Читать книгу Passenger to Frankfurt - Агата Кристи, Agatha Christie, Detection Club The - Страница 9

‘Fasten your seat-belts, please.’ The diverse passengers in the plane were slow to obey. There was a general feeling that they couldn’t possibly be arriving at Geneva yet. The drowsy groaned and yawned. The more than drowsy had to be gently roused by an authoritative stewardess.

‘Your seat-belts, please.’

The dry voice came authoritatively over the Tannoy. It explained in German, in French, and in English that a short period of rough weather would shortly be experienced. Sir Stafford Nye opened his mouth to its full extent, yawned and pulled himself upright in his seat. He had been dreaming very happily of fishing an English river.

He was a man of forty-five, of medium height, with a smooth, olive, clean-shaven face. In dress he rather liked to affect the bizarre. A man of excellent family, he felt fully at ease indulging any such sartorial whims. If it made the more conventionally dressed of his colleagues wince occasionally, that was merely a source of malicious pleasure to him. There was something about him of the eighteenth-century buck. He liked to be noticed.

His particular kind of affectation when travelling was a kind of bandit’s cloak which he had once purchased in Corsica. It was of a very dark purply-blue, had a scarlet lining and had a kind of burnous hanging down behind which he could draw up over his head when he wished to, so as to obviate draughts.

Sir Stafford Nye had been a disappointment in diplomatic circles. Marked out in early youth by his gifts for great things, he had singularly failed to fulfil his early promise. A peculiar and diabolical sense of humour was wont to afflict him in what should have been his most serious moments. When it came to the point, he found that he always preferred to indulge his delicate Puckish malice to boring himself. He was a well-known figure in public life without ever having reached eminence. It was felt that Stafford Nye, though definitely brilliant, was not—and presumably never would be—a safe man. In these days of tangled politics and tangled foreign relations, safety, especially if one were to reach ambassadorial rank, was preferable to brilliance. Sir Stafford Nye was relegated to the shelf, though he was occasionally entrusted with such missions as needed the art of intrigue, but were not of too important or public a nature. Journalists sometimes referred to him as the dark horse of diplomacy.

Whether Sir Stafford himself was disappointed with his own career, nobody ever knew. Probably not even Sir Stafford himself. He was a man of a certain vanity, but he was also a man who very much enjoyed indulging his own proclivities for mischief.

He was returning now from a commission of inquiry in Malaya. He had found it singularly lacking in interest. His colleagues had, in his opinion, made up their minds beforehand what their findings were going to be. They saw and they listened, but their preconceived views were not affected. Sir Stafford had thrown a few spanners into the works, more for the hell of it than from any pronounced convictions. At all events, he thought, it had livened things up. He wished there were more possibilities of doing that sort of thing. His fellow members of the commission had been sound, dependable fellows, and remarkably dull. Even the well-known Mrs Nathaniel Edge, the only woman member, well known as having bees in her bonnet, was no fool when it came down to plain facts. She saw, she listened and she played safe.

He had met her before on the occasion of a problem to be solved in one of the Balkan capitals. It was there that Sir Stafford Nye had not been able to refrain from embarking on a few interesting suggestions. In that scandal-loving periodical Inside News it was insinuated that Sir Stafford Nye’s presence in that Balkan capital was intimately connected with Balkan problems, and that his mission was a secret one of the greatest delicacy. A kind of friend had sent Sir Stafford a copy of this with the relevant passage marked. Sir Stafford was not taken aback. He read it with a delighted grin. It amused him very much to reflect how ludicrously far from the truth the journalists were on this occasion. His presence in Sofiagrad had been due entirely to a blameless interest in the rarer wild flowers and to the urgencies of an elderly friend of his, Lady Lucy Cleghorn, who was indefatigable in her quest for these shy floral rarities, and who at any moment would scale a rock cliff or leap joyously into a bog at the sight of some flowerlet, the length of whose Latin name was in inverse proportion to its size.

A small band of enthusiasts had been pursuing this botanical search on the slopes of mountains for about ten days when it occurred to Sir Stafford that it was a pity the paragraph was not true. He was a little—just a little—tired of wild flowers and, fond as he was of dear Lucy, her ability despite her sixty-odd years to race up hills at top speed, easily outpacing him, sometimes annoyed him. Always just in front of him he saw the seat of those bright royal blue trousers and Lucy, though scraggy enough elsewhere, goodness knows, was decidedly too broad in the beam to wear royal blue corduroy trousers. A nice little international pie, he had thought, in which to dip his fingers, in which to play about …

In the aeroplane the metallic Tannoy voice spoke again. It told the passengers that owing to heavy fog at Geneva, the plane would be diverted to Frankfurt airport and proceed from there to London. Passengers to Geneva would be re-routed from Frankfurt as soon as possible. It made no difference to Sir Stafford Nye. If there was fog in London, he supposed they would re-route the plane to Prestwick. He hoped that would not happen. He had been to Prestwick once or twice too often. Life, he thought, and journeys by air, were really excessively boring. If only—he didn’t know—if only—what?

It was warm in the Transit Passenger Lounge at Frankfurt, so Sir Stafford Nye slipped back his cloak, allowing its crimson lining to drape itself spectacularly round his shoulders. He was drinking a glass of beer and listening with half an ear to the various announcements as they were made.

‘Flight 4387. Flying to Moscow. Flight 2381 bound for Egypt and Calcutta.’

Journeys all over the globe. How romantic it ought to be. But there was something about the atmosphere of a Passengers’ Lounge in an airport that chilled romance. It was too full of people, too full of things to buy, too full of similarly coloured seats, too full of plastic, too full of human beings, too full of crying children. He tried to remember who had said:

I wish I loved the Human Race;

I wish I loved its silly face.

Chesterton perhaps? It was undoubtedly true. Put enough people together and they looked so painfully alike that one could hardly bear it. An interesting face now, thought Sir Stafford. What a difference it would make. He looked disparagingly at two young women, splendidly made up, dressed in the national uniform of their country—England he presumed—of shorter and shorter miniskirts, and another young woman, even better made up—in fact quite good-looking—who was wearing what he believed to be called a culotte suit. She had gone a little further along the road of fashion.

He wasn’t very interested in nice-looking girls who looked like all the other nice-looking girls. He would like someone to be different. Someone sat down beside him on the plastic-covered artificial leather settee on which he was sitting. Her face attracted his attention at once. Not precisely because it was different, in fact he almost seemed to recognize it as a face he knew. Here was someone he had seen before. He couldn’t remember where or when but it was certainly familiar. Twenty-five or six, he thought, possibly, as to age. A delicate high-bridged aquiline nose, a black heavy bush of hair reaching to her shoulders. She had a magazine in front of her but she was not paying attention to it. She was, in fact, looking with something that was almost eagerness at him. Quite suddenly she spoke. It was a deep contralto voice, almost as deep as a man’s. It had a very faint foreign accent. She said,

‘Can I speak to you?’

He studied her for a moment before replying. No—not what one might have thought—this wasn’t a pick-up. This was something else.

‘I see no reason,’ he said, ‘why you should not do so. We have time to waste here, it seems.’

‘Fog,’ said the woman, ‘fog in Geneva, fog in London, perhaps. Fog everywhere. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Oh, you mustn’t worry,’ he said reassuringly, ‘they’ll land you somewhere all right. They’re quite efficient, you know. Where are you going?’

‘I was going to Geneva.’

‘Well, I expect you’ll get there in the end.’

‘I have to get there now. If I can get to Geneva, it will be all right. There is someone who will meet me there. I can be safe.’

‘Safe?’ He smiled a little.

She said, ‘Safe is a four-letter word but not the kind of four-letter word that people are interested in nowadays. And yet it can mean a lot. It means a lot to me.’ Then she said, ‘You see, if I can’t get to Geneva, if I have to leave this plane here, or go on in this plane to London with no arrangements made, I shall be killed.’ She looked at him sharply. ‘I suppose you don’t believe that.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘It’s quite true. People can be. They are, every day.’

‘Who wants to kill you?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Not to me.’

‘You can believe me if you wish to believe me. I am speaking the truth. I want help. Help to get to London safely.’

‘And why should you select me to help you?’

‘Because I think that you know something about death. You have known of death, perhaps seen death happen.’

He looked sharply at her and then away again.

‘Any other reason?’ he said.

‘Yes. This.’ She stretched out her narrow olive-skinned hand and touched the folds of the voluminous cloak. ‘This,’ she said.

For the first time his interest was aroused.

‘Now what do you mean by that?’

‘It’s unusual—characteristic. It’s not what everyone wears.’

‘True enough. It’s one of my affectations, shall we say?’

‘It’s an affectation that could be useful to me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I am asking you something. Probably you will refuse but you might not refuse because I think you are a man who is ready to take risks. Just as I am a woman who takes risks.’

‘I’ll listen to your project,’ he said, with a faint smile.

‘I want your cloak to wear. I want your passport. I want your boarding ticket for the plane. Presently, in twenty minutes or so, say, the flight for London will be called. I shall have your passport, I shall wear your cloak. And so I shall travel to London and arrive safely.’

‘You mean you’ll pass yourself off as me? My dear girl.’

She opened a handbag. From it she took a small square mirror.

‘Look there,’ she said. ‘Look at me and then look at your own face.’

He saw then, saw what had been vaguely nagging at his mind. His sister, Pamela, who had died about twenty years ago. They had always been very alike, he and Pamela. A strong family resemblance. She had had a slightly masculine type of face. His face, perhaps, had been, certainly in early life, of a slightly effeminate type. They had both had the high-bridged nose, the tilt of eyebrows, the slightly sideways smile of the lips. Pamela had been tall, five foot eight, he himself five foot ten. He looked at the woman who had tendered him the mirror.

‘There is a facial likeness between us, that’s what you mean, isn’t it? But my dear girl, it wouldn’t deceive anyone who knew me or knew you.’

‘Of course it wouldn’t. Don’t you understand? It doesn’t need to. I am travelling wearing slacks. You have been travelling with the hood of your cloak drawn up round your face. All I have to do is to cut off my hair, wrap it up in a twist of newspaper, throw it in one of the litter-baskets here. Then I put on your burnous, I have your boarding card, ticket, and passport. Unless there is someone who knows you well on this plane, and I presume there is not or they would have spoken to you already, then I can safely travel as you. Showing your passport when it’s necessary, keeping the burnous and cloak drawn up so that my nose and eyes and mouth are about all that are seen. I can walk out safely when the plane reaches its destination because no one will know I have travelled by it. Walk out safely and disappear into the crowds of the city of London.’

‘And what do I do?’ asked Sir Stafford, with a slight smile.

‘I can make a suggestion if you have the nerve to face it.’

‘Suggest,’ he said. ‘I always like to hear suggestions.’

‘You get up from here, you go away and buy a magazine or a newspaper, or a gift at the gift counter. You leave your cloak hanging here on the seat. When you come back with whatever it is, you sit down somewhere else—say at the end of that bench opposite here. There will be a glass in front of you, this glass still. In it there will be something that will send you to sleep. Sleep in a quiet corner.’

‘What happens next?’

‘You will have been presumably the victim of a robbery,’ she said. ‘Somebody will have added a few knock-out drops to your drink, and will have stolen your wallet from you. Something of that kind. You declare your identity, say that your passport and things are stolen. You can easily establish your identity.’

‘You know who I am? My name, I mean?’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen your passport yet. I’ve no idea who you are.’

‘And yet you say I can establish my identity easily.’

‘I am a good judge of people. I know who is important or who isn’t. You are an important person.’

‘And why should I do all this?’

‘Perhaps to save the life of a fellow human being.’

‘Isn’t that rather a highly coloured story?’

‘Oh yes. Quite easily not believed. Do you believe it?’

He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘You know what you’re talking like? A beautiful spy in a thriller.’

‘Yes, perhaps. But I am not beautiful.’

‘And you’re not a spy?’

‘I might be so described, perhaps. I have certain information. Information I want to preserve. You will have to take my word for it, it is information that would be valuable to your country.’

‘Don’t you think you’re being rather absurd?’

‘Yes I do. If this was written down it would look absurd. But so many absurd things are true, aren’t they?’

He looked at her again. She was very like Pamela. Her voice, although foreign in intonation, was like Pamela’s. What she proposed was ridiculous, absurd, quite impossible, and probably dangerous. Dangerous to him. Unfortunately, though, that was what attracted him. To have the nerve to suggest such a thing to him! What would come of it all? It would be interesting, certainly, to find out.

‘What do I get out of it?’ he said. ‘That’s what I’d like to know.’

She looked at him consideringly. ‘Diversion,’ she said. ‘Something out of the everyday happenings? An antidote to boredom, perhaps. We’ve not got very long. It’s up to you.’

‘And what happens to your passport? Do I have to buy myself a wig, if they sell such a thing, at the counter? Do I have to impersonate a female?’

‘No. There’s no question of exchanging places. You have been robbed and drugged but you remain yourself. Make up your mind. There isn’t long. Time is passing very quickly. I have to do my own transformation.’

‘You win,’ he said. ‘One mustn’t refuse the unusual, if it is offered to one.’

‘I hoped you might feel that way, but it was a toss-up.’

From his pocket Stafford Nye took out his passport. He slipped it into the outer pocket of the cloak he had been wearing. He rose to his feet, yawned, looked round him, looked at his watch, and strolled over to the counter where various goods were displayed for sale. He did not even look back. He bought a paperback book and fingered some small woolly animals, a suitable gift for some child. Finally he chose a panda. He looked round the lounge, came back to where he had been sitting. The cloak was gone and so had the girl. A half glass of beer was on the table still. Here, he thought, is where I take the risk. He picked up the glass, moved away a little, and drank it. Not quickly. Quite slowly. It tasted much the same as it had tasted before.

‘Now I wonder,’ said Sir Stafford. ‘Now I wonder.’

He walked across the lounge to a far corner. There was a somewhat noisy family sitting there, laughing and talking together. He sat down near them, yawned, let his head fall back on the edge of the cushion. A flight was announced leaving for Teheran. A large number of passengers got up and went to queue by the requisite numbered gate. The lounge still remained half full. He opened his paperback book. He yawned again. He was really sleepy now, yes, he was very sleepy … He must just think out where it was best for him to go off to sleep. Somewhere he could remain …

Trans-European Airways announced the departure of their plane, Flight 309 for London.

Quite a good sprinkling of passengers rose to their feet to obey the summons. By this time though, more passengers had entered the transit lounge waiting for other planes. Announcements followed as to fog at Geneva and other disabilities of travel. A slim man of middle height wearing a dark blue cloak with its red lining showing and with a hood drawn up over a close-cropped head, not noticeably more untidy than many of the heads of young men nowadays, walked across the floor to take his place in the queue for the plane. Showing a boarding ticket, he passed out through gate No. 9.

More announcements followed. Swissair flying to Zürich. BEA to Athens and Cyprus—and then a different type of announcement.

‘Will Miss Daphne Theodofanous, passenger to Geneva, kindly come to the flight desk. Plane to Geneva is delayed owing to fog. Passengers will travel by way of Athens. The aeroplane is now ready to leave.’

Other announcements followed dealing with passengers to Japan, to Egypt, to South Africa, air lines spanning the world. Mr Sidney Cook, passenger to South Africa, was urged to come to the flight desk where there was a message for him. Daphne Theodofanous was called for again.

‘This is the last call before the departure of Flight 309.’

In a corner of the lounge a little girl was looking up at a man in a dark suit who was fast asleep, his head resting against the cushion of the red settee. In his hand he held a small woolly panda.

The little girl’s hand stretched out towards the panda. Her mother said:

‘Now, Joan, don’t touch that. The poor gentleman’s asleep.’

‘Where is he going?’

‘Perhaps he’s going to Australia too,’ said her mother, ‘like we are.’

‘Has he got a little girl like me?’

‘I think he must have,’ said her mother.

The little girl sighed and looked at the panda again. Sir Stafford Nye continued to sleep. He was dreaming that he was trying to shoot a leopard. A very dangerous animal, he was saying to the safari guide who was accompanying him. ‘A very dangerous animal, so I’ve always heard. You can’t trust a leopard.’

The dream switched at that moment, as dreams have a habit of doing, and he was having tea with his Great-Aunt Matilda, and trying to make her hear. She was deafer than ever! He had not heard any of the announcements except the first one for Miss Daphne Theodofanous. The little girl’s mother said:

‘I’ve always wondered, you know, about a passenger that’s missing. Nearly always, whenever you go anywhere by air, you hear it. Somebody they can’t find. Somebody who hasn’t heard the call or isn’t on the plane or something like that. I always wonder who it is and what they’re doing, and why they haven’t come. I suppose this Miss What’s-a-name or whatever it is will just have missed her plane. What will they do with her then?’

Nobody was able to answer her question because nobody had the proper information.