In Spite of Thunder (17 page)

“Hathaway, I’m not blaming you. We’re all liars in the same boat. But if you’re afraid of the consequences …?”

Hathaway, really amazed, glared back at him.

“Consequences? Tut! Do you imagine I referred to a risk like that? No, no, no! I was compelled to send a message in far too general terms. ‘Have you any further information on the subject we discussed?’ Fell might not have seen Elliot. Or Elliot might not have answered, even with a hundred words reply-paid. Or he might have answered only through official channels. Risk!”

“So he didn’t answer?”

“Oh, he answered.” Hathaway gripped the newspaper in both pudgy hands. “He and Fell, evidently, had been discussing the lady’s two previous husbands. When I investigated those two husbands, long ago, I paid no attention to them because both were poor men from whom she couldn’t have inherited a penny. That was a mistake on my part.”

“Then Elliot’s reply was about her second husband? A fighter-pilot in the R.A.F.?”

Hathaway looked him up and down.

“Now how, my fine friend, were you aware …?”

“Never mind! It was about her second husband, wasn’t it?”

“No, it was not. It concerned her first husband. I already knew he had been a very young and unstable analytical chemist employed by the Ferndale Aniline Dye Company. In March of ’36 she divorced him. A month later he committed suicide by swallowing a poison called nitrobenzene. That was the information in the cable. Can anyone now doubt this woman spread suicide or murder wherever she went?”

Brian turned away.

The buildings of the Quai Turrettini showed dark grey against street-lamps and under a rising moon. Brian glanced towards the lights of the Hotel du Rhône; he hesitated, and looked back at the staring face in front of him.

“Laugh at my deductions. Laugh!” said Hathaway. “They were right in every way.”

“I’m not laughing. This nitrobenzene, or oil of bitter almonds, is the same stuff that killed Mrs. Ferrier herself?”

“It was. A post-mortem will prove it was.”

“In that case, why are you here?”

Now it was Hathaway who shied back. “I don’t understand.”

“I think you do understand. Why aren’t you out at the villa, triumphing over Dr. Fell and the police too? Why are you standing here and shivering as though you didn’t want them to ask you questions?”

“The fact is, my dear fellow—”

“Well?”

“The fact is, my dear fellow,” Hathaway answered in a loud voice, “that I don’t want them to ask questions. There! I can prove every bit of the trick that was used to kill Mrs. Ferrier. But I can’t explain the trick used on Hector Matthews.”

“Matthews? Matthews at Berchtesgaden? That’s the very trick you’ve been saying you
could
explain! You’ve been shouting it at everyone since last night!”

“I was over-optimistic: merely that. I can explain all except one very small, relatively minor point. And I don’t like being challenged or sneered at. In short …”

“In short, you were the one who deliberately lied?”

Hathaway threw the crumpled newspaper over the parapet into the river. Even his bald head had taken on a look of furious earnestness.

“I did not lie,” he said, “and I resent being told I did!”

“Then what do you call it? Nitrobenzene, presumably, leaves traces in the victim’s body?”

“Naturally.”

“So there isn’t any real mystery about the way in which Mrs. Ferrier was killed? It was a different method from the one used on Matthews?”

“No mystery? A different method?” Hathaway, in danger of strangling from his own sincerity, had to gasp for breath. “I would have you know, my fine friend, it was exactly the same method for both of them. I was with Mrs. Ferrier at the breakfast-table this morning. She did not eat or drink anything, any more than Matthews did on the other occasion. She was not injected with poison. No one came near her with poison. The miracle, if you wish to call it so, remains just as it was.”

“Then why can’t you explain both deaths? Don’t fume: answer me! Why can’t you explain both deaths?”

“Because—”

Again Hathaway stopped, but from a different cause.

He had looked down towards the Hotel du Rhône in an abstracted sort of way. Then his gaze grew rigid. A police-car, moving fast, swept up and stopped just outside the hotel. Out of it climbed Philip Ferrier, M. Gustave Aubertin, and Dr. Gideon Fell.

Brian knew the last two of them were coming to question Hathaway, which meant that very shortly they would be questioning Audrey. Automatically he looked across at the block of flats just opposite, and raised his eyes towards the lighted windows in the sitting-room of his flat on the sixth floor.

But those sitting-room windows were now dark. Nor was there a light in any window of his flat.

Cold panic touched him. After counting windows, up and across, he made sure there was no mistake. That was his flat; those were the windows. A similar blank blindness swam across his wits.

Hathaway, leaning forward to touch his arm, had gabbled a sharp question. Brian did not hear it. Unheeding, eyes raised towards those windows, he ran across the street in the path of an oncoming car whose horn screamed before it swerved and missed him.

He did not glance backwards as he entered the building. He had reached the lift before he remembered there was a question he had been wanting to ask Hathaway since early morning; and, of course, he had failed to ask it.

This hardly mattered now. Concern for Audrey, as well as another panicky discovery, drove it from his mind. He was in the sixth-floor corridor, and groping in his pockets for a key to the outer door of the flat. But he found no key at all.

Fool! Idiot!

Vividly he remembered putting down Madame Duvallon’s latchkey on the portable bar. He had neglected to pick it up again. When he went downstairs for Audrey’s suitcase—also forgotten, in the tumult of meeting Hathaway—the spring-lock of the door snapped shut after him. If anything had happened to Audrey …

Brian stood still. He was in a familiar corridor, haunted by the ghosts of so many cooked meals. You sensed the presence of people all about you, though you never saw any of them. In somebody’s flat a television set throbbed with muffled life; he knew it was a television, not a radio, from the hoarser, heavier sound.

If anything had happened to Audrey …

“Nonsense!” he said aloud.

But he pressed the door-buzzer, he pressed it for many seconds and heard it clamour inside. He called Audrey’s name. There was no voice or footstep in response.

His first thought, that Eve Ferrier might have returned to carry away Audrey in the dark, was morbid and unlike him. Yet he seized the knob of the door, twisting it and pushing. And the door yielded, almost flinging him into an unlighted entry.

It had been closed but unfastened, its spring-lock set at the open position. That must have been done by Audrey herself, who could easily have left unseen while he was talking to Hathaway. He began to believe this as he ran from little room to little room, switching on lights. He knew it for certain when, in the bedroom, he encountered a message scrawled in lipstick across the dressing-table mirror.

“I love you too,” ran Audrey’s message. “Please forgive what I’m going to do.”

The city’s night-noises, through open windows, made a reedy cacophony above the rushing of the river. Brian returned to the living-room.

Nothing seemed disturbed there, including the glasses he and Audrey had drunk from, until his frantic eye studied the telephone. Though the telephone did not seem to have been moved either, the little note-pad had been pulled to one side.

There was nothing written on that note-pad. Nor could you distinguish any marks, either, until you held it tilted beside the light of a lamp. Words written by a sharp-pointed pencil, on a thin top-sheet torn off, had left their imprint on the leaf below.

From his desk Brian took a blunter pencil of soft lead. Putting down the pad on the desk, he gently began to black out the surface of the under-sheet so that the writing might emerge in the white of its indentations.

“Desmond Ferrier. Desmond Ferrier. Desmond Ferrier.” That name, written three times, emerged as Audrey must have scrawled it as she sat by the telephone and poured out what was in her mind. He could almost see her writing it while she waited for the number she had dialled.

The grey-black surface crept down on the paper. Next, sharply written in the middle of the sheet, emerged an address she must have received over the phone. The words were also underscored.

Caverne des Sorcières,

16 rue Jean Janvier

Twenty minutes.

There were no more indentations.

Caverne des Sorcières. Cave of the Witches. He knew where he had heard that name before.

Cave of the Witches.

Brian tore off this sheet and put it in his pocket. When he looked up at the black-and-white sketch of Audrey Page, yearning at him from the wall between the windows, he neither cursed her impetuousness nor raved at her tendency to face danger even though she might be in mortal terror of it. He was thinking of Dr. Fell’s warning.

“I failed miserably to prevent one tragedy,” Dr. Fell had said. “There must not be another.”

This was the point at which the clamour of the door-buzzer, piercing through his thoughts, made him jump up from the chair beside the desk.

It could only be the police.

If there had been any other way out of the flat, Brian would have bolted. They were not going to keep him from Audrey. On the other hand, they were not going to learn of this address until he himself had discovered what Audrey thought she was doing.

The door-buzzer went on shrilling. It wouldn’t stop; it wouldn’t leave off piercing his nerves. Presumably Dr. Fell and M. Aubertin had seen him, as he had seen them. He could hardly pretend not to be there, and he had no means of leaving the flat except through that clamouring door.

It was not the police, as he discovered when he opened the door. Paula Catford, seeming perhaps a little less good-natured and sympathetic, hesitated only a moment before she brushed past him without any invitation to enter.

“You must forgive this intrusion, Mr. Innes.” She wheeled round in the entrance-hall, her colour high. “I’m afraid I must see her. Where is she?”

“If you mean Audrey …”

“Please, please! Of course I mean Audrey. Don’t tell me she’s not here. There’s nowhere else she could have gone.”

“That,” Brian answered bitterly, “is what everyone else says. Have it your own way: she was here, right enough, but she’s gone out.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. And I’m afraid I have got to go out too. Immediately. I don’t want to seem inhospitable, but will you excuse me?”

“No. I can’t excuse you. Murder isn’t a joke; there’s somebody with a sick mind among us; the police are getting closer for an arrest.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? Anyway, what do you want with Audrey?”

“Mr. Innes, why did she telephone to Desmond Ferrier a little while ago?”

Brian looked over at the clock on the bookshelves. It was nearly ten minutes past nine, much later than he had expected.

“Quite by accident,” said Paula, “I picked up an extension-’phone and heard them talking. That’s easy to do, with so many extension-’phones at the villa. I put it down immediately, of course. But why did she ring up? Why did Desmond go out?”

Paula, at least, was harmless. The clock-ticks grew more imperative. Brian made up his mind.

“I can tell you what I think, at least, if you’ll answer something in return.”

“Anything, believe me! Oh, anything!”

“What, exactly, is the Cave of the Witches? Did Ferrier really have dinner there last night?”

“I—I beg your pardon?”

“Ferrier said he did, though he added ‘if you could call it a dinner.’ That doesn’t sound the sort of name any restaurant would adopt. He also seemed to think, for some reason, I ought to know of the place.”

“The Cave of the Witches!” Paula looked badly startled. “Is that where he and Audrey went tonight?”

“Answer the question, will you?”

“The Cave of the Witches! It’s in the rue Jean Janvier, off the rue de l’Hotel de Ville in the Old Town. That’s why Desmond must have said you ought to know it; he was joking.”

“Believe it or not, I am getting a bit fed up with the sort of remark Desmond Ferrier seems to think is a joke.”

“Please!” Paula spoke sharply. “In the eighteen-eighties and eighteen-nineties, here in Geneva, there was a painter who used the pseudonym of Jean Janvier. I did a story about him. Didn’t you ever hear of Jean Janvier?”

“No.”

“He wasn’t a very good painter, they say. But he was colourful. He specialized in witchcraft, vampirism, and all kinds of sadistic horrors as well. The work fascinated a lot of people. In the early nineteen hundreds there was a little museum of his paintings; but some said they were indecent and others lost interest. Janvier pictures were a drug on the market.

“Then, after World War Two, somebody had a brand-new idea. A man named Lafargue bought up a job lot of the lurider canvases, and opened a combination restaurant and night-club in the street where Janvier lived. It’s mainly an odd kind of night-club, though you can get a meal of sorts in the evening. The—the attractions go on later.”

“What attractions?”

Paula dismissed this.

“It doesn’t matter! Many people get a terrific thrill out of waitresses and other attendants who have good figures but papier-mâché skulls for heads. It’s mostly crude, of course, but some of the effects can be quite frightening.”

“And that’s supposed to be an entertainment?”

“Yes. Like a very sophisticated version of the Ghost Trains and Haunted Mills at amusement parks.” Some emotion not remote from fear had begun to gather in Paula’s expressive eyes. “Please tell me!” she added. “Did Desmond take Audrey there?”

“I don’t know. I honestly can’t tell you. I wasn’t here when she ’phoned him. Why should he have taken her there?”

“That’s what
I
don’t know! You see. …”

“Go on!”