Destination Unknown - Agatha Christie [23]
‘Permit me to assist you, Madame.’
Hilary was standing, rather bewildered at the bustle and noise of the station. Arab porters were seizing her luggage from her hands, shouting, yelling, calling, recommending different hotels. She turned gratefully to her new French acquaintance.
‘You are going to the Palais Djamai, n’est-ce pas, Madame?’
‘Yes.’
‘That is right. It is eight kilometres from here, you understand.’
‘Eight kilometres?’ Hilary was dismayed. ‘It’s not in the town, then.’
‘It is by the old town,’ the Frenchman explained. ‘Me, I stay here at the hotel in the commercial new city. But for the holiday, the rest, the enjoyment, naturally you go to the Palais Djamai. It was a former residence, you understand, of the Moroccan nobility. It has beautiful gardens, and you go straight from it into the old city of Fez which is untouched. It does not seem as though the hotel had sent to meet this train. If you permit, I will arrange for a taxi for you.’
‘You’re very kind, but…’
The Frenchman spoke in rapid Arabic to the porters and shortly afterwards Hilary took her place in a taxi, her baggage was pushed in, and the Frenchman told her exactly what to give the rapacious porters. He also dismissed them with a few sharp words of Arabic when they protested that the remuneration was inadequate. He whipped a card from his pocket and handed it to her.
‘My card, Madame, and if I can be of assistance to you at any time, tell me. I shall be at the Grand Hotel here for the next four days.’
He raised his hat and went away. Hilary looked down at the card which she could just see before they moved out of the lighted station:
Monsieur Henri Laurier
The taxi drove briskly out of the town, through the country, up a hill. Hilary tried to see, looking out of the windows, where she was going, but darkness had set in now. Except when they passed a lighted building nothing much could be seen. Was this, perhaps, where her journey diverged from the normal and entered the unknown? Was Monsieur Laurier an emissary from the organization that had persuaded Thomas Betterton to leave his work, his home and his wife? She sat in the corner of the taxi nervously apprehensive, wondering where it was taking her.
It took her, however, in the most exemplary manner to the Palais Djamai. She dismounted there, passed through an arched gateway and found herself, with a thrill of pleasure, in an oriental interior. There were long divans, coffee tables, and native rugs. From the reception desk she was taken through several rooms which led out of each other, out on to a terrace, passing by orange trees and scented flowers, and then up a winding staircase and into a pleasant bedroom, still oriental in style but equipped with all the ‘conforts modernes’ so necessary to twentieth-century travellers.
Dinner, the porter informed her, took place from 7.30. She unpacked a little, washed, combed her hair and went downstairs through the long oriental smoking-room, out on the terrace and across and up some steps to a lighted dining-room running at right angles to it.
The dinner was excellent and, as Hilary ate, various people came and went from the restaurant. She was too tired to size them up and classify them this particular evening, but one or two outstanding personalities took her eye. An elderly man, very yellow of face, with a little goatee beard. She noticed him because of the extreme deference paid to him by the staff. Plates were whisked away and placed for him at the mere raising of his head. The slightest turn of an eyebrow brought a waiter rushing to his table. She wondered who he was. The majority of diners were clearly touring on pleasure trips. There was a German at a big table in the centre, there was a middle-aged man and a fair, very beautiful girl who she thought might be Swedes, or possibly Danes. There was an English family with two children, and various groups of travelling Americans. There were three French