’ thought Hilary, as she sat up in her seat and reached for her handbag. But it was not Paris. The air hostess came down the car saying, with that nursery governess brightness that some travellers found so annoying:

‘We are landing you at Beauvais as the fog is very thick in Paris.’

The suggestion in her manner was: ‘Won’t that be nice, children?’ Hilary peered down through the small space of window at her side. She could see little. Beauvais also appeared to be wreathed in fog. The plane was circling round slowly. It was some time before it finally made its landing. Then the passengers were marshalled through cold, damp mist into a rough wooden building with a few chairs and a long wooden counter.

Depression settled down on Hilary but she tried to fight it off. A man near her murmured:

‘An old war aerodrome. No heating or comforts here. Still, fortunately, being the French, they’ll serve us out some drinks.’

True enough, almost immediately a man came along with some keys and presently passengers were being served with various forms of alcoholic refreshments to boost their morale. It helped to buoy the passengers up for the long and irritating wait.

Some hours passed before anything happened. Other planes appeared out of the fog and landed, also diverted from Paris. Soon the small room was crowded with cold, irritable people grumbling about the delay.

To Hilary it all had an unreal quality. It was as though she was still in a dream, mercifully protected from contact with reality. This was only a delay, only a matter of waiting. She was still on her journey—her journey of escape. She was still getting away from it all, still going towards that spot where her life would start again. Her mood held. Held through the long, fatiguing delay, held through the moments of chaos when it was announced, long after dark, that buses had come to convey the travellers to Paris.

There was then a wild confusion, of coming and going, passengers, officials, porters all carrying baggage, hurrying and colliding in the darkness. In the end Hilary found herself, her feet and legs icy cold, in a bus slowly rumbling its way through the fog towards Paris.

It was a long weary drive taking four hours. It was midnight when they arrived at the Invalides and Hilary was thankful to collect her baggage and drive to the hotel where accommodation was reserved for her. She was too tired to eat—just had a hot bath and tumbled into bed.

The plane to Casablanca was due to leave Orly Airport at ten-thirty the following morning, but when they arrived at Orly everything was confusion. Planes had been grounded in many parts of Europe, arrivals had been delayed as well as departures.

A harassed clerk at the departure desk shrugged his shoulders and said:

‘Impossible for Madame to go on the flight where she had reservations! The schedules have all had to be changed. If Madame will take a seat for a little minute, presumably all will arrange itself.’

In the end she was summoned and told that there was a place on a plane going to Dakar which normally did not touch down at Casablanca but would do so on this occasion.

‘You will arrive three hours later, that is all, Madame, on this later service.’

Hilary acquiesced without protest and the official seemed surprised and positively delighted by her attitude.

‘Madame has no conceptions of the difficulties that have been made to me this morning,’ he said. ‘Enfin, they are unreasonable, Messieurs the travellers. It is not I who made the fog! Naturally it has caused the disruptions. One must accommodate oneself with the good humour—that is what I say, however displeasing it is to have one’s plans altered. Après tout, Madame, a little delay of an hour or two hours or three hours, what does it matter? How can it matter by what plane one arrives at Casablanca.’

Yet on that particular day it mattered more than the little Frenchman knew when he spoke those words. For when Hilary finally arrived and stepped out into the sunshine on to the tarmac, the porter who was moving beside her with his piled-up trolley of luggage observed:

‘You have the lucky chance, Madame, not to have been on the plane before this, the regular plane for Casablanca.’

Hilary said: ‘Why, what happened?’

The man looked uneasily to and fro, but after all, the news could not be kept secret. He lowered his voice confidentially and leant towards her.

‘Mauvaise affaire!’ he muttered. ‘It crashed—landing. The pilot and the navigator are dead and most of the passengers. Four or five were alive and have been taken to hospital. Some of those are badly hurt.’

Hilary’s first reaction was a kind of blinding anger. Almost unprompted there leapt into her mind the thought, ‘Why wasn’t I in that plane? If I had been, it would have been all over now—I should be dead, out of it all. No more heartaches, no more misery. The people in that plane wanted to live. And I—I don’t care. Why shouldn’t it have been me?’

She passed through the Customs, a perfunctory affair, and drove with her baggage to the hotel. It was a glorious, sunlit afternoon, with the sun just sinking to rest. The clear air and golden light—it was all as she had pictured it. She had arrived! She had left the fog, the cold, the darkness of London; she had left behind her misery and indecision and suffering. Here there was pulsating life and colour and sunshine.

She crossed her bedroom and threw open the shutters, looking out into the street. Yes, it was all as she had pictured it would be. Hilary turned slowly away from the window and sat down on the side of the bed. Escape, escape! That was the refrain that had hummed incessantly in her mind ever since she left England. Escape. Escape. And now she knew—knew with a horrible, stricken coldness, that there was no escape.

Everything was just the same here as it had been in London. She herself, Hilary Craven, was the same. It was from Hilary Craven that she was trying to escape, and Hilary Craven was Hilary Craven in Morocco just as much as she had been Hilary Craven in London. She said very softly to herself:

‘What a fool I’ve been—what a fool I am. Why did I think that I’d feel differently if I got away from England?’

Brenda’s grave, that small pathetic mound, was in England and Nigel would shortly be marrying his new wife in England. Why had she imagined that those two things would matter less to her here? Wishful thinking, that was all. Well, that was all over now. She was up against reality. The reality of herself and what she could bear, and what she could not bear. One could bear things, Hilary thought, so long as there was a reason for bearing them. She had borne her own long illness, she had borne Nigel’s defection and the cruel and brutal circumstances in which it had operated. She had borne these things because there was Brenda. Then had come the long, slow, losing fight for Brenda’s life—the final defeat … Now there was nothing to live for any longer. It had taken the journey to Morocco to prove that to her. In London she had had a queer, confused feeling that if only she could get somewhere else she could forget what lay behind her and start again. And so she had booked her journey to this place which had no associations with the past, a place quite new to her which had the qualities she loved so much: sunlight, pure air and the strangeness of new people and things. Here, she had thought, things will be different. But they were not different. They were the same. The facts were quite simple and inescapable. She, Hilary Craven, had no longer any wish to go on living. It was as simple as that.

If the fog had not intervened, if she had travelled on the plane on which her reservations had been made, then her problem might have been solved by now. She might be lying in some French official mortuary, a body broken and battered with her spirit at peace, freed from suffering. Well, the same end could be achieved, but she would have to take a little trouble.

It would have been so easy if she had had sleeping-stuff with her. She remembered how she had asked Dr Grey and the rather queer look on his face as he had answered:

‘Better not. Much better to learn to sleep naturally. May be hard at first, but it will come.’

A queer look on his face. Had he known then or suspected that it would come to this? Oh, well, it should not be difficult. She rose to her feet with decision. She would go out now to a chemist’s shop.

Hilary had always imagined that drugs were easy to buy in foreign cities. Rather to her surprise, she found that this was not so. The chemist she went to first supplied her with only two doses. For more than that amount, he said, a doctor’s prescription would be advisable. She thanked him smilingly and nonchalantly and went rather quickly out of the shop, colliding as she did so with a tall, rather solemn-faced young man, who apologized in English. She heard him asking for toothpaste as she left the shop.

Somehow that amused her. Toothpaste. It seemed so ridiculous, so normal, so everyday. Then a sharp pang pierced her, for the toothpaste he had asked for was the brand that Nigel had always preferred. She crossed the street and went into a shop opposite. She had been to four chemists’ shops by the time she returned to the hotel. It had amused her a little that in the third shop the owlish young man had again appeared, once more asking obstinately for his particular brand of toothpaste which evidently was not one commonly stocked by French chemists in Casablanca.

Hilary felt almost lighthearted as she changed her frock and made up her face before going down for dinner. She purposely went down as late as possible since she was anxious not to encounter any of her fellow-travellers or the personnel of the aeroplane. That was hardly likely in any case, since the plane had gone on to Dakar, and she thought that she had been the only person put off at Casablanca.

The restaurant was almost empty by the time she came into it, though she noticed that the young Englishman with the owl-like face was just finishing his meal at the table by the wall. He was reading a French newspaper and seemed quite absorbed in it.

Hilary ordered herself a good meal with a half-bottle of wine. She was feeling a heady kind of excitement. She thought to herself, ‘What is this after all, but the last adventure?’ Then she ordered a bottle of Vichy water to be sent up to her room and went straight up after leaving the dining-room.

The waiter brought the Vichy, uncapped it, placed it on the table, and wishing her good night, left the room. Hilary drew a sigh of relief. As he closed the door after him, she went to it and turned the key in the lock. She took from the drawer of the dressing-table the four little packets she had obtained from the chemists’, and unwrapped them. She laid the tablets out on the table and poured herself out a glass of Vichy water. Since the drug was in tablet form, she had only to swallow the tablets, and wash them down with the Vichy water.

She undressed, wrapped her dressing-gown round her and came back to sit by the table. Her heart beat faster. She felt something like fear now, but the fear was half fascination and not the kind of flinching that would have tempted her to abandon her plan. She was quite calm and clear about that. This was escape at last—real escape. She looked at the writing-table, debating whether she would leave a note. She decided against it. She had no relations, no close or dear friends, there was nobody to whom she wished to say goodbye. As for Nigel, she had no wish to burden him with useless remorse even if a note from her would have achieved that object. Nigel would read presumably in the paper that a Mrs Hilary Craven had died of an overdose of sleeping-tablets in Casablanca. It would probably be quite a small paragraph. He would accept it at its face value. ‘Poor old Hilary,’ he would say, ‘bad luck’—and it might be that, secretly, he would be rather relieved. Because she guessed that she was, slightly, on Nigel’s conscience, and he was a man who wished to feel comfortable with himself.

Already Nigel seemed very far away and curiously unimportant. There was nothing more to be done. She would swallow the pills and lie down on her bed and sleep. From that sleep she would not wake. She had not, or thought she had not, any religious feeling. Brenda’s death had shut down on all that. So there was nothing more to consider. She was once again a traveller as she had been at Heathrow Airport, a traveller waiting to depart for an unknown destination, unencumbered by baggage, unaffected by farewells. For the first time in her life she was free, entirely free, to act as she wished to act. Already the past was cut away from her. The long aching misery that had dragged her down in her waking hours was gone. Yes. Light, free, unencumbered! Ready to start on her journey.

She stretched out her hand towards the first tablet. As she did so there came a soft, discreet tap on the door. Hilary frowned. She sat there, her hand arrested in mid-air. Who was it—a chambermaid? No, the bed had already been turned down. Somebody, perhaps, about papers or passport? She shrugged her shoulders. She would not answer the door. Why should she bother? Presently whoever it was would go away and come back at some further opportunity.

The knock came again, a little louder this time. But Hilary did not move. There could be no real urgency, and whoever it was would soon go away.

Her eyes were on the door, and suddenly they widened with astonishment. The key was slowly turning backwards round the lock. It jerked forward and fell on the floor with a metallic clang. Then the handle turned, the door opened and a man came in. She recognized him as the solemn, owlish young man who had been buying toothpaste. Hilary stared at him. She was too startled for the moment to say or do anything. The young man turned round, shut the door, picked the key up from the floor, put it into the lock and turned it. Then he came across towards her and sat down in a chair the other side of the table. He said, and it seemed to her a most incongruous remark:

‘My name’s Jessop.’

The colour rose sharply in Hilary’s face. She leaned forward. She said with cold anger:

‘What do you think you’re doing here, may I ask?’

He looked at her solemnly—and blinked.

‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I came to ask you that.’ He gave a quick sideways nod towards the preparations on the table. Hilary said sharply:

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Oh yes, you do.’

Hilary paused, struggling for words. There were so many things she wanted to say. To express indignation. To order him out of the room. But strangely enough, it was curiosity that won the day. The question rose to her lips so naturally that she was almost unaware of asking it.

‘That key,’ she said, ‘it turned, of itself, in the lock?’

‘Oh, that!’ The young man gave a sudden boyish grin that transformed his face. He put his hand into his pocket and, taking out a metal instrument, he handed it to her to examine.

‘There you are,’ he said, ‘very handy little tool. Insert it into the lock the other side, it grips the key and turns it.’ He took it back from her and put it in his pocket. ‘Burglars use them,’ he said.

‘So you’re a burglar?’

‘No, no, Mrs Craven, do me justice. I did knock, you know. Burglars don’t knock. Then, when it seemed you weren’t going to let me in, I used this.’

‘But why?’

Again her visitor’s eyes strayed to the preparations on the table.

‘I shouldn’t do it if I were you,’ he said. ‘It isn’t a bit what you think, you know. You think you just go to sleep and you don’t wake up. But it’s not quite like that. All sorts of unpleasant effects. Convulsions sometimes, gangrene of the skin. If you’re resistant to the drug, it takes a long time to work, and someone gets to you in time and then all sorts of unpleasant things happen. Stomach pump. Castor oil, hot coffee, slapping and pushing. All very undignified, I assure you.’

Hilary leaned back in her chair, her eyelids narrowed. She clenched her hands slightly. She forced herself to smile.

‘What a ridiculous person you are,’ she said. ‘Do you imagine that I was committing suicide, or something like that?’

‘Not only imagine it,’ said the young man called Jessop, ‘I’m quite sure of it. I was in that chemist’s, you know, when you came in. Buying toothpaste, as a matter of fact. Well, they hadn’t got the sort I like, so I went to another shop. And there you were, asking for sleeping-pills again. Well, I thought that was a bit odd, you know, so I followed you. All those sleeping-pills at different places. It could only add up to one thing.’

His tone was friendly, off-hand, but quite assured. Looking at him Hilary Craven abandoned pretence.

‘Then don’t you think it is unwarrantable impertinence on your part to try and stop me?’

He considered the point for a moment or two. Then he shook his head.

‘No. It’s one of those things that you can’t not do—if you understand.’

Hilary spoke with energy. ‘You can stop me for the moment. I mean you can take the pills away—throw them out of the window or something like that—but you can’t stop me from buying more another day or throwing myself down from the top floor of the building, or jumping in front of a train.’

The young man considered this.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I agree I can’t stop you doing any of those things. But it’s a question, you know, whether you will do them. Tomorrow, that is.’

‘You think I shall feel differently tomorrow?’ asked Hilary, faint bitterness in her tone.

‘People do,’ said Jessop, almost apologetically.

‘Yes, perhaps,’ she considered. ‘If you’re doing things in a mood of hot despair. But when it’s cold despair, it’s different. I’ve nothing to live for, you see.’

Jessop put his rather owlish head on one side, and blinked.

‘Interesting,’ he remarked.

‘Not really. Not interesting at all. I’m not a very interesting woman. My husband, whom I loved, left me, my only child died very painfully of meningitis. I’ve no near friends or relations. I’ve no vocation, no art or craft or work that I love doing.’

‘Tough,’ said Jessop appreciatively. He added, rather hesitantly: ‘You don’t think of it as—wrong?’

Hilary said heatedly: ‘Why should it be wrong? It’s my life.’

‘Oh yes, yes,’ Jessop repeated hastily. ‘I’m not taking a high moral line myself, but there are people, you know, who think it’s wrong.’

Hilary said:

‘I’m not one of them.’

Mr Jessop said, rather inadequately:

‘Quite.’

He sat there looking at her, blinking his eyes thoughtfully.

Hilary said:

‘So perhaps now, Mr—er—’

‘Jessop,’ said the young man.

‘So perhaps now, Mr Jessop, you will leave me alone.’

But Jessop shook his head.

‘Not just yet,’ he said. ‘I wanted to know, you see, just what was behind it all. I’ve got it clear now, have I? You’re not interested in life, you don’t want to live any longer, you more or less welcome the idea of death?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ said Jessop, cheerfully. ‘So now we know where we are. Let’s go on to the next step. Has it got to be sleeping pills?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I’ve already told you that they’re not as romantic as they sound. Throwing yourself off a building isn’t too nice, either. You don’t always die at once. And the same applies to falling under a train. What I’m getting at is that there are other ways.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘I’m suggesting another method. Rather a sporting method, really. There’s some excitement in it, too. I’ll be fair with you. There’s just a hundred to one chance that you mightn’t die. But I don’t believe under the circumstances, that you’d really object by that time.’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Of course you haven’t,’ said Jessop. ‘I’ve not begun to tell you about it yet. I’m afraid I’ll have to make rather a thing about it—tell you a story, I mean. Shall I go ahead?’

‘I suppose so.’

Jessop paid no attention to the grudgingness of the assent. He started off in his most owl-like manner.

‘You’re the sort of woman who reads the papers and keeps up with things generally, I expect,’ he said. ‘You’ll have read about the disappearance of various scientists from time to time. There was that Italian chap about a year ago, and about two months ago a young scientist called Thomas Betterton disappeared.’

Hilary nodded. ‘Yes, I read about that in the papers.’

‘Well, there’s been a good deal more than has appeared in the papers. More people, I mean, have disappeared. They haven’t always been scientists. Some of them have been young men who were engaged in important medical research. Some of them have been research chemists, some of them have been physicists, there was one barrister. Oh, quite a lot here and there and everywhere. Well, ours is a so-called free country. You can leave it if you like. But in these peculiar circumstances we’ve got to know why these people left it and where they went, and, also important, how they went. Did they go of their own free will? Were they kidnapped? Were they blackmailed into going? What route did they take—what kind of organization is it that sets this in motion and what is its ultimate aim? Lots of questions. We want the answer to them. You might be able to help get us that answer.’

Hilary stared at him.

‘Me? How? Why?’

‘I’m coming down to the particular case of Thomas Betterton. He disappeared from Paris just over two months ago. He left a wife in England. She was distracted—or said she was distracted. She swore that she had no idea why he’d gone or where or how. That may be true, or it may not. Some people—and I’m one of them—think it wasn’t true.’

Hilary leaned forward in her chair. In spite of herself she was becoming interested. Jessop went on.

‘We prepared to keep a nice, unobtrusive eye on Mrs Betterton. About a fortnight ago she came to me and told me she had been ordered by her doctor to go abroad, take a thorough rest and get some distraction. She was doing no good in England, and people were continually bothering her—newspaper reporters, relations, kind friends.’

Hilary said dryly: ‘I can imagine it.’

‘Yes, tough. Quite natural she would want to get away for a bit.’

‘Quite natural, I should think.’

‘But we’ve got nasty, suspicious minds in our department, you know. We arranged to keep tabs on Mrs Betterton. Yesterday she left England as arranged, for Casablanca.’

‘Casablanca?’

‘Yes—en route to other places in Morocco, of course. All quite open and above board, plans made, bookings ahead. But it may be that this trip to Morocco is where Mrs Betterton steps off into the unknown.’

Hilary shrugged her shoulders.

‘I don’t see where I come into all this.’

Jessop smiled.

‘You come into it because you’ve got a very magnificent head of red hair, Mrs Craven.’

‘Hair?’

‘Yes. It’s the most noticeable thing about Mrs Betterton—her hair. You’ve heard, perhaps, that the plane before yours today crashed on landing.’

‘I know. I should have been on that plane. I actually had reservations for it.’

‘Interesting,’ said Jessop. ‘Well, Mrs Betterton was on that plane. She wasn’t killed. She was taken out of the wreckage still alive, and she is in hospital now. But according to the doctor, she won’t be alive tomorrow morning.’

A faint glimmer of light came to Hilary. She looked at him inquiringly.

‘Yes,’ said Jessop, ‘perhaps now you see the form of suicide I’m offering you. I’m suggesting that you should become Mrs Betterton.’

‘But surely,’ said Hilary, ‘that would be quite impossible. I mean, they’d know at once she wasn’t me.’

Jessop put his head on one side.

‘That, of course, depends entirely on who you mean by “they”. It’s a very vague term. Who is or are “they”? Is there such a thing, are there such persons as “they”? We don’t know. But I can tell you this. If the most popular explanation of “they” is accepted, then these people work in very close, self-contained cells. They do that for their own security. If Mrs Betterton’s journey had a purpose and is planned, then the people who were in charge of it here will know nothing about the English side of it. At the appointed moment they will contact a certain woman at a certain place, and carry on from there. Mrs Betterton’s passport description is 5ft. 7, red hair, blue-green eyes, mouth medium, no distinguishing marks. Good enough.’

‘But the authorities here. Surely they—’

Jessop smiled. ‘That part of it will be quite all right. The French have lost a few valuable young scientists and chemists of their own. They’ll co-operate. The facts will be as follows. Mrs Betterton, suffering from concussion, is taken to hospital. Mrs Craven, another passenger in the crashed plane, will also be admitted to hospital. Within a day or two Mrs Craven will die in hospital, and Mrs Betterton will be discharged, suffering slightly from concussion, but able to proceed on her tour. The crash was genuine, the concussion is genuine, and concussion makes a very good cover for you. It excuses a lot of things like lapses of memory, and various unpredictable behaviour.’

Hilary said:

‘It would be madness!’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Jessop, ‘it’s madness, all right. It’s a very tough assignment and if our suspicions are realized, you’ll probably cop it. You see, I’m being quite frank, but according to you, you’re prepared and anxious to cop it. As an alternative to throwing yourself in front of a train or something like that, I should think you’d find it far more amusing.’

Suddenly and unexpectedly Hilary laughed.

‘I do believe,’ she said, ‘that you’re quite right.’

‘You’ll do it?’

‘Yes. Why not?’

‘In that case,’ said Jessop, rising in his seat with sudden energy, ‘there’s absolutely no time to be lost.’