Dorothy Eden by Deadly Travellers

exhaustion. She was temporarily content to have him lead her.
    “Put your coat on. Where are your bags?”
    “There’s only one. Francesca’s—” Her voice trembled. She made herself say carefully, “You’re very good to me, although you don’t really believe there is a Francesca. I’ve got some gloves somewhere—oh, look!” Her cry was chiefly one of surprise, as if she, too, had been becoming convinced that Francesca did not exist. “Here’s Francesca’s doll. It’s got pushed behind the mattress. There you are! That proves she was here!”
    Triumphantly she held up the slightly shabby doll, pathetic and somehow without personality now that it lacked an owner.
    “You have to believe me now,” she said.
    “Any child can have a doll,” he murmured. “But, Kate dear, I’ve never disbelieved you. Come along, let’s get off this ghastly train.”
    Francesca lured somewhere on a false bribe, without her promised trip to the Eiffel Tower, without her precious doll. A little girl determinedly dressed for a party that seemed to be fast becoming a tragedy… Kate resolutely swallowed the lump in her throat and followed Lucian.
    They had to wait for the London call to come through. Lucian had arranged it. He had somehow got several talkative and gesticulating railway officials persuaded of the urgency of it, and had also the tired and irritable guard, who had first heard Kate’s report of the child’s disappearance, to bear witness. They all stood and watched as Kate at last got through and heard Mrs. Dix’s voice which seemed to come from infinitely far away. Yet even in that wispy sound she could hear the breathless eagerness of the “Yes! Yes! Who is it, please?” and she realized the forlorn and fantastic hope that was running through Mrs. Dix’s mind. Even after fifteen years of silence, any telephone call from abroad revived her tenacious optimism. This, perhaps this, was the one to tell her that her husband had come back from the dead…
    It was cruel to shatter that expectancy, and even in this emergency Kate hesitated.
    “It’s Kate here, Mrs. Dix.”
    “Kate? Kate?” The disembodied voice had lost its liveliness. It sounded groping and lost, as if the transition from hope to reality was too much for its owner.
    “Kate Tempest, Mrs. Dix. I went to Rome to get Francesca.”
    “Oh, yes, I remember. The Italian child. What about it? Where are you speaking from? Has something gone wrong?”
    “Terribly wrong, I’m afraid. Francesca’s missing. Lost. She disappeared off the train. And no one has seen her.”
    They were all watching her in the dreary brown room, Lucian, the telephone operator, and the officials who had argued and protested that the whole thing was imaginary, unnecessary. Relatives had picked up the child at Basle—if there had been a child… Pouf, anyone could leave a shabby toy on a train…
    “Missing! Oh, goodness me!” The flurried voice told Kate that Mrs. Dix was groping in a convenient chocolate box for sustenance.
    The disappointment that the call from abroad was not from her long-lost husband after all, and now this news that Kate’s mission had gone so badly astray, would throw her off balance.
    “Shall I call the police in? That’s what I must know.”
    “Those foreign police—so excitable—just to find a child who’s run away. Can’t you look for her?”
    “You don’t understand, Mrs. Dix. She’s been missing all night. We think she was taken from the train at Basle.”
    “We?”
    “The gentlemen here,” Kate said, looking placatingly at the avidly listening gentlemen. “The railway officials, and an Englishman who has been very kind.”
    There were sundry strange noises coming through the receiver that may have been Mrs. Dix clucking in alarm, or merely munching a chocolate. But when she spoke again her voice was surprisingly decisive.
    “Not the police yet, dear. Must get in touch with Rome, with her father. Oh, dear! What a bore! And we thought