Destination Unknown - Agatha Christie [42]
‘It must be,’ said Hilary, ‘yes, yes, indeed it must.’
‘These miserable ones,’ said the chauffeur, ‘they have been sent in the past to perish miserably on a lonely island. But here this new treatment of Dr Kolini’s cures a very high percentage. Even those who are far gone.’
‘It seems a lonely place to have a hospital,’ said Hilary.
‘Ah, Madame, but you would have to be lonely in the circumstances. The authorities would insist upon it. But it is good air here, wonderful air. See, Madame, you can see now where we are going.’ He pointed.
They were approaching the first spurs of a mountain range, and on the side of it, set flat against the hillside, was a long gleaming white building.
‘What an achievement,’ said the chauffeur, ‘to raise such a building out here. The money spent must have been fantastic. We owe much, Madame, to the rich philanthropists of this world. They are not like governments who do things always in a cheap way. Here money has been spent like water. Our patron, he is one of the richest men in the world, they say. Here truly he has built a magnificent achievement for the relief of human suffering.’
He drove up a winding track. Finally they came to rest outside great barred iron gates.
‘You must dismount here, Madame,’ said the chauffeur. ‘It is not permitted that I take the car through these gates. The garages are a kilometre away.’
The travellers got out of the car. There was a big bell-pull at the gate, but before they could touch it the gates swung slowly open. A white-robed figure with a black, smiling face bowed to them and bade them enter. They passed through the gate; at one side, screened by a high fence of wire, there was a big courtyard where men were walking up and down. As these men turned to look at the arrivals, Hilary uttered a gasp of horror.
‘But they’re lepers!’ she exclaimed. ‘Lepers!’
A shiver of horror shook her entire frame.
Chapter 11
The gates of the Leper Colony closed behind the travellers with a metallic clang. The noise struck on Hilary’s startled consciousness with a horrible note of finality. Abandon hope, it seemed to say, all ye who enter here…This, she thought, was the end…really the end. Any way of retreat there might have been was now cut off.
She was alone now amongst enemies, and in, at most, a very few minutes, she would be confronted with discovery and failure. Subconsciously, she supposed, she had known that all day, but some undefeatable optimism of the human spirit, some persistence in the belief that that entity oneself could not possibly cease to exist, had been masking that fact from her. She had said to Jessop in Casablanca, ‘And when I do reach Tom Betterton?’ and he had said then gravely that that was when the danger would become acute. He had added that he hoped that by then he might be in a position to give her protection, but that hope, Hilary could not but realize, had failed to materialize.
If ‘Miss Hetherington’ had been the agent on whom Jessop was relying, ‘Miss Hetherington’ had been out-manoeuvred and left to confess failure at Marrakesh. But in any case, what could Miss Hetherington have done?
The party of travellers had arrived at the place of no return. Hilary had gambled with death and lost. And she knew now that Jessop’s diagnosis had been correct. She no longer wanted to die. She wanted to live. The zest of living had come back to her in full strength. She could think of Nigel, of Brenda’s grave, with a sad wondering pity, but no longer with the cold lifeless despair that had urged her on to seek oblivion in death. She thought: ‘I’m alive again, sane, whole…and now I’m like a rat in a trap. If only there were some way out…’
It was not that she had given no thought to the problem. She had. But it seemed to her, reluctantly, that once confronted with Betterton, there could be no way out…
Betterton would say: ‘But that