Destination Unknown - Agatha Christie [9]
Some hours passed before anything happened. Other planes appeared out of the fog and landed, also diverted from Paris. Soon the small room was crowded with cold, irritable people grumbling about the delay.
To Hilary it all had an unreal quality. It was as though she was still in a dream, mercifully protected from contact with reality. This was only a delay, only a matter of waiting. She was still on her journey–her journey of escape. She was still getting away from it all, still going towards that spot where her life would start again. Her mood held. Held through the long, fatiguing delay, held through the moments of chaos when it was announced, long after dark, that buses had come to convey the travellers to Paris.
There was then a wild confusion, of coming and going, passengers, officials, porters all carrying baggage, hurrying and colliding in the darkness. In the end Hilary found herself, her feet and legs icy cold, in a bus slowly rumbling its way through the fog towards Paris.
It was a long weary drive taking four hours. It was midnight when they arrived at the Invalides and Hilary was thankful to collect her baggage and drive to the hotel where accommodation was reserved for her. She was too tired to eat–just had a hot bath and tumbled into bed.
The plane to Casablanca was due to leave Orly Airport at ten-thirty the following morning, but when they arrived at Orly everything was confusion. Planes had been grounded in many parts of Europe, arrivals had been delayed as well as departures.
A harassed clerk at the departure desk shrugged his shoulders and said:
‘Impossible for Madame to go on the flight where she had reservations! The schedules have all had to be changed. If Madame will take a seat for a little minute, presumably all will arrange itself.’
In the end she was summoned and told that there was a place on a plane going to Dakar which normally did not touch down at Casablanca but would do so on this occasion.
‘You will arrive three hours later, that is all, Madame, on this later service.’
Hilary acquiesced without protest and the official seemed surprised and positively delighted by her attitude.
‘Madame has no conceptions of the difficulties that have been made to me this morning,’ he said. ‘Enfin, they are unreasonable, Messieurs the travellers. It is not I who made the fog! Naturally it has caused the disruptions. One must accommodate oneself with the good humour–that is what I say, however displeasing it is to have one’s plans altered. Après tout, Madame, a little delay of an hour or two hours or three hours, what does it matter? How can it matter by what plane one arrives at Casablanca.’
Yet on that particular day it mattered more than the little Frenchman knew when he spoke those words. For when Hilary finally arrived and stepped out into the sunshine on to the tarmac, the porter who was moving beside her with his piled-up trolley of luggage observed:
‘You have the lucky chance, Madame, not to have been on the plane before this, the regular plane for Casablanca.’
Hilary said: ‘Why, what happened?’
The man looked uneasily to and fro, but after all, the news could not be kept secret. He lowered his voice confidentially and leant towards her.
‘Mauvaise affaire!’ he muttered. ‘It crashed–landing. The pilot and the navigator are dead and most of the passengers. Four or five were alive and have been taken to hospital. Some of those are badly hurt.’
Hilary’s first reaction was a kind of blinding anger. Almost unprompted there leapt into her mind the thought, ‘Why wasn’t I in that plane? If I had been, it would have been all over now–I should be dead, out of it all. No more heartaches, no more misery. The people in that plane wanted to live. And I–I don’t care. Why shouldn’t it have been me?’
She passed through the Customs, a perfunctory affair, and drove with her baggage to the hotel. It was a glorious, sunlit afternoon,