Airport Sandwiches

 by Pat Jourdan

 tea with sugar

Margo  turned up early at her father’s house at the edge of Johannesburg without much luggage. Stan was surprised how much she had changed after her divorce, but then it was quite a while ago. They sat outside on the veranda in the evenings planning his  visit to his brother in Montreal, a last chance to meet as they were both in their late seventies. Margo had persuaded him and even suggested going with him as encouragement.

“It’ll be a wonderful thing to do, meeting after twenty years! You’ll both be so glad and you’ll wonder why it took so long – Uncle Oscar will be really pleased you made the effort!” Margo cheered him up. She set to work on her laptop, finding out flight times, connections, printing out tickets and boarding passes, comparing currency dealers, travel insurance, looking for somewhere to stay overnight in Montreal and  ordering new suitcases. “At least you’ve got a ten-year passport already, or we’d be stuck here waiting,” she added.

 “It’s a good job you went to that conference in Canberra after you retired. We’ll need visas for Canada too.”

 Stan was impressed how business-like his daughter was, how capable. She even organised new clothes for him, taking him with her and seeing that he bought outfits that would impress his brother.
 
“I’ll just dash off to the travel agents now about the visas while you try on something warm for Canada wear.” Margo was like a whirlwind.

They managed to get through Johannesburg airport with the least trouble.

“We’re on our way at last!” Stan said, a bit relieved it was really happening.

In Stansted airport Stan sat watching the people opposite, sitting in the brightly lit café that served real meals. He could see families sitting down to large plates with hot dinners, set next to desserts and drinks. Drifts of assorted food aromas reached him. Perhaps later he could go across and manage to have something to eat, but he had to ration out his money to last until tomorrow. All the other outlets were coffee bars, sandwich shops, newsagents, money-changers and boutiques selling all kinds of luxury goods. The never-ending stream of passengers entertained him; or at least they had at first. Now it was getting later, five in the afternoon here, something like eight o’clock in the morning in his jet-lagged bloodstream.

He still could not work out how Margo had happened to go off with his passport and his tickets. She also had most of his money as he had packed his jacket and only had a little space in his waistcoat pockets.

“I’ll take care of all that, Dad,” Margo had said. “I’ve got this handbag, after all  it’s more convenient if I carry the lot together. And you shouldn’t be carrying so much loose cash, you might lose it. She kept pointing out how forgetful he was these days, and she was right. Ever since she had come to stay she was pointing out how often he could not remember where he put things and how his memory was really befuddled. Often he was puzzled at this; living alone, he had not noticed it until Margo had come to stay. Suddenly he was losing keys, forgetting to lock doors, mistaking the right time, it was a catalogue of mishaps. As she pointed out,all the more reason to go and visit his only brother while he could still manage the journey.

It had taken some courage to go and contact the enquiry desk and ask about the two o’clock flight to Montreal. But the check-in clerk could not help.

“That’s gone several minutes ago. It’s up on the board, you can see it on the Departures section,” the assistant pointed out. “If you did not turn up on time there would have been a public announcement. Didn’t you hear it?”
Stan was sure he had not heard his own name called but these days he was becoming more doubtful day by day.

“I’ve been here in the departures hall all the time, heard nothing at all. You say the flight has gone? My daughter’s on it, she has my passport and the tickets too.” He did not mention the money, the precious rands changed into Canadian dollars.

“Her mobile won’t be working while she’s on the flight, I suppose, so it’s useless  trying to get into contact until they land.” The enquiry assistant looked at him  carefully and being both kindly and efficient, made a call to Montreal arrivals hall  that Ms Margo Naidoo, flying from Johannesburg via Stansted, should be contacted as soon as possible to come to their passenger counter and produce her  father’s passport and tickets to the authorities in Canada.

“Well, that’s all we can do so far, you’ll be able to do something about that  tomorrow morning. I’m sorry, that’s as much as we can do at present. You see, right now you have no confirmed travel identity and you cannot buy another ticket without your passport or credit card. We have to wait until we have confirmation.”

She looked over the passenger details of the flight again, but could find no entry for any Stan Govender. “Are you sure this was the right flight? There is another one later this evening. It has to have a changeover in Reykjavic 19.30 and arrives at Pierre Trudeau International the next day – you’ll have quite a wait, unfortunately” But that flight was also without any trace of his name. While Stan waited for any news he had time to think and wonder. How had Margo been separated from him in the luggage hall?

He had been waiting for her at the carousel for their suitcases and she had been lost in the crowd. He wheeled the overladen trolley into the airport hall, thinking Margo had probably gone off to the toilets but she had not reappeared. Stan loitered at the arrivals concourse along with all the taxi drivers and tour representatives. Nearly an hour had gone by before he accepted that something had gone seriously wrong. He did not have enough money to go off to a nearby hotel now, either – Stansted had several in the grounds. Margo had taken his wallet, for security, she said. “I’ll keep all the important things together, Dad, so you don’t lose anything.”

 He sat with the trolley piled up with Margo’s and his own suitcases, sure that the mess would all be settled in the morning.

Getting into conversation with a middle-aged woman at the next table as they sat outside a café, Stan told her he was stranded here because his daughter had gone off to Montreal with his ticket and passport. He was stuck overnight with nowhere to stay. “I’m just going to sit here, have to sleep in a chair, she’ll be getting in touch as soon as they land and the mix-up can be settled. Just got to last the night here,” he said.

The woman was worried, though, and went across to a security attendant nearby, telling him of the old man’s plight. “He’s not a youngster and he can’t be left alone in an airport all night sitting in a plastic seat. In fact he doesn’t look at all healthy to me. I’d help, but my own flight to Vienna is due soon and I’ve got to be off.”

“I’ll have a word with him. You mean that old guy over there by Pret-á-manger with the gigantic luggage trolley? We have little overnight cabins for situations like this, anyone ill or overnight staff having to stay. Don’t worry, we’ll look after him.”

She went off to the take-away café and came back with teas and large sandwiches of cheese and tomato in wholemeal bread. “It’s the healthiest version I could find. I don’t know if you take sugar. There’s two sachets here,” she said as she sat down next to him again. “I love these airport sandwiches. I wonder where they get this bread from, is it something special? It tastes so different from any at home.” Stan accepted the tribute of food gratefully.

He had not realised how out-of-pocket he was. A few rand still in his pocket; not enough for a meal in any currency. It occurred to him that in this quickly-moving crowd he could sit here unnoticed as the world walked past. No one would see him.


The attendant showed Stan into a cabin, explaining he would be called for at first light. He would be safe in the forest of cabins until the morning.  “Yes, this one is called ‘Larch.’ They’re all called after trees, Birch, Oak, Ash, Fir, Holly, Rowan, Willow and so on - they’re all here.” He helped Stan wheel the luggage into the little cabin and  left Stan sitting on the bed. He was worn out and beginning to be far more worried now than he had been earlier. Bits of questions were falling into a strange jigsaw. Opening one of Margo’s three large cases, he found it full of old books; another was full of shoes. In her other case there were no clothes, no toiletries, just newspapers and magazines. It was the luggage of a woman who was going to disappear.

The Chocolate Murders

by Pat  Jourdan 

 dark chocolate

 It was interesting to sit here in the airport. Pisa airport was smallish, but did have the usual array of shops and cafés, with an escalator up to an extra layer of shops. Tessa wandered around for a while but seeing a row of seats, made for them, to have a rest.

Stopping at the general store, she was already stocked with another bottle of spring water to cope with the heat. It was amazing to see the display of cigarettes spread behind the counter. For a couple of years now it had been forbidden in England to show any cigarettes for sale. They were always hidden behind sliding cupboard doors and a customer had to ask particularly, humbly, if they wanted to purchase any packet of cigarettes.

Her friend, Moira who worked at the Co-op, said that if the sliding doors were open even slightly, the shop would get fined £4,000. It looked as though different rules were obeyed or broken in the EU, as here in Italy surely the same rules existed. It was all a mess of decisions criss-crossing each other.
The young woman sitting next to her was engrossed in her phone, a private existence in a public space. Beside her were two large suitcases wreathed tightly in layers of bright light-green plastic, almost phosphorescent.

A young man stood in the middle of the concourse, a Green Wrap hero with bolts of plastic, and a contraption ready to festoon any baggage with green wrapping. Once done, it looked so complete that the traveller would not be able to open their luggage without unweaving all the layers. What on earth did the silent girl have in those two cases, or was she going through several stopovers and needed extra security?

Tessa, bored now, went off for another walk round the corridors and deposited her own small suitcase through the handlers’ counters. As she walked back, the same seat was empty so she sat down again in the same place.

Suddenly the girl turned to her and with a warm smile and offered Tessa some chocolate. It was the end of the bar, a couple of broken segments in the silver-paper wrapper. They introduced themselves. Gina was from Argentina and on her way to Spain to visit her sister. Tessa was going back to England after visiting relatives on holiday in Florence.

“I’ve got to write a murder story for a writers’ group by next week and you’ve given me an idea. This chocolate could be poisoned and there would be no trace of how it happened. Of course there could be CCTV of us here now, but I can’t see any cameras. I think there’s some rule that they have to be observable if it’s a public place or perhaps that’s an urban myth. But thank you.”

  Tessa wandered outside to throw away the remains of her bottle of water before going through passport control. Outside in the humid heat, two young soldiers stood on duty. She asked if it was all right to throw the water onto a potted plant and the dark-haired soldier signalled yes. The bush would need some water today, surely. She slung the plastic bottle into the nearby rubbish bin and that was the last she saw of Italy. The trademark dark plumed Italian trees were far
away beyond the humdrum layout of the airport buildings and its carpark.


Back home, Tessa looked up poisonous plants and remembered laburnum, and sure, there it was. All parts of the plant were (or are) poisonous although mortality could be rare. Symptoms of laburnum poisoning included intense sleepiness, vomiting, convulsive movements, coma, frothing at the mouth and, the reference said, unequally dilated pupils. Who would notice that in the midst of all the other signs?

Tessa set to work. This was too exciting to waste on mere writing. Along the suburban lane on the way to the park, a magnificent laburnum tree swept over the wall of an old mansion waiting for redevelopment. Its long trails of bright yellow flowerets could be seen from afar; it was always a sign of late spring. She waited until the seedpods were formed and picked several when no one was about.
Buying some bars of dark chocolate, with their strong, almost bitter taste, she melted the bars, folding in the ground-up seeds. Leaving the lot to set, she had to think out the next step. In some of the crime books she had read, a poisoner tried out their doses on something smaller like a cat or dog. Wasn’t it Bywaters and Thompson who had also given the husband a mild dose at first, gradually increasing the amount weekly. Mixed in with a stew or fish and chips or cheese on toast it would have been well disguised. There was some sort of medical protocol that if a person had been unwell for some time, and if that person had been seen by a doctor in the week previous to their death, then an inquest would not be necessary.


Tessa of course could not embark on such a slow process with any strangers. But a small experiment with next-door’s cat was amazingly successful. She tried to look upset on learning that the fat malevolent moggy had been taken seriously ill. It had died before the vet had been able to arrive as there was a violent thunderstorm at the time.

“Perhaps it was heart failure?” Tessa said airily. “We don’t know how animals react in the middle of a thunderstorm, they must get affected. When I was a child our dog always hid under one of the fireside chairs and wouldn’t come out until it was all over.”

She made another batch, upping the amount of laburnum seeds. Somewhere in the past, perhaps in the sixth form, they had studied George Orwell’s The Decline of the English Murder. He had suggested that when divorce was unobtainable in the lower classes, domestic poisonings were the only way out for discontented wives (usually the wife) or husbands. While some, stupidly in fact, went to a chemist’s and asked for arsenic to kill rats, other, cleverer ones collected poisonous innocent-looking plants like foxglove or laburnum. Those who bought arsenic from chemists’ shops had to sign a Poisons Book, which was one of the first things police would inspect. But few police could trace a walk down a country lane and some leaves or seeds gathered into a bag or pocket.

With her new bus pass, Tessa went off to Heathrow and arrived full of enthusiasm. The new red wig and glasses gave a different image. She found a seat and offered some chocolate to the first person who sat next to her.

About the author

Pat Jourdan, winner of the Molly Keane Short Story Award and second in the Michael McLaverty Short Story Award, has also published collections of stories, poetry collections and two novels 'Finding Out' and 'A Small Inheritance.' Trained as an artist, she has held exhibitions in England and Ireland.