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

a kind of knowledge and wisdom that Ellen found both comforting and slightly disconcerting at the same time.

“I’m sorry to bore you with my story,” she said.

“It was not at all boring, my dear.”

“But I really must be going now,” Ellen added. “I’m travelling back to Basel this morning.”

“So soon?” asked the elegant lady, looking at Ellen with an expression that bordered on shock, together with what Ellen sensed to be a strange hint of disappointment.

“It was really nice talking to you. This should cover the coffee for both of us,” said Ellen, as she got up to leave, handing her companion a ten franc note, which the elderly lady politely refused.

“Please, the pleasure was all mine. I wish you…” the elderly lady paused for a moment as she looked up at Ellen… “a safe journey.”

Ellen hesitated, pondering the emphasis her companion placed on those last two words. It was as if the elderly lady knew just how perilous the journey had been over the last twelve months and had some kind of preternatural inkling of further trouble ahead.

Or was it simply that months of talking with Marthe’s psychiatrist husband had spawned a paranoid suspicion of the slightest inflection in a person’s voice?

These worrisome thoughts hastened Ellen’s steps as she headed back through the narrow streets to fetch her bags and settle up with Signor Sciarone.

Chapter 2

Frank flew out of London on Saturday, 6 February 1971. The day was too early, too cold and too empty to enjoy. But it was his first trip to Switzerland and, while the country was known more for dull precision and timekeeping than for any newsworthy stories, he felt an inexplicable buzz of excitement. An odd sense of agitation that surprised him.

Ellen was constantly rebuking him for always being so cool, for the way he never let anything get to him. But Frank was a fence-sitter. He knew it. And he tried to justify this to her by insisting how important it was to remain objective about things. This, after all, was what had attracted him to journalism in the first place. It was this part of his argument that incensed Ellen all the more. And recalling her display of passion now as he sat on the tube to Heathrow airport brought a smile to his face.

His heart was still pounding from the rush to change onto the Piccadilly line at Earl’s Court. But it was also racing with a sense of apprehension and expectation. He wondered what Ellen would think about his lack of cool now. Yet it was not so much the prospect of what awaited him in a strange country as the opportunity he felt it offered.

He knew how much Ellen would really like to start a family. In truth, this was not a prospect he relished. He was not ready to commit to the pitter patter of tiny feet. But he also knew that, if it were to happen, there was no way they could contemplate bringing a baby into the world while they were stuck in a Fulham bedsit. So, if this assignment works out, Frank told himself, then maybe it could help pave the way to a staff job, more job security and a bigger flat. It was as much this as the trip itself that set his heart beating nineteen to the dozen.

When Frank arrived at Heathrow, he found that his flight was delayed. He phoned in to tell the newspaper, so they could cancel a meeting that had been set up for him later that morning with a local editor, then took himself off to the bar for a coffee.

Despite the frustration, it was a welcome delay in one sense: ever since depriving Ellen of a lock of her hair, he had been feeling awkward at the thought that the only home he was able to find for it was a shabby envelope. This long wait now gave him time to find something more fitting. He was hoping to find a wallet with a window inside that would allow him to see Ellen’s lock of hair every time he opened it. The best he could manage was a wallet with a little pouch for coins. It was not ideal, but at least Ellen’s hair would be safe, he told himself as he put a ten-pound note into the outstretched hand of the shop assistant.

When eventually he touched down in Basel, it was mid-afternoon. And the dull gloom of the sky told him the end of the day was already fast approaching. The temperature was several degrees lower than in London. Remnants of snow lay around the edges of the tarmac. The airport itself was on French soil. But to the east loomed the mountains of the Black Forest in Germany and to the south the dark hills that marked the easternmost tip of Switzerland’s Jura Mountains.

A state of blurred borders that would come to define his stay. He had wondered, when he was handed his flight tickets, why he was being sent to Basel. He would have expected Zurich or even Geneva. But there were some people they wanted him to meet in Basel before travelling on to Zurich after the vote for some post-referendum coverage.

When Frank was sent on this assignment, it had shocked him to find that there was a country in post-war Europe where women were still denied the right to vote, and he was keen to learn more about this country. But much as he was itching to get his teeth into this mission, he was also deeply frustrated that he had to put his story about the Bank of England’s connections with pre-war Nazi Germany on the back burner.

And yet, as the taxi carried Frank into town, this frustration began to ebb away amidst a strange sense of comfort and familiarity that he could not explain. A peculiar hominess. A spirit of belonging. The only discord in this sense of intimacy with the place was the array of posters that decorated