Mysterious Mr. Quin - Agatha Christie [69]
He ended his speech with a curious little laugh. His eyes were still blazing with some subdued excitement. Yet there was something tragic about him.
‘It has been quite a pleasure,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘Our conversation has been most interesting and instructive to me.’
He then made his funny, courteous little bow and passed out of the restaurant. The night was a warm one and as he walked slowly down the street a very odd fancy came to him. He had the feeling that he was not alone–that someone was walking by his side. In vain he told himself that the idea was a delusion–it persisted. Someone was walking beside him down that dark, quiet street, someone whom he could not see. He wondered what it was that brought the figure of Mr Quin so clearly before his mind. He felt exactly as though Mr Quin were there walking beside him, and yet he had only to use his eyes to assure himself that it was not so, that he was alone.
But the thought of Mr Quin persisted, and with it came something else: a need, an urgency of some kind, an oppressive foreboding of calamity. There was something he must do–and do quickly. There was something very wrong, and it lay in his hands to put it right.
So strong was the feeling that Mr Satterthwaite forebore to fight against it. Instead, he shut his eyes and tried to bring that mental image of Mr Quin nearer. If he could only have asked Mr Quin–but even as the thought flashed through his mind he knew it was wrong. It was never any use asking Mr Quin anything. ‘The threads are all in your hands’–that was the kind of thing Mr Quin would say.
The threads. Threads of what? He analysed his own feeling and impressions carefully. That presentiment of danger, now. Whom did it threaten?
At once a picture rose up before his eyes, the picture of Gillian West sitting alone listening to the wireless.
Mr Satterthwaite flung a penny to a passing newspaper boy, and snatched at a paper. He turned at once to the London Radio programme. Yoaschbim was broadcasting tonight, he noted with interest. He was singing ‘Salve Dimora’, from Faust and, afterwards, a selection of his folk songs. ‘The Shepherd’s Song’, ‘The Fish’, ‘The Little Deer’, etc.
Mr Satterthwaite crumpled the paper together. The knowledge of what Gillian was listening to seemed to make the picture of her clearer. Sitting there alone…
An odd request, that, of Philip Eastney’s. Not like the man, not like him at all. There was no sentimentality in Eastney. He was a man of violent feeling, a dangerous man, perhaps–
Again his thought brought up with a jerk. A dangerous man–that meant something. ‘The threads are all in your hands.’ That meeting with Philip Eastney tonight–rather odd. A lucky chance, Eastney had said. Was it chance? Or was it part of that interwoven design of which Mr Satterthwaite had once or twice been conscious this evening?
He cast his mind back. There must be something in Eastney’s conversation, some clue there. There must, or else why this strange feeling of urgency? What had he talked about? Singing, war work, Caruso.
Caruso–Mr Satterthwaite’s thoughts went off at a tangent. Yoaschbim’s voice was very nearly equal to that of Caruso. Gillian would be sitting listening to it now as it rang out true and powerful, echoing round the room, setting glasses ringing–
He caught his breath. Glasses ringing! Caruso, singing to a wine-glass and the wine-glass breaking. Yoachbim singing in the London studio and in a room over a mile away the crash and tinkle of glass–not a wine-glass, a thin, green, glass beaker. A crystal soap bubble falling, a soap bubble that perhaps was not empty…
It was at that moment that Mr Satterthwaite, as judged by passers-by, suddenly went mad. He tore open the newspaper once more, took a brief glance at the wireless announcements and then began to run for his life down the quiet street. At the end of it he found a crawling taxi, and jumping into it, he yelled an address to the driver and the information that it was