They came to Baghdad - Agatha Christie [3]
‘I should like three weeks’ leave of absence if I might have it, Mr Morganthal. Starting from Tuesday next.’
Staring at her, he said uneasily: ‘It will be awkward – very awkward.’
‘I don’t think it will be too difficult, Mr Morganthal. Miss Wygate is fully competent to deal with things. I shall leave her my notes and full instructions. Mr Cornwall can attend to the Ascher Merger.’
Still uneasily he asked:
‘You’re not ill, or anything?’
He couldn’t imagine Miss Scheele being ill. Even germs respected Anna Scheele and kept out of her way.
‘Oh no, Mr Morganthal. I want to go to London to see my sister there.’
‘Your sister?’ He didn’t know she had a sister. He had never conceived of Miss Scheele as having any family or relations. She had never mentioned having any. And here she was, casually referring to a sister in London. She had been over in London with him last fall but she had never mentioned having a sister then.
With a sense of injury he said:
‘I never knew you had a sister in England?’
Miss Scheele smiled very faintly.
‘Oh yes, Mr Morganthal. She is married to an Englishman connected with the British Museum. It is necessary for her to undergo a very serious operation. She wants me to be with her. I should like to go.’
In other words, Otto Morganthal saw, she had made up her mind to go.
He said grumblingly, ‘All right, all right…Get back as soon as you can. I’ve never seen the market so jumpy. All this damned Communism. War may break out at any moment. It’s the only solution, I sometimes think. The whole country’s riddled with it – riddled with it. And now the President’s determined to go to this fool conference at Baghdad. It’s a put-up job in my opinion. They’re out to get him. Baghdad! Of all the outlandish places!’
‘Oh I’m sure he’ll be very well guarded,’ Miss Scheele said soothingly.
‘They got the Shah of Persia last year, didn’t they? They got Bernadotte in Palestine. It’s madness – that’s what it is – madness.
‘But then,’ added Mr Morganthal heavily, ‘all the world is mad.’
Chapter 2
I
Victoria Jones was sitting moodily on a seat in FitzJames Gardens. She was wholly given up to reflections – or one might almost say moralizations – on the disadvantages inherent in employing one’s particular talents at the wrong moment.
Victoria was like most of us, a girl with both qualities and defects. On the credit side she was generous, warmhearted and courageous. Her natural leaning towards adventure may be regarded as either meritorious or the reverse in this modern age which places the value of security high. Her principal defect was a tendency to tell lies at both opportune and inopportune moments. The superior fascination of fiction to fact was always irresistible to Victoria. She lied with fluency, ease, and artistic fervour. If Victoria was late for an appointment (which was often the case) it was not sufficient for her to murmur an excuse of her watch having stopped (which actually was quite often the case) or of an unaccountably delayed bus. It would appear preferable to Victoria to tender the mendacious explanation that she had been hindered by an escaped elephant lying across a main bus route, or by a thrilling smash-and-grab raid in which she herself had played a part to aid the police. To Victoria an agreeable world would be one where tigers lurked in the Strand and dangerous bandits infested Tooting.
A slender girl, with an agreeable figure and firstclass legs, Victoria’s features might actually have been described as plain. They were small and neat. But there was a piquancy about her, for ‘little indiarubber face,’ as one of her admirers had named her, could twist those immobile features into a startling mimicry of almost anybody.
It was this last-named talent that had led to her present predicament. Employed as a typist by Mr Greenholtz of Greenholtz, Simmons and Lederbetter, of Graysholme Street, WC2, Victoria had been whiling away a dull morning by entertaining