In Spite of Thunder (19 page)

“Is it? Say what you mean!”

“That is well recommended; say it!” interposed M. Aubertin.

Dr. Fell, fiercely apologetic, addressed the Director of Police.

“Sir, I beg your pardon for all this. You have kept me muzzled the whole day, as it is only right you should. But I can’t question your witnesses. I can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, which is what I have been doing.”

“Yes, my friend,” said M. Aubertin, “I think you have been doing just that.”

The hum of the lift grew louder.

Philip Ferrier, with hollows under his eyes and in a desperation like Brian’s own, made the gesture of one who would arrest a runaway engine.

“Now look!” he began. “As far as Audrey is concerned—”

“We are going to see Miss Page,” the Director of Police interrupted sharply, “in good time. That can wait. As for you, my friend,” he said to Dr. Fell in an ever sharper voice, “it is plain you have been trying to guide us. But I also think you want the truth. Ask your questions.”

Dr. Fell hesitated for a moment.

“In actual fact, then, there are only two questions. Every other point is merely an elaboration of those two. Very well.” He looked at Hathaway. “The first question (and oh, by thunder, it’s important!) is for you.”

“Ah! It is about this morning, undoubtedly?”

“No,” Dr. Fell told him with rounded emphasis. “It is about the photograph album you have been carrying, and the death of Hector Matthews seventeen years ago.”

Every mention of Hector Matthews touched Hathaway like the flick of a whip.

“When you were giving us a lecture last night,” said Dr. Fell, “and recounting all the ways in which the man
wasn’t
killed, you flourished that album like a talisman of triumph. If it meant anything at all, it meant you must have found your evidence in some photograph taken at Berchtesgaden. But I have pored over the album until I am misty of wits; I can see no evidence in a photograph of the scenes there.”

“Quite right,” Hathaway said coolly. “There was none.”

The lift, humming at its loudest, slid down to the ground floor. The light inside illuminated all their faces through its glass panel. Dr. Fell, who had started to open the lift-door, let it close with a slam.

“Oh, ah? Then your famous and still-unexplained theory was based on no more than a random guess?”

“Oblige me,” snapped Hathaway, “by refraining from mere insult. My theory was based on other photographs—others!—of Mrs. Ferrier’s tour in Germany. If you had listened to me, years ago at the Murder Club, you would have heard the essential clue. I also mentioned it to Brian Innes.”

M. Gustave Aubertin, for all his flawless English, spoke with a sudden guttural harshness, whose effect was like a baring of teeth.

“Would it be too much, Sir Gerald, if you mentioned it to us now?”

“Stop!” said Dr. Fell.

“My friend,” said M. Aubertin, “there is a limit to one’s patience.”

“Stop, I say,” roared Dr. Fell, his eyes squeezed shut. “I see now what he means. And it does much to clear underbrush from our path.” For a moment Dr. Fell remained with his eyes closed. “Now the second and equally important question,” and he looked at Philip Ferrier, “is for you. I urge you, I beg you, to think with extraordinary care.”

Philip, head lowered, merely nodded. This all-too-formal young man, with his formal black coat and formal striped trousers and formal hard collar, wore a look not far from sheer tragedy. He had been badly treated and he knew it. He had done his best, and it wasn’t good enough. Now, in doggedness and determination, he was trying to understand.

“Look!” he said. “Do you know what killed Eve?”

“Yes,” replied Dr. Fell, after exchanging a glance with M. Aubertin. “We have every reason to think we know.”

“I’m not trying to dodge your question,” Philip said with fierce clarity. “I’ve been answering a long string of ’em ever since I got back from the bank. Here’s what I mean. It doesn’t seem to be any secret, from what you two have been saying, that Eve either killed herself or was killed with poison?”

“Yes, young man,” answered M. Aubertin. “We are almost certain it was poison.”

“Ah!” murmured Sir Gerald Hathaway.

“So all this business about what happened at breakfast—”

“Or before breakfast,” Dr. Fell interposed.

“All right; or before breakfast! When it comes down to brass tacks,” Philip cried out, “you’re saying she was poisoned either at breakfast or before then?”

“In a sense,” Dr. Fell agreed gravely, “that is quite true.”

“But it can’t have been. It’s damn silly! Eve didn’t have any breakfast. She was at the table, and sometimes she’d have coffee and rolls. But this morning she didn’t.”

“In this particular instance,” replied Dr. Fell, “she had no need to take breakfast in the ordinary way. That is the subject of my question.”

A brief, chilly little silence coiled round the group. Hathaway stared at the floor.

“Five of us,” continued Dr. Fell, “straggled down to breakfast at various times. ‘Down,’ in my own case, is a misnomer. I was sleeping on the ground floor, also on the east side. But let the statement stand.”

He paused very briefly.

“At whatever times we descended, all of us—you, Mrs. Ferrier herself, Miss Page, Sir Gerald Hathaway and I—had all left the table by seven-thirty. According to Sir Gerald Hathaway, Mrs. Ferrier went for a stroll in the garden at shortly past seven o’clock. Did you see her there?”

“No, I didn’t see her. But I’m certain she did.”

“Why are you certain?”

“She always did. Every morning since she’s been working on that book.”

“When and where did you first see her this morning?”

“When I went downstairs, about a quarter past seven. She was coming out of the study.”

“Out of the study?” Dr. Fell raised his voice. “Out of the study? Are you quite sure of that?”

“Yes, of course I’m sure,” cried Philip, with both an astonishment and a sincerity it was impossible to doubt. “Why shouldn’t she have done that? She said she’d sit with us and smoke a cigarette before she began work.”

In the midst of a dead silence, while Brian Innes stood rigid behind the door, the silhouette of the policeman moved at the entrance to the flats. Footsteps rang first on tile and then on the concrete of the corridor floor. Marching up to M. Aubertin, the policeman saluted.

“
Mr. Director,
” he said in French, “
the signal has been given.
”

“Good!” announced M. Aubertin, with a sharp little smile. “You may go. Into the lift, if you please, with the rest of us. We must see Miss Page.”

“But look—!” Philip began.

“Into the lift, please! We can all manage it, I think, at something of a crowding. Miss Page is upstairs; the signal has been given; we have very little time.”

The policeman stalked away, leaving Brian’s road clear. But he did not move, even after the others had gone up in the lift. He did not move, in fact, until a voice spoke from the stairs just behind him.

He was later to remember that a signal had been given, a baton had been lifted, for a loosing of other forces that would not end until a certain evil scene the next morning.

Meantime, at a time when all his wits groaned with exasperation, he heard Paula Catford speak from the stairs.

She stood halfway down the last concrete flight, gripping the iron railing, under a caged electric bulb whose light threw harsh shadows on a gentle face. He never forgot her there, lithe and slender in the yellow dress, with stockings and shoes (he suddenly noticed) of the same tan colour as Audrey’s. Then Paula ran the rest of the way down.

“I wasn’t sure I could overtake—” She paused. “Please forgive me for what I said a while ago. I didn’t mean it; I didn’t mean any of it! If you’re going to the Cave of the Witches, so am I.”

Exasperation grew still greater. Yet it was not easy to escape the pleading of her voice and her lifted eyes.

“I don’t want to seem ungallant, but have you got any special reason?”

“Yes! Every reason!”

“For Desmond Ferrier’s sake?”

“For yours too. I wasn’t quite frank with you, but then I couldn’t be. I couldn’t possibly be!” The pleading of her eyes had become almost a hypnosis. “May I go with you?”

“If you promise not to interfere.”

“I promise not to interfere at all,” said Paula, “in the way you’re thinking. But you don’t know what may happen there unless I do go. You don’t know what may happen,” and she touched the lapels of his coat, “at the Cave of the Witches.”

A
GAINST THE REARWARD
splendour of the moon, above the rue Jean Janvier, a black shape which marked the outline of the Hotel de Ville rose above lower roofs in the streets on top of the hill.

“You’ve been talking of impossible murders,” Paula’s voice breathed out of the gloom, “and yet you don’t know the name of Aubertin?”

“It’s vaguely familiar. I’ve heard it somewhere.”

“You should have. I’ll bet Sir Gerald knows it.”

“Hathaway knows everything. Why should he know this particular event?”

“It happened in Geneva,” said Paula. “A dead woman walked.”

Brian, parking the car at an upwards and backwards angle against a little blind wall where it shouldn’t have been parked, heard dirt spin under the rear wheels; the car humped and its engine stalled. Paula, in the seat beside him, leaned round and looked into his eyes.

You couldn’t see much of the eyes except their faint gleam. Ten o’clock had rung from the bell called Clemency. Aside from the distant barking of a dog, the streets were as quiet as they seemed deserted. Brian inclined his head politely.

“Was it any particular dead woman?”

“I’m serious!”

“So am I. Where is this Cave of the Witches, by the way?”

“You could throw a stone and hit it.” Paula leaned still closer. “Shall I show you?”

Brian climbed out of the car. He went round to the other side, opened the door, and almost yanked her out.

“All right. Show me where old Jean Janvier lived. Just because we’re going to a night-club with a name like that, there’s no need to drag in a ghost or a walking corpse.”

“It isn’t where Jean Janvier lived. It’s a cellar where they’ve got a lot of his bigger paintings. And, whether you believe it or not, I’m telling the truth about the woman who died. She was the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, wife of the Emperor Franz-Joseph, not quite sixty years ago.”

Under the eye of the moon, in a sloping little street with a dim lamp at ground-level, Brian paused as he heard that name.

“The Empress of Austria,” said Paula, “had travelled across the lake by steamer from Caux. She was staying incognita at a hotel overlooking the Quai du Mont Blanc. The next afternoon, when she was walking back along the quai to the steamer, a young Italian named Lucheni got up from a bench and ran at her.

“Nobody, including the Empress herself, saw any weapon. The witnesses thought Lucheni made a grab at the watch she was wearing on her breast; his first struck her; then he ran away. The Empress said it was nothing, and walked on to the steamer with the Countess Sztaray.—You remember the case now, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“The Empress didn’t know it, but she was already dead. She’d been stabbed through lungs and heart with a knife-blade so thin she never felt the internal hemorrhage until afterwards she collapsed and died.”

“Another of your journalistic reconstructions? Why mention it now?”

“Don’t you see? The Commissary of Police was called Aubertin. It’s only a coincidence in names; and, anyway, our present Aubertin is the Director.

“That’s all? That’s the only reason for mentioning it?”

They were standing close together. Paula looked up again. Either she had forgotten herself in some obscure excitement which made her eyes glisten, or else she remembered her attractiveness all too well and played a deliberate siren-game even with a man whose ideal woman was Audrey Page.

From somewhere near at hand, muffled, the music of an accordion broke out a thread of sound. There were voices, too: little more than a hum or a rustle, yet the sound had depth and grew heavier as the accordion-note soared up.

“Is that the only reason?” Brian demanded.

“You know it’s not.”

“Well?”

“We’re almost there. Those are the steps leading down to the cave.”

“I see them. Do you think we’re going to meet a dead woman?”

“Oh, don’t be absurd! When we see Desmond and your little girl-friend, if we do see them at all, will you let me do all the talking at first? Will you?”

“No.”

“You’re not very helpful, are you?”

“In getting Audrey arrested for murder?”

“She’s not going to be arrested. Will you at least not speak,” and Paula seized the lapels of his coat, “until I’ve said one thing to Desmond? Just one thing? No; don’t answer! Don’t answer! This way.”

The accordion-music, the buffet of voices, smote them as they stumbled down the steps, past a heavy door which Paula opened, along a corridor, and down a few more steps on the right.

“Madame and monsieur,” a woman’s voice shrieked in French. “Be welcome. Be very welcome among us.”

Brian’s first impulse, which was to laugh at the incongruity, did not long remain.

In a fairly large cellar built to resemble a rock cave with grottoes and thick pillars, six or seven earnest couples were dancing to the bleat of the accordion. Except that a few were middle-aged, they might have been enthusiastic young men and women at a dance-hall in Hammersmith or Tottenham Court Road.

Then Brian saw the wall-decorations. He also saw the hostess.

A muffled, morbid beat stung the enthusiasm even before accordion had been drowned out by drum, trumpet, and piano. Grotesque effects, even claptrap ones, are gained through the emotions of those who see them. These dancers were captivated.

In very dim light the hostess, whose thoroughly displayed figure contrasted with her bloodless face and wide-open mouth and the mark of the sword-cut through her neck, swam up at them and looked.

“A table? A table for monsieur and madame? A table?”

You did not notice that the hostess wore a mask until she thrust her face into yours. Paula, taking fright for all her casualness, shied back.