Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. Agatha Christie

      Pilar sat squeezed up against the window and thought how very odd the English smelt…It was what had struck her so far most forcibly about England—the difference of smell. There was no garlic and no dust and very little perfume. In this carriage now there was a smell of cold stuffiness—the sulphur smell of the trains—the smell of soap and another very unpleasant smell—it came, she thought, from the fur collar of the stout woman sitting beside her. Pilar sniffed delicately, imbibing the odour of mothballs reluctantly. It was a funny scent to choose to put on yourself, she thought.

      A whistle blew, a stentorian voice cried out something and the train jerked slowly out of the station. They had started. She was on her way…

      Her heart beat a little faster. Would it be all right? Would she be able to accomplish what she had set out to do? Surely—surely—she had thought it all out so carefully…She was prepared for every eventuality. Oh, yes, she would succeed—she must succeed…

      The curve of Pilar’s red mouth curved upwards. It was suddenly cruel, that mouth. Cruel and greedy—like the mouth of a child or a kitten—a mouth that knew only its own desires and that was as yet unaware of pity.

      She looked round her with the frank curiosity of a child. All these people, seven of them—how funny they were, the English! They all seemed so rich, so prosperous—their clothes—their boots—Oh! undoubtedly England was a very rich country as she had always heard. But they were not at all gay—no, decidedly not gay.

      That was a handsome man standing in the corridor…Pilar thought he was very handsome. She liked his deeply bronzed face and his high-bridged nose and his square shoulders. More quickly than any English girl, Pilar had seen that the man admired her. She had not looked at him once directly, but she knew perfectly how often he had looked at her and exactly how he had looked.

      She registered the facts without much interest or emotion. She came from a country where men looked at women as a matter of course and did not disguise the fact unduly. She wondered if he was an Englishman and decided that he was not.

      ‘He is too alive, too real, to be English,’ Pilar decided. ‘And yet he is fair. He may be perhaps Americano.’ He was, she thought, rather like the actors she had seen in Wild West films.

      An attendant pushed his way along the corridor.

      ‘First lunch, please. First lunch. Take your seats for first lunch.’

      The seven occupants of Pilar’s carriage all held tickets for the first lunch. They rose in a body and the carriage was suddenly deserted and peaceful.

      Pilar quickly pulled up the window which had been let down a couple of inches at the top by a militant-looking, grey-haired lady in the opposite corner. Then she sprawled comfortably back on her seat and peered out of the window at the northern suburbs of London. She did not turn her head at the sound of the door sliding back. It was the man from the corridor, and Pilar knew, of course, that he had entered the carriage on purpose to talk to her.

      She continued to look pensively out of the window.

      Stephen Farr said:

      ‘Would you like the window down at all?’

      Pilar replied demurely:

      ‘On the contrary. I have just shut it.’

      She spoke English perfectly, but with a slight accent.

      During the pause that ensued, Stephen thought:

      ‘A delicious voice. It has the sun in it…It is warm like a summer night…’

      Pilar thought:

      ‘I like his voice. It is big and strong. He is attractive—yes, he is attractive.’

      Stephen said: ‘The train is very full.’

      ‘Oh, yes, indeed. The people go away from London, I suppose, because it is so black there.’

      Pilar had not been brought up to believe that it was a crime to talk to strange men in trains. She could take care of herself as well as any girl, but she had no rigid taboos.

      If Stephen had been brought up in England he might have felt ill at ease at entering into conversation with a young girl. But Stephen was a friendly soul who found it perfectly natural to talk to anyone if he felt like it.

      He smiled without any self-consciousness and said:

      ‘London’s rather a terrible place, isn’t it?’

      ‘Oh, yes. I do not like it at all.’

      ‘No more do I.’

      Pilar said: ‘You are not English, no?’

      ‘I’m British, but I come from South Africa.’

      ‘Oh, I see, that explains it.’

      ‘Have you just come from abroad?’

      Pilar nodded. ‘I come from Spain.’

      Stephen was interested.

      ‘From Spain, do you? You’re Spanish, then?’

      ‘I am half Spanish. My mother was English. That is why I talk English so well.’

      ‘What about this war business?’ asked Stephen.

      ‘It is very terrible, yes—very sad. There has been damage done, quite a lot—yes.’

      ‘Which side are you on?’

      Pilar’s politics seemed to be rather vague. In the village where she came from, she explained, nobody had paid very much attention to the war. ‘It has not been near us, you understand. The Mayor, he is, of course, an officer of the Government, so he is for the Government, and the priest is for General Franco—but most of the people are busy with the vines and the land, they have not time to go into these questions.’

      ‘So there wasn’t any fighting round you?’

      Pilar said that there had not been. ‘But then I drove in a car,’ she explained, ‘all across the country and there was much destruction. And I saw a bomb drop and it blew up a car—yes, and another destroyed a house. It was very exciting!’

      Stephen Farr smiled a faintly twisted smile.

      ‘So that’s how it seemed to you?’

      ‘It was a nuisance, too,’ explained Pilar. ‘Because I wanted to get on, and the driver of my car, he was killed.’

      Stephen said, watching her:

      ‘That didn’t upset you?’

      Pilar’s great dark eyes opened very wide.

      ‘Everyone must die! That is so, is it not? If it comes quickly from the sky—bouff—like that, it is as well as any other way. One is alive for a time—yes, and then one is dead. That is what happens in this world.’

      Stephen Farr laughed.

      ‘I don’t think you are a pacifist.’

      ‘You do not think I am what?’ Pilar seemed puzzled by a word which had not previously entered her vocabulary.

      ‘Do you forgive your enemies, señorita?’

      Pilar shook her head.

      ‘I have no enemies. But if I had—’

      ‘Well?’

      He was watching her, fascinated anew by the sweet, cruel upward-curving mouth.

      Pilar said gravely:

      ‘If I had an enemy—if anyone hated me and I hated them—then I would cut my enemy’s throat like this…’

      She made a graphic gesture.

      It was so swift and so crude that Stephen Farr was momentarily taken aback.