Destination Unknown - Agatha Christie [32]
Across the aisle from her was the Norwegian, Ericsson.
As she caught his eye, he made her a stiff little bow and leaning across offered her his magazine, which he was just closing. She thanked him and took it. In the seat behind him was the thin, dark Frenchman. His legs were stretched out and he seemed to be asleep.
Hilary turned her head over her shoulder. The severe-faced nun was sitting behind her, and the nun’s eyes, impersonal, incurious, met Hilary’s with no expression in them. She sat immovable, her hands clasped. It seemed to Hilary an odd trick of time that a woman in traditional medieval costume should be travelling by air in the twentieth century.
Six people, thought Hilary, travelling together for a few hours, travelling to different places with different aims, scattering perhaps at the end of that few hours and never meeting again. She had read a novel which had hinged on a similar theme and where the lives of those six people were followed up. The Frenchman, she thought, must be on holiday. He seemed so tired. The young American was perhaps a student of some kind. Ericsson was perhaps going to take up a job. The nun was doubtless bound for her convent.
Hilary closed her eyes and forgot her fellow-travellers. She puzzled, as she had done all last night, over the instructions that had been given her. She was to return to England! It seemed crazy! Or could it be that in some way she had been found wanting, was not trusted: had failed to supply certain words or credentials that the real Olive would have supplied. She sighed and moved restlessly. ‘Well,’ she thought, ‘I can do no more than I am doing. If I’ve failed–I’ve failed. At any rate, I’ve done my best.’
Then another thought struck her. Henri Laurier had accepted it as natural and inevitable that a close watch was being kept upon her in Morocco–was this a means of disarming suspicion? With the abrupt return of Mrs Betterton to England it would surely be assumed that she had not come to Morocco in order to ‘disappear’ like her husband. Suspicion would relax–she would be regarded as a bona fide traveller.
She would leave for England, going by Air France via Paris–and perhaps in Paris–
Yes, of course–in Paris. In Paris where Tom Betterton had disappeared. How much easier to stage a disappearance there. Perhaps Tom Betterton had never left Paris. Perhaps–tired of profitless speculation Hilary went to sleep. She woke–dozed again, occasionally glancing without interest at the magazine she held. Awakening suddenly from a deeper sleep she noticed that the plane was rapidly losing height and circling round. She glanced at her watch, but it was still some time earlier than the estimated time of arrival. Moreover, looking down through the window, she could not see any signs of an aerodrome beneath.
For a moment a faint qualm of apprehension struck her. The thin, dark Frenchman rose, yawned, stretched his arms and looked out and said something in French which she did not catch. But Ericsson leant across the aisle and said:
‘We are coming down here, it seems–but why?’
Mrs Calvin Baker, leaning out of her seat, turned her head and nodded brightly as Hilary said:
‘We seem to be landing.’
The plane swooped round in ever lower circles. The country beneath them seemed to be practically desert. There were no signs of houses or villages. The wheels touched with a decided bump, bouncing along and taxi-ing until they finally stopped. It had been a somewhat rough landing, but it was a landing in the middle of nowhere.
Had something gone wrong with the engine, Hilary wondered, or had they run out of petrol? The pilot, a dark-skinned, handsome young man, came through the forward door and along the plane.
‘If you please,’ he said, ‘you will all get out.’ He opened the rear door, let down a short ladder