Destination Unknown - Agatha Christie [0]
Destination Unknown
To ANTHONY
who likes foreign travel as much as I do
Contents
Chapter 1
The man behind the desk moved a heavy glass paperweight…
Chapter 2
‘Major Glydr?’ Jessop hesitated a little over the name.
Chapter 3
‘Flight 108 to Paris. Air France. This way please.’
Chapter 4
It was not really cold in the hospital but it…
Chapter 5
In the small formal salon of the Hôtel St Louis, three…
Chapter 6
Casablanca had vaguely disappointed Hilary by being such a prosperous-looking…
Chapter 7
Hilary hoped to avoid having to see the old city…
Chapter 8
How alike, Hilary thought to herself, all airports were! They…
Chapter 9
The pilot came up to them.
Chapter 10
A dream journey. So it seemed; more so every day.
Chapter 11
The gates of the Leper Colony closed behind the travellers with…
Chapter 12
The Registry was presided over by a woman who looked…
Chapter 13
‘It’s like a school,’ said Hilary.
Chapter 14
In a room at the Hôtel Mamounia, Marrakesh, the man…
Chapter 15
‘It’s incredible,’ thought Hilary to herself, ‘incredible that I’ve been…
Chapter 16
‘Good evening, Mrs Betterton.’
Chapter 17
Leblanc shrugged his shoulders.
Chapter 18
‘Asseyez-vous, chère Madame,’ said Mr Aristides.
Chapter 19
Hilary awoke the following night with a start. She raised…
Chapter 20
The cars swept up the mountain road and stopped in…
Chapter 21
‘Oh, I feel as if I’d woken up out of…
Chapter 22
‘I’m sorry, Olive. You’ve got to believe I’m sorry. About…
About the Author
Other Books by Agatha Christie
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
The man behind the desk moved a heavy glass paperweight four inches to the right. His face was not so much thoughtful or abstracted as expressionless. He had the pale complexion that comes from living most of the day in artificial light. This man, you felt, was an indoor man. A man of desks and files. The fact that to reach his office you had to walk through long twisting underground corridors was somehow strangely appropriate. It would have been difficult to guess his age. He looked neither old nor young. His face was smooth and unwrinkled, and in his eyes was a great tiredness.
The other man in the room was older. He was dark with a small military moustache. There was about him an alert nervous energy. Even now, unable to sit still, he was pacing up and down, from time to time throwing off a remark in a jerky manner.
‘Reports!’ he said explosively. ‘Reports, reports and more reports, and none of them any damn’ good!’ The man at the desk looked down at the papers in front of him. On top was an official card headed, ‘Betterton, Thomas Charles.’ After the name was an interrogation mark. The man at the desk nodded thoughtfully. He said:
‘You’ve followed up these reports and none of them any good?’ The other shrugged his shoulders.
‘How can one tell?’ he asked.
The man behind the desk sighed.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is that. One can’t tell, really.’ The older man went on with a kind of machine-gun volley abruptness:
‘Reports from Rome; reports from Touraine; seen on the Riviera; noticed in Antwerp; definitely identified in Oslo; positively seen in Biarritz; observed behaving suspiciously in Strasbourg; seen on the beach at Ostend with a glamorous blonde; noticed walking in the streets in Brussels with a greyhound! Hasn’t been seen yet in the Zoo with his arm round a zebra, but I dare say that will come!’
‘You’ve no particular fancy yourself, Wharton? Personally I had hopes of the Antwerp report, but it hasn’t led to anything. Of course by now–’ the young man stopped speaking and seemed to go into a coma. Presently he came out of it again and said cryptically, ‘Yes, probably…and yet–I wonder?’
Colonel Wharton sat down abruptly on the arm of a chair.
‘But we’ve got to find out,’ he said insistently. ‘We’ve got to break the back of all this how and why and where? You can’t lose a tame scientist every month or so and have no idea how they go or why they go or where! Is it where we think–or isn’t it? We’ve always