Destination Unknown

by Agatha Christie

  "Then there is the religieuse," Leblanc said, turning back to the list. "Sister Marie something or other. Andrew Peters, also American. Dr. Barron. That is a celebrated name, le doctor Barron. A man of great brilliance. An expert on virus diseases."

  "Biological warfare," said Jessop. "It fits. It all fits."

  "A man poorly paid and discontented," said Leblanc.

  "How many going to St. Ives?" murmured Jessop.

  The Frenchman shot him a quick look and he smiled apologetically.

  "Just an old nursery rhyme," he said. "For St. Ives read question mark. Journey to nowhere."

  The telephone on the table buzzed and Leblanc picked up the receiver.

  "Allo?" he said. "Qu'est ce qu'il y a? Ah, yes, send them up." He turned his head towards Jessop. His face was suddenly alive, vigorous. "One of my men reporting," he said. "They have found something. Mon cher collegue, it is possible - I say no more - possible that your optimism is justified."

  A few moments later two men entered the room. The first bore a rough resemblance to Leblanc, the same type, stocky, dark, intelligent. His manner was respectful but exhilarated. He wore European clothes badly stained and marked, covered with dust. He had obviously just arrived from a journey. With him was a native wearing the white local dress. He had the dignified composure of the dweller in remote places. His manner was courteous but not subservient. He looked with a faint wonder round the room whilst the other man explained things in rapid French.

  "The reward was offered and circulated," the man explained, "and this fellow and his family and a great many of his friends have been searching diligently. I let him bring you the find himself as there may be questions you want to ask him."

  Leblanc turned to the Berber -

  "You have done good work," he said, speaking now in the man's own language. "You have the eyes of the hawk, my father. Show us then what you have discovered."

  From a fold in his white robe the man took out a small object, and stepping forward laid it on the table before the Frenchman. It was rather a large sized pinkish grey synthetic pearl.

  "It is like the one shown to me and shown to others," he said. "It is of value and I have found it."

  Jessop stretched out a hand and took the pearl. From his pocket he drew out another exactly like it and examined both. Then he walked across the room to the window, and examined them both through a powerful lens.

  "Yes," he said, "the mark is there." There was jubilation now in his voice and he came back to the table. "Good girl," he said, "good girl, good girl! She managed it!"

  Leblanc was questioning the Berber in a rapid exchange of Arabic. Finally he turned to Jessop.

  "I make my apologies, mon cher collegue," he said. "This pearl was found at a distance of nearly half a mile from the flaming plane."

  "Which shows," said Jessop, "that Olive Betterton was a survivor, and that though seven people left Fez in the plane and seven charred bodies were found, one of those charred bodies was definitely not hers."

  "We extend the search now," said Leblanc. He spoke again to the Berber and the man smiled back happily. He left the room with the man who had brought him in. "He will be handsomely rewarded as promised," said Leblanc, "and there will be a hunt now all over the countryside for these pearls. They have hawk eyes, these people, and the knowledge that these are worth good money in reward will pass round like a grapevine. I think - I think, mon cher collegue, that we shall get results! If only they have not tumbled to what she was doing."

  Jessop shook his head.

  "It would be such a natural occurrence," he said. "The sudden breaking of a necklace of costume jewellery such as most women wear, the picking up apparently of what loose pearls she can find and stuffing them into her pocket, then a little hole in the pocket. Besides, why should they suspect her? She is Olive Betterton, anxious to join her husband."

  "We must review this matter in a new light," said Leblanc. He drew the passenger list towards him. "Olive Betterton. Dr. Barron," he said, ticking off the two names. "Two at least who are going - wherever they are going. The American woman, Mrs. Calvin Baker. As to her we keep an open mind. Torquil Ericsson you say has read papers before the Royal Society. The American, Peters, was described on his passport as a Research Chemist. The religieuse - well, it would make a good disguise. In fact, a whole cargo of people cleverly shepherded from different points to travel in that one plane on that particular day. And then the plane is discovered in flames and inside it the requisite number of charred bodies. How did they manage that, I wonder? Enfin, c'est colossal!"

  "Yes," said Jessop. "It was the final convincing touch. But we know now that six or seven people have started off on a fresh journey, and we know where their point of departure is. What do we do next - visit the spot?"

  "But precisely," said Leblanc. "We take up advanced headquarters. If I mistake not, now that we are on the track, other evidence will come to light."

  "If our calculations are exact," Leblanc said, "there should be results."

  The calculations were many and devious. The rate of progress of a car, the likely distance where it would refuel, possible villages where travellers might have stayed the night. The tracks were many and confusing, disappointments were continual, but every now and then there came a positive result.

  "Voila, mon capitaine! A search of the latrines, as you ordered. In a dark corner of the latrine a pearl embedded in a little piece of chewing gum in the house of one Abdul Mohammed. He and his sons have been interrogated. At first they denied, but at last they have confessed. A carload of six people said to be from the German archaeological expedition spent a night in his house. Much money was paid, and they were not to mention this to anyone, the excuse being that there was some illicit digging in prospect. Children in the village of El Kaif also have brought in two more pearls. We know now the direction. There is more, Monsieur le Capitaine. The hand Fatma has been seen as you foretold. This type here, he will tell you about it."

  "This type" was a particularly wild-looking Berber.

  "I was with my flocks," he said, "at night and I heard a car. It passed me and as it did so I saw the sign. The hand of Fatma was outlined on one side of it. It gleamed, I tell you, in the darkness."

  "The application of phosphorous on a glove can be very efficacious," murmured Leblanc. "I congratulate you, mon cher, on that idea."

  "It's effective," said Jessop, "but it's dangerous. It's too easily noticed by the fugitives themselves, I mean."

  Leblanc shrugged his shoulders.

  "It could not be seen in daylight."

  "No, but if there was a halt and they alighted from the car in the darkness -"

  "Even then - it is a notable Arab superstition. It is painted often on carts and wagons. It would only be thought that some pious Moslem had painted it in luminous paint on his vehicle."

  "True enough. But we must be on our guard. For if our enemies did notice it, it is highly possible that they will lay a false trail for us, of hands of Fatma in phosphorous paint."

  "Ah, as to that I agree with you. One must indeed be on one's guard. Always, always on one's guard."

  On the following morning Leblanc had another exhibit of three false pearls arranged in a triangle, stuck together by a little piece of chewing gum.

  "This should mean," said Jessop, "that the next stage of the journey was by plane."

  He looked enquiringly at Leblanc.

  "You are absolutely right," said the other. "This was found on a disused army airfield, in a remote and desolate place. There were signs that a plane landed and left there not long ago." He shrugged his shoulders. "An unknown plane," he said, "and once again they took off for a destination unknown. That brings us once more to a halt and we do not know where next to take up the trail."

  Chapter 15

  "It's incredible," thought Hilary to herself, "incredible that I've been here ten days!" The frightening thing in life, Hilary thought, was how easily you adapted yourself. She remembered
once being shown in France some peculiar torture arrangement of the Middle Ages, an iron cage wherein a prisoner had been confined and in which he could neither lie, stand nor sit. The guide had recounted how the last man imprisoned there had lived in it for eighteen years, had been released and had lived for another twenty after that, before dying, an old man. That adaptability, thought Hilary, was what differentiated man from the animal world. Man could live in any climate and on any food and under any conditions. He could exist slave or free.

  She had felt first, when introduced into the Unit, a blinding panic, a horrible feeling of imprisonment and frustration, and the fact that the imprisonment was camouflaged in circumstances of luxury had somehow made it seem all the more horrible to her. And yet now, already, even after a week here she had begun insensibly to accept the conditions of her life as natural. It was a queer, dreamlike existence. Nothing seemed particularly real, but already she had the feeling that the dream had gone on a long time and would go on for a long time more. It would, perhaps, last, forever... She would always live here in the Unit, this was life, and there was nothing outside.

  This dangerous acceptance, she thought, came partly from the fact that she was a woman. Women were adaptable by nature. It was their strength and their weakness. They examined their environment, accepted it, and like realists settled down to make the best of it. What interested her most were the reactions of the people who had arrived here with her. Helga Needheim she hardly ever saw except sometimes at meals. When they met, the German woman vouchsafed her a curt nod, but no more. As far as she could judge, Helga Needheim was happy and satisfied. The Unit obviously lived up to the picture she had formed in her mind of it. She was the type of woman absorbed by her work, and was comfortably sustained by her natural arrogance. The superiority of herself and her fellow scientists was the first article of Helga's creed. She had no views of a brotherhood of man, of an era of peace, Of liberty of mind and spirit. For her the future was narrow but all conquering. The super race, herself a member of it; the rest of the world in bondage, treated, if they behaved, with condescending kindness. If her fellow workers expressed different views, if their ideas were Communist rather than Fascist, Helga took little notice. If their work was good they were necessary, and their ideas would change.

  Dr. Barron was more intelligent than Helga Needheim. Occasionally Hilary had brief conversations with him. He was absorbed in his work, deeply satisfied with the conditions provided for him, but his enquiring Gallic intellect led him to speculate and ponder on the media in which he found himself.

  "It was not what I expected. No, frankly," he said one day, "entre nous, Mrs. Betterton, I do not care for prison conditions. And these are prison conditions, though the cage, let us say, is heavily gilded."

  "There is hardly the freedom here that you came to seek?" Hilary suggested.

  He smiled at her, a quick, rueful smile.

  "But no," he said, "you are wrong. I did not really seek liberty. I am a civilised man. The civilised man knows there is no such thing. Only the younger and cruder nations put the word Liberty on their banner. There must always be a planned framework of security. And the essence of civilisation is that the way of life should be a moderate one. The middle way. Always one comes back to the middle way. No. I will be frank with you. I came here for money."

  Hilary in her turn smiled. Her eyebrows rose.

  "And what good is money to you here?"

  "It pays for very expensive laboratory equipment," said Dr. Barron. "I am not obliged to put my hand into my own pocket, and so I can serve the cause of science and satisfy my own intellectual curiosity. I am a man who loves his work, true, but I do not love it for the sake of humanity. I have usually found that those who do so are somewhat woolly headed, and often incompetent workers. No, it is the pure intellectual joy of research that I appreciate. For the rest, a large sum of money was paid to me before I left France. It is safely banked under another name and in due course, when all this comes to an end, I shall have it to spend as I choose."

  "When all this comes to an end?" Hilary repeated. "But why should it come to an end?"

  "One must have the common sense," said Dr. Barron, "nothing is permanent, nothing endures. I have come to the conclusion that this place is run by a madman. A madman, let me tell you, can be very logical. If you are rich and logical and also mad, you can succeed for a very long time in living out your illusion. But in the end -" he shrugged, "- in the end this will break up. Because, you see, it is not reasonable, what happens here! That which is not reasonable must always pay the reckoning in the end. In the meantime -" again he shrugged his shoulders, "- it suits me admirably."

  Torquil Ericsson, whom Hilary expected to be violently disillusioned, appeared to be quite content in the atmosphere of the Unit. Less practical than the Frenchman, he existed in a single-minded vision of his own. The world in which he lived was one so unfamiliar to Hilary that she could not even understand it. It engendered a kind of austere happiness, an absorption in mathematical calculations, and an endless vista of possibilities. The strange, impersonal ruthlessness of his character frightened Hilary. He was the kind of young man, she thought, who in a moment of idealism could send three quarters of the world to their death in order that the remaining quarter should participate in an impractical Utopia that existed only in Ericsson's mind.

  With the American, Andy Peters, Hilary felt herself far more in accord. Possibly, she thought, it was because Peters was a man of talents but not a genius. From what others said, she gathered he was a first-class man at his job, a careful and skilled chemist, but not a pioneer. Peters, like herself, had at once hated and feared the atmosphere of the Unit.

  "The truth is that I didn't know where I was going," he said. "I thought I knew, but I was wrong. The Party has got nothing to do with this place. We're not in touch with Moscow. This is a lone show of some kind - a Fascist show possibly."

  "Don't you think," said Hilary, "that you go in too much for labels?"

  He considered this.

  "Maybe you're right," he said. "Come to think of it, these words we throw around don't mean much. But I do know this. I want to get out of here and I mean to get out of here."

  "It won't be easy," said Hilary, in a low voice.

  They were walking together after dinner near the splashing fountains of the roof garden. With the illusion of darkness and the starlit sky they might have been in the private gardens of some sultan's palace. The functional concrete buildings were veiled from their sight.

  "No," said Peters, "it won't be easy, but nothing's impossible."

  "I like to hear you say that," said Hilary. "Oh, how I like to hear you say that!"

  He looked at her sympathetically.

  "Been getting you down?" he asked.

  "Very much so. But that's not what I'm really afraid of."

  "No? what then?"

  "I'm afraid of getting used to it," said Hilary.

  "Yes." He spoke thoughtfully. "Yes, I know what you mean. There's a kind of mass suggestion going on here. I think perhaps you're right about that."

  "It would seem to me much more natural for people to rebel," said Hilary.

  "Yes. Yes, I've thought the same. In fact I've wondered once or twice whether there's not a little hocus-pocus going on."

  "Hocus-pocus? What do you mean by that?"

  "Well, to put it frankly, dope."

  "Do you mean a drug of some kind?"

  "Yes. It might be possible, you know. Something in the food or drink, something that induces - what shall I say - docility?"

  "But is there such a drug?"

  "Well, that's not really my line of country. There are things that are given to people to soothe them down, to make them acquiescent before operations and that. Whether there is anything that can be administered steadily over a long period of time - and which at the same time does not impair efficiency - that I don't know. I'm more inclined to think now that the effect is produced mentally. I mean that I
think some of these organisers and administrators here are well-versed in hypnosis and psychology and that, without our being aware of it, we are continually being offered suggestions of our well being, of our attaining our ultimate aim (whatever it is), and that all this does produce a definite effect. A lot can be done that way, you know, if it's done by people who know their stuff."

  "But we mustn't acquiesce," cried Hilary, hotly. "We mustn't feel for one moment that it's a good thing to be here."

  "What does your husband feel?"

  "Tom? I - oh, I don't know. It's so difficult. I -" she lapsed into silence.

  The whole fantasy of her life as she lived it she could hardly communicate to the man who was listening to her. For ten days now she had lived in an apartment with a man who was a stranger to her. They shared a bedroom and when she lay awake at night she could hear him breathing in the other bed. Both of them accepted the arrangement as inevitable. She was an impostor, a spy, ready to play any part and assume any personality. Tom Betterton she quite frankly did not understand. He seemed to her a terrible example of what could happen to a brilliant young man who had lived for some months in the enervating atmosphere of the Unit. At any rate there was in him no calm acceptance of his destiny. Far from taking pleasure in his work, he was, she thought, increasingly worried by his inability to concentrate on it. Once or twice he had reiterated what he had said on that first evening.