Agatha Christie - Passenger to Frankfurt

Oh well, why think about it? He wasn't likely to see her again and he was annoyed.

Yes, he was annoyed, and he didn't like being annoyed. He considered the matter for some minutes. Then he wrote out an advertisement, to be repeated three times. 'Passenger to Frankfurt . November 3rd. Please communicate with fellow traveller to London .' No more than that. Either she would or she wouldn't. If it ever came to her eyes she would know by whom that advertisement had been inserted. She had had his passport, she knew his name. She could look him up. He might hear from her. He might not. Probably not. If not, the curtain-raiser would remain a curtain-raiser, a silly little play that received late-comers to the theatre and diverted them until the real business of the evening began. Very useful in pre-war times. In all probability, though, he would not hear from her again and one of the reasons might be that she might have accomplished whatever it was she had come to do in London, and have now left the country once more, flying abroad to Geneva, or the Middle East, or to Russia or to China or to South America, or to the United States. And why, thought Sir Stafford, do I include South America ? There must be a reason. She had not mentioned South America . Nobody had mentioned South America except Horsham, that was true. And even Horsham had only mentioned South America among a lot of other mentions.

On the following morning as he walked slowly homeward, after handing in his advertisement, along the pathway across St. James's Park his eye picked out, half unseeing, the autumn flowers. The chrysanthemums looking by now stiff and leggy with their button tops of gold and bronze. Their smell came to him faintly, a rather goat-like smell, he had always thought, a smell that reminded him of hillsides in Greece . He must remember to keep his eye on the Personal Column. Not yet. Two or three days at least would have to pass before his own advertisement was put in and before there had been time for anyone to put in one in answer. He must not miss it if there was an answer because, after all, it was irritating not to know — not to have any idea what all this was about.

He tried to recall not the girl at the airport but his sister Pamela's face. A long time since her death. He remembered her. Of course he remembered her, but he could not somehow picture her face. It irritated him not to be able to do so.

He had paused just when he was about to cross one of the roads. There was no traffic except for a car jigging slowly along with the solemn demeanour of a bored dowager. An elderly car, he thought. An old-fashioned Daimler limousine.

He shook his shoulders. Why stand here in this idiotic way, lost in thought?

He took an abrupt step to cross the road and suddenly with surprising vigour the dowager limousine, as he had thought of it in his mind, accelerated. Accelerated with a sudden astonishing speed. It bore down on him with such swiftness that he only just had time to leap across on to the opposite pavement. It disappeared with a flash, turning round the curve of the road further on.

'I wonder,' said Sir Stafford to himself. 'Now I wonder. Could it be that there is someone that doesn't like me? Someone following me, perhaps, watching me take my way home, waiting for an opportunity?'

Colonel Pikeaway, his bulk sprawled out in his chair in the small room in Bloomsbury where he sat from ten to five with a short interval for lunch, was surrounded as usual by an atmosphere of thick cigar smoke; with his eyes closed, only an occasional blink showed that he was awake and not asleep. He seldom raised his head. Somebody had said that he looked like a cross between an ancient Buddha and a large blue frog, with perhaps, as some impudent youngster had added, just a touch of a bar sinister from a hippopotamus in his ancestry.

The gentle buzz of the intercom on his desk roused him. He blinked three times and opened his eyes. He stretched forth a rather weary-looking hand and picked up the receiver.

'Well?' he said.

His secretary's voice spoke.

'The Minister is here waiting to see you.'

'Is he now?' said Colonel Pikeaway. 'And what Minister is that? The Baptist minister from the church round the corner?'

'Oh no, Colonel Pikeaway, it's Sir George Packham.'

'Pity,' said Colonel Pikeaway, breathing asthmatically. 'Great pity. The Reverend McGill is far more amusing. There's a splendid touch of hell fire about him.'

'Shall I bring him in, Colonel Pikeaway?'

'I suppose he will expect to be brought in at once. Under Secretaries are far more touchy than Secretaries of State,' said Colonel Pikeaway gloomily. 'All these Ministers insist on coming in and having kittens all over the place.'

Sir George Packham was shown in. He coughed and wheezed. Most people did. The windows of the small room were tightly closed. Colonel Pikeaway reclined in his chair, completely smothered in cigar ash. The atmosphere was almost unbearable and the room was known in official circles as the 'small cathouse'.

'Ah, my dear fellow,' said Sir George, speaking briskly and cheerfully in a way that did not match his ascetic and sad appearance. 'Quite a long time since we've met, I think.'

'Sit down, sit down do,' said Pikeaway. 'Have a cigar?'

Sir George shuddered slightly.

'No, thank you,' he said, 'no, thanks very much.'

He looked hard at the windows. Colonel Pikeaway did not take the hint. Sir George cleared his throat and coughed again before saying:

'Er — I believe Horsham has been to see you.'

'Yes, Horsham's been and said his piece,' said Colonel Pikeaway, slowly allowing his eyes to close again.

'I thought it was the best way. I mean, that he should call upon you here. It's most important that things shouldn't get round anywhere.'

'Ah,' said Colonel Pikeaway, 'but they will, won't they?'

'I beg your pardon?'

'They will,' said Colonel Pikeaway.

'I don't know how much you — er — well, know about this last business.'

'We know everything here,' said Colonel Pikeaway. 'That's what we're for.'

'Oh — oh yes, yes certainly. About Sir S.N. — you know who I mean?'

'Recently a passenger from Frankfurt ,' said Colonel Pikeaway.

'Most extraordinary business. Most extraordinary. One wonders — one really does not know, one can't begin to imagine…'

Colonel Pikeaway listened kindly.

'What is one to think?' pursued Sir George. 'Do you know him personally?'

'I've come across him once or twice,' said Colonel Pikeaway.

'One really cannot help wondering –'

Colonel Pikeaway subdued a yawn with some difficulty. He was rather tired of Sir George's thinking, wondering, and imagining. He had a poor opinion anyway of Sir George's process of thought. A cautious man, a man who could be relied upon to run his department in a cautious manner. Not a man of scintillating intellect. Perhaps, thought Colonel Pikeaway, all the better for that. At any rate, those who think and wonder and are not quite sure are reasonably safe in the place where God and the electors have put them.

'One cannot quite forget,' continued Sir George, 'the disillusionment we have suffered in the past.'

Colonel Pikeaway smiled kindly.

' Charleston , Conway and Courtland,' he said. 'Fully trusted, vetted and approved of. All beginning with C, all crooked as sin.'

'Sometimes I wonder if we can trust anyone,' said Sir George unhappily.

'That's easy,' said Colonel Pikeaway, 'you can't.'

'Now take Stafford Nye,' said Sir George. 'Good family, excellent family, knew his father, his grandfather.'

'Often a slip-up in the third generation,' said Colonel Pikeaway.

The remark did not help Sir George.

'I cannot help doubting — I mean, sometimes he doesn't really seem serious.'

'Took my two nieces to see the chateaux of the Loire when I was a young man,' said Colonel Pikeaway unexpectedly. 'Man fishing on the bank. I had my fishing-rod with me, too. He said to me, "Vous n'кtes pas un pecheur sérieux. Vous avez des femmes avec vous".'