The Man in the Brown Suit - Agatha Christie (free novel 24 TXT) 📗

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 sleepwalkers 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 tomorrow. 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 tonight 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 anyone who has seen Miss Pettigrew will admit that it is perfectly respectable.

XXIX

Johannesburg,
March 6th.

There 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