In Spite of Thunder (25 page)

“Our street-hawker hadn’t been satisfied with the fragrance given off by the lavender-bunches. He wanted to increase it, as a lure to buyers. So he had been sprinkling the blossoms with nitrobenzene, which is used in perfumery for just that purpose. But he used too much; he had been pushing the barrow too long a time, leaning over it and inhaling its contents; and the fumes killed him.

“That was accident, granted. Mrs. Ferrier’s death wasn’t accident. Here, in this book, is a complete blueprint for murder. Gideon Fell, can you deny this?”

Dr. Fell, who had taken out a large meerschaum pipe and a fat tobacco pouch, rolled up his head.

“Sir, I do not deny it. These legends of poisoned flowers in the Middle Ages, which the Victorians supposed to be pure fable, were not fables at all. They were most devilishly practical.—What date is written there?”

“The date of the hawker’s death? How the devil should I know?”

“Sir, I did not refer to the hawker’s death.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“As you say, Sir Gerald, Mrs. Ferrier wrote her name on the flyleaf of the book. She also wrote, as so many people do, the date on which she bought it. What is the date?”

“The date is January 14, 1956. The book seems to have been bought in London. Why?”

“Go on,” Dr. Fell said woodenly.

Hathaway, pale with concentration, once more pointed at Brian.

“I remind you, Innes, of my question a moment ago. When Eve Ferrier, then Eve Eden, made her tour of Germany in 1939, with what were they always presenting her?”

Brian moistened his lips.

“Don’t evade, young man! Answer me!”

“With a bouquet of flowers,” Brian answered, “or a consecrated flag. Matthews carried it for her.”

“
I
told you this when we first discussed the case? Those were the words?”

“Yes. I repeated them to Audrey on Thursday evening.”

“And I myself,” said Hathaway, “told Gideon Fell at the Murder Club. You, Innes, have seen the photograph album of the lady’s German tour. There are half a dozen pictures of her receiving a bouquet of flowers—and giving it to Matthews. Only a fool could fail to see that the murder of Eve Ferrier in 1956, and the murder of Hector Matthews in 1939, were both done by the same method.”

“Poisoned flowers at Berchtesgaden? But she wasn’t carrying a bouquet of flowers there. At least, there isn’t any photograph to show it.”

“Ah!”

“By the Lord Harry,” Brian burst out, “there’ll be another murder if you don’t stop saying ‘Ah!’ and looking like Minerva’s owl.”

“Oblige me,” snapped Hathaway, “by refraining from this crude facetiousness. Long ago, very long ago, the notion of poisoned flowers occurred to me. But evidence was concealed. Vital evidence, I protest, was concealed from me. And from you. And from everyone. If I had known seventeen years ago what I tricked a most reluctant witness into blurting out last night, there would never have been a mystery at all.”

“Last night? What did you learn?”

“Ask Miss Catford.”

White curtains whispered at the windows. Paula opened her mouth, but did not speak.

“I had the solution all the time,” announced Hathaway. “But it seemed impossible, it seemed out of the question. No bouquet of flowers, at least when I was watching, had been presented to Mrs. Ferrier at Berchtesgaden.

“After which …

“Yesterday morning, my fine friend, I went to Geneva to send a cablegram. I wasn’t here when Mrs. Ferrier died by a method she herself invented. The evening newspapers, actually appearing in the afternoon, carried the shocking news of her death. I was still bewildered until, last night, Dr. Fell and M. Aubertin called to see me, questioned me, and inadvertently revealed that there had been a bowl of roses on the writing-table at which Eve Ferrier had been sitting.

“It must have been nitrobenzene on the roses. It must, it must, it must! And Hector Matthews
must
have died by the same method.

“But how? How to prove this? Miss Catford was the only survivor of that luncheon-party at Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. Miss Catford, by her own admission, was looking out of a window at the terrace of the Eagle’s Nest when Matthews fell. Miss Catford, as I found by questioning her, had seen something I had not seen in a crush of fourteen guests and half a dozen servants in the dining-room. Just before Eve Ferrier hurried her fiancé out on the terrace, someone handed her a bouquet of arum-lilies. No fuss, no cameras, no posing.

“Who gave it to her? Does that matter? Tchaa! You know it doesn’t. But Miss Catford saw it. The bouquet was in Matthews’s hands when he fell to his death. He
was
genuinely affected by the altitude before then. Poison on the flowers, held in his hands, completed the work. Miss Catford, answer me! Was there such a bouquet?”

“Yes!” replied Paula.

“Why didn’t you ever mention it?”

“Why didn’t anyone else? Because I never once imagined it was important. But now you’re saying … what?”

“Eve Ferrier poisoned the bouquet. Just as I always thought.”

Paula, at the fireplace, gave him a look in which incredulity had now become mixed with horror.

“Eve did that,” she cried, “in the few seconds before going out on the terrace? And nobody saw her pour the poison? And it affected the poor man within another few seconds?”

“Of course.”

“How could it?”

“You disappoint me, dear lady. Matthews needed only a whiff of the fumes to make him more dizzy. So the surgeon found no traces in his body. The bouquet fell with him; it was never found either. A perfect and impossible crime had been created, just as one was attempted on Mrs. Ferrier herself.”

“But who killed Eve? Whom do you accuse of that?”

“Dear lady,” Hathaway said in a silky voice, “I accuse
you
.”

Still the white curtains whispered at the windows, when a little breeze stirred behind them with faint running reflections of sunlight. The chromium desk-lamp lighted the writing-table. And Paula screamed.

She checked herself instantly, hands pressed against her cheeks.

“Dear lady,” Hathaway almost screamed back, “Desmond Ferrier would marry you in an instant if his wife were out of the way. His wife
is
out of the way. Either you did this alone, or you did it with him as your confederate. You wore this mask last night,” and he snatched up the rubber face, “because you were so bitterly jealous of Audrey Page. An affair between you and Desmond Ferrier is the secret of his wife’s murder.”

Fitting his hand inside the mask, so that the mimic and eyeless face looked at Paula, Hathaway stood shivering in a pallor of triumph.

“I am human, dear lady. I don’t like accusing you. But truth is truth; facts are facts. You killed Mrs. Ferrier. I swore to find the answer, and I have found it. I promised to explain Matthew’s death, and I have done so. I swore to accomplish a certain end of my own, and I have got away with it.”

“
Oh, no, you haven’t,
” said Dr. Gideon Fell.

And then, during a silence with the effect of a thunderclap, several things happened at once.

Dr. Fell, who had filled and lighted the big meerschaum pipe, abruptly took the pipe out of his mouth. Propelling himself on his crutch-headed stick, he stood up with a massiveness which seemed to fill the room. Wrath, embarrassment, apology, a deep compassion beyond words, all breathed from him as strongly as heat from a furnace.

“Don’t be alarmed, Miss Catford,” he said. “We shall see to it, believe me, that no harm comes to you. Whether or not Sir Gerald Hathaway believes you killed Mrs. Ferrier, nobody else does.—Aubertin!”

The study door was thrown open.

Gustave Aubertin, with a curious little smile, crossed the room to the windows. Pulling cords at the side of each window, he sent the curtains billowing open as well. Clear daylight, revealing the green-painted balcony outside and the sweep of trees below, illumined the study as well as the faces of those who stood there.

“Yes, by thunder!” said Dr. Fell. “It is time for light and air.”

“It is almost time,” said the Director of Police, “for more than that.” He looked at Hathaway. “You have an ingenious mind, Sir Gerald. Accept my congratulations.”

Hathaway’s fist crashed down on the centre-table.

“I will not be treated. …” he began.

“Sir,” interposed Dr. Fell, “you will not be treated how? As you treated Miss Catford?”

“Stop this! Mrs. Ferrier did die as I said she did!”

“For the last time,” Dr. Fell informed him very clearly, “that is true. Be thankful for so much accomplishment.” He looked at Aubertin. “We discussed with your police-surgeon, I think, the possibility that Hector Matthews might also have been poisoned in this way?”

“We did.”

“Did the police-surgeon,” Dr. Fell asked politely, “consider it possible?”

“Granting the honesty of the German surgeon, it was not possible. The inhalation of
any
fumes from nitrobenzene, or a poison like it, would have caused inflammation of the nasal passages and of the throat as well. No post-mortem could have failed to detect them.”

Dr. Fell banged the ferrule of his stick on the floor.

“The death of Matthews, then, was no more than the bitter and horrifying accident Mrs. Ferrier always swore it was? The Nazi officials, though they did not know it, by ironical circumstance happened to be telling the truth? And someone, seventeen years afterwards, made use of this accident to kill Mrs. Ferrier herself?”

“So I see it,” agreed the Director of Police.

Paula, who was gripping the edge of the mantelpiece, looked from Hathaway to Dr. Fell.

“‘Made use of it,’” she repeated. “Dr. Fell, who did kill Eve?”

“We are coming to that,” replied Dr. Fell.

“Will you excuse me?” said Aubertin. Very formally, after looking round the room like a host who would be sure the dinner-table is ready, he went out into the hall.

(“Look out,” thought Brian, with a sense of dread drawing closer. “Look out!”)

Paula, the pupils of her eyes dilated, glanced towards the balcony.

“Eve,” she declared, “was absolutely innocent. She wasn’t guilty of
anything
.”

“Oh, but she was,” said Dr. Fell.

“What on earth do you mean? You just said—”

“The lady,” and Dr. Fell raised his voice, “was not guilty of murder. Never once in her life did she really think of murder, fond though she was of dreaming and (as I believe she told you?) of acting the part of a murderess in a film. She had lost touch with reality. If she did not commit murder, ask yourself what she did do.”

“Nothing! Nothing at all!”

“What do
you
say, Sir Gerald?”

The clear light lay on Hathaway’s dandified lounge-suit, on his carefully trimmed beard and moustache.

“I have had my say,” he retorted, “and apparently (apparently!) I was wrong. I can do no more.”

“You can do a little more, sir. For instance, you can tell us why you lied.”

“Lied? About what?”

“We shall come to that too.”

Hathaway’s neck, bearded chin and all, seemed to rise from between his shoulders like a turtle’s.

“Say what you mean! I won’t have this; I resent it! My reconstruction was right in all essential points: including the fact that the murderer used Matthew’s death to create a seeming miracle in the case of Mrs. Ferrier.”

“Sir,” Dr. Fell said gently, “don’t be an ass.”

“What’s that?”

“Somewhat to paraphrase your own ringing battle-cry: don’t be an ass. The murderer used that other death, but NOT for a seeming miracle. There has been too much loose talk about ‘reproducing impossible situations,’ and ‘making people jump off balconies,’ and so on. None of this happened or was ever meant to happen. Unless, of course, you believe the guilty person was Audrey Page.”

Brian started to utter a violent protest. Dr. Fell, whose pipe had gone out, dropped it into his side pocket and turned back to Hathaway.

“Unless you believe that, there is no real parallel between the death of Hector Matthews and the murder of Eve Ferrier. Let me read you some words spoken by Dr. Boutet, the police-surgeon who performed a post-mortem yesterday afternoon and made his report early yesterday evening.”

Fishing in his inside breast-pocket, Dr. Fell produced a notebook as rumpled and shabby as his old alpaca suit.

“‘Nitrobenzene,’ I quote Dr. Boutet, ‘is a pale oily liquid easily procured in France just over the border because it is employed for so many commercial uses. When diluted and put to a felonious purpose on flowers with a distinctive fragrance, it can be detected neither by the victim nor by anyone who does not come too near it or breathe the air too long.’”

Hathaway tugged at his collar. “But I told you all that!”

“So you did. ‘When the victim breathes these fumes,’ I continue with Dr. Boutet, ‘he is unlikely to realize what is happening. The fumes work slowly, and in time produce an effect comparable with alcoholic excitement—’”

“I told you that too!”

“The fumes work slowly, not in a few seconds. There is no parallel, surely, in the accidental death of Hector Matthews?”

“Well …”

“Observe other differences. No murderer, having poisoned the bowl of roses early yesterday morning, could possibly have anticipated the entrance of Audrey Page and what ensued. Mrs. Ferrier, caught by the fumes as the street-hawker was caught at Stockwell, behaved just as the hawker did. She quarreled with Miss Page, threatened her, pursued her out on the balcony; and, in the final spasm of the poison, ran straight against a loose hand-rail which sent her tumbling to death. If none of these things had happened, no question of the balcony would have arisen at all. That is evident, I hope?”

“Of course it is,” said Paula. “But what did the murderer want to do?”

“He wanted to kill, with nitrobenzene, in as obvious a way as possible, so that he of all people should not be suspected. This poison was associated with her life, not his. She would be found dead on the floor. Evidence of death by inhaling nitrobenzene fumes would be discovered within twenty-four hours: as it was. It would be assumed someone had poisoned her in the same way she
might
have poisoned Matthews. And none would ever discover—”