Passenger to Frankfurt

‘Because,’ said Sir Stafford thoughtfully, to himself, ‘because somebody was looking for something. But what? And who? And also perhaps why?’ Yes, it was interesting.

He sat down in a chair and thought about it. Presently his eyes strayed to the table by the bed on which sat, rather pertly, a small furry panda. It started a train of thought. He went to the telephone and rang a number.

‘That you, Aunt Matilda?’ he said. ‘Stafford here.’

‘Ah, my dear boy, so you’re back. I’m so glad. I read in the paper they’d got cholera in Malaya yesterday, at least I think it was Malaya. I always get so mixed up with those places. I hope you’re coming to see me soon? Don’t pretend you’re busy. You can’t be busy all the time. One really only accepts that sort of thing from tycoons, people in industry, you know, in the middle of mergers and takeovers. I never know what it all really means. It used to mean doing your work properly but now it means things all tied up with atom bombs and factories in concrete,’ said Aunt Matilda, rather wildly. ‘And those terrible computers that get all one’s figures wrong, to say nothing of making them the wrong shape. Really, they have made life so difficult for us nowadays. You wouldn’t believe the things they’ve done to my bank account. And to my postal address too. Well, I suppose I’ve lived too long.’

‘Don’t you believe it! All right if I come down next week?’

‘Come down tomorrow if you like. I’ve got the vicar coming to dinner, but I can easily put him off.’

‘Oh, look here, no need to do that.’

‘Yes there is, every need. He’s a most irritating man and he wants a new organ too. This one does quite well as it is. I mean the trouble is with the organist, really, not the organ. An absolutely abominable musician. The vicar’s sorry for him because he lost his mother whom he was very fond of. But really, being fond of your mother doesn’t make you play the organ any better, does it? I mean, one has to look at things as they are.’

‘Quite right. It will have to be next week—I’ve got a few things to see to. How’s Sybil?’

‘Dear child! Very naughty but such fun.’

‘I brought her home a woolly panda,’ said Sir Stafford Nye.

‘Well, that was very nice of you, dear.’

‘I hope she’ll like it,’ said Sir Stafford, catching the panda’s eye and feeling slightly nervous.

‘Well, at any rate, she’s got very good manners,’ said Aunt Matilda, which seemed a somewhat doubtful answer, the meaning of which Sir Stafford did not quite appreciate.

Aunt Matilda suggested likely trains for next week with the warning that they very often did not run, or changed their plans, and also commanded that he should bring her down a Camembert cheese and half a Stilton.

‘Impossible to get anything down here now. Our own grocer—such a nice man, so thoughtful and such good taste in what we all liked—turned suddenly into a supermarket, six times the size, all rebuilt, baskets and wire trays to carry round and try to fill up with things you don’t want and mothers always losing their babies, and crying and having hysterics. Most exhausting. Well, I’ll be expecting you, dear boy.’ She rang off.

The telephone rang again at once.

‘Hullo? Stafford? Eric Pugh here. Heard you were back from Malaya—what about dining tonight?’

‘Like to very much.’

‘Good—Limpits Club—eight-fifteen?’

Mrs Worrit panted into the room as Sir Stafford replaced the receiver.

‘A gentleman downstairs wanting to see you, sir,’ she said. ‘At least I mean, I suppose he’s that. Anyway he said he was sure you wouldn’t mind.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Horsham, sir, like the place on the way to Brighton.’

‘Horsham.’ Sir Stafford Nye was a little surprised.

He went out of his bedroom, down a half flight of stairs that led to the big sitting-room on the lower floor. Mrs Worrit had made no mistake. Horsham it was, looking as he had looked half an hour ago, stalwart, trustworthy, cleft chin, rubicund cheeks, bushy grey moustache and a general air of imperturbability.

‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he said agreeably, rising to his feet.

‘Hope I don’t mind what?’ said Sir Stafford Nye.

‘Seeing me again so soon. We met in the passage outside Mr Gordon Chetwynd’s door—if you remember?’

‘No objections at all,’ said Sir Stafford Nye.

He pushed a cigarette-box along the table.

‘Sit down. Something forgotten, something left unsaid?’

‘Very nice man, Mr Chetwynd,’ said Horsham. ‘We’ve got him quietened down, I think. He and Colonel Munro. They’re a bit upset about it all, you know. About you, I mean.’

‘Really?’

Sir Stafford Nye sat down too. He smiled, he smoked, and he looked thoughtfully at Henry Horsham. ‘And where do we go from here?’ he asked.

‘I was just wondering if I might ask, without undue curiosity, where you’re going from here?’

‘Delighted to tell you,’ said Sir Stafford Nye. ‘I’m going to stay with an aunt of mine, Lady Matilda Cleckheaton. I’ll give you the address if you like.’

‘I know it,’ said Henry Horsham. ‘Well, I expect that’s a very good idea. She’ll be glad to see you’ve come home safely all right. Might have been a near thing, mightn’t it?’

‘Is that what Colonel Munro thinks and Mr Chetwynd?’

‘Well, you know what it is, sir,’ said Horsham. ‘You know well enough. They’re always in a state, gentlemen in that department. They’re not sure whether they trust you or not.’

‘Trust me?’ said Sir Stafford Nye in an offended voice. ‘What do you mean by that, Mr Horsham?’

Mr Horsham was not taken aback. He merely grinned.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘you’ve got a reputation for not taking things seriously.’

‘Oh. I thought you meant I was a fellow traveller or a convert to the wrong side. Something of that kind.’

‘Oh no, sir, they just don’t think you’re serious. They think you like having a bit of a joke now and again.’

‘One cannot go entirely through life taking oneself and other people seriously,’ said Sir Stafford Nye, disapprovingly.

‘No. But you took a pretty good risk, as I’ve said before, didn’t you?’

‘I wonder if I know in the least what you are talking about.’

‘I’ll tell you. Things go wrong, sir, sometimes, and they don’t always go wrong because people have made them go wrong. What you might call the Almighty takes a hand, or the other gentleman—the one with the tail, I mean.’

Sir Stafford Nye was slightly diverted.

‘Are you referring to fog at Geneva?’ he said.

‘Exactly, sir. There was fog at Geneva and that upset people’s plans. Somebody was in a nasty hole.’

‘Tell me all about it,’ said Sir Stafford Nye. ‘I really would like to know.’

‘Well, a passenger was missing when that plane of yours left Frankfurt yesterday. You’d drunk your beer and you were sitting in a corner snoring nicely and comfortably by yourself. One passenger didn’t report and they called her and they called her again. In the end, presumably, the plane left without her.’

‘Ah. And what had happened to her?’

‘It would be interesting to know. In any case, your passport arrived at Heathrow even if you didn’t.’

‘And where is it now? Am I supposed to have got it?’

‘No. I don’t think so. That would be rather too quick work. Good reliable stuff, that dope. Just right, if I may say so. It put you out and it didn’t produce any particularly bad effects.’

‘It gave me a very nasty hangover,’ said Sir Stafford.

‘Ah well, you can’t avoid that. Not in the circumstances.’

‘What would have happened,’ Sir Stafford asked, ‘since you seem to know all about everything, if I had refused to accept the proposition that may—I will only say may—have been put up to me?’

‘It’s quite possible that it would have been curtains for Mary Ann.’

‘Mary Ann? Who’s Mary Ann?’

‘Miss Daphne Theodofanous.’

‘That’s the name I do seem to have heard—being summoned as a missing traveller?’

‘Yes, that’s the name she was travelling under. We call her Mary Ann.’

‘Who is she—just as a matter of interest?’

‘In her own line she’s more or less the tops.’

‘And what is her line? Is she ours or is she theirs, if you know who “theirs” is? I must say I find a little difficulty myself when making my mind up about that.’

‘Yes, it’s not so easy, is it? What with the Chinese and the Russkies and the rather queer crowd that’s behind all the student troubles and the New Mafia and the rather odd lot in South America. And the nice little nest of financiers who seem to have got something funny up their sleeves. Yes, it’s not easy to say.’

‘Mary Ann,’ said Sir Stafford Nye thoughtfully. ‘It seems a curious name to have for her if her real one is Daphne Theodofanous.’

‘Well, her mother’s Greek, her father was an Englishman, and her grandfather was an Austrian subject.’

‘What would have happened if I hadn’t made her a—loan of a certain garment?’

‘She might have been killed.’

‘Come, come. Not really?’

‘We’re worried about the airport at Heathrow. Things have happened there lately, things that need a bit of explaining. If the plane had gone via Geneva as planned, it would have been all right. She’d have had full protection all arranged. But this other way—there wouldn’t have been time to arrange anything and you don’t know who’s who always, nowadays. Everyone’s playing a double game or a treble or a quadruple one.’

‘You alarm me,’ said Sir Stafford Nye. ‘But she’s all right, is she? Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘I hope she’s all right. We haven’t heard anything to the contrary.’

‘If it’s any help to you,’ said Sir Stafford Nye, ‘somebody called here this morning while I was out talking to my little pals in Whitehall. He represented that I telephoned a firm of cleaners and he removed the suit that I wore yesterday, and also another suit. Of course it may have been merely that he took a fancy to the other suit, or he may have made a practice of collecting various gentlemen’s suitings who have recently returned from abroad. Or—well, perhaps you’ve got an “or” to add?’

‘He might have been looking for something.’

‘Yes, I think he was. Somebody’s been looking for something. All very nice and tidily arranged again. Not the way I left it. All right, he was looking for something. What was he looking for?’

‘I’m not sure myself,’ said Horsham, slowly. ‘I wish I was. There’s something going on—somewhere. There are bits of it sticking out, you know, like a badly done up parcel. You get a peep here and a peep there. One moment you think it’s going on at the Bayreuth Festival and the next minute you think it’s tucking out of a South American estancia and then you get a bit of a lead in the USA. There’s a lot of nasty business going on in different places, working up to something. Maybe politics, maybe something quite different from politics. It’s probably money.’ He added: ‘You know Mr Robinson, don’t you? Or rather Mr Robinson knows you, I think he said.’

‘Robinson?’ Sir Stafford Nye considered. ‘Robinson. Nice English name.’ He looked across to Horsham. ‘Large, yellow face?’ he said. ‘Fat? Finger in financial pies generally?’ He asked: ‘Is he, too, on the side of the angels—is that what you’re telling me?’

‘I don’t know about angels,’ said Henry Horsham. ‘He’s pulled us out of a hole in this country more than once. People like Mr Chetwynd don’t go for him much. Think he’s too expensive, I suppose. Inclined to be a mean man, Mr Chetwynd. A great one for making enemies in the wrong place.’

‘One used to say “Poor but honest”,’ said Sir Stafford Nye thoughtfully. ‘I take it that you would put it differently. You would describe our Mr Robinson as expensive but honest. Or shall we put it, honest but expensive.’ He sighed. ‘I wish you could tell me what all this is about,’ he said plaintively. ‘Here I seem to be mixed up in something and no idea what it is.’ He looked at Henry Horsham hopefully, but Horsham shook his head.

‘None of us knows. Not exactly,’ he said.

‘What am I supposed to have got hidden here that someone comes fiddling and looking for?’

‘Frankly, I haven’t the least idea, Sir Stafford.’

‘Well, that’s a pity because I haven’t either.’

‘As far as you know you haven’t got anything. Nobody gave you anything to keep, to take anywhere, to look after?’

‘Nothing whatsoever. If you mean Mary Ann, she said she wanted her life saved, that’s all.’

‘And unless there’s a paragraph in the evening papers, you have saved her life.’

‘It seems rather the end of the chapter, doesn’t it? A pity. My curiosity is rising. I find I want to know very much what’s going to happen next. All you people seem very pessimistic.’

‘Frankly, we are. Things are going badly in this country. Can you wonder?’

‘I know what you mean. I sometimes wonder myself—’

CHAPTER 4

Dinner with Eric

‘Do you mind if I tell you something, old man?’ said Eric Pugh.

Sir Stafford Nye looked at him. He had known Eric Pugh for a good many years. They had not been close friends. Old Eric, or so Sir Stafford thought, was rather a boring friend. He was, on the other hand, faithful. And he was the type of man who, though not amusing, had a knack of knowing things. People said things to him and he remembered what they said and stored them up. Sometimes he could push out a useful bit of information.

‘Come back from that Malay Conference, haven’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Sir Stafford.

‘Anything particular turn up there?’

‘Just the usual,’ said Sir Stafford.

‘Oh. I wondered if something had—well, you know what I mean. Anything had occurred to put the cat among the pigeons.’

‘What, at the Conference? No, just painfully predictable. Everyone said just what you thought they’d say only they said it unfortunately at rather greater length than you could have imagined possible. I don’t know why I go on these things.’

Eric Pugh made a rather tedious remark or two as to what the Chinese were really up to.

‘I don’t think they’re really up to anything,’ said Sir Stafford. ‘All the usual rumours, you know, about the diseases poor old Mao has got and who’s intriguing against him and why.’

‘And what about the Arab-Israeli business?’

‘That’s proceeding according to plan also. Their plan, that is to say. And anyway, what’s that got to do with Malaya?’

‘Well, I didn’t really mean so much Malaya.’

‘You’re looking rather like the Mock Turtle,’ said Sir Stafford Nye. ‘“Soup of the evening, beautiful soup.” Wherefore this gloom?’

‘Well, I just wondered if you’d—you’ll forgive me, won’t you?—I mean you haven’t done anything to blot your copybook, have you, in any way?’

‘Me?’ said Sir Stafford, looking highly surprised.

‘Well, you know what you’re like, Staff. You like giving people a jolt sometimes, don’t you?’

‘I have behaved impeccably of late,’ said Sir Stafford. ‘What have you been hearing about me?’

‘I hear there was some trouble about something that happened in a plane on your way home.’

‘Oh?’ Who did you hear that from?’

‘Well, you know, I saw old Cartison.’

‘Terrible old bore. Always imagining things that haven’t happened.’

‘Yes, I know. I know he is like that. But he was just saying that somebody or other—Winterton, at least—seemed to think you’d been up to something.’

‘Up to something? I wish I had,’ said Sir Stafford Nye.

‘There’s some espionage racket going on somewhere and he got a bit worried about certain people.’

‘What do they think I am—another Philby, something of that kind?’

‘You know you’re very unwise sometimes in the things you say, the things you make jokes about.’

‘It’s very hard to resist sometimes,’ his friend told him. ‘All these politicians and diplomats and the rest of them. They’re so bloody solemn. You’d like to give them a bit of a stir up now and again.’

‘Your sense of fun is very distorted, my boy. It really is. I worry about you sometimes. They wanted to ask you some questions about something that happened on the flight back and they seem to think that you didn’t, well—that perhaps you didn’t exactly speak the truth about it all.’

‘Ah, that’s what they think, is it? Interesting. I think I must work that up a bit.’

‘Now don’t do anything rash.’

‘I must have my moments of fun sometimes.’

‘Look here, old fellow, you don’t want to go and ruin your career just by indulging your sense of humour.’

‘I am quickly coming to the conclusion that there is nothing so boring as having a career.’

‘I know, I know. You are always inclined to take that point of view, and you haven’t got on as far as you ought to have, you know. You were in the running for Vienna at one time. I don’t like to see you muck up things.’

‘I am behaving with the utmost sobriety and virtue, I assure you,’ said Sir Stafford Nye. He added, ‘Cheer up, Eric. You’re a good friend, but really, I’m not guilty of fun and games.’

Eric shook his head doubtfully.

It was a fine evening. Sir Stafford walked home across Green Park. As he crossed the road in Birdcage Walk, a car leaping down the street missed him by a few inches. Sir Stafford was an athletic man. His leap took him safely on to the pavement. The car disappeared down the street. He wondered. Just for a moment he could have sworn that that car had deliberately tried to run him down. An interesting thought. First his flat had been searched, and now he himself might have been marked down. Probably a mere coincidence. And yet, in the course of his life, some of which had been spent in wild neighbourhoods and places, Sir Stafford Nye had come in contact with danger. He knew, as it were, the touch and feel and smell of danger. He felt it now. Someone, somewhere was gunning for him. But why? For what reason? As far as he knew, he had not stuck his neck out in any way. He wondered.

He let himself into his flat and picked up the mail that lay on the floor inside. Nothing much. A couple of bills and copy of Lifeboat periodical. He threw the bills on to his desk and put a finger through the wrapper of Lifeboat. It was a cause to which he occasionally contributed. He turned the pages without much attention because he was still absorbed in what he was thinking. Then he stopped the action of his fingers abruptly. Something was taped between two of the pages. Taped with adhesive tape. He looked at it closely. It was his passport returned to him unexpectedly in this fashion. He tore it free and looked at it. The last stamp on it was the arrival stamp at Heathrow the day before. She had used his passport, getting back here safely, and had chosen this way to return it to him. Where was she now? He would like to know.

He wondered if he would ever see her again. Who was she? Where had she gone, and why? It was like waiting for the second act of a play. Indeed, he felt the first act had hardly been played yet. What had he seen? An old-fashioned curtain-raiser, perhaps. A girl who had ridiculously wanted to dress herself up and pass herself off as of the male sex, who had passed the passport control of Heathrow without attracting suspicion of any kind to herself and who had now disappeared through that gateway into London. No, he would probably never see her again. It annoyed him. But why, he thought, why do I want to? She wasn’t particularly attractive, she wasn’t anything. No, that wasn’t quite true. She was something, or someone, or she could not have induced him, with no particular persuasion, with no overt sex stimulation, nothing except a plain demand for help, to do what she wanted. A demand from one human being to another human being because, or so she had intimated, not precisely in words, but nevertheless it was what she had intimated, she knew people and she recognized in him a man who was willing to take a risk to help another human being. And he had taken a risk, too, thought Sir Stafford Nye. She could have put anything in that beer glass of his. He could have been found, if she had so willed it, found as a dead body in a seat tucked away in the corner of a departure lounge in an airport. And if she had, as no doubt she must have had, a knowledgeable recourse to drugs, his death might have been passed off as an attack of heart trouble due to altitude or difficult pressurizing—something or other like that. Oh well, why think about it? He wasn’t likely to see her again and he was annoyed.

Yes, he was annoyed, and he didn’t like being annoyed. He considered the matter for some minutes. Then he wrote out an advertisement, to be repeated three times. ‘Passenger to Frankfurt. November 3rd. Please communicate with fellow traveller to London.’ No more than that. Either she would or she wouldn’t. If it ever came to her eyes she would know by whom that advertisement had been inserted. She had had his passport, she knew his name. She could look him up. He might hear from her. He might not. Probably not. If not, the curtain-raiser would remain a curtain-raiser, a silly little play that received late-comers to the theatre and diverted them until the real business of the evening began. Very useful in pre-war times. In all probability, though, he would not hear from her again and one of the reasons might be that she might have accomplished whatever it was she had come to do in London, and have now left the country once more, flying abroad to Geneva, or the Middle East, or to Russia or to China or to South America, or to the United States. And why, thought Sir Stafford, do I include South America? There must be a reason. She had not mentioned South America. Nobody had mentioned South America. Except Horsham, that was true. And even Horsham had only mentioned South America among a lot of other mentions.

On the following morning as he walked slowly homeward, after handing in his advertisement, along the pathway across St James’s Park his eye picked out, half unseeing, the autumn flowers. The chrysanthemums looking by now stiff and leggy with their button tops of gold and bronze. Their smell came to him faintly, a rather goatlike smell, he had always thought, a smell that reminded him of hillsides in Greece. He must remember to keep his eye on the Personal Column. Not yet. Two or three days at least would have to pass before his own advertisement was put in and before there had been time for anyone to put in one in answer. He must not miss it if there was an answer because, after all, it was irritating not to know—not to have any idea what all this was about.

He tried to recall not the girl at the airport but his sister Pamela’s face. A long time since her death. He remembered her. Of course he remembered her, but he could not somehow picture her face. It irritated him not to be able to do so. He had paused just when he was about to cross one of the roads. There was no traffic except for a car jigging slowly along with the solemn demeanour of a bored dowager. An elderly car, he thought. An old-fashioned Daimler limousine. He shook his shoulders. Why stand here in this idiotic way, lost in thought?

He took an abrupt step to cross the road and suddenly with surprising vigour the dowager limousine, as he had thought of it in his mind, accelerated. Accelerated with a sudden astonishing speed. It bore down on him with such swiftness that he only just had time to leap across on to the opposite pavement. It disappeared with a flash, turning round the curve of the road further on.

‘I wonder,’ said Sir Stafford to himself. ‘Now I wonder. Could it be that there is someone that doesn’t like me? Someone following me, perhaps, watching me take my way home, waiting for an opportunity?’

Colonel Pikeaway, his bulk sprawled out in his chair in the small room in Bloomsbury where he sat from ten to five with a short interval for lunch, was surrounded as usual by an atmosphere of thick cigar smoke; with his eyes closed, only an occasional blink showed that he was awake and not asleep. He seldom raised his head. Somebody had said that he looked like a cross between an ancient Buddha and a large blue frog, with perhaps, as some impudent youngster had added, just a touch of a bar sinister from a hippopotamus in his ancestry.