Agatha Christie - Passenger to Frankfurt

'None of us knows. Not exactly,' he said.

'What am I supposed to have got hidden here that someone comes fiddling and looking for?'

'Frankly, I haven't the least idea, Sir Stafford.'

'Well, that's a pity because I haven't either.'

'As far as you know you haven't got anything. Nobody gave you anything to keep, to take anywhere, to look after?'

'Nothing whatsoever. If you mean Mary Ann, she said she wanted her life saved, that's all.'

'And unless there's a paragraph in the evening papers, you have saved her life.'

'It seems rather the end of the chapter, doesn't it? A pity. My curiosity is rising. I find I want to know very much what's going to happen next. All you people seem very pessimistic.'

'Frankly, we are. Things are going badly in this country. Can you wonder?'

'I know what you mean. I sometimes wonder myself –'

'Do you mind if I tell you something, old man?' said Eric Pugh.

Sir Stafford Nye looked at him. He had known Eric Pugh for a good many years. They had not been close friends. Old Eric, or so Sir Stafford thought, was rather a boring friend. He was, on the other hand, faithful. And he was the type of man who, though not amusing, had a knack of knowing things. People said things to him and he remembered what they said and stored them up. Sometimes he could push out a useful bit of information.

'Come back from that Malay Conference, haven't you?'

'Yes,' said Sir Stafford.

'Anything particular turn up there?'

'Just the usual,' said Sir Stafford.

'Oh. I wondered if something had — well, you know what I mean. Anything had occurred to put the cat among the pigeons.'

'What, at the Conference? No, just painfully predictable. Everyone said just what you thought they'd say only they said it unfortunately at rather greater length than you could have imagined possible. I don't know why I go on these things.'

Eric Pugh made a rather tedious remark or two as to what the Chinese were really up to.

'I don't think they're really up to anything,' said Sir Stafford. 'All the usual rumours, you know, about the diseases poor old Mao has got and who's intriguing against him and why.'

'And what about the Arab-Israeli business?'

'That's proceeding according to plan also. Their plan, that is to say. And anyway, what's that got to do with Malaya ?'

'Well, I didn't really mean so much Malaya .'

'You're looking rather like the Mock Turtle,' said Sir Stafford Nye. '"Soup of the evening, beautiful soup." Wherefore this gloom?'

'Well, I just wondered if you'd — you'll forgive me, will you? — I mean you haven't done anything to blot your copybook, have you, in any way?'

'I?' said Sir Stafford, looking highly surprised.

'Well, you know what you're like, Staff. You like giving people a jolt sometimes, don't you?'

'I have behaved impeccably of late,' said Sir Stafford. 'What have you been hearing about me?'

'I hear there was some trouble about something that happened in a plane on your way home.'

'Oh? Who did you hear that from?'

'Well, you know, I saw old Cartison.'

'Terrible old bore. Always imagining things that haven't happened.'

'Yes, I know. I know he is like that. But he was just saying that somebody or other — Winterton, at least — seemed to think you'd been up to something.'

'Up to something? I wish I had,' said Sir Stafford Nye.

'There's some espionage racket going on somewhere and he got a bit worried about certain people.'

'What do they think I am — another Philby, something of that kind?'

'You know you're very unwise sometimes in the things you say, the things you make jokes about.'

'It's very hard to resist sometimes,' his friend told him. 'All these politicians and diplomats and the rest of them. They're so bloody solemn. You'd like to give them a bit of a stir up now and again.'

'Your sense of fun is very distorted, my boy. It really is. I worry about you sometimes. They wanted to ask you some questions about something that happened on the flight back and they seem to think that you didn't, well — that perhaps you didn't exactly speak the truth about it all.'

'Ah, that's what they think, is it? Interesting. I think I must work that up a bit.'

'Now don't do anything rash.'

'I must have my moments of fun sometimes.'

'Look here, old fellow, you don't want to go and ruin your career just by indulging your sense of humour.'

'I am quickly coming to the conclusion that there is nothing so boring as having a career.'

'I know, I know. You are always inclined to take that point of view, and you haven't got on as far as you ought to have, you know. You were in the running for Vienna at one time. I don't like to see you muck up things.'

'I am behaving with the utmost sobriety and virtue, I assure you,' said Sir Stafford Nye. He added, 'Cheer up, Eric. You're a good friend, but really, I'm not guilty of fun and games.'

Eric shook his head doubtfully.

It was a fine evening. Sir Stafford walked home across Green Park . As he crossed the road in Birdcage Walk, a car leaping down the street missed him by a few inches. Sir Stafford was an athletic man. His leap took him safely on to the pavement. The car disappeared down the street. He wondered. Just for a moment he could have sworn that that car had deliberately tried to run him down. An interesting thought. First his flat had been searched, and now he himself might have been marked down. Probably a mere coincidence. And yet, in the course of his life, some of which had been spent in wild neighbourhoods and places, Sir Stafford Nye had come in contact with danger. He knew, as it were, the touch and feel and smell of danger. He felt it now. Someone, somewhere was gunning for him. But why? For what reason? As far as he knew, he had not stuck his neck out in any way. He wondered.

He let himself into his flat and picked up the mail that lay on the floor inside. Nothing much. A couple of bills and copy of Lifeboat periodical. He threw the bills on his desk and put a finger through the wrapper of Lifeboat. It was a cause to which he occasionally contributed. He turned the pages without much attention because he was still absorbed in what he was thinking. Then he stopped the action of his fingers abruptly. Something was taped between two of the pages. Taped with adhesive tape. He looked at it closely. It was his passport returned to him unexpectedly in this fashion. He tore it free and looked at it. The last stamp on it was the arrival stamp at Heathrow the day before. She had used his passport, getting back here safely, and had chosen this way to return it to him. Where was she now? He would like to know.

He wondered if he would ever see her again. Who was she? Where had she gone, and why? It was like waiting for the second act of a play. Indeed, he felt the first act had hardly been played yet. What had he seen? An old-fashioned curtain-raiser, perhaps. A girl who had ridiculously wanted to dress herself up and pass herself of as of the male sex, who had passed the passport control of Heathrow without attracting suspicion of any kind to herself and who had now disappeared through that gateway into London.

No, he would probably never see her again. It annoyed him. But why, he thought, why do I want to? She wasn't particularly attractive, she wasn't anything. No, that wasn't quite true. She was something, or someone, or she could not have induced him, with no particular persuasion, with no overt sex stimulation, nothing except a plain demand for help, to do what she wanted. A demand from one human being to another human being because, or so she had intimated, not precisely in words, but nevertheless it was what she had intimated, she knew people and she recognized in him a man who was willing to take a risk to help another human being. And he had taken a risk, too, thought Sir Stafford Nye. She could have put anything in that beer glass of his. He could have been found, if she had so willed it, found as a dead body in a seat tucked away in the corner of a departure lounge in an airport. And if she had, as no doubt she must have had, a knowledgeable recourse to drugs, his death might have been passed off as an attack of heart trouble due to altitude or difficult pressurizing — something or other like that.