“I’m sorry,” Graham apologised. “You must excuse me. You see, it is rather funny. I had an appointment to meet someone on the two o’clock train. She’ll be rather surprised to see me.”
He became conscious of someone shaking his arm and opened his eyes.
“Bardonecchia, signore. Your passport, please.”
He looked up at the wagon-lit attendant bending over him and realised that he had been asleep since the train had left Asti. In the doorway, partly silhouetted against the gathering darkness outside, were two men in the uniform of the Italian railway police.
He sat up with a jerk, fumbling in his pocket. “My passport? Yes, of course.”
One of the men looked at the passport, nodded and dabbed at it with a rubber stamp.
“Grazie, signore. Have you any Italian bank-notes?”
“No.”
Graham put his passport back in his pocket, the attendant switched the light off again, and the door closed. That was that.
He yawned miserably. He was stiff and shivering. He stood up to put his overcoat on and saw that the station was deep in snow. He had been a fool to go to sleep like that. It would be unpleasant to arrive home with pneumonia. But he was past the Italian passport control. He turned the heating on and sat down to smoke a cigarette. It must have been that heavy lunch and the wine. It … And then he remembered suddenly that he had done nothing about Josette. Mathis would be on the train, too.