In Spite of Thunder (21 page)

Ha-ha-ha
rang the demoniac blare of laughter from its-metal throat, quivering amid tables and bottles.

Paula Catford made a shivering movement that was too calm for anger.

“This isn’t helping us, and it’s just a bit silly. Desmond, will you dance with me? I want to talk to you.
Will
you dance with me?”

“I can’t dance with you, sweetie-pie, until the band gives us some music. But that merry ha-ha means the effects are beginning; the lights will go down and the band will begin at any minute. Meanwhile, who’s the Empress of Austria? What’s she doing in this?”

“Nothing,” Brian admitted. “We won’t go into that, because it might bring the guilt straight back to Audrey. Let’s take a more reasonable line. Mr. Ferrier, did you ever hear of a poison called nitrobenzene?”

And, clearly, Ferrier had.

He did not attempt to evade or deny. Leaning down to pick up the chair he had knocked over when he first jumped up, he set it back carefully on its legs.

“Yes, I’ve heard of it. My dear wife’s first husband committed suicide with the stuff. You heard that from Aubertin, didn’t you?”

“From Aubertin?”

“Naturally.” Ferrier’s voice held a shade of impatience. “When they questioned us in separate compartments for most of the day, Aubertin startled my ears off by knowing it.”

“No; I heard it from—”

About to mention Hathaway’s name, Brian stopped. Ever afterwards, when all truths were plain, he was to remember Paula Catford and Audrey Page as his questions proceeded: Paula standing tall and dark-haired, in a tight-fitting yellow dress, close beside him; Audrey, smaller and more rounded, in brown tweed suit and orange sweater, sitting at the table and suddenly looking up. They spoke almost together.

Audrey said: “Her
first
husband?”

Paula said: “I’m not the only one, it seems, who listens at doors.”

Ferrier gripped the back of the chair.

“A minute ago, old boy, you were blabbering something about bedroom farce. …”

“And a missing husband. Yes.”

“You don’t think one of my late wife’s husbands had anything to do with this?”

“I think that’s the key to the secret, if we can find it.”

“Lord of high hell,” intoned Ferrier, with a roll in his voice as though he were again playing Othello, “those blokes are dead. D-e-a-d, dead. They could no more have come back than Eve herself could come back.”

“Don’t talk like that!” cried Audrey.

“Let me ask the questions, will you?” Brian begged. He did not take his eyes from Ferrier. “Your wife smoked, didn’t she?”

“Yes. Fairly heavily.”

“I thought so. In the study, just to the left of the manuscript she was writing in some kind of purple ink, there was a big glass ashtray.”

“What about the manuscript?” Ferrier asked sharply.

“Just a minute! Did you ever use that study?”

“No, never. It was Eve’s particular domain and nobody else’s.”

“But I understood you were writing your memoirs too?”

“I tried.” Ferrier moved his neck. “I began it. I tried, so help me! I sat on the terrace and chewed a pencil. And yet, when I looked back over what they call a great theatrical career, the only scenes that stood out in my mind were incidents that were funny or incidents that were bawdy.”

Paula cast up her eyes. “Please, Desmond! This is hardly the time …!”

“I can’t help it, my pet. That’s how I am. Only the other day a couple of earnest interviewers nearly blew their stacks when they were questioning me about my conception of the character of Hamlet. ‘We feel, Mr. Ferrier, that we have solved every problem of this play except one. Mr. Ferrier, did Hamlet seduce Ophelia?’ ‘In my day,’ I said, ‘invariably.’”

“
Desmond!
”

“I keep telling you, my pet: I’m like that! You wouldn’t have me any other way. But I don’t feel such stories add much to Shakespearean commentary, or would greatly improve my reputation if I wrote ’em down.”

“Desmond, haven’t you maligned yourself enough?”

“Possibly he has,” snapped Brian, and Ferrier’s eyes changed a little, “because we’re going on to the murder. This
is
a question of murder.”

“Why is it? If my dear wife committed suicide, or else … Look here, Innes: could the poison have been in a cigarette?”

“I think it could have.”

“Nitrobenzene?”

“Without Dr. Fell’s or Hathaway’s encyclopaedic knowledge, I do seem to remember one or two facts about that poison. It’s used commercially for dyes and—and other things. If you soaked cigarette-tobacco in a preparation of the stuff, and you could somehow conceal the odour, I think the smoke might be damnably dangerous.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“No! But we’ve got to thrash it out.—Audrey!”

Audrey sat up straight.

“Yes? What is it?”

The light which illumined the Cave of the Witches had begun to dwindle and fade slowly among the pillars. Appreciative “Oh’s!” and “Ah’s!” from other tables greeted this approach of darkness. The paintings would remain faintly visible: like that, behind Ferrier’s back, of the three vampire women taking their blood sustenance from an apparently dead young girl in a churchyard. And therefore the faces at this table remained visible too.

“Here we go again,” observed Ferrier, “for more ghost-and-corpse effects in the dark.” He struck the back of the chair. “Can anybody tell me why my late dear wife liked this place so very much?”

Audrey, lines of fatigue under her eyes, twitched her head round with the glossy brown hair trembling against her cheeks.

“Do you mean to say you don’t know, Mr. Ferrier?”

“Easy, little one!”

“Even if people do think I’m stupid, I can tell you that without any trouble. She loved thinking of herself as a … as a
femme fatale
, or a witch-woman, or any of the kind of parts she played in those old films they’re always reviving.”

“Dear, dear, dear!” Paula breathed out of the gloom. “That’s very perceptive. Imagine your noticing it!”

“I notice a good deal, thanks very much,” said Audrey. “Do you mean to say
you
don’t like the place, Mr. Ferrier?”

“Yes, I like it. In more elegant language, so what?” Again Ferrier’s voice grew to a shout. “You sound like the coppers this afternoon, cornering me in the drawing-room and grilling me like a sole. I was here for dinner yesterday evening, was I? Did I like the Cave of the Witches best when I dined out? Did other people prefer it too?”

“What did you say?” asked Paula, raising her voice too.

“Eve liked it best, yes. I like it, right enough; but give me a good meal at the Béarn. Phil doesn’t like it; he prefers the Globe or the Hotel du Rhône. You, Paula, like it a good deal better than you’ve ever admitted to anybody on earth—”

“That’s absurd!”

“All right, call me a swine again. I was rattled; it’s not as easy as being questioned by Innes here. Innes, what do you think you can find out from Audrey?”

“I can find out what happened this morning,” said Brian. “That is, if Audrey’s up to it?”

“Darling, I’m not so frail as all that,” Audrey cried. She looked up at him with a strength and intensity that made his heart turn over. “But I don’t understand what I can tell you. Nothing
happened
!”

“Maybe a good deal happened. Think back. At what time, before breakfast, did Mrs. Ferrier go out into the garden?”

“Eve? Into the garden?”

“‘Now the serpent,’” Ferrier proclaimed, “‘was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman—’”

“Ferrier,” Brian yelled, “for the love of Mike keep out of this. Audrey, please answer me. At what time did Mrs. Ferrier go out into the garden?”

Audrey, with wide-open blue eyes, looked back at him uncomprehendingly.

“Brian, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. She didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“She didn’t go into the garden at any time.”

“But she was seen there!”

“Who saw her?”

At the far side of the cellar, on a long note, the accordion swept up its music for the beginning of more dancing. Chairs shuffled back in the gloom. These four, at the table for four beside the wall, remained motionless.

“Let’s get this straight!” Brian insisted. “As I understand it, she usually went for a stroll there before breakfast?” He glanced at Ferrier. “Isn’t that so?”

“Yes, she always did. But don’t ask me anything about this morning. Paula and I weren’t up. Consequently, as you yourself have pointed out—!”

Audrey looked from one to the other of them.

“D-darling,” she said to Brian, commencing to stammer and then correcting herself, “all I can tell you is what happened.”

“Well?”

“I was the first downstairs. I hadn’t slept a wink; I feel like death now. D-Dr. Fell knocked at my door at about a quarter to seven. I was already dressed, and we went downstairs. That maid (Stephanie, is it?) was laying the table.”

“Go on.”

“Sir Gerald Hathaway joined us about five minutes past seven; Eve was with him. Sir Gerald asked if he could borrow the Rolls to go to Geneva. She said yes. She wouldn’t sit down at the table; she kept looking at me like fire. When Sir Gerald asked if she wouldn’t have something to eat, she said no. But she said she’d got some cigarettes in the study, and she’d have a cigarette. She went upstairs; I thought, ‘Oh, God, what’s she up to?’ and I ran out and looked up the stairs after her. All she did was go into the study, and come out again with a packet of ordinary Players’ cigarettes, and run downstairs to the dining-room. She smoked one, yes. But …”

Here Audrey, staring at memory, let her voice trail away.

“Brian,” she added, “why do you think it’s so frightfully important? About the garden, I mean?”

“
I
don’t think so. Dr. Fell does.”

“Why?”

“The Lord only knows. Listen! When she went up to the study to get her cigarettes, couldn’t she have gone down to the garden by way of the outer staircase? And back up to the study again?”

“No. There wasn’t time. Anyway, there’s a high stone wall on the east side between the rear terrace and the garden. She couldn’t have climbed over it: not a woman like that. What’s more, there’s another thing too.”

And here Audrey cleared her throat.

“I—I don’t know about poisons and such things. But I’m quite definitely certain she couldn’t have been poisoned by that cigarette.”

Paula Catford, who had been waiting quietly, now spoke with great clearness.

“Audrey’s right, you know.”

“Easy, my pet!” snapped Ferrier.

“Desmond, please use your common sense. Could poor Eve have smoked a poisoned cigarette, at a table with all the rest of them there, without anybody else getting a whiff of it? Or, if she smoked it before seven-thirty, would its effect have been delayed until nearly nine o’clock? Any more than that could have happened to Mr. Matthews at Berchtesgaden?”

Silence. And checkmate.

More people were going out to the dance-floor. Drum, trumpet, and piano joined the accordion. The mechanical laughter blared above it. Out of the murk towards their table swam a death’s head face above the body of a woman in a semi-transparent red-gauze robe, making Paula start in spite of herself and Audrey suppress a scream when the death’s head bent down and looked at them.

Ferrier was giving some order which Brian couldn’t hear. Paula tugged at his arm.

“Desmond, I want to dance. And I simply must talk to you.”

“Half a tick, half a tick! For a second, there,” Ferrier said to Brian, who had lowered his head in bitterness, “I was almost convinced you’d got it. There must be
some
solution to this business.”

“Yes; there must be.”

“Desmond!” begged Paula.

Half reluctantly, with a strained and pinched look round his nostrils, Ferrier took Paula’s hand; they moved away into the dark. Brian looked at Audrey.

“I don’t suppose you’d care to dance too?”

“I’d love to.” Audrey sprang up instantly. “Stay beside me; stay as close as you can; don’t ever go far.”

“In that case, I trust you’ll remember your own prescription. If you disappear again into the blue, as you’ve done twice before …”

“Brian, don’t be cross! I won’t disappear. However did you find me? And do you realize this is the first time you’ve ever danced with me? This is the first time you’ve ever condescended to?”

“Condescended to? The new dances aren’t much in my line; I’m all for the fox-trot of twenty years ago. But this is an old-fashioned waltz anyone can manage.”

Old-fashioned waltz or not, it was not being played quite like one. Nor was the spirit which swayed and swept through the cavern as they whirled out with the half-dozen other couples. Audrey’s eyes, those intent blue eyes a little slanted up at the outer corners, were fixed on him. With or without intention, they circled from right to left round the circle of the cavern: widdershins, some would have called it.

“Wrong!” he muttered. “That solution of mine. All wrong! And yet—”

“No. I don’t believe that! Do you remember my saying, earlier this evening, that when Eve stormed out at me she sounded as though she were hypnotized?”

“Yes?”

“A closer word,” said Audrey, “would be groggy or drunk. Which is why she wasn’t making much sense. She was poisoned then; she must have been.”

“Yes; I thought of that. When I heard her talking through the closed door, she sounded like a woman sleepwalking. Afterwards, when she ran frantically at the loose edge of the balcony, she put her hands up to her throat as though poison had got her.”

Audrey shivered in his arms. The music beat faster. In that dim greenish light, seen under the arches of the grottoes with comparatively few couples round them, the parade of Jean Janvier’s paintings showed madness or death in their most exaggerated forms.

“Brian!”

Looking past his shoulder, she lost the beat of the music; both of them half-stumbled, recovered, and automatically moved on as Brian glanced over his own shoulder towards the direction of Audrey’s gaze.

Paula Catford was leaving the Cave of the Witches.

There could be no doubt it was Paula.