The Dark Frontier by A. Decker (best books to read non fiction .txt) 📕

Frank went to the kitchen niche to boil the kettle, while Ellen tidied the documents, sifting through them with curiosity before she laid them on the coffee table.

As she continued leafing through the papers, she failed to notice Frank emerge from the kitchen niche. He was carrying a pair of kitchen scissors. Half open.

It was the sudden tug on her hair that caught her by surprise:

“Ow! What are you doing?”

Ellen span round to find Frank smiling down at her, scissors in one hand and a lock of her strawberry-blonde hair in the other.

“Do you realise we’ve never been apart for more than a day since we met?” Frank reached down to the table, removed an envelope from the file of papers and slipped the lock of hair into it. “Surely you wouldn’t begrudge me this little souvenir to remember you by while I’m gone?”

Ellen seethed over this assault. She loved her gloriously thick hair. To have it shorn of even a single curl enraged her. But still she found it hard to resist his wicked smile. And she instantly caved in to the romance of Frank’s gesture.

“Come on then. The suspense is killing me,” she said as he neatly folded the envelope and slipped it into his wallet. With a triumphant smile, he fetched the teapot, set it down on the table, poured the tea and sat down on the sofa beside Ellen.

“You remember Gaynor?”

His question was met with a blank expression.

“She works in Fleet Street. She was assigned to cover a story in Switzerland, where they’re holding a referendum on giving women the vote, but…”

“Giving women the vote?” Ellen repeated in disbelief. “What kind of country is it where women don’t have the right to vote? In this day and age?”

“That’s why they’re having the referendum.”

“And only the men get to vote in this referendum, I suppose?”

“That’s just it,” said Frank with a boyish excitement. “It’s a really fascinating story.”

“Good God, you can be so irritating.” Ellen glowered at him. “It’s not in the least fascinating. It’s grotesque,” she added, then paused for a moment as her eyes widened. “You don’t actually believe in it, do you?” she asked with a look of horror on her face.

“What do you mean ‘believe in it’?” Frank was taken aback by Ellen’s truculence. He was not used this side of her. But for Ellen it was as if she felt she had suddenly shone a new light on him and was shocked by what she thought she had found.

“It’s not about beliefs or opinions,” he said, brushing his hands nervously through his thick brown hair as he spoke. “Anyway, Gaynor was rushed into hospital with appendicitis or something and can’t now cover the story. Since she’s the only staffer who speaks German, she persuaded her boss to let me cover it instead. They really wanted a woman, but they had no one else, so I jumped at it – not sure how I’ll cope with the weird kind of German they speak there though. And of course it means I’ll have to put my research on the Bank of England story to one side for a bit. But anyway, I went up to town this afternoon to collect this stuff.”

He nodded towards the documents on the table.

“Plane tickets, contacts, background material. Stuff like that. And it will be a chance to reinvent myself.”

His flight from Heathrow was booked for early next morning. Ellen was going to miss him. But she tried as best she could to hide her sadness; she wanted them to enjoy their last hours together without any kind of friction. So Ellen spent the rest of the evening attempting to share Frank’s excitement, while he studied the documents he had been given and talked endlessly about the trip ahead.

When sadness and excitement eventually gave way to longing, they entered the night entwined together in a communion deeper than she had ever felt before. And lay that way, in each other’s arms, until Ellen woke again early next morning. She looked at Frank gently breathing as he slept on in her arms, his smell weaving its way into her senses, his early-morning stubble prickling her shoulder. She stroked every curve of his perfect body. Ran her fingers over the muscular arm half-draped around her waist. Brushing them softly over his neck and face, leaving her thumb at journey’s end to explore the intriguing indentation in the buckled bridge of his nose.

She had often wondered whether this feature of his anatomy had anything to do with his sense of smell. Frank had told her of his strange olfactory senses – that some smells he was unable to detect at all and others he was acutely sensitive to – the acrid smell of ammonia in particular. Cordite was also high on his list. Ellen attributed the latter to an overactive imagination fed by a taste for Dashiell Hammett. He put it all down to what he called the landscape of his nose.

As the theodolite of Ellen’s thumb now surveyed the territory, Frank slowly roused. His dark eyes a reluctant pair of witnesses to dawn, yet just as fetching as ever in their sleep-entrained effort to open. Frank’s arm tightened and he drew it firmly around Ellen’s waist to plant an early-morning kiss on her lips. It was a moment that would stay forever in Ellen’s memory. She recalled his last words not long after that moment.

“I’ll be back before you’ve even noticed I’ve gone,” he said as he opened the door. And disappeared.

Sitting now on the Piazza Grande in Locarno, Ellen was not inclined to share every little detail of their last brief morning together. She simply said: “That was the last time we spoke.”

Her companion took a last sip of her coffee, placed the cup in its saucer and looked across at Ellen. It was a look that contained more than just sympathy – it seemed to convey