The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie (best detective novels of all time TXT) 📖
- Author: Agatha Christie
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“I can’t find him anywhere.”
She was evidently making a night of it. I sighed and sat down in a chair.
“I don’t quite see the reason for your agitation,” I said patiently.
“My dream——”
“That curry we had for dinner!”
“Oh, Sir Eustace!”
The woman was quite indignant. And yet everybody knows that nightmares are a direct result of injudicious eating.
“After all,” I continued persuasively, “why shouldn’t Anne Beddingfeld and Race go out for a little stroll without having the whole hotel aroused about it?”
“You think they’ve just gone out for a stroll together? But it’s after midnight!”
“One does these foolish things when one is young,” I murmured, “though Race is certainly old enough to know better.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I dare say they’ve run away to make a match of it,” I continued soothingly, though fully aware that I was making an idiotic suggestion. For, after all, at a place like this, where is there to run away to?
I don’t know how much longer I should have gone on making feeble remarks, but at that moment Race himself walked in upon us. At any rate, I had been partly right—he had been out for a stroll, but he hadn’t taken Anne with him. However, I had been quite wrong in my way of dealing with the situation. I was soon shown that. Race had the whole hotel turned upside-down in three minutes. I’ve never seen a man more upset.
The thing is very extraordinary. Where did the girl go? She walked out of the hotel, fully dressed, about ten minutes past eleven, and she was never seen again. The idea of suicide seems impossible. She was one of those energetic young women who are in love with life, and have not the faintest intention of quitting it. There was no train either way until midday on the morrow, so she can’t have left the place. Then where the devil is she?
Race is almost beside himself, poor fellow. He has left no stone unturned. All the D.C.’s, or whatever they call themselves, for hundreds of miles round have been pressed into the service. The native trackers have run about on all fours. Everything that can be done is being done—but no sign of Anne Beddingfeld. The accepted theory is that she walked in her sleep. There are signs on the path near the bridge which seem to show that the girl walked deliberately off the edge. If so, of course, she must have been dashed to pieces on the rocks below. Unfortunately, most of the footprints were obliterated by a party of tourists who chose to walk that way early on the Monday morning.
I don’t know that it’s a very satisfactory theory. In my young days, I always was told that sleep-walkers couldn’t hurt themselves—that their own sixth sense took care of them. I don’t think the theory satisfies Mrs. Blair either.
I can’t make that woman out. Her whole attitude towards Race has changed. She watches him now like a cat a mouse, and she makes obvious efforts to bring herself to be civil to him. And they used to be such friends. Altogether she is unlike herself, nervous, hysterical, starting and jumping at the least sound. I am beginning to think that it is high time I went to Jo’burg.
A rumour came along yesterday of a mysterious island somewhere up the river, with a man and a girl on it. Race got very excited. It turned out to be all a mare’s-nest, however. The man had been there for years, and is well known to the manager of the hotel. He totes parties up and down the river in the season and points out crocodiles and a stray hippopotamus or so to them. I believe that he keeps a tame one which is trained to bite pieces out of the boat on occasions. Then he fends it off with a boat-hook, and the party feel they have really got to the back of beyond at last. How long the girl has been there is not definitely known, but it seems pretty clear that she can’t be Anne, and there is a certain delicacy in interfering in other people’s affairs. If I were this young fellow, I should certainly kick Race off the island if he came asking questions about my love affairs.
Later.
It is definitely settled that I go to Jo’burg to-morrow. Race urges me to do so. Things are getting unpleasant there, by all I hear, but I might as well go before they get worse. I dare say I shall be shot by a striker, anyway. Mrs. Blair was to have accompanied me, but at the last minute she changed her mind and decided to stay on at the Falls. It seems as though she couldn’t bear to take her eyes off Race. She came to me to-night and said, with some hesitation, that she had a favour to ask. Would I take charge of her souvenirs for her?
“Not the animals?” I asked, in lively alarm. I always felt that I should get stuck with those beastly animals sooner or later.
In the end we effected a compromise. I took charge of two small wooden boxes for her which contained fragile articles. The animals are to be packed by the local store in vast crates and sent to Cape Town by rail, where Pagett will see to their being stored.
The people who are packing them say that they are of a particularly awkward shape (!), and that special cases will have to be made. I pointed out to Mrs. Blair that by the time she has got them home those animals will have cost her easily a pound apiece!
Pagett is straining at the leash to rejoin me in Jo’burg. I shall make an excuse of Mrs. Blair’s cases to keep him in Cape Town. I have written him that he must receive the cases and see to their safe disposal, as they contain rare curios of immense value.
So all is settled, and I and Miss Pettigrew go off into the blue together. And any one who has seen Miss Pettigrew will admit that it is perfectly respectable.
CHAPTER XXIXThere is something about the state of things here that is not at all healthy. To use the well-known phrase that I have so often read, we are all living on the edge of a volcano. Bands of strikers, or so-called strikers, patrol the streets and scowl at one in a murderous fashion. They are picking out the bloated capitalists ready for when the massacres begin, I suppose. You can’t ride in a taxi—if you do, strikers pull you out again. And the hotels hint pleasantly that when the food gives out they will fling you out on the mat!
I met Reeves, my labour friend of the Kilmorden, last night. He has cold feet worse than any man I ever saw. He’s like all the rest of these people, they make inflammatory speeches of enormous length, solely for political purposes, and then wish they hadn’t. He’s busy now going about and saying he didn’t really do it. When I met him, he was just off to Cape Town, where he meditates making a three days’ speech in Dutch, vindicating himself, and pointing out that the things he said really meant something entirely different. I am thankful that I do not have to sit in the Legislative Assembly of South Africa. The House of Commons is bad enough, but at least we have only one language, and some slight restriction as to length of speeches. When I went to the Assembly before leaving Cape Town, I listened to a gray-haired gentleman with a drooping moustache who looked exactly like the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland.
He dropped out his words one by one in a particularly melancholy fashion. Every now and then he galvanized himself to further efforts by ejaculating something that sounded like “Platt Skeet,” uttered fortissimo and in marked contrast to the rest of his delivery. When he did this, half his audience yelled “Whoof, whoof!” which is possibly Dutch for “Hear, hear,” and the other half woke up with a start from the pleasant nap they had been having. I was given to understand that the gentleman had been speaking for at least three days. They must have a lot of patience in South Africa.
I have invented endless jobs to keep Pagett in Cape Town, but at last the fertility of my imagination has given out, and he joins me to-morrow in the spirit of the faithful dog who comes to die by his master’s side. And I was getting on so well with my Reminiscences too! I had invented some extraordinarily witty things that the strike leaders said to me and I said to the strike leaders.
This morning I was interviewed by a Government official. He was urbane, persuasive and mysterious in turn. To begin with, he alluded to my exalted position and importance and suggested that I should remove myself, or be removed by him, to Pretoria.
“You expect trouble, then?” I asked.
His reply was so worded as to have no meaning whatsoever, so I gathered that they were expecting serious trouble. I suggested to him that his Government were letting things go rather far.
“There is such a thing as giving a man enough rope, and letting him hang himself, Sir Eustace.”
“Oh, quite so, quite so.”
“It is not the strikers themselves who are causing the trouble. There is some organization at work behind them. Arms and explosives have been pouring in, and we have made a haul of certain documents which throw a good deal of light on the methods adopted to import them. There is a regular code. Potatoes mean ‘detonators,’ cauliflower, ‘rifles,’ other vegetables stand for various explosives.”
“That’s very interesting,” I commended.
“More than that, Sir Eustace, we have every reason to believe that the man who runs the whole show, the directing genius of the affair, is at this minute in Johannesburg.”
He stared at me so hard that I began to fear that he suspected me of being the man. I broke out into a cold perspiration at the thought, and began to regret that I had ever conceived the idea of inspecting a miniature revolution at first hand.
“No trains are running from Jo’burg to Pretoria,” he continued. “But I can arrange to send you over by private car. In case you should be stopped on the way I can provide you with two separate passes, one issued by the Union Government, and the other stating that you are an English visitor who has nothing whatsoever to do with the Union.”
“One for your people, and one for the strikers, eh?”
“Exactly.”
The project did not appeal to me—I know what happens in a case of that kind. You get flustered and mix the things up. I should hand the wrong pass to the wrong person, and it would end in my being summarily shot by a bloodthirsty rebel, or one of the supporters of law and order whom I notice guarding the streets wearing bowler hats and smoking pipes, with rifles tucked carelessly under their arms. Besides, what should I do with myself in Pretoria? Admire the architecture of the Union buildings and listen to the echoes of the shooting round Johannesburg? I should be penned up there God knows how long. They’ve blown up the railway line already, I hear. It isn’t even as if one could get a drink there. They put the place under martial law two days ago.
“My dear fellow,” I said, “you don’t seem to realize that I’m studying conditions on the Rand. How the devil am I going to study them from Pretoria? I appreciate your care for my safety, but don’t you worry about me. I shall be all right.”
“I warn you, Sir Eustace, that the food question is already serious.”
“A little fasting will improve my figure,” I said, with a
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