In Spite of Thunder (27 page)

Though addressing Brian, Dr. Fell blinked in a distressed way between Brian and Audrey.

“For instance, did Philip tell you he never dreamed Eve Ferrier had been concerned in any awkward accident at Berchtesgaden in 1939?”

“Yes,” replied Brian. “He said so at the Hotel Metropole when I first met him.”

“Harrumph, yes. He made the same statement to me. Now was that really possible? Archons of Athens! Since Desmond Ferrier and the former Eve Eden had been married since 1943, was it possible he had never heard a word of any kind?

“There is more than this. Desmond Ferrier swore to me they had carefully kept it from the son all those years. He said
they
; he almost insisted too much on the fact, when I asked him the direct question. The father adopted, indeed, a strange attitude towards the son’s possible marriage to Audrey Page. The father lets us think, a little too obviously, that he himself could easily be smitten with Miss Page. Is he concealing something else, drawing fire on himself? Of what does he really want to warn Miss Page?

“I ask you to think over every word Desmond Ferrier said. Interpret these words in a different way from their surface or apparent meaning. Philip Ferrier—as anyone can see—really is deeply in love with Miss Page. More than this, she has money; she is suitable.”

Audrey spoke in a low voice.

“Don’t carry this too far,” she said. “If you’re talking of Phil, don’t carry it too far!”

Dr. Fell regarded her gravely.

“Of myself I need carry it little further,” he said. “But I must draw your attention to certain incidents which took place under the eyes of one or the other of you. And I must mention a possibility which occurred to me soon after I arrived here.

“Desmond Ferrier’s affairs with women, in the past, have been many and notorious. Even now he is half-ready to accuse himself of designs on a young lady, Audrey Page, very much younger than himself. It would be a comment on human nature, I thought, if the real designs were the other way round: that is, the designs of his once-beautiful wife on a step-son very much younger than
her
self.

“And, as we now know from so many details of the confession made by Philip Ferrier, that is precisely what had happened. With a character like that of the woman, and a character like that of the boy, it led to disaster.

“Their affair began nearly two years ago. It demoralized Eve Ferrier. In this handsome youngster, with a surface charm but an inner hardness which perhaps only his father suspected, she believed she had found the reincarnation of her ‘great love,’ the young fighter-pilot killed in the Battle of Britain.

“Philip played up to her. It flattered his vanity, as it so often does. Whereupon he grew bored just as she grew more intense. In January of this year, ’56, Desmond Ferrier and his wife visited London; their son was with them, and he met Audrey Page. I regret that this part must be told,” and Dr. Fell looked at Audrey, “because it will be told in court.

“Now Philip is a very vain young man. If you had ever seen that—”

“I did see it,” Brian interrupted curtly. “But I didn’t let the impression register strongly enough.”

Dr. Fell blinked at him.

“You did see it? When?”

“The same Thursday night, at the Hotel Metropole, when Philip called to take Audrey out to dinner. That young fellow’s manner when he spoke just four words, ‘
Who’s that with you?
’ should have suggested more than it did. He saw me standing beside a window with Audrey; he didn’t even know who I was. But a good deal was expressed at that moment. Anyway, go on about—about the confession.”

“Shall I go on, Miss Page?”

“Yes! Yes! I’m sorry I said that.” Audrey stared at the table. “Because I shall have to make a confession too.”

“Oh, ah. In London, last January,” Dr. Fell resumed, “Philip Ferrier met this young lady here. He wanted her, very much, and he thought she wanted him. He was in no enviable position, with the elder woman at his side and doting on him. Momentarily he got out of the difficulty, he has told the Director of Police, with an inspiration which could have come only to a potentially first-rate criminal.

“Eve, now living in her world of dreams, has been speculating further. ‘Is it possible we can ever acknowledge our great love?’ she has been saying to an impatient and desperate young man. ‘If we were to admit it and marry, what would the world think? Could we ever do that?’

“Hence the inspiration. Of course they could, Philip suggests. He is not really interested in Miss Page, he tells Eve Ferrier,
but it must be plain that his father is
. If the son lets the father cut him out with Audrey Page, then the way will be clear. The father marries a younger woman, and the son in turn will be happy to seek consolation with Eve herself.

“It was the very basis of all stage-intrigue, by which some of these people lived and one of them died. Eve Ferrier, not a criminal but a born intriguer, saw nothing strange in it. She was dazzled. She was overjoyed. Philip would ‘pretend’ to be interested in the girl and she would ‘encourage’ it. At the proper time, when they can discard all masks, Philip will reveal that his real love is for Eve.

“Of course Philip never meant to do that. To get what
he
really wanted, he knew he would have to kill his step-mother.

“And the father, no fool, partly guessed what might be going on. He could not guess all of it, or what form its explosion would take. He could only stand by in horror, wondering what he ought to do.

“If you have ever felt less than charitable towards Desmond Ferrier, I ask you to be charitable now. His many, his notorious affairs are boomeranging back in the worst possible way. If he is wrong, and it is only his own evil mind which makes him suspect all this, there will be hell to pay in the event he accuses his wife or his son. If he stays silent, and he happens to be right, what sort of catastrophe may overtake them?”

Dr. Fell paused. His pipe had gone out; his red face was heavy and lowering.

“Well—!” he added reflectively.

“Events, in the first months of this year, began to march towards a predestined end. But here I am indulging in a deplorable practice of anticipating the evidence. Let us forget this. Let us consider the situation only as it presented itself to me when Ferrier came to me in London, and I arrived here to learn what I could learn.

“Mrs. Ferrier was talking ecstatically of a ‘new life.’ She had decided, or someone had persuaded her, on a triumphant return to the stage. She had decided, or someone had persuaded her, that first she must celebrate this by writing her memoirs: working always in a room, the study, which nobody else used. Meanwhile someone had been whispering rumours about her, rumours about the alleged poisoning of Hector Matthews. She had decided, or someone had persuaded her, to demonstrate her lily-serene innocence by summoning an assorted little group to the Villa Rosalind.

“Wow! I repeat: wow!

“It was not reasonable to suppose she had been whispering rumours about herself, nor did any of her acts look like a prelude to murdering somebody. If any dirty work had been planned in that household, Mrs. Ferrier would appear to figure not as a possible murderess but as the probable victim.

“By the same token, at first glance, the potential murderer would have seemed to be Desmond Ferrier himself. He had been throwing out hints about poison. And yet, in my dunderheaded fashion, I could not accept this either.

“Even apart from the fact that I knew him as essentially an honest and easy-going human being, often weak as we all are weak,
he
could not be opening a new life for Eve. Despite her words, the evidence showed she really cared as little for him as he cared for her. He would never have suggested a return to the stage, nor would she have behaved so joyously if he had. Furthermore, if he talks too much about poison and his wife dies of it, suspicion will rebound heavily on him. That’s not the plan of a murderer. It looks rather as though his talk were a warning to somebody other than Mrs. Ferrier. ‘Don’t do this; keep off; change your mind; don’t be a fool!’

“If I eliminated both those two as potential murderers, only one other person (in the household, at least) was left. Still bearing in mind that this was only a possibility, I watched the events of Thursday afternoon and Thursday night.

“Upstairs, at the villa, Mrs. Ferrier discovered something which upset her universe and sent her straight to the Hotel du Rhône. Since she knew her husband’s reputation, would she have been so
shocked
to hear of any affair with another woman?

“Well, you know what happened at the hotel. Somebody had slipped into her handbag a bottle of the perfume she always wore. She would not discover anything wrong until she found the bottle, and held it up, and discovered its contents were the wrong colour. It was at least possible she would make this discovery in public. But why sulphuric acid? And where had it come from? And, above all, why a perfume-bottle?

“Desmond Ferrier, who had left me at a night-club off the Place Neuve, hurried back there to give me the news. In doing so, upset, he revealed his state of mind at every word. The name of Audrey Page was commented on with a vengeance. He was worried about his son, as he showed. But he now pretended to think Miss Page was in danger: which in a sense she was, but not from a poisoning-attempt by Eve Ferrier.

“I let him know the direction of my suspicions, and told him plainly I believed it was his wife who might be in danger. He didn’t like this, as two of you saw. Having got as far as that, I now proceeded to make one of the great blunders of my life.”

Hathaway, not without satisfaction, drew the air through a hollow tooth.

“Yes,” he said. “I am unrepentant enough to think you did.”

“How?” Brian asked.

Hathaway simmered, but decided against calling anyone a fool or an idiot.

“Years ago at the Murder Club, as I have kept repeating,” he announced, “I outlined the Berchtesgaden case. I gave broad indications that Matthews might have been killed with a poisoned bouquet of flowers.”

“But Matthews wasn’t poisoned! It was an accident. You yourself couldn’t prove anything, because nobody said a word about any flowers at Berchtesgaden, and nobody said a word about the roses in the study at the villa until we actually saw them there!”

Dr. Fell quieted an incipient uproar.

“The possibility,” he said, “should have been considered. If Philip Ferrier did plan any attempt on the life of Mrs. Ferrier, I was expecting something crude—as crude as the sulphuric acid—against which I could guard.

“The sulphuric acid, true, was meant as a threat and a warning. But its real purpose was to call attention to the perfume-bottle. When the lady was found dead, we were meant to think immediately of roses and rose-perfume. The notion did cross my mind, but I rejected it. Since Matthews had not been poisoned, I firmly rejected the vision of poisoned flowers.

“Do you remember? On Friday morning you drove out to the villa in a panic. I told you you need fear nothing. I said I had a glimmering of what Hathaway suspected; but, since I could see no evidence of it, I all but jeered at the idea.

“And then?

“Mrs. Ferrier pitched off the balcony. Audrey Page had walked by accident into the middle of it; she would surely be involved, as I agreed, unless we told a story to protect her. We went along the balcony. One look into that study told me that a bowl of roses stood beside the place where Mrs. Ferrier had been sitting. Every bit of evidence—Hathaway has since outlined it—showed poisoning had been done with flowers. And so, in protecting Miss Page, we had to take a different line.”

Here, as though remarking on the devilishness of all human circumstances, it was Audrey he addressed.

“You follow that, don’t you? Innes wanted to deny you were with Mrs. Ferrier when she fell to her death. He wanted to say you were far away. If they suspected you of throwing her from that balcony, it would have been an admirable idea. On the other hand, since a poison-trap had been set, such a course might have been fatal.

“If you
and
Desmond Ferrier were suspected of setting the poison-trap, you yourself wouldn’t have been there to watch it work. You would have been far away. Hence I could not let Innes give such testimony, or let you give it either.

“My best plan was to insist on the truth; the presence of poison—to be exact, nitrobenzene—should be discovered within twenty-four hours. One question, incidentally: when Mrs. Ferrier was raving at you, did it occur to you she might not have been talking about her husband at all?”

Audrey shivered.

“It occurred to me afterwards,” she said, “and I told Brian it did. But at the time: no! We were talking at cross-purposes. She was talking about Philip, and I thought she meant her husband; I said I’d never even looked at him. But she never mentioned the man’s name.”

“Did you suspect afterwards it might have been Philip?”

“No! Not even when I knew it must have been somebody else, and tried to get information from Mr. Ferrier at the Cave of the Witches. But before then …”

“Before then,” grunted Dr. Fell, “we may say mildly that cross-purposes had involved everybody in a muddle I despaired of setting right.

“This was inevitable. Each person, from the beginning, behaved in accordance with his or her particular temperament; and there are some tolerably flighty temperaments among the lot of you. It would be unjust to say Eve Ferrier had a pathological passion for men, as Innes has told me somebody did say; it would be unjust to call Philip Ferrier a willing murderer. Both these two were too innately respectable to the verge of stuffed-shirtdom: too conscious of the world’s opinion.

“Mrs. Ferrier did have a passion for men younger than herself. She tried to conquer this years ago: first by becoming engaged to a man much older than herself (Hector Matthews), and later by marrying one (Desmond Ferrier). If the one had money, and the other a famous name, that was sound practicality. But it wouldn’t have worked with the one; it did not work with the other.

“Philip Ferrier would have protested, and still protests with tears in his eyes, he never wanted to kill the old girl. But his own practicality wouldn’t endure the situation; his life, his future, his sleep were all threatened; he feared her too much; she should not live, and he got his opportunity.