They came to Baghdad - Agatha Christie [64]
Now at last, dimly, she was herself – Victoria Jones…And something had happened to Victoria Jones – a long time ago – months – perhaps years…after all, perhaps only days.
Babylon – sunshine – dust – hair – Catherine. Catherine, of course, smiling, her eyes sly under the sausage curls – Catherine had taken her to have her hair shampooed and then – what had happened? That horrible smell – she could still smell it – nauseating – chloroform, of course. They had chloroformed her and taken her – where?
Cautiously Victoria tried to sit up. She seemed to be lying on a bed – a very hard bed – her head ached and felt dizzy – she was still drowsy, horribly drowsy…that prick, the prick of a hypodermic, they had been drugging her…she was still half-drugged.
Well, anyway they hadn’t killed her. (Why not?) So that was all right. The best thing, thought the still half-drugged Victoria, is to go to sleep. And promptly did so.
When next she awakened she felt much more clear-headed. It was daylight now and she could see more clearly where she was.
She was in a small but very high room, distempered a depressing pale bluish grey. The floor was of beaten earth. The only furniture in the room seemed to be the bed on which she was lying with a dirty rug thrown over her and a rickety table with a cracked enamel basin on it and a zinc bucket underneath it. There was a window with a kind of wooden lattice-work outside it. Victoria got gingerly off the bed, feeling distinctly headachy and queer, and approached the window. She could see through the lattice-work quite plainly and what she saw was a garden with palm trees beyond it. The garden was quite a pleasant one by Eastern standards though it would have been looked down on by an English suburban householder. It had a lot of bright orange marigolds in it, and some dusty eucalyptus trees and some rather wispy tamarisks.
A small child with a face tattooed in blue, and a lot of bangles on, was tumbling about with a ball and singing in a high nasal whine rather like distant bagpipes.
Victoria next turned her attention to the door, which was large and massive. Without much hope she went to it and tried it. The door was locked. Victoria went back and sat on the side of the bed.
Where was she? Not in Baghdad, that was certain. And what was she going to do next?
It struck her after a minute or two that the last question did not really apply. What was more to the point was what was someone else going to do to her? With an uneasy feeling in the pit of the stomach she remembered Mr Dakin’s admonition to tell all she knew. But perhaps they had already got all that out of her whilst she was under the drug.
Still – Victoria returned to this one point with determined cheerfulness – she was alive. If she could manage to keep alive until Edward found her – what would Edward do when he found she had vanished? Would he go to Mr Dakin? Would he play a lone hand? Would he put the fear of the Lord into Catherine and force her to tell? Would he suspect Catherine at all? The more Victoria tried to conjure up a reassuring picture of Edward in action, the more the image of Edward faded and became a kind of faceless abstraction. How clever was Edward? That was really what it amounted to. Edward was adorable. Edward had glamour. But had Edward got brains? Because clearly, in her present predicament, brains were going to be needed.
Mr Dakin, now, would have the necessary brains. But would he have the impetus? Or would he merely cross off her name from a mental ledger, scoring it through, and writing after it a neat RIP. After all, to Mr Dakin she was merely one of a crowd. They took their chance, and if luck failed, it was just too bad. No, she didn’t see Mr Dakin staging a rescue. After all, he had warned her.
And Dr Rathbone had warned her. (Warned her or