Tourists Are for Trapping

by Marian Babson

  Penny was sitting with Donna in the seat immediately behind Paula. As I paused, Pandora dropped from my shoulder to the back of the seat and down into Penny’s lap, yowling a pleased hello.

  “It’s Pandora,” Sandra Peters cried from across the aisle. “Pandora’s here!” Others took up the cry.

  Pandora obligingly dropped to the floor and meandered up and down the aisle, greeting everyone with enthusiasm. She was in her glory, surrounded by admirers. That was a lot better, her triumphant glance told me, than being cooped up alone in the deserted office flat all day.

  Penny, too, was trying to signal something to me urgently with her eyes, but Donna was talking to her and she was distracted. I winked reassuringly at her and continued down the aisle as the bus started up. Whatever Penny had to say, it couldn’t be that urgent. We’d have a chance to talk at St. Albans.

  Professor Tablor beckoned me to join him on the long seat at the back of the bus. He looked haggard and at a snap diagnosis, seemed in the throes of a monumental hangover. At least, clutching my briefcase nervously, I hoped it was only that.

  The sudden doubt left me no option about joining him. If he was starting some sort of attack, the closer I was with the life-giving orange juice, the better.

  “I don’t want to worry you,” he said slowly, giving me an immediate heart seizure, “but I’m afraid we have a little bit of trouble here.”

  The bones in my legs dissolved, and I slid down beside him in a jellied heap. “Oh, yes?” I still tried for the stiff upper lip—if only because it impressed Americans.

  “I’ve been trying to decide whether I should tell you,” he said, “but I thought you ought to know.” He glanced around and lowered his voice. “Something’s missing.”

  Why did people always think I ought to know? What had I ever done to give them the impression that I was thirsting for knowledge? How could I convince them that I would be perfectly happy to spend the rest of my life in blissful ignorance? More than happy—in fact, eager.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “That’s all right. We already know about her.”

  “Her?” He frowned. “You mean it.”

  I shrugged. “You know the lady better than I do.”

  “What are you talking about?” he stared at me in bewilderment.

  “What,” I hedged cagily, “are you talking about?”

  “My manuscript,” he said. “The one I started at the beginning of the trip. ‘The Trials and Travails of Tour Seventy-nine.’ It’s missing. Disappeared.”

  “Disappeared,” I echoed weakly.

  “From my room,” he said. “I thought it was missing yesterday, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure without a thorough search, so I didn’t say anything. Last night, however, I made a thorough search—and it is most definitely not there.”

  “I see.” I didn’t, but a glimmering was beginning to get through. “I take it this ‘Trials—and—uh’ is a record of the tour?”

  “‘The Trials and Travails of Tour Seventy-nine,’ ” he repeated firmly. “It’s too bad”—he was momentarily wistful—“that we couldn’t have been on an earlier tour. ‘Tour Twenty-two,’ now, would have been more euphonious.”

  Actually, if we were going numerically, he was closer to being on Tour 12, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to tell him so. That’s the sort of thing you can only admit when everything is going well. Tour 79 wasn’t all that successful—and seemed to be still in the process of deteriorating. But that was the kind of thought I didn’t want to admit, even to myself— what shreds of morale I had started out with were rapidly slipping away as people kept telling me all the little items they thought I ought to know.

  “You’re sure”—I tried to be helpful—“that you had it with you when you left Switzerland? You didn’t leave it behind there? You all packed in rather a hurry, you know.”

  “I am positive.” He eyed me as he might eye a potentially trouble-making student, and I was suitably quelled. I was positive that he was positive. He wouldn’t make a mistake over something like that.

  “Did anyone know you were keeping this—er— record of the trip?” I asked.

  “Everyone knew.” For a moment he relaxed and smiled. “I can tell you, we’d been having a lot of fun with it. I’ve written up our adventures at the end of each day, and sometimes, in the morning, on the Continent, when the bus was taking us to our next stop, I’d read them out to the others—and it’s brightened many an hour that might otherwise have been dull for us.”

  “I’ll bet it has,” I murmured. The conclusion was unmistakable. Somewhere along the way, he had observed too much—and written it down. So, the murderer had had to remove the notebook, with its damning evidence in black-and-white. The next question was: Would the murderer try to remove Professor Tablor before he remembered that evidence?

  Tomorrow—I tried to cling to sanity and hope—tomorrow they would all be gone. Back to work out their dubious destinies in their own country. Surely, nothing would happen to Tablor while they were still abroad. The murderer wouldn’t dare risk another death on Tour 79. The killer must depend on the semicriminal conspiracy that had already silenced his compatriots to keep them quiet and tractable for the remainder of the tour.

  But—when they got back to their own country? Ought I to warn Tristan Tablor? Yet, he must be aware of the danger—he was in the conspiracy, too. And at this point, no one knew that I knew—except for Winnie and Billie Mae, who had told me. If Miss Carstairs, who knew them better than I did, thought it was too dangerous to come back to England while all these charming people were still touring it, who was I to decide it was safe to admit to them that I knew their little secret? No, Professor Tablor would just have to take his chances. He was old enough to take care of himself.

  “… particularly unfortunate under the circumstances,” he was going on.

  “Circumstances?” I tried to catch up with him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Now, I don’t know how much you know about the inner workings of American education … ?”

  That was an easy one to answer. “Practically nothing.”

  “Then I will tell you, sir.” His face took on the set look of one mounting a hobby horse, and I braced myself accordingly. “The tragedy in American education today is the constant pressure upon educators to publish. It is no longer good enough to be a teacher. Performance in the classroom means nothing these days. What counts is the line of publications in the president’s study—all written by members of his staff—so that he can impress the parents of prospective students, and the rich who are prospective donors of new buildings or ripe to endow scholarships. To prove they have a staff of live wires, who’ll put the funds to good use …”

  He went on, but my attention was momentarily diverted by the view from the back window. Some maniac in a white car seemed bent on committing suicide, dodging in and out of the line of traffic behind us, taking appalling chances with oncoming lorries in order to gain a car’s length.

  “I tell you, sir”—Tablor’s voice had risen—“the situation in which your professional educator is placed today is iniquitous. Iniquitous!”

  “Terrible,” I agreed. The white car just missed side-swiping a lorry. “Something should be done about it.”

  “Right you are!” he said. “And someday the authorities will come round to what they’re losing by trying to yoke good classroom men to a damned printing press—forgive my language, sir.”

  “Quite understandable,” I said, trying to pull my attention back to his problems.

  “Meanwhile, there is no escape. It’s a case of ‘if you can’t whip them, join them’—and I have been forced, literally forced, to join them. They have left me no alternative. I have an important paper coming out this fall—one that will be important enough to satisfy even them.” He sighed deeply.

  “Congratulations,” I said uncertainly. He didn’t seem all that pleased about it.

  “It was too rushed,” he said. “I should have had more time. Time
to experiment, prove all my conclusions—oh, I know they’ll all stand up, but I should have had time to prove them—”

  “Everyone’s in a hurry these days,” I commiserated. “They’ll understand.”

  “They shouldn’t have to. Can’t you see … ?” He broke off, shaking his head. The academic mind faced with the Philistine and wondering if there could ever be some common ground on which to meet in an uneasy truce.

  “Nevertheless,” he said, as though reminded of something, “that’s why I must get my notebook of the journey back.”

  “You mean you had notes of your experiments in it?”

  He looked at me sadly. I was the dense student who had failed the ten-minute quiz again. “No, no,” he said, “I told you—it’s ‘The Trials and Travails of Tour Seventy-nine.’ Don’t you see? It’s another little publication—to follow up on the important one. Something light and pleasant, to prove I’m a real person as well as a professor of physics. It’s also vital in the educational world today”—his eyes were as sad and mournful as those of an old bloodhound—“to show that you’re a well-rounded individual.”

  And there were days when I thought I had it tough in public relations.

  Come to think of it, I was just as glad I wasn’t a driver today, either. The white car whiplashed in and out of traffic—it was close enough now for me to see the blond head behind the steering wheel. There was beginning to be something terribly familiar about it. But if I concentrated sternly on ignoring it, I might be able to spend a few last seconds in my fool’s paradise.

  There was a defiant, challenging blare from the horn of the white Lancia, and it swept past the bus to cut in sharply in front of us.

  Jim stood on the brake, managing more by luck than by skill to avoid an actual collision; while those who hadn’t noticed what was happening and braced themselves accordingly went flying.

  “That’s disgraceful!” Professor Tablor snapped. “Can’t someone control that girl?”

  Chapter 11

  Control Daphne? Her poor old father, the brigadier, would have laughed himself senseless if he could have heard that one. At any rate, I was relieved to notice that she was alone in the car. Gerry wasn’t with her—not that he could control her, either.

  Now that she was in the lead, Daphne dawdled along, looking back over her shoulder frequently and waving. Young Horace and Donna were standing up and waving back at her. The other tourists were picking themselves up and pulling themselves together; uncomplaining, but distinctly disapproving. Although this was the sort of behaviour they might be accustomed to on a U.S. highway, it was not what they expected on a luxury tour of Quaint Olde Englande. Daphne was letting the side down.

  Penny, looking a trifle tight-lipped, retrieved Pandora from the floor, where she had gone sprawling, and was trying to comfort her. There was no stiff-upper-lip nonsense about Pandora—in the middle of a quiet nap, she had wantonly been flung about and she intended the world to witness how badly she had been treated.

  After about a mile, Daphne put out her hand and signaled Jim to pass. With visible relief, he did so. As he passed, Daphne waved at us, frantically mouthing something incomprehensible, and nodding her bright-yellow head like a demented dandelion.

  I turned back to Tris Tablor, but suddenly sat frozen. We were just rolling along nicely when Daphne obviously had another brainstorm.

  Again she applied the heel of her hand to horn and the heel of her foot to the accelerator. The white Lancia zoomed between our bus and an oncoming Jaguar—removing, I’d swear, the top layer of paint from each. With no room to spare, she sliced in front of us again.

  I was vaguely aware that she had been trying to signal something to the kids again. But they, like everyone else in the bus, had been too mesmerised by the sight of that white chassis skimming the paint job on our vehicle—there couldn’t have been a quarter-inch clearance—to pay attention to the driver.

  Once more, Jim slammed on his brake, and this time, the dam burst. He was nearly as eloquent as Pandora—who had been hurled to the floor a second time and was carrying on like a Greek chorus invoking the vengeance of the gods—but a lot more comprehensible.

  Fortunately, he was cursing in the vernacular. The tourists listened with pleased, academic interest. They knew they were hearing the real thing—they’d all seen enough English films and read enough modern English novels to recognise the words—but they weren’t offended. Although Americans are able to identify such language intellectually, it doesn’t really touch them. All our “bloody’s” and “bugger’s” can never actually convey as much to them as one solid, rousing “Son of a bitch!”

  It was obvious, however, that they were in complete agreement with him on his assessment of Daphne’s character and antecedents. In fact, like me, they probably thought he was drawing it too mild, if anything.

  “Open the door, Jim,” Kate said quietly. “I’ll go out and talk to her. She must want something—”

  “I’ll go—” Horace rose eagerly, but his mother pulled him down into his seat again.

  “Don’t you encourage her,” Hortense said. “She’s out of her mind—and a dangerous driver to boot.”

  “No, she isn’t,” Horace defended. “It’s just—She promised to come with us for lunch in St. Albans. And she’s late. I guess she’s just trying to apologise.”

  “Well, she’s picked one hell of a way of doing it,” Paula snarled from across the aisle. “Trying to scatter us all over the highway is no way to say, ‘Sorry I missed the bus.’ ”

  “Naturally, the poor girl”—finding herself on the same side as Paula, Hortense abruptly switched sides—“was upset to find we’d left without her. One can understand her agitation. She is quite young, after all.”

  Paula drew a deep breath and seemed about to launch a scorching counterattack when, with a final wild signal, Daphne revved up the white Lancia and disappeared over the horizon.

  “I think,” Horace said thoughtfully, “she said she’ll meet us at the ruins.”

  My first priority in St. Albans was a telephone. I wanted to check with Neil and find out if he had discovered the whereabouts of our missing tourist. Not that either of us cared whether she stayed missing or not—the danger was that her worried friends might dig in their heels and refuse to depart without her. (It would serve them right if we discovered she had picked up some totally unsuitable lorry driver and gone off for a brief idyll before rejoining the tour, looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. It wouldn’t be the first time it had happened to a lady tourist on the loose.)

  I hadn’t many ambitions left, but the one I was cherishing at this point was waving good-bye to Tour 79 at Heathrow tomorrow morning. All of Tour 79.

  I made my way to the front of the bus and crouched beside Kate. “What’s the drill?” I asked.

  “Morning coffee,” she said promptly, “then the cathedral, the ruins, the museum, late lunch, and some time free for looking around the town and shopping. There are lots of good antique shops—”

  “That will suit Paula right down to the ground.” Tris Tablor had followed me to the front of the bus. “There’s nothing she likes better than bargain-hunting. She’s spent most of the tour looking for things cheaper than she can get them back home.”

  “I have not!” Paula refuted the charge as though it had involved something unmentionable. “I’ve hardly done any shopping at all.”

  “Oh, come now,” Tris said. “Our bus waited for you all over Europe. We thought we’d lost you for good in that diamond factory near Amsterdam. Don’t you remember?—when you got back you found some of us had been making bets?” He abruptly grew wistful. “I had it all written down in my journal of the trip—even you laughed when I read it out loud the next day.”

  Paula flushed. “I told you. I was looking for the ladies’ and got lost. I didn’t mean to keep everyone waiting.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I thought I handled that very delicately. ‘The call of nature’ …”<
br />
  The wrong person had been murdered, I decidedly arbitrarily. Whatever Carrie had done to become a victim must have been quite spectacular if it meant she had constituted herself a worse nuisance than Professor Tablor.

  “While we’re on the subject”—Professor Tablor turned and faced the others—“I have a grave announcement to make—”

  “Stop the bus,” I told Jim quickly. “Let me off here. I have several errands to do. I’ll catch you up later.”

  Mercifully, he swung the bus in to an empty space at the kerb and I nipped off smartly. I knew what that announcement was going to be—and I had no wish to watch their faces as he told them, implying that one of them had stolen his precious manuscript. I did not want to be in any position to notice whether one of those faces changed abruptly, betraying its owner.

  I knew too much for comfort already; I wished to know no more. They were strangers, one and all, with their own private problems and troubles. All I wanted was to keep it that way.

  The less I knew, the less I could testify to. If it came to that. And there was a spine-chilling possibility that it might.

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow. I clung to that thought, as to precarious sanity. Tomorrow, they’d all be sky-borne and back in their own country before nightfall.

  Godspeed the moment.

  Neil wasn’t in his office and Gerry wasn’t in ours. Which was a pity. I’d wanted to find out if he realised his current bird was fluttering along Watling Street, upsetting the paying customers. Gerry has a very nice sense of the fitness of things—and that was the sort of thing that wouldn’t fit very well with him.

  I kept a wary eye out for the white Lancia as I walked toward the cathedral. I didn’t want to cross any street that might have Daphne bowling down it. Come to that, I didn’t feel too safe on the pavement, either, when she was around.

  There was no sign of Daphne, and after a few moments, I was annoyed with myself for even bothering to think about her. Compared to the problems already besetting Tour 79, she was no trouble at all. Short of actually running one of them down, there was no way in which she could be a menace to them. Or to Perkins & Tate—so long as Gerry wasn’t in the car with her when she went dicing with death along the motorways.