Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie [81]
‘Enormously fat and even nastier and horrider than I remembered her.’
‘You’ve got very queer tastes, I must say, Matilda.’
‘Well, go on, tell me. Tell me what it is you want me to remember?’
‘I wondered if you remembered another friend of yours. Robert Shoreham.’
‘Robbie Shoreham? Of course I do.’
‘The scientist feller. Top scientist.’
‘Of course. He wasn’t the sort of man one would ever forget. I wonder what put him into your head.’
‘Public need.’
‘Funny you should say that,’ said Lady Matilda. ‘I thought the same myself the other day.’
‘You thought what?’
‘That he was needed. Or someone like him–if there is anyone like him.’
‘There isn’t. Now listen, Matilda. People talk to you a bit. They tell you things. I’ve told you things myself.’
‘I’ve always wondered why, because you can’t believe that I’ll understand them or be able to describe them. And that was even more the case with Robbie than with you.’
‘I don’t tell you naval secrets.’
‘Well, he didn’t tell me scientific secrets. I mean, only in a very general way.’
‘Yes, but he used to talk to you about them, didn’t he?’
‘Well, he liked saying things that would astonish me sometimes.’
‘All right, then, here it comes. I want to know if he ever talked to you, in the days when he could talk properly, poor devil, about something called Project B.’
‘Project B.’ Matilda Cleckheaton considered thoughtfully. ‘Sounds vaguely familiar,’ she said. ‘He used to talk about Project this or that sometimes, or Operation that or this. But you must realize that none of it ever made any kind of sense to me, and he knew it didn’t. But he used to like–oh, how shall I put it?–astonishing me rather, you know. Sort of describing it the way that a conjuror might describe how he takes three rabbits out of a hat without your knowing how he did it. Project B? Yes, that was a good long time ago…He was wildly excited for a bit. I used to say to him sometimes “How’s Project B going on?”’
‘I know, I know, you’ve always been a tactful woman. You can always remember what people were doing or interested in. And even if you don’t know the first thing about it you’d show an interest. I described a new kind of naval gun to you once and you must have been bored stiff. But you listened as brightly as though it was the thing you’d been waiting to hear about all your life.’
‘As you tell me, I’ve been a tactful woman and a good listener, even if I’ve never had much in the way of brains.’
‘Well, I want to hear a little more what Robbie said about Project B.’
‘He said–well, it’s very difficult to remember now. He mentioned it after talking about some operation that they used to do on people’s brains. You know, the people who were terribly melancholic and who were thinking of suicide and who were so worried and neurasthenic that they had awful anxiety complexes. Stuff like that, the sort of thing people used to talk of in connection with Freud. And he said that the side effects were impossible. I mean, the people were quite happy and meek and docile and didn’t worry any more, or want to kill themselves, but they–well I mean they didn’t worry enough and therefore they used to get run over and all sorts of things like that because they weren’t thinking of any danger and didn’t notice it. I’m putting it badly but you do understand what I mean. And anyway, he said, that was going to be the trouble, he thought, with Project B.’
‘Did he describe it at all more closely than that?’
‘He said I’d put it into his head,’ said Matilda Cleckheaton unexpectedly.
‘What? Do you mean to say a scientiest–a top-flight scientist like Robbie actually said to you that you had put something into his scientific brain? You don’t know the first thing about science.’
‘Of course not. But I used to try and put a little common sense into people’s brains. The cleverer they are, the less common sense they have. I mean, really, the people who matter are the people who thought of simple things like perforations on postage stamps, or like somebody Adam, or whatever his name was–No–MacAdam in America who put black stuff on roads