Agatha Christie - 1970 - Passenger to Frankfurt
Agatha Christie
Passenger to Frankfurt
To Margaret Guillaume
‘Leadership, besides being a great creative force, can be diabolical…’
Jan Smuts
Contents
Epigraph
Introduction
Book 1
Interrupted Journey
1 Passenger To Frankfurt
2 London
3 The Man From The Cleaners
4 Dinner With Eric
5 Wagnerian Motif
6 Portrait Of A Lady
7 Advice From Great-Aunt Matilda
8 An Embassy Dinner
9 The House Near Godalming
Book 2
Journey To Siegfried
10 The Woman In The Schloss
11 The Young And The Lovely
12 Court Jester
Book 3
At Home And Abroad
13 Conference In Paris
14 Conference In London
15 Aunt Matilda Takes A Cure
16 Pikeaway Talks
17 Herr Heinrich Spiess
18 Pikeaway’s Postscript
19 Sir Stafford Nye Has Visitors
20 The Admiral Visits An Old Friend
21 Project Benvo
22 Juanita
23 Journey To Scotland
Epilogue
About the Author
Other Books by Agatha Christie
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
The Author speaks:
The first question put to an author, personally, or through the post, is:
‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
The temptation is great to reply: ‘I always go to Harrods,’ or ‘I get them mostly at the Army & Navy Stores,’ or, snappily, ‘Try Marks and Spencer.’
The universal opinion seems firmly established that there is a magic source of ideas which authors have discovered how to tap.
One can hardly send one’s questioners back to Elizabethan times, with Shakespeare’s:
Tell me, where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?
Reply, reply.
You merely say firmly: ‘My own head.’
That, of course, is no help to anybody. If you like the look of your questioner you relent and go a little further.
‘If one idea in particular seems attractive, and you feel you could do something with it, then you toss it around, play tricks with it, work it up, tone it down, and gradually get it into shape. Then, of course, you have to start writing it. That’s not nearly such fun–it becomes hard work. Alternatively, you can tuck it carefully away, in storage, for perhaps using in a year or two years’ time.’
A second question–or rather a statement–is then likely to be:
‘I suppose you take most of your characters from real life?’
An indignant denial to that monstrous suggestion.
‘No, I don’t. I invent them. They are mine. They’ve got to be my characters–doing what I want them to do, being what I want them to be–coming alive for me, having their own ideas sometimes, but only because I’ve made them become real.’
So the author has produced the ideas, and the characters–but now comes the third necessity–the setting. The first two come from inside sources, but the third is outside–it must be there–waiting–in existence already. You don’t invent that–it’s there–it’s real.
You have been perhaps for a cruise on the Nile–you remember it all–just the setting you want for this particular story. You have had a meal at a Chelsea café. A quarrel was going on–one girl pulled out a handful of another girl’s hair. An excellent start for the book you are going to write next. You travel on the Orient Express. What fun to make it the scene for a plot you are considering. You go to tea with a friend. As you arrive her brother closes a book he is reading–throws it aside, says: ‘Not bad, but why on earth didn’t they ask Evans?’
So you decide immediately a book of yours shortly to be written will bear the title, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
You don’t know yet who Evans is going to be. Never mind. Evans will come in due course–the title is fixed.
So, in a sense, you don’t invent your settings. They are outside you, all around you, in existence–you have only to stretch out your hand and pick and choose. A railway train, a hospital, a London hotel, a Caribbean beach, a country village, a cocktail party, a girls’ school.
But one thing only applies–they must be there–in existence. Real people, real places. A definite place in time and space. If here and now–how shall you get full information–apart from the evidence of your own eyes and ears? The answer is frighteningly simple.
It is what the Press brings to you every day, served up in your morning paper under the general heading of News. Collect it from the front page. What is going on in the world today? What is everyone saying, thinking, doing? Hold up a mirror to 1970 in England.
Look at that front page every day for a month, make notes, consider and classify.
Every day there is a killing.
A girl strangled.
Elderly woman attacked and robbed of her meagre savings.
Young men or boys–attacking or attacked.
Buildings and telephone kiosks smashed and gutted.
Drug smuggling.
Robbery and assault.
Children missing and children’s murdered bodies found not far from their homes.
Can this be England? Is England really like this? One feels–no–not yet, but it could be.
Fear is awakening–fear of what may be. Not so much because of actual happenings but because of the possible causes behind them. Some known, some unknown, but felt. And not only in our own country. There are smaller paragraphs on other pages–giving news from Europe–from Asia–from the Americas–Worldwide News.
Hi-jacking of planes.
Kidnapping.
Violence.
Riots.
Hate.
Anarchy–all growing stronger.
All seeming to lead to worship of destruction, pleasure in cruelty.
What does it all mean? An Elizabethan phrase echoes from the past, speaking of Life:
…it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
And yet one knows–of one’s own knowledge–how much goodness there is in this world of ours–the kindnesses done, the goodness of heart, the acts of compassion, the kindness of neighbour to neighbour, the helpful actions of girls and boys.
Then why this fantastic atmosphere of daily news–of things that happen–that are actual facts?
To write a story in this year of Our Lord 1970–you must come to terms with your background. If the background is fantastic, then the story must accept its background. It, too, must be a fantasy–an extravaganza. The setting must include the fantastic facts of daily life.
Can one envisage a fantastic cause? A secret Campaign for Power? Can a maniacal desire for destruction create a new world? Can one go a step further and suggest deliverance by fantastic and impossible-sounding means?
Nothing is impossible, science has taught us that.
This story is in essence a fantasy. It pretends to be nothing more.
But most of the things that happen in it are happening, or giving promise of happening in the world of today.
It is not an impossible story–it is only a fantastic one.
Book 1
Interrupted Journey
Ch
apter 1
Passenger To Frankfurt
I
‘Fasten your seat-belts, please.’ The diverse passengers in the plane were slow to obey. There was a general feeling that they couldn’t possibly be arriving at Geneva yet. The drowsy groaned and yawned. The more than drowsy had to be gently roused by an authoritative stewardess.
‘Your seat-belts, please.’
The dry voice came authoritatively over the Tannoy. It explained in German, in French, and in English that a short period of rough weather would shortly be experienced. Sir Stafford Nye opened his mouth to its full extent, yawned and pulled himself upright in his seat. He had been dreaming very happily of fishing an English river.
He was a man of forty-five, of medium height, with a smooth, olive, clean-shaven face. In dress he rather liked to affect the bizarre. A man of excellent family, he felt fully at ease indulging any such sartorial whims. If it made the more conventionally dressed of his colleagues wince occasionally, that was merely a source of malicious pleasure to him. There was something about him of the eighteenth-century buck. He liked to be noticed.
His particular kind of affectation when travelling was a kind of bandit’s cloak which he had once purchased in Corsica. It was of a very dark purply-blue, had a scarlet lining and had a kind of burnous hanging down behind which he could draw up over his head when he wished to, so as to obviate draughts.
Sir Stafford Nye had been a disappointment in diplomatic circles. Marked out in early youth by his gifts for great things, he had singularly failed to fulfil his early promise. A peculiar and diabolical sense of humour was wont to afflict him in what should have been his most serious moments. When it came to the point, he found that he always preferred to indulge his delicate Puckish malice to boring himself. He was a well-known figure in public life without ever having reached eminence. It was felt that Stafford Nye, though definitely brilliant, was not–and presumably never would be–a safe man. In these days of tangled politics and tangled foreign relations, safety, especially if one were to reach ambassadorial rank, was preferable to brilliance. Sir Stafford Nye was relegated to the shelf, though he was occasionally entrusted with such missions as needed the art of intrigue, but were not of too important or public a nature. Journalists sometimes referred to him as the dark horse of diplomacy.
Whether Sir Stafford himself was disappointed with his own career, nobody ever knew. Probably not even Sir Stafford himself. He was a man of a certain vanity, but he was also a man who very much enjoyed indulging his own proclivities for mischief.
He was returning now from a commission of inquiry in Malaya. He had found it singularly lacking in interest. His colleagues had, in his opinion, made up their minds beforehand what their findings were going to be. They saw and they listened, but their preconceived views were not affected. Sir Stafford had thrown a few spanners into the works, more for the hell of it than from any pronounced convictions. At all events, he thought, it had livened things up. He wished there were more possibilities of doing that sort of thing. His fellow members of the commission had been sound, dependable fellows, and remarkably dull. Even the well-known Mrs Nathaniel Edge, the only woman member, well known as having bees in her bonnet, was no fool when it came down to plain facts. She saw, she listened and she played safe.
He had met her before on the occasion of a problem to be solved in one of the Balkan capitals. It was there that Sir Stafford Nye had not been able to refrain from embarking on a few interesting suggestions. In that scandal-loving periodical Inside News it was insinuated that Sir Stafford Nye’s presence in that Balkan capital was intimately connected with Balkan problems, and that his mission was a secret one of the greatest delicacy. A kind of friend had sent Sir Stafford a copy of this with the relevant passage marked. Sir Stafford was not taken aback. He read it with a delighted grin. It amused him very much to reflect how ludicrously far from the truth the journalists were on this occasion. His presence in Sofiagrad had been due entirely to a blameless interest in the rarer wild flowers and to the urgencies of an elderly friend of his, Lady Lucy Cleghorn, who was indefatigable in her quest for these shy floral rarities, and who at any moment would scale a rock cliff or leap joyously into a bog at the sight of some flowerlet, the length of whose Latin name was in inverse proportion to its size.
A small band of enthusiasts had been pursuing this botanical search on the slopes of mountains for about ten days when it occurred to Sir Stafford that it was a pity the paragraph was not true. He was a little–just a little–tired of wild flowers and, fond as he was of dear Lucy, her ability despite her sixty-odd years to race up hills at top speed, easily outpacing him, sometimes annoyed him. Always just in front of him he saw the seat of those bright royal blue trousers and Lucy, though scraggy enough elsewhere, goodness knows, was decidedly too broad in the beam to wear royal blue corduroy trousers. A nice little international pie, he had thought, in which to dip his fingers, in which to play about…
In the aeroplane the metallic Tannoy voice spoke again. It told the passengers that owing to heavy fog at Geneva, the plane would be diverted to Frankfurt airport and proceed from there to London. Passengers to Geneva would be re-routed from Frankfurt as soon as possible. It made no difference to Sir Stafford Nye. If there was fog in London, he supposed they would re-route the plane to Prestwick. He hoped that would not happen. He had been to Prestwick once or twice too often. Life, he thought, and journeys by air, were really excessively boring. If only–he didn’t know–if only–what?
II
It was warm in the Transit Passenger Lounge at Frankfurt, so Sir Stafford Nye slipped back his cloak, allowing its crimson lining to drape itself spectacularly round his shoulders. He was drinking a glass of beer and listening with half an ear to the various announcements as they were made.
‘Flight 4387. Flying to Moscow. Flight 2381 bound for Egypt and Calcutta.’
Journeys all over the globe. How romantic it ought to be. But there was something about the atmosphere of a Passengers’ Lounge in an airport that chilled romance. It was too full of people, too full of things to buy, too full of similarly coloured seats, too full of plastic, too full of human beings, too full of crying children. He tried to remember who had said:
I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face.
Chesterton perhaps? It was undoubtedly true. Put enough people together and they looked so painfully alike that one could hardly bear it. An interesting face now, thought Sir Stafford. What a difference it would make. He looked disparagingly at two young women, splendidly made up, dressed in the national uniform of their country–England he presumed–of shorter and shorter miniskirts, and another young woman, even better made up–in fact quite good-looking–who was wearing what he believed to be called a culotte suit. She had gone a little further along the road of fashion.
He wasn’t very interested in nice-looking girls who looked like all the other nice-looking girls. He would like someone to be different. Someone sat down beside him on the plastic-covered artificial leather settee on which he was sitting. Her face attracted his attention at once. Not precisely because it was different, in fact he almost seemed to recognize it as a face he knew. Here was someone he had seen before. He couldn’t remember where or when but it was certainly familiar. Twenty-five or six, he thought, possibly, as to age. A delicate high-bridged aquiline nose, a black heavy bush of hair reaching to her shoulders. She had a magazine in front of her but she was not paying attention to it. She was, in fact, looking with something that was almost eagerness at him. Quite suddenly she spoke. It was a deep contralto voice, almost as deep as a man’s. It had a very faint foreign accent. She said,
‘Can I speak to you?’
He studied her for a moment before replying. No–not what one might have thought–this wasn’t a pick-up. This was something else.
‘I see no reason,’ he said, ‘why you should not do so. We have time to waste here, it seems.’
‘Fog,’ said
the woman, ‘fog in Geneva, fog in London, perhaps. Fog everywhere. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Oh, you mustn’t worry,’ he said reassuringly, ‘they’ll land you somewhere all right. They’re quite efficient, you know. Where are you going?’
‘I was going to Geneva.’
‘Well, I expect you’ll get there in the end.’
‘I have to get there now. If I can get to Geneva, it will be all right. There is someone who will meet me there. I can be safe.’
‘Safe?’ He smiled a little.
She said, ‘Safe is a four-letter word but not the kind of four-letter word that people are interested in nowadays. And yet it can mean a lot. It means a lot to me.’ Then she said, ‘You see, if I can’t get to Geneva, if I have to leave this plane here, or go on in this plane to London with no arrangements made, I shall be killed.’ She looked at him sharply. ‘I suppose you don’t believe that.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘It’s quite true. People can be. They are, every day.’
‘Who wants to kill you?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Not to me.’
‘You can believe me if you wish to believe me. I am speaking the truth. I want help. Help to get to London safely.’
‘And why should you select me to help you?’
‘Because I think that you know something about death. You have known of death, perhaps seen death happen.’
He looked sharply at her and then away again.