Agatha Christie: Cat Among the Pigeons

The clerk behind the desk knew Bob well and beamed at him.

‘Good morning, Squadron Leader. You want your sister? She has gone on a picnic with the little girl—’

‘A picnic?’ Bob was taken aback—of all the silly times to go for a picnic.

‘With Mr and Mrs Hurst from the Oil Company,’ said the clerk informatively. Everyone always knew everything. ‘They have gone to the Kalat Diwa dam.’

Bob swore under his breath. Joan wouldn’t be home for hours.

‘I’ll go up to her room,’ he said and held out his hand for the key which the clerk gave him.

He unlocked the door and went in. The room, a large double-bedded one, was in its usual confusion. Joan Sutcliffe was not a tidy woman. Golf clubs lay across a chair, tennis racquets had been flung on the bed. Clothing lay about, the table was littered with rolls of film, postcards, paper-backed books and an assortment of native curios from the South, mostly made in Birmingham and Japan.

Bob looked round him, at the suitcases and the zip bags. He was faced with a problem. He wouldn’t be able to see Joan before flying Ali out. There wouldn’t be time to get to the dam and back. He could parcel up the stuff and leave it with a note—but almost immediately he shook his head. He knew quite well that he was nearly always followed. He’d probably been followed from the Palace to the café and from the café here. He hadn’t spotted anyone—but he knew that they were good at the job. There was nothing suspicious in his coming to the hotel to see his sister—but if he left a parcel and a note, the note would be read and the parcel opened.

Time…time…He’d no time …

Three quarters of a million in precious stones in his trousers pocket.

He looked round the room…

Then, with a grin, he fished out from his pocket the little tool kit he always carried. His niece Jennifer had some plasticine, he noted, that would help.

He worked quickly and skilfully. Once he looked up, suspicious, his eyes going to the open window. No, there was no balcony outside this room. It was just his nerves that made him feel that someone was watching him.

He finished his task and nodded in approval. Nobody would notice what he had done—he felt sure of that. Neither Joan nor anyone else. Certainly not Jennifer, a self-centred child, who never saw or noticed anything outside herself.

He swept up all evidences of his toil and put them into his pocket…Then he hesitated, looking round.

He drew Mrs Sutcliffe’s writing pad towards him and sat frowning—

He must leave a note for Joan—

But what could he say? It must be something that Joan would understand—but which would mean nothing to anyone who read the note.

And really that was impossible! In the kind of thriller that Bob liked reading to fill up his spare moments, you left a kind of cryptogram which was always successfully puzzled out by someone. But he couldn’t even begin to think of a cryptogram—and in any case Joan was the sort of common-sense person who would need the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed before she noticed anything at all—

Then his brow cleared. There was another way of doing it—divert attention away from Joan—leave an ordinary everyday note. Then leave a message with someone else to be given to Joan in England. He wrote rapidly—

Dear Joan—Dropped in to ask if you’d care to play a round of golf this evening but if you’ve been up at the dam, you’ll probably be dead to the world. What about tomorrow? Five o’clock at the Club.

Yours, Bob.

A casual sort of a message to leave for a sister that he might never see again—but in some ways the more casual the better. Joan mustn’t be involved in any funny business, mustn’t even know that there was any funny business. Joan could not dissimulate. Her protection would be the fact that she clearly knew nothing.

And the note would accomplish a dual purpose. It would seem that he, Bob, had no plan for departure himself.

He thought for a minute or two, then he crossed to the telephone and gave the number of the British Embassy. Presently he was connected with Edmundson, the third secretary, a friend of his.

‘John? Bob Rawlinson here. Can you meet me somewhere when you get off?…Make it a bit earlier than that?…You’ve got to, old boy. It’s important. Well, actually, it’s a girl…’ He gave an embarrassed cough. ‘She’s wonderful, quite wonderful. Out of this world. Only it’s a bit tricky.’

Edmundson’s voice, sounding slightly stuffed-shirt and disapproving, said, ‘Really, Bob, you and your girls. All right, 2 o’clock do you?’ and rang off. Bob heard the little echoing click as whoever had been listening in, replaced the receiver.

Good old Edmundson. Since all the telephones in Ramat had been tapped, Bob and John Edmundson had worked out a little code of their own. A wonderful girl who was ‘out of this world’ meant something urgent and important.

Edmundson would pick him up in his car outside the new Merchants Bank at 2 o’clock and he’d tell Edmundson of the hiding place. Tell him that Joan didn’t know about it but that, if anything happened to him, it was important. Going by the long sea route Joan and Jennifer wouldn’t be back in England for six weeks. By that time the revolution would almost certainly have happened and either been successful or have been put down. Ali Yusuf might be in Europe, or he and Bob might both be dead. He would tell Edmundson enough, but not too much.

Bob took a last look around the room. It looked exactly the same, peaceful, untidy, domestic. The only thing added was his harmless note to Joan. He propped it up on the table and went out. There was no one in the long corridor.

II

The woman in the room next to that occupied by Joan Sutcliffe stepped back from the balcony. There was a mirror in her hand.

She had gone out on the balcony originally to examine more closely a single hair that had had the audacity to spring up on her chin. She dealt with it with tweezers, then subjected her face to a minute scrutiny in the clear sunlight.

It was then, as she relaxed, that she saw something else. The angle at which she was holding her mirror was such that it reflected the mirror of the hanging wardrobe in the room next to hers and in that mirror she saw a man doing something very curious.

So curious and unexpected that she stood there motionless, watching. He could not see her from where he sat at the table, and she could only see him by means of the double reflection.

If he had turned his head behind him, he might have caught sight of her mirror in the wardrobe mirror, but he was too absorbed in what he was doing to look behind him…

Once, it was true, he did look up suddenly towards the window, but since there was nothing to see there, he lowered his head again.

The woman watched him while he finished what he was doing. After a moment’s pause he wrote a note which he propped up on the table. Then he moved out of her line of vision but she could just hear enough to realize that he was making a telephone call. She couldn’t catch what was said, but it sounded light-hearted—casual. Then she heard the door close.

The woman waited a few minutes. Then she opened her door. At the far end of the passage an Arab was flicking idly with a feather duster. He turned the corner out of sight.

The woman slipped quickly to the door of the next room. It was locked, but she had expected that. The hairpin she had with her and the blade of a small knife did the job quickly and expertly.

She went in, pushing the door to behind her. She picked up the note. The flap had only been stuck down lightly and opened easily. She read the note, frowning. There was no explanation there.