The Man in the Brown Suit - Agatha Christie [80]
She looked at me appealingly.
‘What shall I do, Sir Eustace?’
Repressing the desire to reply, ‘Go to bed, and don’t worry over nothing. An able-bodied young woman like Anne Beddingfeld is perfectly well able to take care of herself,’ I frowned judicially.
‘What does Race say about it?’
Why should Race have it all his own way? Let him have some of the disadvantages as well as the advantages of female society.
‘I can’t find him anywhere.’
She was evidently making a night of it. I sighed, and sat down in a chair.
‘I don’t quite see the reason for your agitation,’ I said patiently.
‘My dream–’
‘That curry we had for dinner!’
‘Oh, Sir Eustace!’
The woman was quite indignant. And yet everybody knows that nightmares are a direct result of injudicious eating.
‘After all,’ I continued persuasively, ‘why shouldn’t Anne Beddingfeld and Race go out for a little stroll without having the whole hotel aroused about it?’
‘You think they’ve just gone out for a stroll together? But it’s after midnight?’
‘One does these foolish things when one is young,’ I murmured, ‘though Race is certainly old enough to know better.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘I dare say they’ve run away to make a match of it,’ I continued soothingly, though fully aware that I was making an idiotic suggestion. For, after all, at a place like this, where is there to run away to?
I don’t know how much longer I should have gone on making feeble remarks, but at that moment Race himself walked in upon us. At any rate, I had been partly right–he had been out for a stroll, but he hadn’t taken Anne with him. However, I had been quite wrong in my way of dealing with the situation. I was soon shown that. Race had the whole hotel turned upside-down in three minutes. I’ve never seen a man more upset.
The thing is very extraordinary. Where did the girl go? She walked out of the hotel, fully dressed, about ten minutes past eleven, and she was never seen again. The idea of suicide seems impossible. She was one of these energetic young women who are in love with life, and have not the faintest intention of quitting it. There was no train either way until midday on the morrow, so she can’t have left the place. Then where the devil is she?
Race is almost beside himself, poor fellow. He has left no stone unturned. All the DC’s, or whatever they call themselves, for hundreds of miles round have been pressed into the service. The native trackers have run about on all fours. Everything that can be done is being done–but no sign of Anne Beddingfeld. The accepted theory is that she walked in her sleep. There are signs on the path near the bridge which seem to show that the girl walked deliberately off the edge. If so, of course, she must have been dashed to pieces on the rocks below. Unfortunately, most of the footprints were obliterated by a party of tourists who chose to walk that way early on the Monday morning.
I don’t know that it’s a very satisfactory theory. In my young days, I was always told that sleep-walkers couldn’t hurt themselves–that their own sixth sense took care of them. I don’t think the theory satisfies Mrs Blair either.
I can’t make that woman out. Her whole attitude towards Race has changed. She watches him now like a cat a mouse, and she makes obvious efforts to bring herself to be civil to him. And they used to be such friends. Altogether she is unlike herself, nervous, hysterical, starting and jumping at the least sound. I am beginning to think that it is high time I went to Jo’burg.
A rumour came along yesterday of a mysterious island somewhere up the river, with a man and a girl on it. Race got very excited. It turned out to be all a mare’s nest, however. The man had been there for years, and is well known to the manager of the hotel. He takes parties up and down the river in the season and points out crocodiles and a stray hippopotamus or so to them. I believe that he keeps a tame one which is