Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie [3]
II
It was warm in the Transit Passenger Lounge at Frankfurt, so Sir Stafford Nye slipped back his cloak, allowing its crimson lining to drape itself spectacularly round his shoulders. He was drinking a glass of beer and listening with half an ear to the various announcements as they were made.
‘Flight 4387. Flying to Moscow. Flight 2381 bound for Egypt and Calcutta.’
Journeys all over the globe. How romantic it ought to be. But there was something about the atmosphere of a Passengers’ Lounge in an airport that chilled romance. It was too full of people, too full of things to buy, too full of similarly coloured seats, too full of plastic, too full of human beings, too full of crying children. He tried to remember who had said:
I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face.
Chesterton perhaps? It was undoubtedly true. Put enough people together and they looked so painfully alike that one could hardly bear it. An interesting face now, thought Sir Stafford. What a difference it would make. He looked disparagingly at two young women, splendidly made up, dressed in the national uniform of their country–England he presumed–of shorter and shorter miniskirts, and another young woman, even better made up–in fact quite good-looking–who was wearing what he believed to be called a culotte suit. She had gone a little further along the road of fashion.
He wasn’t very interested in nice-looking girls who looked like all the other nice-looking girls. He would like someone to be different. Someone sat down beside him on the plastic-covered artificial leather settee on which he was sitting. Her face attracted his attention at once. Not precisely because it was different, in fact he almost seemed to recognize it as a face he knew. Here was someone he had seen before. He couldn’t remember where or when but it was certainly familiar. Twenty-five or six, he thought, possibly, as to age. A delicate high-bridged aquiline nose, a black heavy bush of hair reaching to her shoulders. She had a magazine in front of her but she was not paying attention to it. She was, in fact, looking with something that was almost eagerness at him. Quite suddenly she spoke. It was a deep contralto voice, almost as deep as a man’s. It had a very faint foreign accent. She said,
‘Can I speak to you?’
He studied her for a moment before replying. No–not what one might have thought–this wasn’t a pick-up. This was something else.
‘I see no reason,’ he said, ‘why you should not do so. We have time to waste here, it seems.’
‘Fog,’ said the woman, ‘fog in Geneva, fog in London, perhaps. Fog everywhere. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Oh, you mustn’t worry,’ he said reassuringly, ‘they’ll land you somewhere all right. They’re quite efficient, you know. Where are you going?’
‘I was going to Geneva.’
‘Well, I expect you’ll get there in the end.’
‘I have to get there now. If I can get to Geneva, it will be all right. There is someone who will meet me there. I can be safe.’
‘Safe?’ He smiled a little.
She said, ‘Safe is a four-letter word but not the kind of four-letter word that people are interested in nowadays. And yet it can mean a lot. It means a lot to me.’ Then she said, ‘You see, if I can’t get to Geneva, if I have to leave this plane here, or go on in this plane to London with no arrangements made, I shall be killed.’ She looked at him sharply. ‘I suppose you don’t believe that.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘It’s quite true. People can be. They are, every day.’
‘Who wants to kill you?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Not to me.’
‘You can believe me if you wish to believe me. I am speaking the truth. I want help. Help to get to London safely.’
‘And why should you select me to help you?’
‘Because I think that you know something about death. You have known of death, perhaps seen